by Jack Olsen
While the doctors were working on Ducat in the light of hand-held Coleman lanterns and flashlights, Father Tom Connolly and his Indian friend, Steve Pierre, were trying to recruit a rescue party. Dr. Lindan had stepped back as the surgeon, Lipinski, had taken over the medical procedures, and at the quiet approach of the priest, Dr. Lindan reported softly that the boy was going to survive, and he would like to begin on the rescue of the girl as quickly as possible. Father Connolly agreed and went to round up others. In a few minutes, a party of eight or ten would-be rescuers was ready to depart, but Joan Devereaux intercepted them and told them that a rescue helicopter and an armed ranger would be on the scene within minutes and ordered them to wait. The priest did not want to lose any time; some of the rescue party turned to Tom Walton for support, but Walton said, “No, we’re not going. There’s an armed ranger coming right in. There’s nothing we can do now. The bear could eat us all up. We ’re not going!”
To himself, Walton remembers saying, “OK, we’ve got to be realistic about this. There could be fifty of us going down there, and the bear could gobble us all up. And we have no idea where she is. We don’t even know where they were sleeping. And all we’ve got to defend ourselves with is the fire-and if the bear’s really riled up, the fire won’t stop him. Sure, this man is a priest, and maybe he’s got some protection from above, but I’m not so sure that I do. I have no reason to believe that the bear won’t eat me and everybody else.” And once again, he said aloud, “You’re not going! Nobody’s going down there! It’s stupid!”
With the helicopter due any minute, Walton and the naturalist hastily impressed about twenty chalet guests into duty preparing a landing site. Several days earlier, a helicopter had landed in a flat space behind the chalet, but that had been in broad daylight, and now it was the densest of nights. Joan set some of the guests to work building fires to mark the comers of the site, and Walton ordered others to bring buckets of water in case the fires got away. Several young guests grabbed axes and chopped down a wooden hitching rack that represented a hazard to the helicopter, and others draped warning lanterns on a few big stakes and pipes that could not be moved.
The landing pad was almost ready when the throbbing lights of the helicopter came into sight over the mountains to the south, and Joan took up her station at the two-way radio. She heard a flabbergasted fire guard saying on the air, “Hey, they’re building fires down there!” and the comforting voice of Ranger Gary Bunney replying, “That’s OK, that’s OK, that’s OK.” As the helicopter moved into position about 500 feet above the landing site, a man came out of the shadows and told the girl ranger that he had flown helicopters and would be glad to help talk the aircraft in. Joan nodded her thanks and radioed to the pilot, “You can see the four fires. Try to land right in the middle of them. It’s exactly the same place where you landed the other day.”
The helicopter began settling down for the landing; the four corner fires blazed high into the sky, and a wide circle of guests pointed flashlights upward. Suddenly the aircraft zoomed away, and Bunney’s voice crackled over the radio, “We can’t see! All that light makes a reflection on the dome and blinds us.”
“What should we do?” the naturalist asked.
“Have them point the flashlights down on the ground,” Bunney replied, “and put some people in front of the fires to block out the direct light.”
Joan issued the new orders in top-sergeant style that surprised herself, and within a few minutes, the helicopter was in another descent, assisted by advices from the former helicopter pilot on the ground and relayed by the girl naturalist. As the aircraft came within range of the fires, embers swirled into the night air, and Walton and his crew of fire watchers rushed with their buckets to track down each tiny glow. Then, with a gentle bump and a whoosh of settling air, the helicopter was down. Even before the rotor had stopped turning, the onlookers could see a man in ranger uniform open the door and run out, cradling a rifle in his arms. Willing hands reached into the aircraft and lifted the medical supplies, and everything was rushed into the improvised operating room.
