The clash of the titans, L.A. style

HERE, IN A DREAM about 14,000 years past, be monsters ...

Your band, the first humans ever to see this landscape, are little hunters in an Eden of plenty. A plain of sage and grass, broken by hills, stretches to mountains inland. Up where La Cienega will be, wild black mustard and castor bean plants clump in thickets too dense to walk through, surrounding marshes and pools shaded by old cottonwoods and live oaks. You can hear the sweet whistles of valley quail and spook deer that bounce off, pausing to look behind at you, easy prey.

But you might not want to walk through those thickets or pass under those trees. Other things, some of them beautiful, some deadly, share the landscape. Millennia later, Kipling will write as though addressing you: “Very softly down a glade runs a waiting, watching Shade ... he is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is fear!” Pronghorn antelope flash shining white rumps and run. They can outrun most anything in America these days, but now a cheetah streaks past, to collide and trip her prey on the fly. Watching from the shade under that oak is a pride of lions. They are a third larger than any alive today.

Some creatures are even more frightening than lions. Out of the grass by a waterhole comes a head out of your species’ earliest nightmares: a cat, as burly as a bear, with two fanged teeth like skinning knives. It is the saber-toothed “tiger,” but its scientific name is more evocative: Smilodon fatalis.

Did that whole tree move? You can hear a cracking sound as a snaky arm reaches up to rend a cottonwood in half. That’s no arm; it’s a trunk. The elephant happily destroying the tree is bigger than any today, 12 feet at its shoulder. It is the great imperial mammoth of the Southwest, maybe the biggest elephant that ever walked.

You might remember some creatures from your old home in Asia, but not everything looks familiar. A shaggy reddish beast 8 feet tall hauls down branches from another tree, using forepaws armed with foot-long claws hooked inward, so when it goes on all fours, it walks on its knuckles. It has only two relatives today, little sad-faced relicts that hang upside-down from South American trees. The one you are watching is the Rancholabrean megalonyx, better known as a ground sloth.

Another monster stalks by, swinging through the grass with insolent grace. It has the head of a bear, but its shoulder is higher than a man’s head. The saber-toothed tiger is a cat built like a bear, but this is a bear, shaped for running, the short-faced bear. Despite its grace, it weighs three-quarters of a ton and is perhaps the greatest predator to walk the continent since the dinosaurs.

What would a modern hunter use to hunt these giants? The tradition for hunting the biggest game comes to the United States from the English, so we might imagine a 4-bore Saurian gun, built by Holland and Holland in London in 1985, decorated with images of dinosaurs by the finest of artists in metal, made to fire two quarter-pound balls. Such a gun was recently sold to a mysterious collector for six figures.

But this kingdom will soon fall to the seemingly crude weapons of your band: stone points; the atlatl, or throwing stick; and the loyal domestic dog.

AROUND 12,000 BC, bands of the Little Hunters crossed the dwindling plains of the Bering land bridge, still above water between Siberia and Alaska, and sped down the ice-free corridor flanking the Rockies into our northern plains. They couldn’t tarry; nothing lived between the land bridge and what is now Montana. In an essay titled “Man’s Best Friend, Mammoth’s Worst Enemy,” archeologist Stuart Fiedel suggests they took only 120 days to pass through the chasm in the ice to the east of the Rockies.

They arrived, multiplied and made elegant tools now known as Clovis points, and they spread out. In no more than 500 years, all the monsters were gone. The hunter-gatherers ate elephants and the horses, which would return with the Spanish. In an ironic finale, many of the megafauna we think of as native are no more so than the Asian immigrants were, or we are. Elk, moose, caribou, wolves and brown bear are Eurasian immigrants.

Probably the big predators followed their prey to extinction; but can’t you see a giant bear standing, roaring, swinging paws, raising dust in a swirl of baying, screaming dogs, as a hunter fits a bolt to his atlatl? Great birds, bigger than condors, wait soaring overhead, to become the thunderbirds of legend generations later. Who were the most fearsome hunters in the end?

The natives are ghosts. But sometimes, when the summer fogs roll inland, when a shimmer of water gleams on the tar at La Brea, you can almost hear them.

*

Steve Bodio is the author of numerous books, including “Eagle Dreams” and “On the Edge of the Wild.”