MONTANA OUTDOORS 1110 SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2013 FWP.MT.GOV/MTOUTDOORS

WHEN BIG GAME WAS BIGShort-faced bears standing 12 feet tall, massive direwolves, mammoths weighing up to 10 tons—at one timehunting in Montana was a highly dangerous necessity. BY HAL HERRING

ILLUSTRATION OF EARLY NORTH AMERICANHUNTERS STALKING A WOUNDED MAMMOTH BY ROY ANDERSEN.

12 SEPTEMBER–OCTO?

he noon sun poured down hot and strong, burning awaythe last of the frost. Weather brewed above the ice-cladwestern mountains, the boiling gray clouds rising highand tumbling like waves above the plains. The hunters

moved at a slow trot and held to the high ground, avoiding thebrush-choked coulees where they would be easy prey for the hugelions that sheltered under the cutbanks waiting out the daylight.Five men, long-haired and sparsely bearded, were clad in stiffmammoth skin, woven mastodon-hair tunics, camel-hide leggings,and warm hats made of soft hare or dire wolf neck. They carriedspears with shafts of bodock wood and foreshafts of mammothivory. The hand-sized spear points, flaked from northern Yellow-stone chert to razor sharpness, were bound tightly to the ivory withsinews from mastodons or mammoths, and the spears werestained with red ochre and blood. Dried blood also clotted themen’s beards, and it blackened their hands and forearms and theskin around their mouths. After they reached a low butte, all ofthem checked a different direction for danger before clamberingup to a notch in the rimrock. The leader stopped to study the topof the butte for peril or game before committing himself to the lastfew feet of the climb.

High ground meant a moment of peace, where no great cheetahcould run you down, no saber-tooth could leap from hiding uponyou. The dire wolves—roughly 30 percent larger than today’s graywolves—saw no need to climb when there was prey aplenty on theflats. The hunters rested at the edge of the rimrock, sitting just backfrom the edge to avoid skylining themselves to whatever might bewatching from below. They set their spears down but kept themclose at hand. The three hunters who carried atlatls took the quiversoff their shoulders, glad to be free of the beautiful but awkward-to-carry darts, 5-foot shafts of straight skunkbrush, fletched with cranefeathers and tipped with thumb-sized points of obsidian black as awinter night’s sky. From bags woven of beargrass, they took snackslabs of purple sloth meat, flicking off the grass seeds, specks ofdirt, and fly eggs as they ate. Everything they carried was sturdyand well-crafted. Anyone who made shoddy weapons or clothesor cordage had died off hundreds of years ago in the frozen wastesof Beringia—the ice age land bridge between Asia and NorthAmerica—or elsewhere in the hostile, unforgiving landscape.Thousands of years earlier their counterparts, the mammothhunters of Europe, had painted elaborate charcoal andred ochre frescoes of their prey and predatorson walls of the caves where they lived. Butthese North American men had fewdreamers among them; the relentlesspresence of predators—especially thegiant short-faced bear—meant that onlythe hyperalert, the tricky, and the strong

could live long enough to sire children. Their clothes and weaponswere barely adorned, the ivory marked with simple hatches or cir-cles or stripes of ochre. They were nomads, with few havens, al-ways on the move, constantly under siege from the bears that wererelentlessly stealing their carcasses and attacking their camps.Their art was in their lives—intense, dangerous, often short, packedto bursting with the power of the hunt, the heat of blood, and thewealth of meat and fat.

Below them the brush, low trees, and tall grasses of the prairiesyawned eastward, where immense columns of remnant ice glit-tered along the edge of a lake that seemed to have no end. A wav-ing clump of serviceberry marked where a giant sloth was feedingonly a quarter-mile distant, but it was in a blind swale too danger-ous for the hunters to approach. A band of pronghorn passed, stay-ing to open ground. The hunters ignored them—no use wastingeffort on a wary animal that could outrun a cheetah.

