Night of the Grizzlies

by Jack Olsen

  Soon the bear was visiting the garbage cans behind the big house every three days, almost like clockwork, and the scholarly Mrs. Berry had become the resident authority on the peculiar animal. She watched it engage in quixotic unbearlike behavior night after night. One evening, the animal suddenly flew into a rage, dumped all the garbage cans and flung them about like matchboxes, and just as suddenly reared up on its hind legs and began to bat playfully at the moths flitting in the light above. A few minutes later, the grizzly dropped back on all fours and continued tearing up everything in sight.

  After only a few visits, the bear seemed to become acutely annoyed by motion inside the house, and it would charge the walls or slap at the tiny window panes with its claws. Whenever the mercurial grizzly was at the garbage cans, Mrs. Berry would counsel everyone not to move between the light and the window, and if someone would forget and commit this error, the bear would crash into the side of the house with all its weight, smashing against the walls with its heavy paws and one night sending a saw flying halfway across the room from the intensity of the impact.

  The Berrys had disciplined themselves to remain completely inert when the bear was around, but they could not discipline their German shorthaired pointer. If the dog would bark when the bear was outside, the result would be an instant attack. Whenever someone spotted the bear nearby, Mrs. Berry would grab the dog and hustle him into a room on the opposite side of the house from the garbage cans, where neither animal would sense the other’s presence. But sometimes she was too late. One night, as she lay in bed, she heard the familiar noises from the garbage cans. The bear was right on schedule; it had been exactly three days since its last visit Mrs. Berry jumped out of bed and ran to get the dog, but the big pointer had heard the noises himself and raced into the kitchen, barking and growling. Almost in the same second, there was a thump, and the back door started to buckle inward. Mrs. Berry held her breath as the bear crashed into the door once again, and she pulled and shoved the dog into another room and locked him in. The next time she looked out the back window, the bear was calmly selecting foodstuffs from the cans, as though nothing had happened to disturb its equanimity. Mrs. Berry thought that there must be something wrong with its brain. A few days after this incident, Kelly’s Camp was noisy for a change. The day was bright, and the camp was full of vacationers and multiples of their children, running about between the tall trees and splashing around the lakeside. Up on the porch of cabin No. 2, a feast had been laid out on a big table. There were bologna, cheese, ham and all sorts of delicacies, and liquid refreshments of various proofs down to zero. A good time was going to be had by all, for this June 29, 1967, was the fifty-seventh birthday of one of the most popular of the camp’s regular guests: Mr. W. R “Teet” Hammond, a kind and gentle man who spoke with a soft Lyndon Johnson accent and wore a cowboy hat.

  W. R “Teet” Hammond was the sort of person who is called by his nickname by young and old alike, this despite the fact that he was a man of imposing stature who once had been sheriff of Clayton, New Mexico, a dry and dusty place that was almost the exact reciprocal of Kelly’s Camp. With his wife, Hammond had been spending summers at Kelly’s Camp since 1955, and he had long since come to be regarded as the unofficial marshal of the place, though he neither liked guns nor understood them to any great extent, despite his past experience. One might have supposed that a man like Hammond, in his twelfth season deep in the interior of Glacier National Park, would know all there was to know about things like grizzly bears. But he did not. “Far as we knowin’ anything about grizzlies, other than to chunk’em and pop’em if you have to, that’s it,” he once explained. “Other’n that, I’ve never been too interested in grizzlies.” Personally, he preferred to don his old five-gallon straw hat and row out on the lake for a try at the trout and salmon. Indeed, although it was his birthday and the festivities were about to begin, Teet Hammond was puttering around the lakeside as usual. It was about five in the afternoon, and a new boat had just been delivered, and Teet and a few of his friends were helping to launch it. The boat had barely tipped the edge of the cold water when Teet heard a commotion and turned to find his wife running at top speed and hollering for his attention.

  “There’s a grizzly in camp!” she cried.

  Teet stopped what he was doing and considered the matter. Finally he said, “Ah, blooey! There’s no such thing as a grizzly here in the last of June. Early in the spring and late in the summer, yes, but never in the middle of the summer. It’s impossible.”

