the huge male tiger who killed, dismembered and ate Markov in 1997 was ten years old, quite likely it was the same then-younger cat whose scent we snorted in 1992 on the Amba River. We were, at that time, less than five miles away from the Markov attack site.
Somehow, this apparent coincidence didn’t hit me as startling: The fact that we probably crossed the sign of a tiger who later tore a man to pieces and ate him, for me, many curious precedents. Deep in the Sierra Madres of Chihuahua, Mexico in 1985, a jaguar coughed and sprayed just beyond the light of my campfire. It was my first jaguar and I glibly imagined this rosette-spotted predator stalking me. The next morning I discovered the jaguar had backtracked me for 14 miles.
And I remember vitality at the edge of fear infused into my own life when my mountain campfire was besieged by a huge black grizzly—he knew me—one stormy autumn night near Glacier Park in Montana: Only a few days earlier the same bear had ripped a cache of camping gear from a tree and had chewed to bits my sleeping bag and sweaty T-shirt, everything that smelled of me, while ignoring a tent and other gear which did not (sending me an unmistakable message: “Get the hell off my mountain.” I did).
The sentience of large predators is unlike what you see gazing into the orbs of a chimp or your favorite Labrador retriever. The tiger with a vendetta or bear with a memory stirs a different set of sensory responses cached deeper down in our brainstems. I knew a grizzly in Yellowstone, one I tracked for a decade, who set up what looked like a deliberate ambush for me in the snowy woods. I had snowshoed into a remote thermal area and later found a huge male grizzly on a winterkilled bull bison. About dusk, the bear rose and followed my snowshoe tracks out onto the crusted snow into the timber. I waited ten minutes and started after him. A few feet into the darkening forest, I stopped and looked at the huge, twisted paw imprinted over my own snowshoe track. A premonition rose up my spine to the hair on my neck. I retreated rapidly and pitched a distant tent in the darkness. The next morning, I cautiously followed the skewed tracks: the big grizzly had trailed my snowshoe prints for a hundred yards, then his tracks veered off sharply in a tight circle that led to an icy depression in the snow behind a large deadfall ten feet off my trail. Had I gone any further in the darkness, he would have been right there. The icy bed spoke of a long wait.
Years later, I investigated a bear mauling: In August of 1984, a woman camper was killed and partially consumed in the backcountry of Yellowstone’s upper Pelican Valley. In late October of that year, I hiked back to the site of the fatality. I squatted to fill my canteen at a small pond. I tensed feeling a sudden tightness in my lungs, then a crushing pain in my chest: In the frozen mud I saw the distinctive track of the big grizzly who would have ambushed me eight years earlier. For a moment, I was disorientated. The tracks were old, unconnected to whatever happened here in August. He probably wasn’t the killer. But he had been right here. I hadn’t known what to make of the snowshoe ambush in 1976 either. Maybe the grizzly was just curious. I felt separated from the magic that once connected me to the grizzly with the crooked track. The authorities never found the bear who killed the young woman. I left the site of the fatal mauling bewildered, isolated from my own kind, wondering how ancient people maintained their humanity among the other nations of animals. An acting park superintendent put out an odd statement: “The last thing we want out there,” he said, “is the legend of a killer grizzly.”
The point of these recollections is that sharing the wilderness with legendary killer bears or cats dramatically shifts the psychic landscape. You think about the world differently because you have no illusions about being in control. If you traveled armed with a spear in Pleistocene North America, you definitely lived in the middle of the food pyramid, stumbling about like a minor but tempting pork chop, hunted by the big cats and bears while you pursued the mammoths and camels of your ice-age vision quests.
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The most mercurial player remains the gigantic short-faced bear who was a matchless American native. What kind of creature was Arctodus simus: Was it indeed the terror of the tundra, as suggested by a few eminent paleontologists, or a peaceful grazer of the plains?
Considerable academic debate rages about whether the giant short-faced bear was a practicing predator, scavenger or vegetarian. The more interesting question is what sort of challenge Arctodus simus presented to people by appropriating the hunters’ kills and in actually bringing down people as prey. Paleontologists are not a lot of help on this one; they tend not to directly address such human/bear issues.
The core is this: How does it feel to share the land with creatures who are aggressively trying to kill and eat you? It probably felt like it does today, regardless of the rarity of modern human/predator relationships. The hunter who roams the land, spear in hand—looking over his shoulder for the bear or cat that, indifferent to our emerging dominion, regards puny two-legged Homo sapiens as just another variety of pot roast—carries with him a valuable awareness of vulnerability that we lack today in our safe, sterilized woodlots of well-managed white-tail deer and high-powered rifles. That value, I believe, lies in perceiving authentic risk that in turns triggers an appropriate survival response. In such a cosmos, you hear more, see more and smell more. Today’s polluted global winds dilute the olfactory discernment of the shadow of the sabertooth. I’m saying maybe we could use some of this biological insecurity and acuity in today’s world.
It is within that context I consider the short-faced bear.
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I would think the short-faced bear potential to limit early American demographics too important an issue to be ignored by either archaeologists or paleontologists, although, for the most part, the academics avoid specific speculation. I searched the professional literature for clues and illumination. The venerated vertebrate paleontologist Bjorn Kurten once called Arctodus simus “the most powerful predator in the Pleistocene fauna of North America.” Here is a vulnerable windmill, like “Clovis First,” that makes for great press and it’s something to tilt against. Paleontology often does a good job of debunking popular misconceptions. Archaeology scarcely mentions human/short-faced bear interactions. Paleontology does so only indirectly in a few technical studies—the sort that I endeavor to steer clear of in this book. The reasons are simply to avoid getting snagged in technical detail as well as an acknowledgement of my layman limitations.
Nonetheless, I reluctantly grabbed a handful of recent papers as an example. The representation is probably biased because the ones that caught my attention were either very enlightening or exasperating. They are, however, about the only source for beginning a discussion. The scientist’s conclusions are examined in a stew of my own experiences with grizzly bears. Here’s a summary of three nearly random, technical articles that help paint the panorama. All challenge A. simus’s reputation as a predator.
Spanish paleontologists measured a small number of bone pieces and fragments of short-faced bear fossils and inferred that the bear was not short-faced, long-legged or predacious. One question, which was never asked, is what determines what a bear eats? The answer is behavior, especially aggression, not snout size nor the cut of their omnivore teeth. Animal protein is universally preferred over vegetation. Aggression and dominance played a huge role, especially around the kill sites of Pleistocene carnivores. Predation is opportunistic.
The study purported to compare A. simus to the grizzly bear implying the short-faced bear was a slow moving vegetarian. But grizzlies can outrun racehorses over a short distance and bring down adult elk, caribou, moose and the calves of all these creatures. The short-faced bear evolved in an America without people—grizzlies did not. From my own observations, brown bear routinely displace wolves, cougars and, less commonly, humans from carcasses, presumably because the bear has reason to fear humans. The short-faced bear had no reason to fear H. sapiens because it had never seen one until the late autumn of its species some 13,000 to 30,000 years ago. Since there is no record whatsoever of human interaction with any of these big prehistoric carnivores (there is an anecdotal rumor of a New Mexico Clovis point lodged in a dire wolf’s jaw), my account of such
