Night of the Grizzlies

by Jack Olsen

  In recent years, the trail register just below the lake had been crammed with entries about bears. If they chose, campers could make comments in the book, placed in a small cabinet alongside the road. Rangers had to laugh when they read one day, “I just came face to face with a grizzly bear,” followed by an entry that said, “I saw the pile that the lady left that came face to face with the grizzly bear.”

  The reason for Trout Lake’s surplus of bears was Trout Lake’s surplus of berries, the strawberries and raspberries and most of all the huckleberries and serviceberries that constitute the bear family’s basic diet There are other berries that grow in the region of Trout Lake, but they are less tasty, and bears ignore them until they have no choice, like children eating their cauliflower last Typical of these unloved specimens are the thimbleberries that grow all around the lake; the fruit resembles raspberries and comes in a beautiful dull-red color, but the flavor is flat and insipid and does not live up to its promise. Neither does the bearberry, with its dry and seedy fruit The Indians found a better use for the bright red bearberry; they ground its leaves, called it kinninnick, and smoked it incessantly. Bears eat it, instead, but only as a last resort.

  In those rare years when the huckleberry crop comes up short around Trout Lake, the bears have even been known to tum to tart, unpleasant berries like those produced by the twinberry varieties, red and black, and even the Pacific mountain ash, whose red-orange berries form a large, fiery clump that one often sees decorating the front yards of North American towns. But no bear will touch a shrub called smooth Menziesia, or fool’s huckleberry, which grows in the region of Trout Lake and confuses the tourists. Through the years, the bears have learned that the blue-black berries of the Menziesia are small, hard, and totally inedible, and the leaves are poisonous if consumed in large quantities. The grizzlies do not consume them in large quantities, or small quantities either, nor are they fooled by two other tempting plants of the region: showy crazyweed (also known as hairy locoweed) and little larkspur, both of which are poisonous.

  Almost all of these specimens, the tasty ones and the flat ones and the downright evil ones, are to be found struggling for Lebensraum on the mountainsides around Trout Lake. In places, the greenery looks almost tropical, as though patches of Brazilian rain forest had been laid down intact like thick green throw rugs. Old paths wind through the brush, and there are places where one can stand and pick whortleberries from both sides of the trail, if one is so inclined. A thousand bears could hide in this thick growth of bushes and flowers and shrubs and never be seen by man, and many a fisherman has whipped his dry fly on Trout Lake in happy ignorance of the fact that a collection of burping grizzlies was lapping up berries just a few hundred yards away.

  The lake itself lies in a bowl rimmed by mountains that tower thousands of feet above and duplicate themselves almost perfectly in the clear blue-green of the water. Camas Creek flows in the north end and out the south, and at the lower outlet of the lake, several hundred huge tamarack trunks are crunched together into a logjam that will support a man’s weight almost all the way across the water; the tamaracks have long since lost their bark and their branches to the grinding action of the weather, and now they flash white in the sun like a stack of bleached bones. To one side of the logjam, a small clearing has been hacked out of the spruces and thick bushes that march down to the water’s edge; in its center, the Park Service has installed an iron grating for cooking, and the spot is popular with campers, who pitch their tents, drag a few cutthroat trout out of the lake, and enjoy an epicure’s feast in the forest.

  On the afternoon of June 25, 1967, a week or so after the strangely shaped grizzly had first been spotted at Kelly’s Camp, a pair of 22 year-old honeymooners arrived at this camp site. Peter Cummings, a medical student at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and his law-student bride, Ellen, intended to spend the night in the open and then push on for a three-or four-day hike into the vast interior of the 1-million-acre park. Their plans had been made with meticulous care. Before setting foot on the trail, they had checked out the possibility of grizzly attack. They had been told that the only genuine danger might come from stumbling across some cubs and being chased by an overprotective mother who thought she was defending her young. They were advised that the possibility of attack was so remote as to be almost ludicrous, but if they were nervous, they could carry bear bells that jingled on their packs and presumably warned all wild animals that humans were coming. The young honeymooners armed themselves with the bells, and just before pushing out into the wilderness, they talked briefly with a ranger who told them that they had been in far greater danger on their drive from Cleveland than they would be on their hike.

