Night of the Grizzlies

by Jack Olsen

  A psychologist might say that some of this protective attitude toward the grizzly is related to the country’s guilt about the cruel treatment of the species, but a simpler explanation is the traditional Yankee veneration of the courageous underdog. “Dogs, guns, poison and traps have swept the majority of grizzlies away,” Enos Mills wrote in The Grizzly. “Their retreat was masterly and heroic, but the odds were overwhelming.” Gradually the great bear ceased to be a menace and became a source of pride, and readers could stir to the words of dedicated conservationists like Andy Russell, who bared his own feelings in Grizzly Country:

  The animal that impresses me most, the one I find myself liking more and more, is the grizzly. No sight encountered in the wilds is quite so stirring as those massive, clawed tracks pressed into mud or snow. No sight is quite so impressive as that of the great bear stalking across some mountain slope with the fur of his silvery robe rippling over his mighty muscles. His is a dignity and power matched by no other in the North American wilderness. To share a mountain with him for awhile is a privilege and an adventure like no other.

  Russell, who may be the ranking nonscientific authority on the grizzly, calls him “the living symbol of the mountain wilderness” and new generations of outdoor Americans, the backpacking fresh-air seekers who are spilling into the national parks in record numbers, are inclined to agree. There is no thrill like returning to St. Louis or Chicago or New York with a tale about a grizzly that came in the night and stole a package of cookies and ran off when someone shouted, “Get out of there, you old son of a gun, you!” The thrill comes from close camaraderie with “the living symbol of the mountain wilderness,” the kinship of sharing the forest together, and ultimately the feeling that the huge animal with the consummate tools of murder on his paws and in his mouth chose instead to run away like a shy child.

  Out of all these commingled feelings about the great bear, conscious and unconscious feelings, expressed and implied feelings, has come an admiration of the grizzly that borders on hero worship, especially on the parts of those who live near the final haunts of the animals or come into these areas to hike and enjoy nature. When a rogue grizzly must be exterminated by government officials, the laments of these new ursophiles continue for months, and letters to the editor run four or five to one in condemnation of the exterminators. On those rare occasions when a grizzly makes an attack on a human being, or appears to make an attack, there is an automatic response by those who control wildlife areas to give the animal another chance, to wait and see. Says Mel Ruder, Pulitzer Prize-winning Montana editor and longtime student of grizzlies and people, “Montana is one of the last remaining places that have grizzlies, and there’s a strong sentiment to protect the grizzly. And in the national parks, that feeling is even stronger. ’Grizzlies must be preserved at all costs’ —that’s what they’ll tell you. So when any attacks would happen, the park officials would just let nature take its course, hoping that nothing else would happen.”

  Ruben Hart, a former chief park ranger at Glacier National Park, was not reluctant to express his feelings about grizzlies.

  “I’ve got all the respect in the world for those critters,” Hart says. “They’ve been pushed back by man, pushed back and pushed back, all the way into the mountains. We have to think twice before we kill one, and think twice again.”

  Park officials like Ruben Hart are the stewards of the grizzlies’ last days as an American species, and most observers will agree that they are performing the difficult task as well as can be expected. When Yellowstone Park was created in 1872, grizzlies imploded into the protected area, where probably 200 or fewer of them remain, and when Glacier Park was set up in 1910, the grizzlies seemed to sense once again that this was a place where hunters could not follow, and something between 100 and 140 of the great bears remain within the relatively narrow confines of the park today. The number varies with the month; when the Montana hunting season begins, grizzlies scurry out of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area and the Flathead National Forest and the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, all contiguous with Glacier Park, into the safety of the area where firearms are not allowed.

  The men who preside over America’s national parks operate under a clear and simple mandate. The act of August 25, 1916, creating the National Park Service, said that the function of the new government agency would be “to conserve the scenery, the natural and historic objects and the wildlife” and “to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Later, the same philosophy was laid down in the Park Service’s administrative manual:

  The animals indigenous to the parks shall be protected, restored if practicable, and their welfare in a natural wild state perpetuated. Their management shall consist only of measures conforming with the basic laws and which are essential to the maintenance of population and their natural environments in a healthy condition.

