Night of the Grizzlies (11 page)
Jerry Chase came running up the slope below the girls just as the bear turned to an expensive pack that had been borrowed from a doctor in Kalispell. As the bear stuck a claw into the sixty-dollar pack, one of the girls lost her temper and threw a rock at the animal. When the grizzly showed no signs of resentment, the whole group began throwing, but the stones did not seem to have the slightest effect. Jerry Chase picked up a rock almost too heavy to carry, crept to within twenty feet of the bear, and slammed it into the animal’s thin ribs. The grizzly woofed once and kept on eating. From her position higher on the hill, Sharon Chase threw smaller stones, and when one of them caught the bear full in the nose, it jumped up and retreated toward the logjam, pawing at its face. After only a few seconds, it dashed off the logs and headed up the hill toward its tormentors.
Jerry Chase grabbed a handful of rocks and told the girls that he would hold off the bear while they circled back to the campsite and salvaged what was left for a hurried trip out. The bear was quartering the brush toward the girls, and the girls were circling away and working down toward the camp. Chase intruded himself in the middle and began pelting the bear with stones. As the girls reached the camp and grabbed what was left, the schoolteacher and the bear reached the main trail that paralleled the lakeshore, alternately chasing each other. The man would hit the bear in a tender spot, and the animal would race up the trail toward Arrow Lake, but as soon as the teacher got close enough for his next salvo, the bear would come woofing down the trail at him. In this yoyo fashion, man and bear reached a point about 150 yards from the camp, where the lake trail made a slight tum, when all at once the bear seemed to tire of the game and charged at full speed. The brave schoolteacher stood his ground and let fire several rocks, but the grizzly hesitated only slightly, and Chase fled all the way back to the camp. As he did, he saw the bear above him on the trail disappearing toward a thicket by the logjam. “He’s gone!” Chase hollered. “Let’s get out of here!” He had thrown a saddle on the pony and started tying on the manny bag when his wife shouted, “Here he comes again!” The grizzly had reappeared on the trail below the logjam.
Sharon said, “I’ll try and hold him off while you tie the bag.”
With her husband yanking feverishly on the ropes, Sharon Chase walked toward the bear and threw a small rock. The animal stopped and studied the scene of frenzied activity less than fifty feet away and then calmly lay down on the trail.
Sharon returned to the group, and the bear continued watching them, resting its head on its forepaws like a puppy. The pony rolled her eyes back in their sockets and pulled against her tether, and Sharon tried to hold the frightened animal by the halter, but the movements were too strong for her. “I can’t hold her!” she shouted, and Chase said, “Take the girls and get out!”
The troop ran ahead, followed by the man and the lurching pony, and as soon as the area was cleared of humans, the grizzly pulled itself slowly to its feet and started across the end of the logjam toward the camp. By now, it was plain that the animal was more interested in food scraps than Girl Scouts, and Susie Sampson felt safe enough to pull out her Kodak Instamatic and snap a picture from the crest of the hill that led downtrail to safety.
It was dark, and the group was exhausted when the dirt road around Lake McDonald finally came into view. There was talk about stopping and reporting the affair to the local ranger, but Jerry Chase failed to see the point. “They can read,” he said, “and they’ve seen all those remarks on the trail register by now. We’d just be telling them something they already know.”
When the group got back to Kalispell, thirty miles south of Glacier Park, Susie Sampson told her regular scout leader that they had seen a grizzly bear. “Oh, come on,” the woman said, and laughed. But then Susie took her roll of film to the Daily Inter Lake, Kalispell’s only daily newspaper, and on Thursday, August 10, 1967, a picture of the Trout Lake bear appeared on page l. The next day, a hard-driving newspaperman went to Glacier Park to peddle his papers and have a few words with some of his friends, the ranger officials. Mel Ruder, holder of a master’s degree in sociology, had been reporting, writing, photographing, editing, proofreading, and selling the local news for twenty-two years, and his weekly Hungry Horse News had won more plaques and trophies than there was room for in the tiny office in Columbia Falls. Ruder had won the Pulitzer Prize two years earlier for his reporting of a flood that inundated Glacier Park, but the prize changed nothing in his life. He still worked twelve hours a day, Monday through Friday, and then spent weekends taking photographs for the next week’s paper with his old-fashioned Speed Graphic camera; he still sold his own advertising, and he still ran around the county every Friday afternoon with fresh-run copies of the Hungry Horse News under his arm, planting them in dispensers and giving away as many as he sold.