  Toward the end of this first day on the trail, Peter and Ellen had begun to accept the idea that the ranger was right. They had reached the logjam without so much as seeing a trace of bears, either grizzly or black, and now they were getting ready to enjoy their dinner. Peter had pitched their tent, and Ellen had dished out heaping hot portions of canned ravioli, and they were about to dig in when a crash came from the fire-grate area, where their provisions and gear were piled temporarily. Unconcerned, Peter Cummings told his wife to look out and see what was there; she was sitting closer to the tent flap. When Ellen refused on the reasonable grounds that she was a woman and strange noises frightened her, Peter pulled the flap aside and saw that a grizzly bear had walked into the middle of their camp and was engaged in popping open tin cans with its teeth. He motioned to his wife to be silent, then gripped her hand and half pulled and half led her out of the tent and up toward the trail. The bear showed no interest in them as they passed eight feet away. When they had reached a point about 150 feet up the lake, the young couple stopped for breath, and then they saw two people fishing a little farther up the shoreline. The four gathered together on the trail and exchanged ideas. Everyone was nervous, but no one was very frightened. They all had been informed over and over that wild bears in this wild park could be counted upon to run from humans, and they assumed that it was just a matter of minutes before the bear would realize that it was acting in a very bizarre manner and move on. They stood and watched; their view was limited in the gathering dusk, but the bear appeared to be a skinny brownish grizzly with a peculiarly long, thin head. It was busily biting into cans and ripping into the canvas packs. When Peter Cummings saw that their entire supply of food was being ruined by this presumptuous animal, he began to shout, and others joined in the clamor. “Hey, get out! ” someone said, and the others cried, “Go home, bear!” “You’re not wanted!” The situation was annoying, to be sure, but not without its lighter side.

  The animal did not even cock an ear in the direction of the sounds. Slowly, systematically, it went about the business of destroying the camp. When the provisions and gear were littered about, the grizzly turned to the tent and ripped it open with a single claw, as though it were pulling down a zipper. Inside the tent, it continued the job of demolishing the worldly effects of the young couple from Cleveland. Twenty-five minutes after the attack had started, the grizzly casually ambled down to the lakeside, about 30 feet from the wreckage, and began lapping at the cool water. “Come on!” Peter Cummings said to his wife, and the two of them tiptoed back to their camp. While the bear occupied itself a few bounds away from them, they looked for salvage. Of their fifteen or so cans of food, all but two had been opened. Peter’s extra set of long underwear had been chewed into strips and now stank of bear. The first-aid kit was ripped open. The aluminum pack frames were bent out of shape. The tent was shredded. Once again, the young husband put his fingers to his lips to caution his wife against making a sound. They picked up the undamaged sleeping bags and reached for the remains of their packs, and one of their warning bells, tied to a pack, began to tinkle. The bear looked up and headed immediately in their direction. Peter and Ellen held onto what was left of their belongings and raced up the trail to a shelter cabin two miles away near Arrow Lake.

&
nbsp; On their way out by daylight, the couple spotted fresh bear scat, but they saw no grizzlies, and after an hour’s walk, they reached Trout Lake. There they recognized a short-time acquaintance from the village of West Glacier, a young man who had told them a few days before that his father worked for the Park Service. He was fishing, and he gave the famished couple a trout, which they cooked and ate on the spot. When they told him what had happened, the young man expressed no surprise. “That same bear bothered some people a few weeks ago,” he said. “They’re gonna tranquilize him and ship him north of here.”

  At ranger headquarters just outside the village of West Glacier, the couple filled out a report about the ruined gear. A courteous ranger seemed to enjoy talking to them, but he asked one question that was perplexing. “What was the bear’s name?” the ranger said.

