Night of the Grizzlies

by Jack Olsen

  Everyone in the hunting party, including the bloodied Shea and the limping Hagen, rushed across the ravine to inspect the latest kill. Martinka dropped to his knees and examined the bear’s paws. There was a reddish substance that looked to be blood matted in the hairy spaces between claws. A pad hung loose from one of the hind paws like a flapping half-sole, and the biologist realized that the old injury must have kept the bear in constant pain. Quickly, he ran the salient facts through his brain: The bear apparently was in the habit of coming to the dump after the chalet had closed for the night, at about the same time that Julie Helgeson had been killed; the bear was a sow with cubs, and this was the most volatile kind of grizzly; the bear’s ripped foot would have kept it in an angry mood; and the bear was bloodstained. Kneeling alongside the carcass, Martinka looked up at the others and said, “We got her. This is the one.” Wasem cut into the stomach and found undigested bread dough, and pictures were snapped and measurements taken, and gradually the participants in the midnight execution became of a single mind about the grizzly. Twenty-four hours after the word had gone out that the killer bear was dead, the killer bear was dead.

  Gildart was up at 4 a.m., and he shook Landa. Both men peeked through the door of the shelter cabin into the black night. They agreed that there was nothing to be done until daylight, and for two hours they lay on their cots refining their hunting plans for the day. Just before 6, Gildart opened the door of the cabin and took a few paces toward the stream that ran just in front, and out of the shadows to his right he thought he detected movement. The young ranger stopped and turned his head slowly toward the north. At first, he could see nothing; night and day were still a blend, and visibility was slight. But as he peered toward a bend in the trail about thirty or forty feet away, he made out what appeared to be an expanse of fur, and then a grizzly bear, humped and unmistakable, padded out of the brush toward him. Gildart spun around and saw that it was about ten feet to the open door of the cabin. He thought he could make it to safety if the grizzly charged, and he patted his holster and felt the .357 Magnum, hoping all the time that the animal would stop, because a bear with pistol slugs in it was likely to be more dangerous than a bear in good health. There was no movement of air and no sound whatever, and only a second or two passed before Gildart realized that the grizzly was not going to stop. “Bring the rifles out! ” he shouted to Landa. “Here’s the bear!”

  At the sound of the human voice, the animal halted, made a few shuffling movements with its front feet as though it were going to continue, then slipped sideways into the thick brush that grew like African jungle along the steep banks of Camas Creek. As he heard Landa rushing around in the cabin, Gildart took careful note that the grizzly had not backed up, not an inch, but only sidestepped into the heavy canopy of bushes. Gildart reminded himself that he and Landa were there to kill grizzlies, not just to protect their own lives, and he realized that the bear’s actions suggested three possibilities : that the animal was crossing the creek and running up the slope on the opposite side; that the bear was using the cover of the stream banks to beat a retreat upstream, or that the bear was proceeding downstream, in which case it would have to pass about twenty five feet in front of the shelter cabin. A normal bear would have taken either of the first two routes, but then Gildart was not certain that he was dealing with a normal bear.

  Landa thrust the .30-06 into Gildart’s hands and said, “You’re not kidding around, are you?”

  “No,” Gildart said. “There’s a bear right out there.”

  The two men stood side by side facing the place where the stream bank dropped off six or eight feet straight down. If the bear was going to attack them, it would have to come from that direction. The light remained as grainy as ever. Neither man spoke, and there was not a sound, not even the rustle of a leaf. The busy stream seemed muted. Two or three minutes passed, and then Gildart said softly, “There he is!” Landa squinted into the half-light, saw the grizzly, and said with awe, “Look at that head!”

  The bear had worked its way downstream till it was underneath the bank directly in front of the shelter cabin, and now it was looking over the edge of the bank, reconnoitering the area, turning its head slowly from side to side as though trying to pick up a scent in the dead air. Once, the dark animal seemed to be trying to brace itself for a push up and over the bank, but then the head and shoulders slipped back out of sight, and Landa said, “Let’s don’t let him get away!”

