Travel is always a learning experience, and here’s what I learned today: If I had been a caveman, I would have died young and hungry.

High above the Yukon River, in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, I find myself with an atl-atl in my hand.

“Hold it like this,” the museum guide from the Beringia Centre says. The Centre is dedicated to showing that during the last ice age, this part of Canada was actually quite warm and toasty, part of a vast steppe—think Wyoming plains—called Beringia, which also covered most of Alaska, stretching into Siberia. Walking Beringia were mammoths and camels, horses and giant steppe bison, beavers the size of ottomans and sloths the size of Volkswagons; hunting them were the first North Americans, who’d come across the Bering land bridge.

And so the atl-atl, the height of caveman technology: they could bring down a wooly mammoth with these things.

The guide shows an elderly lady how to hold the yard-long throwing stick part of the atl-atl. Together, they knock an arrow into its base. “Now just like you were throwing a baseball.”

The lady uncoils, the arrow flies forty feet and whacks a cutout of a cave bear.

After my turn, while I check for blood on my feet and on the arrow that hit them, the lady has the manners not to laugh. “I used to play a lot of softball,” she explains.

Despite my utter failure at being a caveman, I’m undeterred. I have come to the Yukon, Canada’s upper left corner, because I needed  mammoth.

Now, needing a mammoth may be an urge that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but there it was. I lived in the desert, it was summer, I was hot. Then I read an old report of the discovery of a mammoth carcass frozen in the Siberian steppe, discovered in 1901. “Some time before the mammoth body came in view I smelt its anything but pleasant odor.”

It wasn’t so much the idea of  the mammoth itself, but the fact that, when it died, it had a mouth full of buttercups, which had been perfectly preserved for more than 25,000 years.

So I did the only thing that made sense: I went to the heart of wooly mammoth country with a simple itinerary in mind: from Whitehorse to Dawson City, where the great Klondike gold rush was centered, and then north on the Dempster Highway, which leads straight up to the small town of Inuvik, Northwest Territories, right at the mouth of the Mackenzie River, 150 miles above the arctic circle.

But I’m not even halfway to Dawson before I have to slam on the brakes. A sign tells me that the village of Carmacks has the world’s only working mammoth trap, which is apparently a series of huge rabbits snare strung between thin spruce trees.

According to the sign, “The mammoths, as they were nearing extinction, became a threat to people. . . . The Northern Tuchtone devised this elaborate snare system to rid their land of this most feared predator.”

Let’s get serious. When  wooly mammoths roamed this land, there were no trees for hundreds of miles; the ice age glaciers were actually to the south, leaving the north full of yummy plants perfect for furry elephants. Mammoths had only four teeth, each shaped something like a brick—not exactly threatening. They could grind down a couple hundred pounds of plants a day, but being a “feared predator”? Only if they stepped on you.

Back in the car, I’m thinking, wooly mammoth trap or tourist trap? Hey, it caught me, even if it isn’t exactly what catches most people though.

They’re here for the gold.

In 1898, as many as 100,000 people came to Dawson City, where the Yukon and Klondike Rivers meet, because they’d heard rumors of nuggets the size of eggs, laying on the ground.

Official estimates are that fewer than 50 prospectors actually got rich; the rest got little but cold and hungry.

Dawson City today is false-front buildings, mud streets, tourists buying gold jewelry as if they weren’t a hundred years too late.; the town has an end-of-the-world vibe that I’ve always loved, the kind of feeling you get in a town where the only people are people who genuinely want to be here, and even if not many of them go to the museum to see the piece of dried wooly mammoth meat, plenty show up to listen to a bluegrass band playing by the riverside.

Mammoth finds were actually a side effect of the gold rush. It was inevitable, with all those people digging. In fact, there were so many tusks around that miners built cabins with them.

But by now, every inch of soil within miles of Dawson has been turned over a hundred times; the landscape looks churned, blended. There can’t possibly be anything left, so I light out for the Northwest Territories.

The Dempster Highway is Canada’s northernmost road, stretching 456 miles from the road junction to the road’s end in Inuvik, NWT; the pavement gives out after only a few miles, but after that, it’s smooth dirt and gravel, and as long as I occasionally get out and clean mud off the rear window, I’m okay.

The road is quickly surrounded by mountains that look like they were drawn by kids who just discovered a full Crayon box.

At the Tombstone Mountain Visitor’s Center—the craggy peak lost in fog—I’m apparently the first person to ask the ranger about mammoths. “Most people just want to know about the mosquitoes,” she says.

Ah, okay, the mosquitoes. Imagine ground fog so thick your headlights can’t cut through it. Up here, that would be swarms of mosquitoes.

The forest gives way to tundra, and tundra, as always, makes me happy. It’s just like a forest, but in miniature. There are berries larger than the bushes they grow on—I’ve seen a couple grizzly bears happily munching away—and there are willow trees an inch tall and a hundred years old. At sunset—this time of year, right around midnight—the tundra glows like a bowl of kid’s cereal, all marshmallows and sugar color.

It’s time to go mammoth hunting. I’d gotten instructions from experts: “Walk a streambed, and look at the high water mark. Spring floods expose the tusks and bones.”

I stop at a likely looking river, scramble down the banks, which are dotted with tiny blue flowers. The mosquitoes hit before I’m fully out of  the truck; from a distance, I must look like one of those guys wearing a bee beard, but I haven’t seen another car in hours, so there’s nobody I can check with. Most people turn back south at the arctic circle, contented with crossing an imaginary line.

We move together, the mosquitoes and I, checking the soil above the water for mammoth bits. This is when I realize there’s a slight flaw in my plan: I have no idea exactly what I’m looking for. Unless I see something that looks like a prop from the Flintstones, would I even recognize a mammoth bone if I saw one?

I pick up a couple rocks, hopeful. Pretty sure they’re rocks. Probably rocks. I pick a couple tiny flowers, a delicate white, and press them in my notebook. Then the mosquitoes and I get back in the truck to try another river. And another. There’s a stream, a river, another wide swath of tundra around every bend in the road.

We’re all of us, the mosquitoes and me, having a really good time. The Red River is startlingly red. The Peel River is huge and swift. I stop at a pass in the Richardson Mountains, which is not only the continental divide but also the Yukon/Northwest Territories border, the land drops away into clouds lower than me, catching the afternoon light; and I drive away with no idea what the Richardsons look like, because they, too were in cloud, and for a while, I drive between layers of white, the road stretching ahead between narrow strips of tundra.

I have the landscape to myself, except for a porcupine, the size of a sheepdog, that waddles across the road.

At the tiny town of Fort McPherson, the church and the gas station seem to be the landmarks, and the even tinier town of Tsligehtchich seems to be all about the view of the Red River pouring into the Mackenzie.

I pull the car to the side of the road one more time, stand beside this grandest of arctic rivers. No mammoth bones conveniently present themselves, but I’m not all that disappointed.  I can hear the hissing of silt—First Nations people called this sound the “voices of the ancestors”—in the river, and maybe what the sound points out to me is that the Mackenzie warms the land here, and its banks are lined with Canada’s northernmost trees.
   
I think about setting up some giant rabbit slings, just in case there’s still a mammoth or two out there.