In the Shadow of the Sabertooth. Doug Peacock
big brown arrowheads had come from another cache or even a burial weathering out of the nearby bank. I would return but not to collect artifacts or look for the cache.
That next year I gave up my entire collection of arrowheads. I started reburying arrowheads and repatriating the ones I had kept as a boy.
Except for one. Later, I carried the largest of those chocolate-brown chert arrowheads into war. It protected me from countless enemy bullets and would prefigure the decades to come.
The arrowheads told a story but I didn’t know what it was about. Our family had a trout fishing cabin on the upper Pine River. My grandpa and uncle built it out of wood scraps and tarpaper after the Depression. The cabin was where the stories were told. Grandfather narrated sagas of a gigantic brown trout hooked three times over a decade but never landed. He had a Chippewa Indian friend he sometimes ice-fished with. But the legend of the arrowheads was one story my grandfather never told me.
My father hauled me around to local archaeological meetings—amateur groups who would bring in a professional for a lecture—and helped me find books at the library. My dad made up wonderful stories about an Indian boy like myself, that he would write out over the years and mail to me from his distant Boy Scout postings, or, occasionally sneak into my bedroom (after all, I was a teenager) and ease me towards smiling sleep with his soothing woodsy tales.
I plugged away, tracking the trails of those ancient hunters, especially the earliest ones. Plunging into my backyard wilderness, I prowled those swamps and wastelands. The songs of warblers and larks ushered my forays into dark woodlands. Dusk suggested jeopardy. My child’s universe of adventure edged into a larger world and I slowly began to crave wildness beyond the hills and cornfields. I know now that those fens, sand ridges and feathered herds flying at sunset gave rise to my own idea of home, one that had everything to do with discovery and a sense of the importance of wild exploration that eventually propelled a lifetime aimed at boundless horizons. Much of that value emerged from a child looking for arrowheads and then thinking about the lives of the vanished people who had made them. Where’d they come from and how did they live?
By this time, age fifteen, I had figured out that those sand ridges at 605 feet of elevation represented a post-glacial beach of the Great Lakes, lived on by Late Archaic people about 4,000 years ago. I found another red colored anthill and immediately called the anthropology department at the University of Michigan and talked to James B. Griffin, a giant, I later learned, in the archaeology of the eastern United States.
Griffin sent out two doctorial graduate students, Louis Binford and Mark Papworth. I tagged along on many a field reconnaissance and eavesdropped on conversations too sophisticated for my provincial upbringing. Papworth, especially, took me under his care; we slogged through muddy cornfields and paddled canoes down roily rivers looking for sites. Mark pointed out stands of wild marihuana and passed me a beer—knowledge and rites I had barely imagined. Some time passed, the University of Michigan got a grant for archaeological fieldwork in the Saginaw Basin and I was hired in 1960 as a research assistant on a dig of a site I had discovered when I was sixteen. Later, I attended the University of Michigan and took archaeology courses taught by these great men, learning about the peopling of the Americas and the bold hunters, called “Clovis,” who once stalked mammoth during the time of the gigantic American beasts (now extinct) at the end of the Pleistocene.
But as a student, I was restless, aching for the Rocky Mountains and would quit alternate semesters to go West and pound nails for a living. All the time, the draft board was close behind.
In the spring of 1963, I was working as a core-logging geologist for a copper mine in southern Arizona. My U of M advisor, paleontologist John (Jack) Dorr, called and asked me to accompany him to the Alaskan backcountry on a three-month expedition to look for non-marine vertebrate fossils from the Tertiary era—an effort to correlate the Bering Strait land migration route theory for extinct horses and camels. We went everywhere: All over Alaska, the Yukon drainage, the Mackenzie River basin and the North Slope before big oil got there. The trip was a total academic and scientific failure. We found no such fossils, not a single one. It was one of the best times of my life.
We camped out on a braided river halfway between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean. The bush plane that had landed on a gravel bar and dropped us off would be a couple weeks late in picking us up because of poor weather. We ran short of food, and worse, Jack was out of tobacco. Every day, we scanned the gray horizon for breaks in the weather: The plane never came. Jack smoked coffee grounds rolled in newspaper while I foraged the flats and hills for berries, fish and meat. We guilelessly wondered if we might end up wintering in this land of tundra and muskeg—we’d have to live like Indians or Eskimos. I fashioned a hook with feathers, made a fly, tied it with a leader to a short branch of dwarf willow, let the wind blow it over the sloughs and jerked countless grayling up onto the bank. Dr. Jack, who had collected sample skulls of nearly all North American mammals, asked me if I might bag an Arctic ground squirrel (whose skull was missing from his collection) for him with my pistol. I stalked the dry ridges, dodging dive-bombing gyrfalcons that nested on the low summits, and watched a coal-black wolf nearly my own weight disappear into the fog. That night I fried up the headless ground squirrel in bacon grease and wondered how the ancients survived in such a place.
I didn’t get back to the North Country for a number of years. In 1966, I wrapped up the big chocolate brown arrowhead in a small roadmap of the northern Rocky Mountains and headed to Southeast Asia. The arrowhead kept me alive during firefights, grenade lobs, mortar attacks and friendly fire from helicopters and stray bombs. The map showed me what I wanted to stay alive for. After serving two tours as a Special Forces medic in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, I was finally repatriated to the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific coast of Alaska and British Columbia, the Arctic tundra, and the great deserts of the Southwest U.S. and Northwestern Mexico—North America, the land I loved the most. The maimed vet crawled back into the brush and lived with grizzly bears until his wound began to staunch, then struck out again walking the high country. The wild habitats of the West that represented my homeland were also the terrain of that great adventure—when the first people reached the western shore of the Pacific and found their way south. How would it have felt to be the first human to explore this uninhabited wilderness when huge lions, sabertooth cats and gigantic bears patrolled the land? I walked the wild ridges with these scenes in the back of my mind.
For four more decades I stalked these places and routes, following grizzly bears, often retracing the paths of prehistoric people, never with artifact collecting on my mind but rather with a sense of wonder and curiosity about how people might have lived in such habitat. Accordingly, I lived off the land, often alone, for weeks at a time in remote deserts, mountains, coastal British Columbia, including the Queen Charlotte and Goose Islands, a coastal route that was not completely glaciated during the last Ice Age. I walked point on a polar bear expedition in eastern Beringia (Beringia during the Late Pleistocene was the vast Arctic region encompassing the Bering land bridge, west from the Russian Far East, Siberia and much of Alaska, east all the way past the Mackenzie River in Canada), tracked Siberian tigers in western Beringia, stalked grizzlies throughout Alaska and all the way down into Mexico, slowly paddled down the Porcupine River where I found a mammoth tusk sticking out of the bank of a side channel and roamed the region of the ice-free corridor, ranging from the waters of the Yukon and Mackenzie Rivers south to the Rocky Mountain Front. For seven months a year, over fifteen years, I lived with wild grizzlies in the high mountains of the American West. I’m still here.
Archaeologists had enriched my life. After the war, I lived in the home of eminent anthropologist Edward H. Spicer, where I came to know Thomas Hinton and Bernard (Bunny) Fontana. For years, Tom and I camped up and down Sonora’s Seri Coast, and Bunny remains a close friend. Henry Wright bailed me out of a jam one time. Mark Papworth read my first book, Grizzly Years, got hold of me through the publisher and we resumed our old friendship.
The past was close behind. My repatriation was already unconsciously tracking this great adventure story—the colonization of ice-age America by humans. A couple developments narrowed my focus on this tale into the brilliant sunlight of a Montana summer and the writing of this book. The first of these concerned an archaeological site.
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