  Seconds passed, and inch by inch the head began to rise again above the bank. When its eyes were in sight, the bear made a sudden upward thrust that exposed its neck and shoulders, and Gildart took a step forward to shorten the range. At this motion, the bear slipped quickly from sight again, and Gildart backed off. More seconds passed, and then the bear was in violent motion, hauling itself up and over the bank to charge. In the sights of his gun, Gildart could see nothing but a great expanse of furry neck and chest, and he fired at a range of less than twenty feet. Almost in the same split second, Landa’s .300 H&H Magnum went off, and the bear did a giant back dive and fell heavily into the bottom of the gulch. Gildart rushed across the clearing toward the stream, and Landa shouted, “Take it easy! This is the most dangerous time!” but Gildart was already scrambling down the bank of Camas Creek, and Landa levered a bullet into the chamber of his rifle and followed him down. Instantly, the two experienced hunters knew that the great bear was dead; there were two jagged holes seeping blood, one in the chest and one in the head; either would have been fatal. Gildart dropped to his hands and knees and saw that the bear was a brownish-colored old sow with worn-down molars and a thin, almost scrawny body. “Let’s haul her up to the cabin,” he said, but the bank was too steep and slippery, and the two rangers decided to let the animal lie where it had fallen. They discussed the idea of opening the stomach to see what they could find, but Gildart said he preferred to leave any autopsies to his superiors. After they had radioed headquarters that they had killed a bear, the two friends sat in the little shelter cabin and wondered whether they had shot the right grizzly. Gildart said he was sure they had.

  “What makes you so sure?” Landa asked. “Well, what do you think she was doing around the cabin this morning?” Gildart said. “She was stalking us. And that’s ·not normal for a grizzly.”

  Landa said he had to agree that the bear had not acted normally. The two men waited for orders to call off their hunt, but when no such orders came, they wandered back down the trail toward Trout Lake to search for more grizzlies. They saw plenty of fresh sign, but no bears.

  The rangers at Granite Park maintained their watch through the rest of the dark hours of Tuesday morning, on the off chance that there was still another anonymous bear coming into the dump at night, but they heard nothing except the soft sighing of a light breeze and the occasional distant bawling of the cubs. Wasem drew the final shift, from 4 to 6 a.m., and he heard nothing whatever, not even a breeze. He sat in a canvas chair on the upper balcony and wondered where the cubs had gone and what would happen to them now that their mother was dead. He was thankful that no one, in the wild excitement of the shooting, had pegged a bullet at the young bears. By now, they were 8 or 9 months old and weaned to a normal diet, and there was reason to believe that they had a chance for survival.

  When daylight came, the biologist walked across the ravine and up the steep side of the lava flow where the cubs had been seen last, but there was no trace of them. Wasem’s shift was over, but he had been up almost all night, and he figured he might as well finish his assignment. The evening before, park headquarters had radioed that one of the most obstreperous journalists in the area, G. George Ostrom of Kalispell, would be arriving at the chalet the next morning, and a high-ranking ranger executive had ordered Wasem and the other members of the party to remove all traces of dead bears before the arrival of the press. With his bandaged assistant, Dave Shea, senior biologist Wasem started down toward the trail cabin at about 7:30 to get some rope to drag the carcasses aw
ay. The two men had gone a short distance when Shea heard a bawling noise and spotted the cubs on some rocks about 150 yards below the chalet in the draw that led to the campground. Shea turned· toward the chalet and saw Cliff Martinka standing several hundred yards away. “There they are!” Shea shouted up to the other biologist and gave chase with Wasem. As they ran across the rocky ground near timberline, shots rang out. Both men looked up and saw that Martinka was taking aim for another shot at the young bears. Now the cubs seemed to double their pace and headed for the far edge of the bench and the underbrush that ran down the hill on the other side. Martinka fired a few more times, but soon the bears were gone. In the bushes not far from where Julie Helgeson had been killed, Wasem and Shea found fresh spots of blood, and they knew that one of the cubs had been wounded.

