The article analyzes the short story «Hunting the Wooly Mammoth» by T. N. Tolstaya. The peculiarity of this text is its unusual narrative structure: here we find a maximum fixation on the internal point of view of the main character combined with vivid phraseology of the narrator, which sets the ironic tone of the story and forms the impression that the author invites her readers to laugh together at the stereotypical heroine and her down-to-earth desires. However, the ending of this text is humorless, dark, and ambiguous, which implies that the task and strategy of the narrator were different. The characters in this text are neither really above nor below the reader, and it is not only their stereotypical thinking that is the focus of the text. The reader, whose attention the text so insistently draws to the heroine's stereotypical judgments, is in fact also thinking in a clichéd way. And this discovery generates a sense of unease from the fact that at the end the narrator completely deprives him of his footing on the reality of the text and plunges him into the phantasmagorical world of the character's imagination.