by Jack Olsen
Cliff Martinka, originally from Pennsylvania, was a newly hired research biologist; he had just completed two and a half years with the Montana Fish and Game Department and had come to his new post in Glacier Park two weeks before. In his own way, Martinka was as dedicated a scientist as Wasem. He was so steeped in the jargon of biology (he had both bachelor’s and master’s degrees) that he was sometimes difficult for the layman to follow. In the world of Cliff Martinka, animals did not eat berries; “they utilized them for consumptive purposes.” Bears were not killed; they were “dispatched,” “taken care of,” or “eliminated.” Nor did Cliff Martinka have any compunction about dispatching or taking care of or eliminating bears, provided, of course, that there was no alternative. As he later explained, “I’ve been a hunter all my life. I’ve killed more than my share. Regardless of the situation, it doesn’t disturb me at all to see something dead or to have to kill it. I was thinking as we climbed up there that this was something that had to be done, and if it had to be done, I preferred to be involved. I felt competent enough with a rifle, and perhaps other less experienced people may not have been able to handle the situation.”
The fourth member of the execution team was a seasonal ranger and wintertime high-school teacher named Kerel Hagen, a short, wiry Montanan who had worked his way up to a high rating on the park’s personnel charts despite his part-time employment. The word had gone out many summers earlier that Kerel Hagen was uniquely adaptable to the special problems of the park’s backcountry, and whenever the rangers needed a wilderness troubleshooter, they tried to get him. Still in his 30s, Hagen was able to hike nonstop from one end of the park to the other, and he handled horses and rifles like a typical Montanan.
The four men arrived at the chalet just before noon and sat down for a quick lunch. The atmosphere was uneasy in the big stone-and-log building; usually there were dozens of giddy dudes milling around and occupying every space at the tables, but now there was only the chalet staff. Some of the girls had reddened eyes and disappeared around corners, sniffling, and even the ones who were not on the verge of tears looked miserable and afraid. The young innkeeper, Tom Walton, joined the newcomers and confided, “I hate to do it, but I’ve had to be a little tough on them. One of them keeps walking around crying and saying, ‘Keep a stiff upper lip.’ I told her to knock it off. She was just upsetting everybody else. Then another one said, ‘We’re gonna march right out of here. We can’t stand it anymore. This is a house of death.’ Even my wife and Gracie Lundgren were acting spooky. I had to give’em hell to straighten’em out.”
Wasem asked Walton to describe the bear situation around the chalet, and the young man from Idaho said that so far as he knew there were only two bears: a big silvertip that came around nine or nine thirty at night, and a smaller brownish bear that arrived later and chased the silvertip away. The rangers told Walton that both bears would have to be killed, and Walton said that he had expected as much, and he hoped that the girls in the chalet would be able to control themselves during the executions; some of them had become attached to the big animals.
While Francis Elmore went to work with his measuring tapes, his camera, and his recorder, the other three men took their rifles and reconnoitered the area around the chalet. For several hours, they saw nothing out of the ordinary, but at about four o’clock, a dark silvertip grizzly and a single cub were picked up in the binoculars at a range of almost two miles. The bears were feeding on berries near a small lake southeast of the chalet, and there was no reason to suspect that they were among the scavenging bears that came to the garbage dump nightly. Tom Walton took a look, and he said that he had never seen this pair before. The hunters glassed the animals off and on until 6:30, when they disappeared into the scrub.
By 8:30 that night, the three hunters were staked out under the clotheslines behind the chalet, waiting for bear No. 1. The garbage dump had been baited with a gallon glob of bread dough, laced with a half-pound of bacon. Tom Walton and Ross Luding stood by with powerful flashlights, and several times they focused the beams on the dump so that the hunters could twist their scopes in. The range was about fifty yards; the men had comfortable shooting stances in canvas chairs, and no one doubted what was going to happen to each bear that appeared. From up above on the rear balcony, several of the chalet employees watched, and now and then the rangers would have to tell them to quiet down; they did not want to risk the slightest possibility of frightening away the “regular” bears.