  When G. George Ostrom turned on the radio in his house in Kalispell and heard the news that two 19 year-old girls had been killed by grizzlies during the night, he turned to his wife and said, “My God, there goes the last grizzly in Montana! ” Like a movie preview, a whole sequence of future events passed through Ostrom’s mind. He could see the letters to the editor mounting up and finally reaching a fortissimo; he could hear the voices on the floor of the state legislature and all the way to Washington, demanding that Glacier National Park be made safe for the public; he could see the National Park Service bending with the public pressure, and finally he could see bands of official hunters entering the park from all comers, bearing with them .30-06 rifles and widemouthed bear traps and cyanide charges and orders to kill every last specimen of Ursus arctos horribilis or drive them across the border into Canada.

  It was not that George Ostrom was a fanatical protector of grizzlies or any other predator. He was a hunter, an enthusiastic one, and he had shot his share of bears, including a massive grizzly when he was a young boy. But like certain members of the Park Service staff, Ostrom had a deep respect for this biggest of land carnivores and a deeper respect for nature’s checks and balances. He also knew that there were times when a grizzly or two had to be exterminated in the greater interests of both bears and humans. Certainly this was one such time, and Ostrom wished that he could be whisked into the park to help do the job crisply and efficiently.

  At 32, G. George Ostrom had been a smoke jumper, banker, photographer, journalist, radio announcer, advertising man, and lifelong student of bears and nature. With his black wavy hair and mustache, strident voice, earthy vocabulary, and deep sense of anger and righteousness, he was a one-man cause celebre around his home town of Kalispell. His prize-winning column in the prize-winning weekly, the Hungry Horse News, was read and discussed and praised and condemned by everyone who could read, especially by the National Park Service. For several years, Ostrom had been dissatisfied with the operation of the park that he had been visiting all his life, and his columns had made him persona non grata with the ranger executives. Every host in the nearby towns of Columbia Falls and Martin City and Kalispell and Whitefish knew that one either invited G. George Ostrom or the top rangers, never both. Years before, someone had invited Ostrom and two ranger executives, and when a question-and-answer session began, Ostrom stood Night of the Grizzlies up, announced that he was speaking in his capacity as president of the local wildlife federation, and asked the rangers, “Is it true that you allow the concessioner to feed grizzlies at Granite Park?”

  The rangers said that they doubted that it was true, but they certainly would look into the matter on the earliest possible occasion.

  “It’s true, isn’t it, that the feeding of bears is one of the most dangerous practices in the park and that it’s strictly against the law?” Ostrom said.

  The rangers said that he was absolutely correct and that the law was enforced impartially. “Well, then, tell me how many people have been arrested in the last ten years for feeding bears,” Ostrom said.

  The rangers said they would have to check the records. Ostrom asked them for an educated guess. The rangers said that they did not deal in educated guesses, and they would have to look in the files.

  Ostrom said, “Don’t bother looking in the files. I’ve already looked in your files. In the last ten years, you’ve arrested nobody for feeding bears. Nobody. Zero. And everybody on the main street of Kalispell knows that you can see grizzlies any night of the summer by watching the garbage dump at Granite Park. Now what are you gonna do about it?”

  The rangers said that they would have to check the facts, and from then on, no ranger would go to a public event if the name of G. George Ostrom was on the guest list. Ostrom did not mind. He found that the turnover of rangers and ranger officials was so rapid that hardly any of them stayed on the premises long enough to learn more than the minimum about the park that was under their stewardship; it was not like the old days when a ranger might be stationed in the park for fifteen or twenty years and one could throw him a barrage of questions and get an answer to everyone. Ostrom had his own coterie of friends inside the ranger headquarters-men who did not agree with park policies but could not afford to say so out loud-and it amused him a little and frightened him a lot that when difficult questions would come up, these friends would telephone him instead of turning to their superiors. G. George Ostrom was the ex officio authority on Glacier National Park, and nobody knew it better than the top rangers.

