Night of the Grizzlies

by Jack Olsen

  “OK,” Walton said. “And you better start burning all your garbage in the incinerator we got for you,” the ranger executive said.

  Rather than argue, Walton nodded agreeably, but later that night he told his wife that the instructions did not sound serious to him, that he was willing to bet that this particular ranger official} enjoyed watching the feeding bears as much as anyone and was merely going through the motions of admonishing him. He discussed the matter with Ross Luding, and the veteran concessioner told him that there was nothing to worry about, to continue putting out the scraps. “It’s against the rules,” Luding said, “but I don’t know what else to do, and neither does the Park Service.”

  ∞

  By early August, the Granite Park Chalet’s official two-month season was half over, and the grizzlies’ visits to the garbage dump had become a big talking point in the park, but the Park Service’s public position was that animal feeding was strongly prohibited by several dozen rules and regulations, and therefore it must not be going on. Rangers and naturalists who took in the nightly display of grizzlies went along with their superiors; most of the rangers had filed protests, written or verbal, at one time or another, to one executive or another, but when they saw that the ritual appeared as inevitable as the nightly singing of “I’ve been Working on the Railroad,” they said nothing more. High park officials would deny that so much as a single scrap of food was being put out for wild animals anywhere in the park. If such illegal activities were going on, they said, they would be the first to know about it.

  As the deep snows melted off in the harsh sun of this abnormally hot summer, all trails were cleared and hikers began arriving in record numbers, many of them taking advantage of the chalet’s bargain rates: $12.50 for a cot and three square meals. Some nights, every bed would be taken, and eight or ten more customers would stretch out on the floor in their sleeping bags. If there had ever been a sliver of a chance that the small incinerator could handle the leftovers, it was gone now. Tom Walton had a slop bucket for the garbage, and in the beginning of the season it had never been completely full. Now it was brimming to the top routinely, and sometimes he would have to dump it and come back for more. With such lavish fare, the bears had become a permanent fixture. Looking back on the summer later, Walton realized why some authorities said that grizzlies were creatures of habit. From mid-July until the chalet closed after Labor Day, the bears had arrived almost every night.

  But this familiarity with grizzlies did not delude the young innkeeper into underestimating the animals, as certain others did. When hikers would arrive and announce their intention of sleeping on the ground in the Granite Park campground below, Walton would give them his standard lecture on grizzlies, closing with the suggestion that bears were always unpredictable. He advised long-distance hikers to carry bear bells, so that they would not take the bears by surprise, and if they had no bells, he would improvise them out of tin cans and iron washers and tie them to the backpacks.

  By now, the domestic staff of the timberline inn had cured its outbreaks of cabin fever and settled into a regular routine, and a few of the girls were even enjoying summer romances, though at a certain nightly risk. About 500 yards down the trail that wended along the lower edge of the lava flow, the Park Service had built a small cabin out of logs and corrugated metal, and each night two girls from the chalet would rush to finish their duties so they could hike to the cabin and visit the young trail workers in residence. The girls used the same path frequented by grizzlies on their own nightly trips to the chalet. Usually, the two girls would head toward the trail cabin while the bears were at the dump, but sometimes their work would tie them up longer, and they would follow the bears back down the trail. The situation disturbed Tom Walton, and when his own warnings to the girls seemed to have no effect, he took the matter up with concessioner Luding. The older man was highly popular with his employees; his manner tended to be light and jocular, but this time he laid down the law to the two girls. He told them that grizzlies make poor nocturnal companions, and that no summer romance was worth such a risk. The girls promised to visit their boyfriends at other hours, but soon they resumed their trips just as though nothing had been said. By 9 or 9:30 p.m., they would be gone, and an hour or two later, the trail workers would bring them back by the light of lanterns. Tom Walton threw up his hands; there was a limit to how much advice one could hand out without becoming a bore, and he felt he had reached the limit.

