As we slammed into the Arctic whitecaps, spraying cold salt water into our Zodiac, Sven shouted, “There’s the island. I’ll run up the white flag.”

We needed it, apparently. Sven said the locals shot at the first three Zodiacs. I wondered how they afforded guns and ammo, and Sven said they had a stockpile from the Soviet days.

The fourth attempt stood offshore and offered some goods in return—salt pork, fancy red parkas, DVDs. The locals had generators for electricity, but not much else. That deal got the Zodiac ashore and they looked around the little stone-cottage village. It was amazing that anybody lived here at all, within 15 degrees of the pole, utterly isolated. The Zodiac crew took a quick survey—123 people, some dogs, plenty of softening tundra. Plus a bubbling pond they saw at a distance. That’s what had primed my interest. I had to beg Operations for an extra trip to visit this forlorn island.

Figures waved on the rocky shore. Sven’s white flag got us in. The village was a ramshackle affair of leftover sheet metal, concrete blocks, gray roofing and muddy streets. A generator chugged out power on a stone platform and an outhouse tainted the air.

They wore fur parkas and quite deftly stripped us of our goods for “favors”—more canned food, cheap cotton dresses for the ladies, Russian paperbacks, fuel oil. Then the hard bargaining got started, for the best goodies—fruit; high-calorie snacks; seeds for mid-winter green sprouts; vitamin supplements; good knives; toothpaste.

They beamed at us. This was the right moment. Carefully I asked to see the “bubbly” in my wobbly Russian.

They led me across two kilometers of squishy tundra, to a big pond with bubbles breaking around its edge. I knelt, put a meter on it, took the chem reading. “Yep, methane,” I told Sven. “Plenty.”

He knelt and flicked his lighter. Orange flames danced above the brackish water. “Right.” Plenty more bubbles popped out on the pond.

We were monitoring the accelerating methane emissions throughout the Arctic tundra. Islands like this, far above the Siberian shore, were a missing part of the map, and we needed data points. This was a clear sign of a fast emission rate. I turned to go—and saw them.

The natives had them in a corral. They were gray-black and shaggy, with snaky trunks. I spotted them as dwarf elephants, though I’m not a biologist. I was just a geology lab tech—if it’s got a pulse, it’s not my field. They were darker than the Asian elephants I’d seen, which made sense—darker absorbs more sunlight.

There was a partially buried barn for them, like a longhouse mound. That made sense. Shelter would be the only thing the locals could provide that the tiny elephants couldn’t find, far more efficiently, for themselves. So here, with no machinery, the people used shelter as a draw to keep them in the area. Elephants can do a lot of brute work better than a tractor.

Intrigued, I slogged through the soft tundra to the stone corral fence. The tiny elephants could probably push through the wall. I guessed that the natives must have trained them not to, maybe by feeding them dwarf willow and other treats, as rewards for staying put.

They came over to the wall, snouts up, mouths wide, as if expecting to be fed. They were less than two meters tall, plenty smaller than any elephant you see in zoos, and smelled like last week’s kitchen trash. I did know that Asian elephants range from over two meters to