In the darkness and confusion, someone had mislaid the needle for administering intravenous blood, and when Dr. Lipinski heard that the needle was missing, he recommended that the boy be airlifted immediately to the hospital thirty air miles away in Kalispell. Ducat’s wounds were serious but not critical; muscles and tendons had been torn away in his arm, and there were deep lacerations on his legs and back, but the only danger to his life was the loss of blood. Still in Don Gullett’s blue mummy bag, the 18 year-old former lifeguard from Ohio was lifted gently to the seat alongside helicopter pilot John Westover and whisked away in the night. All this was completed in ten or fifteen minutes, and at last Joan Devereaux turned to her superior ranger and said, “Now we’ve got to go find the girl.” Gary Bunney said, “You stay here .and handle the radio. I’ll take the men and go down.”
As the posse of searchers disappeared on the trail to the cabin below, the weary naturalist went inside the chalet dining room to put the radio back on the air. Dr. Lipinski told her, “Let me know when they bring in the girl,” and disappeared in the direction of his room. A few women sat around sobbing; their husbands had gone off with the search party. An older woman clomped halfway down the stairs and asked what was causing the gassy smell. “We’re making coffee in the kitchen,” said Eileen Anderson. “That’s probably what you smell.” The older woman nodded her head, as though this simple explanation accounted for the helicopter sounds and the medical apparatus in the dining room and the sobbing women and the general air of emergency. She turned and headed back to her bed.
Joan was sitting at one of the dining-room tables, fiddling with the controls of the Motorola radio when a man sat down alongside. She turned and recognized the young Air Force doctor from Malmstrom. “I’m sure you’re aware of this already,” he said, “but I want to tell you one thing.”
“What’s that?” the ranger asked. “The boy was in bad shape,” the young doctor said gently, “but the girl is going to be much worse.”
Joan Devereaux nodded her head and told him that she understood. Off in a corner, a man was saying to his wife, “I wouldn’t go down there. If those damned fools want to go down there and get caught by a bear, let them go. I’m not gonna risk my life.”
His wife said, “Well, at least be quiet about it.”
Another man was explaining in vivid detail how the rescue should be carried out, dosing his explanatory lecture with the words, “That’s exactly the way it should be done.”
“Then why aren’t you out doing it?” a voice asked.
“Are you kidding?” the man asked. “My husband shouldn’t be down there,” a sobbing woman said. “His heart isn’t good. I’m afraid they’ll be bringing him back on a stretcher.” Another woman moved over to comfort her, and the two sat with their arms around each other, crying and dabbing at their eyes. Joan turned the volume control to maximum and walked to the window. Far down the slope, she could see the glow of the washtub, surrounded by bobbing points of light like fireflies. A muffled shouting came up the mountain, as though a football game were in progress a mile away, and Joan realized that the men were making noises to scare off the bear. She turned to the radio and told headquarters that the rescue operation was under way.
Sometime between two and three in the morning, Denise Huckle found herself awake and listening intently to a splashing sound that was coming from the shallow water alongside the camp at Trout Lake. Squirt pushed himself up on his front paws and peered into the night toward the sound, and when a low growl began to issue from the puppy’s throat, Denise grabbed him and stuffed him under her sleeping bag. She thought she could make out the silhouette of a bear, and she did not want Squirt to antagonize the animal. When the sounds seemed to move out of the water and down toward the original camp, Denise awoke the others and told them what she had heard. After a few minutes of silence, the Noseck brothers scrambled out and rebuilt the fire, by
now only a bed of dull embers. They set the sack of cookies on the edge of a driftwood log, fanned up the fire once again, and returned to their bags. Within a few minutes, the bear had walked to the edge of the camp, grabbed up the cookie bag in a huge paw, and disappeared. Paul Dunn, the deepest of the sleepers, was up now, and the five frightened campers decided to lie awake, feed the fire, and wait for dawn. It was 3 o’clock; first light would be about 5:30 or 6. Paul Dunn inched his sleeping bag closer to the roaring fire but inched it back when his toes became too hot. Once again, the bear began splashing in the shallow water below the camp, and almost simultaneously a woofing sound seemed to come from the woods above. For a few minutes, the companions of the night discussed whether bears attacked in packs or couples and finally decided that they did not. By 4 a.m., the noises had stopped, and most of the campers had pulled the bags over their heads and gone back to sleep.
