It had been a hard summer. The places that would one day be called the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys had not seen any rain in many months but there had been plenty of lightning. The prairies were dry and there were many fires. Big animals like mammoths and bison and woolly rhinoceros had to keep moving to find enough food and water. Big Mama had not led her herd this far north in many years, but her memory was good and she kept them moving.
But others were there before them. They were mammoths, but they were strange, completely covered with hair.
To understand why this should be strange to Big Mama and her herd, you should know that there was more than one kind of mammoth, all those years ago. (There were also cousins of mammoths, called mastodons, but we don't need to worry about them.)
There were people back then, and they hunted the mammoths, but we don't know what they called them. Today, we call the two types of mammoth that lived in North America the woolly mammoth and the Columbian mammoth.
The woolly mammoths stayed mostly in the north, in what we now call Canada.
The Columbian mammoths stayed mostly in the south, sometimes as far south as what we now call Mexico!
But there were places where you could have found both kinds of mammoth.
Mammoths sometimes traveled great distances in search of food. Scientists call this migration. When woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths met they usually didn't get involved with one another, any more than they concerned themselves with the giant ground sloths or woolly rhinos or giant bison they shared the plains with. You can see a scene very much like this in Africa today,