Shortly after nine, someone came running out the back door with the news that the aggressive smaller bear, No. 2, was down at the bottom of the draw that led from Granite Park campground and appeared headed up to the dump. Minutes passed, and the rangers pushed their safeties off and on nervously, but no bear arrived. “What do you think happened?” Wasem asked Walton.
“Nothing,” the innkeeper replied. “They’ll be in. Just wait.”
By now it was dark, except for a slight glow from a quarter moon tinted yellow-orange by a thin film of smoke from distant fires. A light breeze was blowing, and the temperature already was tumbling down toward the low fifties and forties, where it customarily spent the night. The men sat quietly, their rifles in their laps, and Walton and Luding kept reassuring them that sooner or later the bears would be in. At a few minutes after ten, a large silhouette lumbered into the gully and began scrambling up toward the dump. Instantly, Walton and Luding caught the animal in their big flashlights and were surprised to see that it was not the small grizzly, No. 2, but the beautiful silvertip, No. 1. Wasem whispered, “One. Two. Three!” and each man fired. The bear staggered and fell to the ground, and another volley of bullets slammed into its body. The animal thrashed about for a few seconds and lay still, its eyes gleaming like bright red reflectors into the direct beams of the flashlights. From the balcony above, a young girl began to sob violently.
About fifteen minutes later, the firing squad could hear a snorting sound from below the dump, and Walton whispered, “That’ll be No. 2.” When they were sure that the animal had reached the bread dough, Walton and Luding switched on their high beams and caught the smaller bear in a cross pattern. The animal looked up briefly and resumed its eating; performing in the glow of spotlights was not a new experience. This time, Hagen barked out the count; on “two” the bear looked up again, and on “three” the rifles sounded, and the animal catapulted into the air and came down heavily. The three men fired again, and now both bears lay side by side in death.
“That’s it, ” Walton said, and the men ran across the ravine. “That’s it, ” Walton said, and the men ran across the ravine. Night of the Grizzlies “That’s it?” Wasem asked.
They found that bear No. I was a female of about 350 pounds; No. 2 was also a female, but it weighed about 100 pounds less than the silvertip. Martinka and Wasem poked flashlights into the bears’ mouths and spread their claws, looking for signs of guilt, but there was not so much as a speck of flesh or blood on either of them. The biologists opened the stomachs and looked for human hair or strips of cloth or skin, but all that was visible were the half-digested remains of leaves and berries and the ends of tapeworms that reached down into the intestines. The team took dozens of flash pictures and then returned to the chalet to report their kills to headquarters, and everyone was asleep by 11 o’clock. It was not long afterward that newspapers and the wire services received the word from headquarters: The killer bear of Granite Park was dead. Or was it?
Sometime before, Seasonal Ranger Bert Gildart had executed a troublesome bear on instructions of his superiors, and he had no doubt about the reason he was to report to headquarters again on Monday, or why Leonard Landa was to be his partner. Presumably, Landa knew the Trout Lake area; it was part of his responsibility to patrol Trout and Arrow lakes. Gildart knew bears and guns and how to track and kill. The two of them formed the logical assassination squad for the Trout Lake bear, so they showed up at headquarters at 8 a.m. Monday, August 14, fully armed. This time, Gildart had r
emembered to bring his own rifle, a .30-06 converted 1903 Springfield, and he had strapped a single-action .357 Magnum Ruger revolver to his waist.
The two young rangers checked in with the chief ranger’s office and waited for instructions. At 9 a.m., they were still waiting. By now, all available ranger executives had arrived, and they kept walking back and forth past Gildart and Landa at high speed, saying nothing, but appearing to be in a hurry. After a while, Gildart intercepted a high-ranking ranger and asked if they should not be heading toward Trout Lake to eliminate the killer bear. “We’re seeing about that,” the executive said.