  The couple answered, “Huh?”

  “What was the bear’s name?” the ranger asked. When Peter and Ellen persisted in looking blankly at him, he explained that sometimes bears get nicknames after they have disturbed a sufficient number of people.

  “No,” Peter Cummings said finally. “We didn’t get his name.”

  ∞

  For the next month or so, the bear without a name alternated between harassing the people of Kelly’s Camp and making raids on the itinerants who were flowing in and out of Trout Lake in great numbers. No physical contact was made between man and bear, although there were times when the peculiar animal would follow campers for hundreds of yards, always staying twenty or twenty-five feet away, and scare them half to death. Almost always the victims of such encounters berated themselves later, the tenderfeet for not knowing that grizzlies are relatively harmless, and the old-timers for realizing it and still being afraid. There was something about this persistent grizzly that alarmed even the most knowledgeable. Grizzlies had been snooping in and out of the campsites of North America ever since the first primitive man had pitched the first camp, but they had rarely made their intrusions while the campsites were occupied, and certainly not while people were in the middle of meals and other activities. The oddly shaped grizzly did not seem to know fear, nor did it seem to understand the ground rules that always had been followed by man and bear in Glacier National Park. It stormed into camps and bowled over fire tripods, tents, and packs; it stayed exactly as long as it wanted to stay; it ignored the shouts and screams and sometimes the rocks of annoyed and displaced campers.

  The rules of the National Park Service specify clearly that such a bear must be shot, but somehow the skinny animal managed to remain alive through June and July. Now and then, an ashen-faced camper would make a report in person, and others would scribble capsule comments on the trail registers. But no one was reading the trail register (they were to be gathered at the end of the season and studied), and no one seemed to be listening to the first-person reports. A biology teacher named Ron Johns and his small children were shadowed by the bear for several hours, and when they made a complaint to rangers, they were told that the animal should have been eliminated but the rangers simply had not had time. Two hikers from California were treed by the bear and their packs rifled. When they reported the incident to a ranger executive, they were told that others had encountered the same grizzly around Trout Lake, and something would have to be done about it sooner or later. When railroad man Paul Price of Whitefish, Montana, lost a string of cutthroat trout to the bear and was chased halfway around the lakeshore, he wound up telling his story to a ranger who almost seemed bored by the news. “That bear’s been chasing people all summer,” the ranger said, “and a little last summer.” “What are you gonna do when it catches somebody?” Price asked. “Well, I don’t know,” the ranger said bemusedly. “He hasn’t caught anybody yet. ” By the middle of the summer, Glacier Park was sweltering. Day after day, new record-high temperatures were posted at the weather station, and the glaciers from which the park derived its name had long since lost their outer coatings of fresh snow; now they were a uniformly dirty white. The rocky ground of the whole park had become thirsty. The Weeping Wall was barely dripping, and at least once a day someone could be counted on to say that the Weeping Wall soon would be down to a mere frown. The splash and spatter of Birdwoman Falls no longer was heard; only a trickle of water passed over its rim. Fires broke out, and the surveillance had to be increased sharply. Smoke jumpers were called out frequently, and crews of Indians were recruited to beat back small blazes that threatened tens of thousands of heavily forested acres. The hot and unpleasant month of July was almost over when two 14 year-old schoolboy chums, John Cook and Steve Ashlock, packed into Trout Lake for a three-day festival of fishing, and hardly had the boys set up camp when a fire broke out on the ridge to the west, and they were treated to the thrilling sight of ten smoke jumpers arriving to put out the blaze. They also were treated to the thrilling sight of five or six bears, blacks and grizzlies both, coming to the lake for water, and the boys guessed that the ·general drought in the park had dried up some of the springs back in the hills. There was a light rain on the day they arrived, but it quit after about three minutes, and soon the bright sun was beating back down on them. They caught a few cutthroats, cooked them at their campsite alongside the logjam, and turned in early.