  That was that. If Teet Hammond said it was impossible, it was impossible. The men turned back to the boat, and Mrs. Hammond watched. But hardly had they returned to their task when somebody said, “Look over there at the impossible!” and Teet looked and saw a big, furry animal at the outer edge of the bay.

  “Run get the binoculars and let me get a look at that,” Teet said. “Now I’m not so sure what it is.”

  A few minutes later, Hammond was narrowing down the focus of his binoculars, and at last he had a clear and distinct look at the animal. “It’s a grizzly, all right,” the former sheriff said, “but I never saw one like this before. He’s got a pretty good-size frame, but he’s poor! He’s skinny and thin lookin’, like he doesn’t eat. He is surely poor!”

  As though insulted by the description, the bear turned and dipped into the woods, and when it did not come back into sight, the men finished launching the boat and strolled up to cabin No. 2 for the birthday party. One by one, the other guests arrived, and soon there were nine on the wooden porch. They were singing “Happy Birthday to You” and “He’s a jolly Good Fellow” and other tributes that embarrassed Teet Hammond to no end, and then somebody served a few drinks. The poor grizzly was forgotten, until one of the birthday celebrants strolled to the end of the porch and looked down the steep flight of eight or ten rough-hewn steps that led to the forest floor and saw the bear standing there taking it all in.

  Somebody shouted, “Get the food inside!” and Teet rushed to get a close-up look at the grizzly before it could run away. As he watched from the head of the stairs, the bear calmly began walking toward the cabin. Teet shouted at it and made a few threatening gestures, but the grizzly continued on a straight line toward the foot of the steps. When the animal reached the bottom and began climbing, Teet shouted for everybody to get inside and picked up a heavy bench about four feet long. The animal was halfway up the steps when Teet lifted the bench above his head and sent it crashing down. The edge of the bench seemed to hit the bear’s foot, but the animal showed neither pain nor panic. It backed down the stairs, stood up on its hind feet and snorted once or twice, then dropped down and walked slowly into the brush.

  Once again, the party was resumed, but only a few minutes had passed when Teet heard screams from the south end of the camp. Someone was hollering, “Get a gun!”

  Teet went to his cabin and picked up his old lever-action .25-.35 and hurried toward the noises. On the way, he met his 9 year-old grandson and a girl of about 14 walking rapidly along the dirt road. Just as they reached Teet, the boy said in a loud whisper, “Don’t run, but walk as fast as you can!” Teet looked down the road and saw the bear coming toward them at a range of about sixty feet. While the children rushed toward a cabin, Teet levered a cartridge into the chamber, clicked off the safety, and drew a bead on the hurrying animal, and when it was clear to him that the grizzly was not going to slow down, he fired a warning shot into the dirt about three feet from the bear. The animal stopped short and then rose to its hind feet in the classic position of attack. Teet cocked the gun again and raised it to his shoulder, and as he did he said to himself, “Well, he’s fixin’ to come now. I’ll just have to get him.”

  He held the grizzly’s head square in his sights, and he was about to begin a slow squeeze on the trigger when the animal dropped down and circled around the back of a cabin. Teet waited, and a short time later he heard a scream from the big house, where the Kelly descendants stayed. He rushed over with
his rifle cocked, but the bear had dashed to another part of the camp. Teet ran to his telephone and called park headquarters for help. An hour and four phone calls later, the bear was still foraging around the camp, and no ranger had arrived. It was almost dark when the frightened citizens of Kelly’s Camp heard the sound of a vehicle driving up and two armed rangers got out. They explained that they were sorry it had taken them so long to arrive, but they had been attending a first-aid course. They told the people not to worry, that they had seen the bear scurrying up the ridge toward Trout Lake as they had driven toward the camp.

  “I don’t claim to be an authority on bears,” Teet Hammond spoke up, “but I’ll tell you one thing for sure. That bear wasn’t acting right. No, sir, that was no normal bear.”

  The rangers said they would check into the matter, but for the time being they felt that there was no danger. After all, the bear was running away when they spotted it. An animal that ran away could not be considered much of a menace to human life. Teet Hammond said he hoped that they were right, but that it had taken the bear an awful long time to make up its mind to run away.