They all saw the mammoth at the same time, a dark shape farout against the olive-colored plain, moving toward them. The menfelt no need to hurry. Though the mammoth was capable of a fastrun, it, like the other huge beasts of the era, grazed and movedslowly unless attacked. The hunters would kill in bold and carefullyorchestrated attacks, the atlatl darts serving to drain and slow themassive prey animal, to set it up for the finish with spears. The long,slow killing, the blood trailing, the rush and thrust and battle werenothing compared to the challenge of trying to keep the kill. Thebutchering of a mammoth was a dance at the sharp edge of apredatory abyss, attended by dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, evenhuge wolverines. The short-faced bear trumped them all. The mas-sive beast could smell blood on the wind from miles away andwould come lumbering in like a tank to take it from the hunters, andtry to kill them in the process. What meat the men could not haulback to camp in one trip was probably lost to the unstoppable carnivore, standing 12 feet tall and weighing half again as much astoday’s grizzly. For the luckiest and the strongest, though, there wasthe camp that every hunter of every epoch knows, where lovedones work and talk beside blazing fires, hoping for meat and safe return, where the laughterof children mingles with thesound of wind and water-fowl passing above... n

Mid-September, 12,000 years ago, 20 miles east of Choteau, Montana...

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MONTANA OUTDOORS 13

herever we hunt this fall in Montana, we walk in the foot-steps of ancient hunters very

similar to ourselves. The Clovis people werenamed after the massive and beautifullyflaked tools they used, first discovered in the1930s near Clovis, New Mexico. The Clovismay have come from today’s Siberia andAlaska during the waning years of the lastice age, venturing down to today’s UnitedStates by way of an ice-free corridor—a break between the Laurentide and Cor -dilleran ice sheets that ran east of the RockyMountain Front from Alberta south to whatis now the Great Plains. According to a morerecent theory, the Clovis came from Siberiaby boat along the edges of the ice shelf thatcovered the Bering Sea, and then workedtheir way inland. Still other scientists claimevidence that the Clovis drifted north to theGreat Plains from the forests of the south-east and Midwest. Nobody knows.

What is certain is that at one time the Clo-vis people were here in Montana. These werenot cavemen or Neanderthals; they were notvastly different in appearance from us. “Mon-tana is the special place,” says Doug Peacock,who lives in Livingston. His new book, In theShadow of the Sabertooth, offers a deep look atthe first peoples of North America, the in-credibly diverse megafauna that sustained(and often killed) them, and what happenedto man and beast alike as the climate warmedafter the last ice age. “There is evidence thatpeople were here as early as 13,000 yearsago, a scattering of pilgrims, perhaps, whowould have run into the mammoths in south-ern Alberta and hunted camels and slothsand horses,” Peacock told me. “But it’s notuntil the giant invasion that we call the Clo-vis—who discovered and quarried the flintand chert south of the Missouri River, andflaked the huge tools—that we see the obvi-ous mammoth hunters.”

n 1968, a heavy equipment operator inthe Shields Valley near Wilsall uncov-ered, at the base of a cliff, a Clovis burial

site that would yield some of the most spec-

tacular ancient tools ever seen. Huge spearpoints of carefully selected multicoloredstone suggest that the lack of wall paintingsand other artwork left behind by thesehunters was not because they did not recog-nize beauty. Finely wroughttools of bone and antler accom-panied the points, along with theskeleton of a child. The burial,known as the Anzick site, is oneof the most significant Clovisfinds in North America.

From the Anzick site to theancient chert quarries of Mon-tana City, to the mammothsburied in the Doeden Gravelsnear Miles City, to the giantsloth and dire wolf remains inBlacktail Cave on the Dearborn River, theevidence confirms that there has neverbeen, before or since, a wilder place or timeto be a hunter on this planet than in Mon-tana during the Clovis period.

But these wild and diverse times did not

last long. At some point around 10,000years ago, the last mammoths died out. The climate warmed and became much drier.Gone were the giant sloths, the beavers bigas ponies, the horses and camels, along with

most of the predators that followed them,the dire wolves and saber-toothed cats, thecheetahs and lions. Without the mightygrazing beasts, the mixed shrublands grewso thick that fire became a more regular partof the environment, favoring the prairie

The evidence confirms that there has never been, beforeor since, a wilder place ortime to be a hunter on thisplanet than in Montana during the Clovis period.