  But one night, a seasonal naturalist and wintertime schoolteacher found out about the romantic activities and was aghast. “My God, man,” he said to Walton, “don’t you realize that those girls are sharing a path with grizzlies?”

  Walton said he realized it fully. “Well, you just can’t let them do it! ” the naturalist said. “Now you’ve just got to go and tell them to quit!”

  Wearily, Walton said he would tell the girls, and he did, but again nothing changed. The innkeeper consoled himself with the fact that the bears’ behavior had seemed to become more consistent as July had turned to August. There were two of them now, regular nightly visitors, although tracks and other signs indicated that a sow and a pair of cubs were coming in late at night, long after the chalet was asleep. The two “regular” bears had learned to live with the powerful flashlights that were shone on them and the monotone of awed conversation that came from the chalet 150 feet away, where a throng of guests watched in hushed excitement. Some nights, the two bears would stay for as long as thirty minutes, taking turns eating, circling each other, dipping in and out of the tree cover behind the dump, and now and then having a minor disagreement.

  Walton and the chalet staff had not gone to the extreme of naming the bears, as others had done in the past. They were called simply No. 1 and No. 2. No. 1 was a big silvertip, a handsome animal with dark-brown fur and extreme dignity. Sometimes the flashlights would catch No. 1 just right, and its fur would take on a ghostly luminescence, and an admiring gasp would come from the onlookers. Naturalists guessed the big bear’s weight at 500 pounds.

  No. 2 was a smaller grizzly with a shoddy coat and long claws. Wildlife experts in the crowd would explain to the tenderfeet that such claws were a sign that the bear had given up its normal ways of finding food, such as digging for glacier lily bulbs and Columbian ground squirrels, and was depending on man for most of its sustenance. Probably the bear was old, with worn teeth; certainly it was crotchety, and it soon was playing the nightly role of villain in the little backyard tableaux. No. 1 would arrive from the direction of the trail cabin just after dark, and a few minutes later, No. 2 would come up the same path and start the trouble. Sometimes the massive silvertip would see the grouchy bear coming and simply move into the brush to wait. Then No. 2 would stuff itself with garbage and leave by, the same route. There were a few nights when No. 1 would stand its ground at the dump when the mangier bear arrived, and the two would circle and growl and woof at each other and finally come to blows, but in a few seconds, No. 1 would disengage itself from the undignified proceedings and walk slowly to the trees to wait. It was plain to everyone that No. 1 could have vanquished the smaller bear at any time, but the naturalists explained that there was something called the peck order, and somehow or other the smaller bear had achieved ascendancy over the silvertip. The crowds, being accustomed to movies and television, could not understand why the handsome hero always lost and the runty villain always won in these nightly encounters, and some of the chalet staff joined them in hoping for the smaller bear’s downfall. One night, No. 1 was eating peacefully, bathed in the light of two high-powered flashlights focused from the chalet, when No. 2 came up the trail and walked straight to the food. This was usually No. 1’s cue to depart, but this time the big animal stood its ground, and the aggressive smaller bear moved in to fight. Instantly, the silvertip clamped its mouth on the smaller bear’s head, and with a massive display of strength flipped the other bear into the air and down on its back. The crowd cheered and applauded, and Tom Walto
n felt himself sharing the enthusiasm. But then the big bear started walking off to the trees as though it had lost. “Come back!” Walton wanted to holler, “Come back! You won, stupid! You’ve got the food now!” but he restrained himself. The smaller bear pulled itself together and began dining as though nothing had happened, while the silvertip waited its turn patiently. The peck order remained unchanged.