  All the legislation and all the policy statements added up to a paraphrase of Mies van der Rohe’s famous approach to the science of design: “Less is more.” The national parks were to be administered with the least amount of human interference consistent with keeping wildlife “in a natural wild state” for “the enjoyment of future generations.”

  For decades, that simple approach worked to perfection. In the case of the grizzlies, more and more of them holed up in the national parks, especially Yellowstone and Glacier, where they presented no problem. In 1911, the first full year of Glacier Park’s existence, there were only 4,000 hungry visitors, and very few of them went into the craggy backcountry where grizzlies were enjoying their independence and the freedom from man’s meddling that had been denied them for nearly 100 years. Later, guided horse trips into the park’s interior became popular, and long packtrains would travel from camp to camp in tours that might last a week and cover hundreds of miles of grizzly habitat. As many as 10,000 horsemen a year were visiting Glacier in the years just preceding World War II, but grizzly incidents were all but unknown. By the time the loud parties of humans and their sweat-lathered horses drew near the den of one of the great bears, the animal would be five miles away with its tail between its legs. In the first 30 years of the park’s existence, only one human being was harmed by grizzlies. John Daubney hiked into Piegan Pass in 1939 and was slashed by one of a trio of grizzlies that attacked him. Nevertheless the park’s animal safety record was vastly better than any zoo’s in the country.

  But after World War II, the situation changed. The packhorse concession had folded during the war, and people started going into the park on foot and in great numbers. Hiking has remained popular with the park’s visitors. By 1966, nearly a million people a year were coming to Glacier, and some 30,000 of them were hitting the wilderness trails into the backcountry. Footwear had been improved, lightweight clothing had been perfected, plastic tents and aluminum backpacks were available, and dudes who had never spent a night in the open were finding themselves marching deep into the interior of Glacier Park and the very heart of the grizzly refuge. Once again, the bears were confronted with their only natural enemy, and once again they retreated; but the hikers’ lemminglike rush continued, and all at once the simple mandate of the National Park Service had become exceedingly difficult to administer. Minor brushes between man and bear became a part of each summer’s history, and new rules crept into the Park Service manuals. “Remove by shooting those known and identifiable rogue bears that cannot be transplanted promptly and efficiently by trapping or by drugs,” one such rule specified. “Superintendents, at their discretion, can authorize park rangers to destroy an individual bear in any emergency or after a verified report of a personal injury.” (Realizing the public sympathy that was building up for the embattled species, the cautious author of this directive added, “When a bear is to be removed by shooting, it should be done discreetly and with as little public attention as possible. We must realize, however, that -such a positive approach to the pro
blem will cause some visitor reaction that may or may not be friendly.”)

  And so the National Park Service, an agency dedicated by law to the preservation, protection, and restoration of the wild animal species in the park, found itself more and more in the business of trapping and transplanting and sometimes shooting the rare grizzlies to protect tenderfooted hikers. At first, the necessary killings were accomplished almost in secret. Said Dave Thompson, West Glacier businessman and frequent park visitor, “Twenty, twenty-five years ago, somebody would come in and say they were bothered by a grizzly, and automatically some ranger would go out quietly with a gun, and that would be the last you heard of that bear.”