  A few days later, a ranger executive arrived in Kelly’s Camp on a routine visit, and Joan Berry, who had been away from the camp on the bear’s most recent intrusion, took him to one side and said, “We’ve got a sick bear, a crazy-acting bear around, and I wish you’d do something about it.”

  The official asked for a description of the animal, and Mrs. Berry told him that it was a dark grizzly with a big, emaciated frame and a thin, elongated head. “I’m sure that he’s dangerous and somebody’s going to get hurt,” the schoolteacher said.

  The ranger executive chuckled at the remark. “Oh, Joan,” he said casually, “is it really that bad?” Mrs. Berry was annoyed and repeated emphatically that the bear was acting abnormally and must be considered a menace. The ranger official said, “Well, when his illness makes him go berserk, we’ll do something about him,” and made it plain that the matter was closed. His attitude made Mrs. Berry seethe inside. In all the decades since her family had homesteaded on the north shore of Lake McDonald, they had almost never reported a troublesome bear; they preferred taking their chances on coexistence. Kellys and grizzlies had been living together amicably since the 1800s, and Mrs. Berry felt that the ranger official ought to know that and ought to have taken her complaint more seriously.

  ∞

  The next weeks were spent in a state of tension. The grizzly came back periodically, and the residents of Kelly’s Camp drove about with rifles and shotguns on the seats of their cars and kept careful watch on their children and their pets. The Park Service, badgered by dozens of complaining calls from the families of the camp, installed a big, green trap, but the strange grizzly ignored it. Several times, rangers arrived with guns, but they were always a few minutes behind the wary animal. It seemed to have a particular fear of automobile or truck engines, a fear that was not accompanied by a similar response to marine engines. Several times, the bear walked right up toward motorboaters trolling the edge of the lake, but the instant an automobile engine would come into earshot of Kelly’s Camp, the grizzly would scamper off.

  One morning, in the last cool hour before dawn, an elderly resident of a camp a few miles down the lakeshore heard a noise exactly like a thumbnail screeching across a violin sounding board. Jim Hindle jumped out of his bed and grabbed his gun; he thought he knew exactly what was making the sound-he had been hearing about a peculiar bear for weeks-and he wanted to put an end to it once and for all. Hindle dashed out of the bedroom toward the screeching sound, and sure enough, two panels had been neatly slashed and bits of light screen were flapping in the morning breeze. Hindle could see the bear, a tall, skinny grizzly, standing about ten feet away, but when he poked the barrel of the gun through the hole in the screen, the bear moved behind a butane gas tank and out of the line of fire.

  Jim Hindle had been coming to Glacier National Park for nearly four decades, or about four times as long as any of the park rangers, and it infuriated him that this misshapen grizzly with the collection of weird habits was still at large to rip open his screen and endanger both him and his wife. He shoved the slugloaded, double-barreled shotgun under his arm and pushed open the door to the outside to solve the problem, just as he had solved any number of bear problems around the camp in the past. His right hand was missing, but Jim Hindle was not afraid of mischievous bears, whatever their dimensions.

  Outside, it was still half dark, but Hindle could see a portion of the bear as it ran behind a tall fence on the other side of the lawn. For an instant, the bear rose to its full height above the six-foot fence and exposed part of its head and shoulders, but before Hindle could fire a single barrel, the animal was off and running. There was no possibility of taking a shot at the fleeing shadow; the camp was full of people, including many children, and a wounded grizzly was the last thing Jim Hindle wanted. He waited a few minutes for the animal to return, but then he heard a dog barking excitedly a mile or so up the lake, and he knew that the bear was making tracks.

  At nine that morning, Jim Hindle knocked loudly on the door of the nearby Lake McDonald ranger station, but the ranger was away. The angry man telephoned his information straight into headquarters, and there was no time lost on cordial conversation. Hindle was a well-known critic of the National Park Service; for forty years he had been telling the park how to get by, and for forty years the park had been ignoring his every suggestion. His latest suggestion was that something had better be done about this crazy grizzly before somebody was killed.