  The Last Week

  By the beginning of August, 1967, Glacier Park was in the middle of its most hectic season. The summer was unnaturally hot everywhere; visitors were coming from all over to sit on glacial ice and turn their noses into the alpine winds and walk under mantles of conifers that would shield them from the sun. But even in Glacier Park, the summer remained scaldingly hot. Temperatures of 90 degrees were commonplace, and rangers were learning to accustom themselves to carping tourists who complained that they should have stayed in Indianapolis or Fort Worth or Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, as though somehow the Park Service had cheated them by falsely promising an air-conditioned paradise. To worsen the situation, headquarters’ rangers frequently found themselves called from their normal duties to battle the persistent fires that broke out in the dry brush. The Park Service personnel were stretched thinner and thinner, and only a handful of skilled men were left to handle the record crowds. In such an atmosphere, no one had time to keep track of bears, either black or grizzly, much less to keep records on the increasing numbers of face-to-face meetings between grizzlies and man, particularly at the remote places called Granite Park and Trout Lake. While no one was noticing, the contacts between man and bear were reaching the point where something had to give.

  Early in the second week of August, a droll personage named Izzy Kolodejchuk checked out a horse and headed up the trail toward Swiftcurrent Lookout, just above Granite Park Chalet on the edge of the Continental Divide. Izzy was an electronic technician assigned to service radios, and he was a welcome sight at the park’s lonely outposts. For one thing, Izzy was always good for a laugh; he had learned to enjoy the constant kidding about his long, Polish name. “Kolodejchuk,” he would say. “Ko-lo-day-chuck: The “J” is silent, like the Pin swimming.” Izzy had been brought up on a ranch in North Dakota, and horses were a way of life to him, but grizzlies were not. He had never seen a grizzly, and in the hectic activity of this first summer in Glacier Park, he had heard little about them. Mostly he had worked and told jokes and laughed about his name.

  The radio at Swiftcurrent posed no major problems; Izzy reached into his saddlebags and pulled out a few parts and made it as good as new. Then he remounted his horse and rode back down through a light rain to Granite Park Chalet, where already the standing-room-only sign had been posted. The young innkeeper, Tom Walton, said he could squeeze the park employee in, and Izzy went outside and hitched his horse to a rail in the back of the chalet. It was nearly dark, and he was just sitting down in the dining room when he heard someone shout, “The bears! The bears are here!”

  Izzy blurted out to no one in particular, “What bears?” and someone answered, “The grizzlies!”

  Izzy jumped up and ran to the back of the chalet, where already thirty or forty guests milled about excitedly. But the radio technician was a North Dakotan, and instead of gawking at the bear that was dimly visible on the other side of the shallow gully, he looked toward his horse. The animal was keening in the direction of the bears, and lzzy saw that it was shuffling its feet and acting highly nervous. Now another bear had come on the scene, and the horse began pulling hard at its tether. One thought passed through the technician’s head that the saddlebags were full of antennae and other heavy equipment, and if the horse ran away, he would have to haul the stuff out himself. Immediately, lzzy picked up a rock and threw it toward the bears, but the range was too long, and the shadowy animals made no move to leave. He cupped his hands and began to whistle and holler. “Get out! ” he said. “Beat it! Hey, bears!” He noticed that a few members of the chalet staff were looking at him oddly, but he was in the green uniform of a park employee and nobody stopped him. In fact, nobody spoke to him at all until he took a few steps down the gully to shorten the range and then he was told, “Watch your step! Don’t get too close!” lzzy threw a few more rocks and returned to comfort his horse till the bears left in their own time. Just before the larger of the bears wandered back down the trail and the last guest went inside the chalet, lzzy heard someone humming. He turned to see a young light-haired girl strolling down the path, carrying a guitar and a pie. “Girl,” lzzy shouted, “you crazy?” The girl turned and smiled and kept on going.

  A night or two later, a party of four headed toward Granite Park to see if all the rumors were true. For weeks, the members of this party had been hearing that genuine, live grizzly bears were making nightly appearances at the chalet, and since grizzly bears were among the most exciting and interesting of the carnivores, they were going in to see for themselves. The hikers were not much different from the hundreds of others who had been walking to Granite Park to ogle bears, except that two of them were in ranger uniforms. Bert Gildart, a 27 year-old seasonal ranger, was with his wife, Margie; and Dave Shea, a 21 year-old assistant park biologist, was with Roberta Seibel, curator of the park’s museum at headquarters. The two men had worked that day, but their curiosity about the bears was so intense that they led the women up the tortuous trail at the end of their regular shifts. At the chalet, they were told that two bears had been coming in every night, and that the tracks of another adult bear with cubs frequently were seen around the garbage dump in the morning.

