Sometimes, in the pale moonlight of a sylvan night or in the whispers of a still afternoon in the back yard, you can hear the footsteps of previous cultures. The cadence is as regular as a heartbeat, and it is called the relentless thunder of time.
And then, just for a few seconds you must know that you are not the center of the universe but rather a recruit in the platoon of succession that marches with the colors of mankind.
This land is our land only for the blink of an eye, and then it will belong to others, and we will be with those people of the past, destined to march eternally with them down the strange, echoing streets of cultural evolution.
But, hey, its not bad company, and certainly not a boring group in places like Lake and McHenry Counties: wanderers with the wooly mammoths, hunters among the glaciers, early tool makers, the first corn growers, etc.
This is the scene, as structured with some imagination from archeological records and with the help of the Lake County Museum and professionals such as Rochelle Lurie of Harvard and Douglas Kullen of Warrenville, both of whom are archeologists who have done research work in northeastern Illinois.
Regress now for some 14,000 years, back through the centuries with one grand leap of time. The Wisconsin Glacier is retreating before southern breezes and a warming sun. Its shadow looms off to the north like a great hulking beast, and the grinding crunch of its ice mass echoes across the land as the moans of death itself. Melt water trickles in a thousand tiny streams, cutting through sprawls of outwash and joining to form gushing rivers. The rivers twist off into the spruce trees that poke up out of the new soil like quills, and over it all there is the conflicting aura of old and new, as if a time warp war had just been fought and the future had won, but just barely.
In a low area of bogs and marsh, a ponderous mammoth tries to make its way to higher ground, but it steps into a depression that is disguised by a mixture of soil particles and water. It struggles mightily, tossing its trunk about and thrashing at the soupy clay with its huge curled tusks. (A mammoth bone was found near Ingleside in 1925 and is on display at the Lake County Museum.)
Suddenly before the doomed creature, a man appears. It is one of the first human residents of northeastern Illinois, a Paleo-Indian who is wrapped in rugged fur and who carries a crude spear. He is part of a small band of traveling hunters who descended from the Asians that migrated centuries ago across the temporary land mass between Alaska and Siberia. He is a man of opportunity, and the great beast trapped in glacial glue is his ticket to survival for days to come.
The mammoth`s death is hastened with clubs and spears, and the man and his fellow travelers use their crude stone tools to hack off pieces of hide and flesh. They stay in the area of the mammoth`s remains, shelterless or in rough animal-hide tents, until the dead beast sinks into the gray muck, and then they move on to be swallowed up in the cold, wet mist and rain of their time.
So the first residents were transients, and the record of their presence is sparse, a few crude spear points made from stone. According to a comprehensive archeological survey of McHenry County made in 1973-74, two such points have been found, one just north of Harvard and another along the Fox River near McHenry.
``There is some thought that these hunting bands figured in the extinction of some of the large land mammals,`` Kullen said, ``the mammoths, camels and sloths.``
There is something ominous in that speculation, that man`s first appearance in McHenry or Lake County coincided with conditions that made it possible for him to tip the population balance of such awesome animals.
In any case, as those huge creatures disappeared, the Paleo-Indians moved on to be replaced by the early Archaic Indians who were around from about 6000 to 5000 B.C.
So now where the flesh of the trapped mammoth fed the first man, there were bands of hunters who concentrated on smaller game species such as deer and who still traveled in quest of food, but not so widely as their predecessors.
``There were some major changes in the climate,`` Kullen said. ``It became warmer and drier, and among the inhabitants there was increased use of stone tools, grinding stones and notched points, for example. They probably used tent-like shelters with more permanent structures such as lean-tos as base camps.``
From 5000 to 3500 B.C., called the Middle Archaic Period by the archeologists, the size of Indian bands increased, housing became more permanent, and there was more use made of plants for food.