Lesson 16: The Tunguska Event

Snow had turned to rain a couple of hours before. At the first, distant thunder crack, he swooped low over a small patch of snow that was destined to melt before the day was out. Now, thunder’s roar was the periodic accompaniment to the steady beat of Rasim’s wings. The Northern Hawk Owl never faltered. Lightning suddenly flared, painfully bright to the brown-and-white striped owl. Rasim blinked his eyes and carried on. Thoroughly professional, he was, and proud of it, too.

Hogwarts and the assigned recipient of his message were close now, just hours away.

. . .

CRACK!

Professor Montgomery “Gummy” Vance jumped, as did a number of his students. “That one sounded as if it was in the room with us, didn’t it?” Gummy laughed a bit nervously. It really had sounded as if the sky had split open right above them. “Thunderstorms,” he said with a grin. “It must be April. But let’s get on with the lesson, shall we?”

The professor pulled a newspaper out of his inner robe pocket and smoothed it out on the desk. “It’s a Muggle newspaper, so it won’t move when I enlarge it. You may be glad for that.” Gummy tapped his wand on the paper, whispered an incantation, and flicked his wand upward. The picture from the paper seemed to follow his wand motion and in seconds was hovering in the air next to him, stretching itself out until it was nearly a yard wide.

“Does anyone know what we’re looking at?” Gummy asked the class. Much to the professor’s surprise, a hand immediately shot into the air. The excitedly waving hand was attached to a boy wearing a big smile and an eager expression. “Kyle, please enlighten us.”

“It’s an old black and white photo of the Siberian forest around Tunguska. All the trees are stripped of leaves and branches. They’ve all been blasted in the same direction, like a big, circular ripple in a pond. Except it wasn’t a pebble dropped into a pond. It was an alien spacecraft. I saw a TV show about it once. They said it was proof that aliens had been visiting the earth and one of them blew up or something.” The boy finished up with a very pleased nod of his head. “I’ve been looking forward to this lesson, Professor Vance. I can’t wait to find out what wizards know about the aliens.”

Gummy gazed thoughtfully at the boy for a moment. Teaching Muggleborns was full of surprises. “Ten points for Ravenclaw, but we’re going to have to unravel a bit of what Kyle just told us. This is indeed an old Muggle photo of the Tunguska forest. It was taken in 1927, which is 19 years after the Tunguska event took place. Here are some of the things everyone, wizards and Muggles alike, can agree upon.

⚡ An explosion occurred at 7:17 am on the 30th of June, 1908, above the forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river in Siberia.

⚡ No Muggles were killed, but hundreds of reindeer lost their lives and approximately 80 million trees were destroyed.

⚡ The blast leveled 800 square miles of forest.

⚡ The trees at the very center of the blast remained standing, but they were burned and their limbs were sheared off, making them look like telephone poles.

⚡ Trees outside the epicenter were sheared of their limbs, burned and broken. When the blast radiated outward, it knocked the trees down in an outward radiating pattern. It does, as Kyle stated, look very much like the pattern you see when you drop a pebble into a pool of water.

The pebble in question, however, is where Muggle and magical accounts of the event diverge. By which, of course, I mean that Muggles do not know the true cause of the explosion and therefore continue to study and speculate.”

Gummy turned to look at the large photograph bobbing gently in the air above his desk. “And who can blame them? If there is something in your world capable of doing that much damage, you’d want to know what the heck it was. There are currently three major Muggle theories. The first theory is aliens, as Kyle pointed out. The second theory is an mid-air explosion of a small comet. The third theory is a mid-air explosion of an asteroid. The last two are really just splitting hairs with regard to what the space rock was made of, the size, and the altitude of the airburst.”

For the second time that day, Gummy pulled out a sheet of Muggle newspaper and spread it out on the desk. With a gentle flick of his wand, he dismissed the over-sized photo of the flattened Tunguska landscape and then smoothly replaced it with a new image. It was a drawing of what looked like a rhinoceros, except the animal was covered in shaggy fur and had an absurdly large horn on its head.

”This,” Gummy gestured to the image with a grand flourish, “is a Woolly Erumpent. Muggle paleontologists refer to it as Elasmotherium sibiricum and some silly people, mostly journalists, call it the Siberian Unicorn. Woolly Erumpents are extinct, but they roamed central Asia for many, many years. Like our modern Erumpents, the horns were filled with an extremely explosive liquid. The fossilized horns are rare and quite expensive, and that is how the Tunguska event began.” Gummy leaned back against his desk and settled in for story time.

”There had been an unfortunate cascade of explosions during the Erumpent mating season of 1902 which resulted in few surviving adult Erumpents. This soon translated into demand for Exploding Fluid and ground Erumpent horn far exceeding supply, which lead to all-time-high prices. If only there were more Erumpents in the world, someone could get rich! A group of Asian witches and wizards knew of an area in Siberia known as the Erumpent Graveyard. It was a large area, but was said to have the remains of ancient, fossilized Woolly Erumpents hidden beneath the earth. There was a good reason the area was unpopulated: the horns were still highly explosive.”

Professor Vance smiled as he watched most of the students shake their heads. “Yeah”, he responded to their unspoken dismay, “it’s pretty easy to see where this is headed. Greed makes people blind, though. So this group dug up a lot of fossilized Woolly Erumpent horns and gathered them together in their base camp near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. Obviously there are no records of how many people died trying to excavate the horns, but owls sent to distant relatives of the reckless group indicate that there were numerous injuries and deaths before the final, tragic events.”

The History of Magic professor glanced at the clock. They were running short on time – again. “So, let’s skip ahead to the morning of June 30th, 1908. A large quantity of Woolly Erumpent horns had been prepared for shipment. A Turkish consortium had agreed to pay an outrageous number of Galleons for the horns. There was excitement in the camp. All the enterprising group’s efforts were about to be handsomely paid off. Thugs from the consortium flew in on giant, pale blue carpets. A dispute over the payment ensued. The consortium thugs attempted to fly off with the load of Woolly Erumpent horns. It’s unknown if the spell that hit the carpet was intentional or accidental, but the flying carpet and its load of fossilized horns exploded. Everyone at the base camp was killed—“ CRACK, CRACK, CRACK!

Gummy broke off in mid-sentence. Those cracks weren’t thunder. He turned toward the window with a slight sense of déjà vu. A large brown-and-white striped owl stared in, directly at him, and lifted its leg to display the message it was carrying. Without hesitation, Gummy strode across the room and opened the window. If there was one thing he had learned last semester, it was that trying to evade a bird delivering a message was utterly futile. “Well, I’ll be,” he said as the bird flew across the room. It landed on his desk and shook itself off on top of the newspapers. “You’re from Siberia, aren’t you?” he asked the owl. It cocked its head at him and held out its message. “What an interesting coincidence.

”If I’m not mistaken, this is a Northern Hawk Owl,” Gummy explained to the class as he removed the message from the owl’s leg. “You don’t find them around here. They are native to the same general region that we’ve been talking about today.” He unrolled the small scroll and began to frown as he quickly scanned the contents.

”Is it about Bubastis again?” one of the students asked.

”Is it about Woolly Erumpents?” another student suggested.

”Is is about aliens?” Kyle asked.

Gummy turned patient eyes in Kyle’s direction. “No aliens, Kyle. There are no aliens, but you’ll probably like the next lesson, too.” The bell to end class rang and Gummy thrust the message into his pocket. “It isn’t about Bubastis, Amy, that’s behind us. No need to worry about that any more. And it has nothing to do with Erumpents, living or dead. But it is something I’m going to need to investigate. And meanwhile, you lot have homework to do.”