  On this night, the big silvertip was the first to arrive, shortly after 10 o’clock, and a few minutes later, a smaller bear moved in and chased the other into the brush line. When both bears had fed, the four visitors went inside for a cup of coffee. Activities in the chalet were coming to a halt: hikers were tired and going off to bed; the kitchen crew finished cleaning up and disappeared into closed rooms, and soon there was almost no one up and around but Gildart and Shea and the two young women. Just before midnight, they walked quietly out the front door to begin the return trip down the Alder Trail, and as they turned around the edge of the big building, they heard woofing noises from the garbage pit. They slipped around to the back and saw a large bear and two cubs dining peacefully on leftover leftovers.

  On the way down the trail, Gildart and Shea talked about their mammal-watching coup: five grizzlies in a single night, a lifetime’s supply for most observers. But the young men were not exhilarated. Shea was annoyed because he knew about the incinerator and the park’s efforts to eliminate the unnatural food supply, and now he had seen with his own eyes that the bear feeding was worse than ever. Gildart was annoyed because he believed thoroughly in the park’s reason for existence- to show nature in natural settings. Glacier National Park was not a zoo.

  But neither man made any official report, and in fact they almost avoided talking about what they had seen: It seemed to them that they were just about the last to be let in on the “secret,” and they realized that they had been naive to doubt the stories that had been trickling down all summer from the lonely old chalet. Briefly, they worried about the location of the Granite Park campground below the chalet; they had seen bears come from the direction of the camping area and return in the same direction, but they made no report on this matter, either. Wise, experienced heads had established the campsite in the middle of the bear’s stamping grounds; surely there must have been good reason. The two young men had mildly disturbing thoughts, but they did nothing.

  Toward the end of the week, Granite Park Chalet was visited by another man in ranger green, Francis Elmore, the great park’s chief naturalist, accompanied by a distinguished guest, Mr. A. J. Taylor of Santa Fe, New Mexico, a businessman and brother-in-law of President Lyn don Johnson. Ladybird Johnson’s brother had been visiting Elmore and the park for several days, and the two old friends agreed to make the four-mile uphill hike to Granite Park together. The walk took the middle-aged men a l
ittle longer than expected, with botanist Elmore stopping frequently to deliver impromptu and enlightening lectures on the park’s flora, but the party reached the chalet in plenty of time for the big attraction: grizzlies.

  It was not long before A.J. Taylor of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was feeling exceedingly nervous. Although he talked and joked and laughed with the sixty or sixty-five others who waited in the rear of the chalet for the animals to appear, his mind was full of forebodings about grizzlies. With the arrival of the first bear at the pit, some fifty yards away, the president’s brother-in- law sneaked a peek over his shoulder to see if it would be possible to climb on the roof. He decided that it would be possible, but most likely the younger people would beat him to it. He asked one of the rangers if there were any guns in the chalet, and he was told with a certain coolness that guns were absolutely forbidden in the park. “I was indignant!” he told friends later. “Absolutely indignant! I thought, The park people are so dedicated to preserving the wildlife that they aren’t even protecting the people. Why, a bear could have gone berserk and massacred everyone there!”

  A large, silvertip bear had been enjoying itself at the garbage dump for several minutes when Taylor and his companions began to hear sounds from the trail below the gully. “It’s the other bear,” someone whispered, but someone else said quickly, “Not unless he’s wearing bear bells.” Sure enough, whatever was headed up the trail was making a steady, rhythmical tinkle and hallooing loudly. “My God, ” cried one of the rangers, “it’s somebody hiking in!” The ranger ran to the side of the balcony and shouted, “Leave the trail! The bear’s here! Get off the trail and come up in a direct line through the brush!”