  “My God, it happened,” Ostrom told his wife on the morning of August 13, “and it happened exactly the way we were afraid it would happen.” He had to dial park headquarters several times before there was an answer, and then he was told that there was nothing to report “Well,” Ostrom said, “can I hike in and see for myself what happened?” “The trails are closed,” the voice from headquarters told him.

  “Even to the press?”

  “Even to the press.”

  As the day went on, journalist Ostrom fidgeted and fumed and tried to figure out what to do. He went to the hospital in Kalispell to interview Roy Ducat, but nurses whisked him out of the room before the conversation could begin. He called headquarters again and was told that the trails were still closed to everyone, including the press. Now the radio stations around Kalispell began listing the park’s various explanations and theories about the twin killings. The bears had become crazed by the 100-odd lightning strikes of two days before; the bears had been made cranky by the long hot spell; the bears had become panicky from the fires; the bears had been excited by the fact that both girls wore cosmetics; the bears were upset by a sonic boom; the bears were aggravated by tourists who threw rocks at them. No hypothesis was too wild to escape mention, and George Ostrom thought he had never heard so much buncombe in his life. One commentator reported that there was a rumor that bears had been fed at Granite Park, but the very next newscast carried the park’s denial: There was a gas incinerator at the chalet, and any leftover scraps were buried. Listening to such information, Ostrom worked up a powerful head of steam.

  On Monday, the press embargo continued, and Ostrom called a friend on Life magazine in New York and asked for a formal assignment to the case. Life and the Associated Press and United Press International and the New York Times and all news media had the same problem as Ostrom: The only information that was coming out of Glacier Park was being funneled through park headquarters, and no firsthand observers were being allowed in. Ostrom’s friend on Life told him to consider himself assigned and wished him luck on breaking down the embargo.

  Now the angry journalist rang up the park once again and identified himself as “G. George Ostrom of Life magazine.”

  “Who?” the switchboard voice said.

  Ostrom said, “I’m covering for Life, and I want to talk to the superintendent.” By late afternoon, G. George Ostrom of Life had had several conversations with park officials, but nothing had changed.

  Just before nightfall on Tuesday, almost three full days after the attacks on the girls, he picked up the phone, dialed headquarters, and announced that he was going into the park the next morning with or without permissio
n. The voice on the other end said the trails were closed, and Ostrom said that he was going to open them singlehandedly at dawn the next day. Within an hour, permission had been granted.

  Late on Tuesday morning, a weary George Ostrom, necklaces of cameras beating on his chest, staggered up the last switchback and headed across the bench toward the Granite Park Chalet. As he approached, he recognized Ross Luding and the kitchen superintendent, Eileen Anderson, and four or five young girls, plus the execution squad of four park personnel. Immediately, one of the rangers turned to a two-way radio and began talking, and as soon as the conversation had ended, Ostrom began receiving terse instructions. The carcass of one bear was waiting to be carried out for autopsy, he was told, but the other two had been dragged down the hill and were not to be photographed. “Why not?” Ostrom asked. “We don’t want any publicity on it,” one of the rangers said.

  For the first of several times during that day, Ostrom lost his temper. “It’s none of yol.lr business what you get publicity on and what you don’t,” he snapped. “This is my park as much as it’s yours, and I’m taking the pictures.”

  As he walked down the hill to find the dead bears, he saw that the radio was in use again. “How about coming down and standing over your trophies?” Ostrom said.

  “No, thanks,” the bear killers told him.

  He saw two men heading down the mountain with rifles, and when he asked them what they were doing, they said they were hunting the cubs. “Cubs?” Ostrom said. “Were there cubs?” He was told that there had been two, that they had been sighted earlier in the morning, and that attempts to shoot them had failed.

  “You tried to shoot the cubs?” the puzzled Ostrom asked.