Denise comforted Squirt, imprisoned for his own safety under the sleeping bag, and tried to stay awake. Dawn was not far off. More than once, Denise thought she heard noises around the edge of the campsite, and each time she patted and stroked the dog to keep him from making a sound. Except for the single low growl earlier when the bear had been wading around the edge of Trout Lake, Squirt’s behavior had been perfect, but there was no doubt that the dog’s scent was on everything in the camp, and especially on the two girls, Denise and Michele, who had spent more time than the others babying him in their arms. Denise tucked her pet farther under the bag till he was completely hidden.
It was 4: 30, and the fire had fallen to low flames and embers again when she heard a splash and narrowed her eyes to peer into the night and saw a bear coming at a lope straight from the shoreline toward the center of the camp. When the bear was four or five feet away and she could make out its head and upper body clearly, Denise pulled the sleeping bag over herself and Squirt, just as the dog began a high-pitched squeal. Lying perfectly still inside the warm bag, the terrified girl heard a ripping noise that sounded like shredding canvas, but then there was a silence broken only by the deep breathing and grunting of the grizzly. She held Squirt tightly in her arms and felt his trembling mingle with her own. She tried to keep the dog from bawling out its fright, as the bear sniffed rapidly at the bag.
Paul Dunn woke up and peeped from his own sleeping bag to see the huge wet form of the bear standing next to him. Noiselessly, the boy slithered into his bag and tried to remain absolutely still. He heard the bear making more sniffing sounds, and suddenly he realized that the sniffs were getting closer and closer. Then something crunched into his sleeping bag and took a firm grip on his sweatshirt. Instinctively, the boy threw back the flap of the bag and scrambled to his feet, slamming into the bear in the process and shouting to no one in particular, “The goddamn bear tore my shirt! ” When the grizzly reared up on its hind feet as though to attack, Paul dashed to a tree and climbed thirty or forty feet in a matter of seconds, ripping and cutting his chest and his legs on the desperate ascent. When he reached the safety of the top, he looked down and saw the bear circling lazily below.
Lying in bags side by side, Denise and Ron Noseck saw the bear amble over to Paul Dunn’s tree, a few feet outside the semicircle of campers, and Ron decided that the time had come to run for trees of their own. “We have to get out of here!” he yelled, and Denise replied, “I can’t. I’ve got to undo the collar around Squirt’s neck.” Once again, Noseck told his girlfriend to run, and when she did not move, the 21 year-old dental student yanked the girl full-length from her sleeping bag and gave her a shove toward the southern end of the lake. The couple ran about fifty yards in the direction of the original camp, and as they ran, they heard Paul Dunn shouting down from his treetop. He seemed to be telling Ray and Michele to get out of their sleeping bags and make a break for it, but in their own headlong flight down the lakeline, Denise and Ron could not be sure. They reached a slight incline, and as they stopped, gasping for breath, the puppy came bounding up. Ron boosted the girl up a tree, threw the dog after her, and shinnied up a tree of his own. Neither one could see distinctly to the new camp fifty yards away, but they could still hear Paul Dunn shouting, and they added their own cries to the pandemonium. “Get out! ” they yelled toward the camp. “Find a tree!” From his observation point almost directly above the camp, Paul Dunn saw everything that happened within the small circle of reddish light thrown off by the dying fire. He saw Ron and Denise run down the shoreline, followed by the puppy, and then he saw the grizzly walk toward Ray Noseck’s sleeping bag and begin sniffing rapidly. When the bear turned momentarily toward Michele’s bag, Ray came out of his own as though shot from a gun and headed down the lake toward Denise and Ron, shouting as he ran, “Get out of your bag and run for it!”
Paul hollered at Michele, “Get out! Get out! Unzip and get out!”
The bear clamped its jaws on the side of the sleeping bag, and Paul heard the girl begin to scream. When the animal raked the bag with its claws, Paul heard Michele cry out, “He’s ripping my arm!”