Now it was 10 a.m. The two eager young men had been curbing their impatience for two hours, and still no one was paying any attention to them. The pace in the handsome new headquarters building had become more frenetic; high officials dashed in and out of the offices of higher officials and vice versa. Telephones jangled, and secretaries raced up and down the long hall to whisper in their bosses’ ears. Gildart and Landa began to get the impression that no concrete steps would be taken until ordered by someone outside the park headquarters, perhaps someone as far away as the Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C. Once again, they collared a ranger official, and once again they were told to wait. It was after 11 when they were finally instructed to hike into Trout and Arrow lakes by way of the Lake McDonald Trail and to kill every grizzly bear they encountered.
The two young men ran out of the headquarters building and almost bowled over a newspaper photographer. “Wait a minute!” the man said. “I want to get a picture of you with your guns.” The two rangers brushed past without slowing stride, got into their pickup truck already loaded with camping gear and canned salmon, and roared down the blacktop toward the Trout Lake trailhead. They were on the way over Howe Ridge by noon, moving slowly and methodically, studying the terrain. Now that they were started, there was no hurry; their orders specified killing any grizzlies they encountered, and they were to stay until the area was completely clear of the big animals or until the killer bear was executed and positively identified. Sometimes they made wide detours to specific vantage points, but after four hours of silent stalking and glassing every square inch of visible territory, they had seen neither grizzly nor sign. It was 4 p.m. before they dropped down into the Trout Lake area and found their first bear scat.
It was still fresh, and in the middle of it was a tiny white bone.
Gildart took a closer look and saw that the bone was from a small mammal, perhaps a ground squirrel or a chipmunk. The two hunters poked holes in several cans of salmon and walked around the logjam campsite, distributing the aromatic juice on the ground. Then they spread bits of the delicacy around the fire grate and the open beach where the hot sun could do its work. Within an hour or so, the place had begun to smell like a cannery, and Gildart and Landa waited expectantly for the bear to come out of the underbrush as it had so many times before. But when the grizzly did not appear after several hours, Landa suggested that it might make more sense to search around the area, returning from time to time to the logjam campsite to see if the bear had shown up, and thus the two men occupied themselves until early evening. When the sun dropped behind· Rogers Peak, they decided that the bear might have moved uptrail toward Arrow Lake, and since they intended to camp at the Arrow Lake shelter cabin that night, they began a slow hunt toward the north, always staying near the trail that ran narrow and tortuously through high walls of berry bushes and trees. They had gone about a mile up Trout Lake when they began to notice fresh bear tracks and scats at almost regular intervals, but they had mistimed their departure, and all at once, night closed down on them. There could be no more hunting in the darkness; they were hit with the chilling realization that they had inadvertently switched roles with the killer bear, and now they had to get to the shelter cabin as quickly as possible. There was no doubt in their minds that the bear had fled in this same direction, and no doubt that it would attack human beings, and the two young rangers broke into a jog, stumbling into bushes and stopping occasionally to probe for the lost trail with their flashlights. Once Landa said breathlessly, “What was that?”
Gildart stopped, and both men heard a rustling noise in the bushes alongside. “I think it’s a squirrel,” Gildart said, “but let’s not wait to find out.”
The shelter cabin was empty; the trail had been closed by order of the park superintendent, and the two men had the 20-by-10-foot cabin all to themselves. They brought in a supply of water from the stream just down the bank, one of them doing the carrying while the other stood guard with a rifle, and after a short snack and a radio report to headquarters describing their futile day, the two men went to sleep.
Shortly after dawn on Monday, biologist Cliff Martinka was studying the carcasses of the two bears at Granite Park when he realized that the bread dough and bacon strips were gone from the dump. At first, he thought that there must be thousands of hungry ground squirrels and other small mammals around the area, but he discarded the idea almost as quickly as it came to him. Only a big animal could have done away with so much food in just a few nighttime hours. Once again, he asked Tom Walton if there were any other bears that came to the garbage dump, and once again Walton said that there were no others. Earlier, when there had been snow on the ground, the tracks of an adult bear with two cubs had been seen often, but Walton said that there had been no trace of this bear family for several weeks.