  No ranger was fond of the job, but it had to be done. Man/grizzly incidents were becoming more common, and ranger executives feared an outbreak of maulings. No longer could Glacier National Park be administered as a giant culture dish in which representative types of American flora and fauna were completely protected to the exclusion of all other considerations. With his probings deeper and deeper into the wilderness retreats of the great bear, man was pressing harder and harder against the patience of the grizzlies, and the animals themselves were finding less and less space in which to flee the dreaded man smell. In August, 1956, a man named Tobey Johnson was bitten by a grizzly while sleeping in the open at Stoney Indian Pass. This was the first attack on a human by a grizzly since the 1939 incident at Piegan Pass, and only the second such attack recorded in the park’s previous history. In the next ten years, there were nine more attacks, and three of them resulted in serious injury. The mystery was not that there had been so many attacks, but so few. Tens of thousands of visitors were sifting into the farthest reaches of the park, but despite this intense pressure, the administrators of Glacier Park could report at the beginning of 1967 that in its long history, not a single life had been lost to the world’s largest land carnivore. Apparently the Park Service’s improvised policy of shooting or transplanting troublesome specimens was working successfully. To be sure, there were a few voices crying out that sooner or later human life would be sacrificed unless fewer hikers were permitted to leave the trailheads or the bear population was drastically reduced or wiped out entirely. One advocate of grizzly extermination, Forest “Nick” Carter, was himself a former chief ranger at Glacier National Park. Carter told the Hungry Horse News, a northern Montana weekly newspaper, that “the government has to take the decided step to safeguard the trail traveler from grizzlies and do it before some hiker loses his life.”

  But no one was listening to Nick Carter, and in fact there were some rangers, just as sincere and dedicated as their former chief, who suggested that he must be getting cranky in his old age. One had only to look at the record. As a ranger executive explained it, “If you set up a danger index ranging from zero to ten, where the butterfly is zero and the rattlesnake is ten, the grizzlies of Glacier Park would have to rate somewhere between zero and one. The rattlesnake kills about ten Americans a year. The grizzly kills about none. It’s foolish to talk about the grizzly menace to human life.”

  Admittedly, there were a few mysterious deaths on the books of Glacier Park, a few people who had left the trails and never been seen again, alive or dead. But the fact remained that as the long, hot summer of 1967 began, park officials could boast with accuracy that not a single documented death could be blamed on the embattled grizzly.

  That Summer: Kelly’s Camp

  A few miles inside the southern edge of Glacier National Park, the visitor comes to Lake McDonald, ten miles long and nearly two miles wide, glowing with the intense blue-green common to deep glacial lakes all over the world. On windy days, the spindrift on the lake catches the sun’s rays and sends off glittering arcs of light like shooting stars. When the wind dies, the water turns into a translucent turquoise, weightless and unfathomable, and children dangle their heads over the sides of boats and try to see to China.

  Millennia ago, an immense glacier came inching into a vast basin of soft rock and carved out Lake McDonald as one would slice the eye from a potato. For at least three-quarters of its length, the lake is 400 feet deep, with sharp drop-offs on all sides. Lake trout, the atomic submarines of freshwater, cruise about at maximum depth, hunting for baitfish that enjoy the same environment, and above them are several varieties of trout and vast schools of algae-eating whitefish, whose flesh is as tender and mild as turbot or sole. Every now and then, an osprey swoops down to the lake’s surface for a snack, and most of the time his victim turns out to be a whitefish. Perhaps the herbivorous little fish is less skilled at evading the fish hawk, or perhaps the osprey is a gourmet with sophisticated taste buds; there is no definitive answer, and neither osprey nor whitefish is talking.

  Ducks and swans and geese live at Lake McDonald, too, and one sees grebes, sandpipers, gulls, terns, and other typical water birds soaring around the lake, seeking their own kinds of provender. Sporadically, one is rewarded with a glimpse of the rare Grinnell water thrush, teetering on the littoral of the lake, using its tail as a balance rod. Deeper in the woods, noisy mountain chickadees, metallic-blue Steller’s jays and hen-sized ravens make their homes among the coniferous trees that flourish at the 3,000-foot altitude. Some of them live in stands of Western red cedar, sometimes called arborvitae, or tree of life, by botanists. The red cedar gives off a spicy, pungent aroma and resists decay for ages, long after fire or disease or pestilence has ended its natural life in the forest. Not far from Lake McDonald, one can see the spars of dead red-cedar trees poking like monuments high into the sky. Around the red-cedar populations are patches of Western larch, or tamarack, one of the few cone bearers that shed their needles. In early autumn, the needles of the tamarack begin to fall like maple leaves, leaving its bare trunk and branches reaching into the sky like the fingers of the dead. In spring, new needles appear in a pale-lime color that makes the tree stand out from the other species around if, and soon the thick overhead branches of all the coniferous trees blend together in a mottled green canopy that shuts out the sun and makes the forest below seem coolly primeval.