  The next day, the two young boys from nearby Columbia Falls, Montana, were exploring the logjam, trying to find a way across, when they heard a noise from their camp behind them and turned to see a dark, skinny grizzly sitting on its haunches eating a loaf of their bread. Both Steve and John knew that grizzlies would run from humans, so they crept to within 10 to 15 feet of the animal and began yelling. The bear looked them over coldly and kept on eating. The boys picked up some small stones and began pelting the animal, whereupon the bear reared up and scuttled to a log a few feet closer to them and began growling. “Get out of here!” Steve hollered, but the bear only growled louder. The boys resumed throwing, this time with heavier rocks, and when one of them caught the grizzly in the leg, it bolted out of the camp like an excited racehorse, circled around a few times, and then returned and began ripping at the canvas packs.

  Now that they could see how fast the big animal could move and how powerful were its jaws, the two boys retreated once again to the middle of the logjam. They figured that the bear would not stay long, and it would be safer simply to wait quietly. From their vantage point, they watched as the animal slashed their packs into small pieces and bent the frames. Then it strolled to the lakeside for a drink and came across a pan containing ten cleaned trout, the boys’ dinner. After gobbling up the fish, the bear walked out on the logjam, its head twisting for scent. The boys retreated to the place where the heavy logs petered out and there was nothing but a channel of cold lake water. Now the bear stopped, distracted by the remains of a smelly trout that had been lying in the sun on one of the logs. The boys decided to take to the water and try to swim around the grizzly to the eastern shore above the campsite. But as they were taking their boots off, they remembered that bears were good swimmers, so they decided to ease themselves into the lake, swim underwater to a point beneath the logs, and lie there with only their noses poking up for air. They had just begun to carry out this last-ditch escape plan when the bear tossed the remains of the sunbaked trout into the air and headed at a brisk pace back to the campsite, as though it had suddenly decided that it did not have to eat garbage when there was fresh food around.

  Steve and John grabbed their boots and began lacing them back on, while the bear tore wildly at their camp. They crept across the logjam toward the animal, and when they were within 25 or 30 feet, they stepped into the shallow water and waded to the bushes on the opposite edge of the logjam from the bear. They ran about 100 feet down Camas Creek and then cut through the dense vegetation and headed for the trail that wound over Howe Ridge to the Lake McDonald ranger station. In one hour, the panting youngsters covered four miles, including a 1,500-foot climb and a corresponding 2,000-foot descent, and burst out on the road shortly after ten at night. A r
anger heard their story and advised them to wait till morning to go back and recover the remains of their equipment. He said that the bear had been bothering people all summer and that he was planning to do something about it.

  Steve and John spent the night in a nearby cabin and returned to Trout Lake in the morning. They found wreckage littered in a wide circle, and one of the packs had been dragged along the trail and into the woods to a hole in the ground about 40 feet up the hillside. Their Coleman lantern had been punctured, and the fuel had run out. Spaghetti and chili cans were crushed and torn, and two flip-top cans of Vienna sausages had been opened exactly according to the instructions and devoured. A pair of leather boots lay to one side; the uppers were scarred with teeth marks, and the tongues had been ripped away. The boys’ light-green tent was ripped and ruined. They gathered what they could and went home.

  A few days later, an official report appeared in the park records. It read: “7-29-67 Steve Ashlock, John Cook, two torn packs, torn shoe, torn tent, ate all food. Dollar value of damage $30. No action taken. Backcountry incident.”

  On August 4, there was a brief item in the weekly Hungry Horse News. Under the headline “ENCOUNTER BEAR AT TROUT LAKE,” the newspaper noted that Steve Ashlock and John Cook of Columbia Falls were the “latest” to meet the Trout Lake bear and told the tale of their narrow escape. There was no response from ranger headquarters. Later, much later, a high park official was to comment that somebody should have called the article to his attention.