  Park officials answered the retired schoolteacher’s latest blast by sending a part-time employee, a college student, to conduct an interview. “He wanted to know if I was sure it was a grizzly,” Hindle told friends later, “and I said, ’Son, I’ve seen more grizzlies than you have flies!’ Then he wanted to know if I had gotten a look at the bear’s teeth and whether there was any tartar on them and what color the eyes were and I said no, I hadn’t observed any of those important things. But then I told him that they should destroy that bear, because it was too bold and the fear of man had gone from it. I said if you don’t, the federal government is liable to have one .of the darndest lawsuits that they ever had if this bear kills. This boy said something to me about preserving the species, and I said, how many sharks do we have to have in the ocean to preserve the shark species? I told him I thought the park spends too much time thinking about the preservation of the species and to hell with the preservation of the people.”

  The upshot of this confrontation was a crisp report in the park files. “This is probably the same bear which hangs around Kelly’s Camp,” the report said. “No real damage reported; just rummaging for food... ” The report was filed; no action was taken.

  Not long afterward, Teet Hammond was being visited by a good friend, Lou Feirstein, a Montana lumberman and rancher, when the telephone rang and one of the Berry children announced that their mother was off shopping and the bear had arrived. What should they do?

  “Just wait right there, honey,” Teet said. He and Feirstein grabbed up rifles, walked to the big house, and tiptoed through the front door to a rear bedroom that overlooked the trash cans. The bear was only six or eight feet from them, going about its business of pilfering garbage and swatting millers, and all that separated men from grizzly was a window with tiny panes. Wordlessly, Hammond and Feirstein stretched out on the cot in the darkened room and sighted their rifles on the bear’s head from a prone position. But no shot rang out; each man was waiting for the other. Teet was troubled by the memory of a woman in the camp who thought the grizzly was cute. One day, when the bear was standing just outside the window, the lady had tapped on the pane and said baby words to the big teddy bear. What would someone like that say if he blasted the animal’s brains out? Teet held his fire while he puzzled out the situation. Finally, he said, “You know we’re not supposed to shoot him unless he comes in a building or destroys something.”

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p; “I’m just a visitor, and I’m not supposed to shoot him at all,” Feirstein said, “but I sure would if I owned property here.”

  The two cronies watched the bear through their sights for ten minutes, then ten minutes more and ten minutes more. Once, the grizzly flew into a rage over nothing and slapped the window in front of their eyes, but the thick glass held, and just as suddenly the bear returned to its battle with the garbage cans, turning them upside down and scattering the smelly refuse all over the ground. When it appeared that all the edibles might be gone and the bear about to go on its way, Hammond said in a soft voice to the visiting rancher, “I’ll tell you how we can do it and nobody’ll ever know who shot him, Lou. We’ll count one-two-three, and we’ll both pull the trigger, and we’ll blow him in two.” But before Lou Feirstein could comment, the grizzly was gone.

  When August 1 arrived, the inhabitants of Kelly’s Camp recapitulated the bear’s pattern: Since the middle of June, it had visited the place some fifteen times, starting at first in a cycle of every three days, extending this to four, and now arriving every fifth day on a rigid schedule. But then a ranger dropped by and told some of the residents, “You shouldn’t be having any more trouble. Your bear’s at Trout Lake, tearing up camps.” For the first time that summer, Kelly’s Camp relaxed.

  That Summer: Trout Lake

  Four miles up and over Howe Ridge, the place called Trout Lake was popular with fishermen because of a peculiar combination of circumstances: It was close enough to an automobile road to be reasonably accessible, but the climb up and down the spiny back of the ridge was steep enough to keep out the dudes who were beginning to clutter up certain other wilderness campsites in the park. To get to Trout Lake from Lake McDonald, hikers had to hit the trail not far from Kelly’s Camp and climb 2,000 feet in two miles, a rate that quickly eliminated any but the most serious of hikers. Once on top of the ridge, it was an easy 1,5 00-foot descent through the forest to the lush stand of vegetation that made the place popular with another sort of wildlife bears, both grizzly and black. There was hardly a spot in Glacier Park where more grizzly sightings had been made; in fact, a trio of visitors to Trout Lake once reported being treed by no less than five grizzlies simultaneously, something of a record for the National Park Service.