The rangers pondered the matter all morning long as they busied themselves making measurements, taking more pictures of the dead bears, and patrolling the environs of the chalet for other grizzlies. Shortly after 2 p.m., the tall, red-haired Dave Shea came up the trail, carrying a rifle. He was listed on the park records as Wasem’s assistant, and headquarters had ordered him to interrupt an elk research project on the Belly River and join his boss at Granite Park. When the young seasonal ranger-biologist saw the two bear carcasses lying behind the chalet, he said, “Where are the other ones?”
“What other ones?” Wasem asked. “There’s a sow with two cubs that comes late at night,” Shea said. “Bert Gildart and I saw them here last week.”
Martinka and Wasem exchanged meaningful glances, and after dinner, the firing squad, now augmented by Shea, again took up its position behind the chalet. There was no garbage at the dump, but the bodies of the two dead bears lay redolent in the moonlight, and now and then Luding and Walton poked their light beams to see if anything had begun to gnaw at them. Nine o’clock passed, and 10, but Dave Shea said the sow and cubs had not arrived until nearly midnight the week before, and if they came at all, it probably would be an hour or so later. A few of the hunters went to bed and left instructions that they be called at the first sign of the bears. At 10: 30, a woofing sound came from the draw below the chalet, and the alarm went out to awaken the riflemen. For a few seconds, cubs could be heard squealing, but then the squealing turned into bawling and the bawling into the woofing grunts that grizzlies make when they are ready to fight. Standing at ground level in the back of the chalet, Tom Walton said to himself that he had never heard a bear sound so ferocious, and he commented to Luding that the animal must have caught the scent of the two carcasses at the dump. Just then, he heard a noise behind him and turned to see Kerel Hagen lying in a heap at the foot of the stairs, clutching his ankle. “I think I’ve sprained it,” Hagen said. “I missed the last three steps in the dark.” Out in the draw, the woofing and bawling sounds continued, but now they were plainly moving away.
With Hagen rubbing his ankle gingerly, the hunting party discussed the situation and decided to take up watches from the balcony above to avoid spooking the wary animals again. By now, it was clear why Walton and the chalet employees had never seen the sow and cubs; the slightest sound would send them racing back down the draw. Unlike bear No. 1 and bear No. 2, these were not circus performers to eat in a puddle of light as dozens cheered. They were wild bears. Shortly after midnight, Shea and Walton were alone on the balcony when they hea
rd another woof from the draw. But before they could even alert the other men, someone in search of a midnight snack ignited a lantern in the downstairs part of the chalet, and with the first glimmer of new light, the bears once again dashed away. “Well, that’s that,” Walton said, preparing to go to bed. “They’ll never come back a third time.” Shea remained on watch.
Just before 1 a.m., Shea thought he heard a shuffling sound coming from the path that led from the trail cabin to the chalet. He strained to hear and made out a low cough; instantly, he slipped back inside the chalet to awaken the crew. Within a few seconds, Elmore and Luding were manning flashlights at the corners of the balcony, and all four riflemen were sighted in on the little circle of bare earth that marked the dim outline of the garbage dump. For a few minutes, there was no sound except the breathing of the men. Then a large shadowy form began to infiltrate its way across the open gully between the chalet and the dump, and Elmore and Wasem flipped on their lights. They picked up the outline of a medium-sized grizzly about five feet from the dump, and Hagen snapped, “One! Two! Three!” and all the guns sounded together. The bear spun around wildly and began to bawl at the cubs, but the lights stayed sharply on the adult bear, and another volley sent it sprawling and flopping to the ground. It was exactly forty-eight hours and five minutes since the attack on Julie Helgeson.
In all, eleven shots had been fired, but only one by Dave Shea. On the first round, the scope of his rifle had kicked into his eye and cut it open, and now a thin stream of blood ran down to his chin. When the last reverberation had come back from the surrounding mountains and died away, another sound could be heard from the hillside above the dump. The two cubs were running away, whimpering and bawling, and after a few minutes, they were hidden in the rock cover.