The strange animal in the ice looked like it was sleeping. Ten-year-old Kostia Khudi and his brother had never seen anything like it before. But they had heard stories of the mamont. It was an imaginary animal that lived in the ice-filled blackness of the Siberian underworld. Their father,a reindeer herder named Yuri Khudi, went to ask a friend for advice. But when he returned, the body had vanished.