“Michele!” Paul shouted. “Get out of your bag! Run and climb a tree!”
“I can’t,” the girl screamed. “He’s got the zipper!”
Then the defenseless girl shouted, “He’s got my arm... My arm is gone! Oh, my God, I’m dead!”
Paul Dunn saw the bear lift the sleeping bag in its mouth and drag it out of the circle of fire and up the hillside into the darkness. He heard a sound like bones crunching and shouted down the lake to the other three, “He’s pulling her up the hill!” and then, “She’s dead! She’s dead!”
In the hysteria of the moment, it seemed to the 16 year-old boy that he must get dressed and join his friends, and when he figured that the bear and its helpless bundle were at least fifty yards up the hill, he scrambled down the trunk and slipped his trousers over his underclothes. Then he sprinted along the lake to the others and climbed another tree, and the four survivors of the attack comforted one another and waited for the dawn. It came at 6 a.m., an hour and a half after the attack, and while Ray attended to Denise and the dog, the two younger men ran back to the campsite and gathered up shoes and jackets.
They listened for any sounds coming from the dark woods that might indicate Michele was still alive. From somewhere up the hill in the direction the bear had taken, Ron was sure he could hear the sound of bones being snapped. The four terrified campers yanked on their shoes and ran down the trail toward the turnoff that led up and over Howe Ridge. Denise thought she saw the bear in the brush as they ran, but she said nothing, and two hours later, after running and stumbling and lurching four miles up and down the 2,000 feet of hill, the campers burst out on the road that ran from Going-to-the-Sun Highway along the northern edge of Lake McDonald to Kelly’s Camp. A fisherman and his wife had parked at the trailhead and were just starting to hike in, but they took one look at the panicky group coming out and urged them into their car. When they pulled up at the path that led to the lake and the small ranger station, the four refugees from Trout Lake asked their benefactors to keep the dog in the car. Then they rushed off to tell their story to the ranger.
Fire Control Officer Gary Bunney and his rescue party had begun their mercy mission at 2:45 a.m., almost exactly two hours after the attack in the Granite Park campground. Since they were not sure where the young couple had been camping, the rescuers decided to go straight down the path to the trail cabin and try to fan out from there in the general direction of the campground. Bunney was in the lead, a powerful miner’s lamp strapped to his forehead and his finger lightly touching the safety of his .300 Winchester Magnum. Right behind him were the Indian, Steve Pierre; the innkeeper, Tom Walton; the geologist, Robert Klein; the priest, Tom Connolly; the doctor, Olgierd Lindan, the strong young man from Montana, Monty Kuka; the hiker from California, Don Gullett; the anonymous former pilot who had assisted in the landing; and six or eight others. They had not gone more than 100 yards downtrail when they had to step over bear droppings, fresh and steaming in
the cool night air, and Gary Bunney slowed the pace for a short consultation. He adjusted his head lamp so that it would shine dead ahead, and he said, “If the bear comes into sight, we’ll be in a tough spot. There’s only one chance, and that’s for you to shine your lights right on him and keep them shining on him, because I can’t hit him in this kind of darkness, and whether you know it or not, a grizzly can move. And remember this: Stay back! Don’t go moving out ahead of me, because if you do, we’ll just be one big jumble of bodies out there, and I won’t know where I can shoot and where I can’t, and a lot of people could get hurt.”
As the group continued toward the trail cabin, stepping gingerly across more fresh sign, Walton focused his five-cell flashlight out ahead of the ranger, but he could see that even this powerful torch was dimming after several hours of use. Behind him was a small amount of diffused reddish light coming from the fire tub dragged by the priest and fed by some of the others, but not enough to shine more than a few feet into the bushes and scraggly trees of the timberline area. Some of the men were keeping up a steady shouting to frighten the bear, and a few of the voices had turned hoarse and quavery. “Whoa, bear!” one man shouted tremulously. “Whoa, bear!” Walton had to admire the man, whoever he was. He was plainly stricken with terror but nevertheless proceeding down the trail to provide his share of help to a suffering human being.