  At the northern end of Lake McDonald, in a fern-filled mossy copse among such trees, a small collection of cabins traces its existence back to the years before Glacier Park was founded. Nowadays, the place called Kelly’s Camp is owned by descendants of the original settlers who homesteaded the land and refused to sell it to the government, thereby retaining possession even though completely surrounded by publicly owned land. Kelly’s Camp is a serene and silent place, sheltered from the sun by the stately trees and sound-conditioned by the beds of needles that mute the footsteps and the voices of the good neighbors who live there in the summer.

  Early in the summer season of 1967, one of the first to arrive was Mrs. Don Berry of Ephrata, Washington, a schoolteacher descended from the original homesteader. Together with her three children, ranging in age from 6 to 16,Joan Berry moved into her customary dwelling: “the big house,” largest of the various cabins and dwellings on the property and the one traditionally reserved for descendants of the original Kelly family. Her husband, Don, would commute back and forth to his radio station in Ephrata.

  It was shortly after the middle of June when Mrs. Berry first saw the bear. She glanced out the back window of the big house toward a little indented area, where garbage and trash barrels were kept, and saw an animal that puzzled her. Joan Berry was no stranger to grizzlies after a lifetime of summers in Glacier National Park, and this bear was plainly a grizzly, with its dished-in face and conspicuous hump just behind the head. But she had never seen so ragged a bear. One expected grizzlies to be somewhat mangy and dull in the early summer, after a winter of hibernation, but this bear’s physical appearance was markedly worse than average. The hair on the mane behind the hump, usually luxuriously thick, was short and thin, and when the animal leaned over to dip into the Berry family’s trash barrel Mrs. Berry could see bald spots along the line of the backbone. The head seemed long and narrow, almost misshapen; to Mrs. Ber
ry, it looked like a normal grizzly’s head that had been flattened and stretched. When the bear rose to tip the big fifty-gallon drum just outside the back window, the schoolteacher got a good look at its claws; they were longer than any she had ever seen, and it occurred to her that the bear must not have been using them for normal pursuits like digging for roots and small mammals and other delicacies; hence they were not being worn down properly. She supposed that the grizzly might be an old-timer barely managing to hold onto life by scrounging for garbage. Certainly the animal was underfed; it had the frame of a large bear, upwards of 500 pounds, but the body was so emaciated and scrawny that Mrs. Berry doubted if it would weigh half that much. She concluded that the grizzly was not only elderly but sick, and she decided to mention the pathetic old specimen to one of her ranger friends when they happened along. There was no hurry; grizzly bears were not uncommon around the thick woods of Kelly’s Camp, and in all the years since the original Kelly had established the homestead, no one had been killed or injured by them. Usually the bears would run at the first sight or sound of human beings and confine their petty pilferings to the small hours of the morning when the camp was silent and asleep. But as the first weeks of summer passed, Mrs. Berry noticed that the strange bear was as different from other grizzlies in action as it was in appearance. She would look up from her housework in the primitive cabin and see the animal digging into the trash barrels in broad daylight, and when she would make tentative noises to frighten the bear away, it would stand and look at her unabashedly or even take a few menacing steps in her direction. She warned the children about the bear and told them that it could not be treated as a normal, nervous grizzly that would run away. When they saw the bear in the corners of the camp, they were to come indoors immediately.