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Hal Herring of Augusta has written for The Economist and The Atlantic Monthlyand is a contributing editor for Field & Stream.

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grasses that dominate today. The Clovis people disappeared, too.

Or, like the landscape around them, theymorphed into something else, adapting tochanges in climate, vegetation, and prey,driven and altered by their own restlesssearching for better weapons, better tech-nology. Within three millennia, Montanabegan to look much more like we know it, orat least as the Lewis and Clark Expeditionrecorded it. The antique bison and the giantlong-horned bison were gone, but Bisonbison, the ones we know today, were begin-ning their heyday. The speedy pronghornnever left; their populations exploded in theempty niches left behind by the extinctions.Mule deer and elk, adapted to grasslands,thrived. Gray wolves, no longer held incheck by the more powerful dire wolves,came back strong, as did coyotes. The trendwas to the smaller, the faster, the wilier.

or Montana’s human hunters, too, it was a time of forced adaptation.

The Folsom people (named after spearpoints first found near Folsom, New Mexico)that appeared around 10,000 years ago hadabandoned the finely flaked and massivespear points of the Clovis. Instead they developed smaller, more efficient weapons,more suited to the new dominant prey ani-mals of the plains, especially the bison. The

Folsom made more knives, more hide scrap-ers, more atlatls. There was a wealth of preyin the species that had survived the greattransition with them, but no human huntercould run as fast as a bison, much less apronghorn. No man was strong enough toleap like a mountain lion and kill an elk.Physically outclassed in everyway, our ancestors made theclassic human decision to employ brain over brawn.Weapons technology and themechanics of obtaining meatwent through rapid change.

The great drawback of theatlatl is that, to use it effec-tively, a hunter must be stand-ing up, in the open. It is not aweapon of stealth or ambush.Even the sound of the throw—the “whoosh”—can be enough to startle adeer or antelope and allow it to escape. Useof the bison jump—dating to around 12,000years ago, and of which Montana alone con-tains more than 300 sites—likely becamemore common during the Folsom period. Sodid driving pronghorn and other game into“pounds,” or rock enclosures, that wouldslow or entrap them. Since horses did not ar-rive here until the mid-18th century, earlyhunters built cairns at strategic points formiles at a stretch, where hunters could con-ceal themselves and leap up, perhaps waving

a hide or other object, to stampede their preyin the direction of the jump or pound. At aMadison Valley site, pronghorn were drivenover what is no more than a steep embank-ment into a creek bottom. It did not matterwhether the jump killed the prey; injury wassufficient, anything to slow the animals down

and give the human hunters a fightingchance to feed themselves and their families.

Like killing a mammoth or mastodon,using jumps and pounds for hunting was acommunal effort. Until the appearance ofthe bow, about 2,000 years ago in NorthAmerica, the idea of the lone hunter—somuch a part of our recent history of moun-tain men and trappers and adventurers—was probably alien to human cultures.

s we venture forth this fall, hunt-ing alone or with friends and family, we might take a few

minutes to imagine a time when we were asoften the prey as the predator. Instead ofthe smooth bolt of the Remington 700, weworked the rough wood of a spear handle.Instead of a tiny .30-caliber copper-jack-eted missile propelled by a burning mixtureof the earth’s chemicals discovered by 7th-century Chinese alchemists, we usedraw muscle to force a hand-sized chunk offlaked stone between giant ribs. Huntinghas changed in substantial ways—most im-portantly that failure no longer meansdeath—but the goals are not so differentfrom thousands of years ago: meat andhides to share, the taking of an animal’s lifewith skill and honor, the fierce freedom ofour wild spaces and all that inhabits them.There is an echo, from the Pleistocene, thatonly a hunter can hear.

As we venture forth this fall,hunting alone or with friendsand family, we might take afew minutes to imagine a timewhen we were as often theprey as the predator.

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