“They know me up in the park,” Ruder said with studied understatement later, “and I love to mind their business for them. I’ve been around here longer than any of the rangers, and I tell them off, and they like me and I like them. We can speak frankly.”
On this day, Ruder told anyone in headquarters who would listen, including the superintendent, that a dangerous situation had developed at Trout Lake. “Just look at the facts,” Ruder said as he collared one ranger executive. “This bear’s been around all summer. People have written about him. I wrote about him myself the other day when he chased Steve Ashlock and John Cook. And now that bear’s not only being written about, but its picture is running in the Inter Lake!”
The rangers at headquarters told him that they were busy with fires, but they would see what could be done. Ruder left to peddle his papers elsewhere, but he could not rid himself of the fear that any day now, there would be trouble.
The Long Weekend
M
iss Joan Devereaux, 22 years old and barely out of college, stopped every now and then to call the group’s attention to some wonder of nature. The brown-haired ranger naturalist had majored in botany at Miami University of Ohio and Ohio State, so her trailside lectures tended more toward plant life, just as certain other naturalists tried to stick to geology or zoology or some other subject of easy familiarity. Miss Devereaux hoped that the devoted bird watchers in her group would not rely too heavily on her. She had heard them chattering, and it was plain that four or five of them were walking encyclopedias of ornithology. Joan Devereaux, in her first year as a ranger-naturalist conducting guided tours through the park, felt somewhat shaky when it came to birds. She could get just as excited as the next person over the sight of a snowy owl or a goshawk, but she was frankly no expert, and every time the bird watchers came near, she managed to steer the conversation toward flora. “See this bright yellow flower,” she would say in her most charming manner.
“This is a butterwort, and it is an insectivorous plant. Did I get that right
? In-sec-ti-vor-ous.
That means it eats insects. It’s sort of like a pitcher plant. Insects will get trapped in the sticky stuff on the leaves and then the plant produces an acid that kind of devours them. Basically the plant wants the nitrogen in the insect. Butterwort is the name.”
When Joan had gone to work that morning, she had learned that she was to make her maiden guided tour of one of the most spectacular trails in the world: the 7.6-mile Highline Trail from Logan Pass to Granite Park Chalet. The young botanist had been on the trail before, but only as a visitor. Her own guided tours were usually shorter, but on this Saturday, August 12, every available male on the Park Service’s roster had been rushed into fire-fighting duties; there had been an electrical storm the day before, and fire watchers had spotted more than 100 ground strikes and 21 “smokes.” By the next morning, the acrid smell of disaster was in the air. Joan had heard about the hot strikes, and she was not surprised when she was told that Fred Goodsell was on the fire lines and she would have to conduct his overnight tour into Granite Park Chalet.
There were thirty-six hikers plus the girl guide, and they ranged in age from a woman of about 65 to a 9-month-old baby boy, backpacked by his sturdy father. At first, the trail cut into the side of dark, sheer cliffs; a single misstep could send a hiker plunging several hundred feet down, and the group picked its way carefully. But soon the trail reached steeply sloping mountainsides thickly carpeted with fields of berries: There were bunchberries, thimbleberries, huckleberries, twinberries, gooseberries, serviceberries, raspberries, and several other varieties. The whole hillside looked as though it had been designed and planted solely on behalf of the Ursus family, the world’s most enthusiastic berriers, but Joan quickly explained to the hikers that they were still fairly close to the Going-to-the-Sun Highway, a few hundred feet below them, and despite the profusion of berries, grizzly bears had almost never been spotted here in the summer. This brought a sigh of relief from the hikers and the usual round of bear jokes, but Joan did not join in. Every day, she talked to her fellow naturalists, and one of the subjects they discussed most was the blatant feeding at Granite Park Chalet. She was wondering how she would react to it firsthand.
After an hour or two of walking, the group came to a place where the trail snaked a few thousand feet below the jagged top of the Garden Wall, a gigantic razor’s edge of sharply banded rock that marked the edge of the Continental Divide. Ages before, a pair of giant glaciers had come scooping their way through the upthrust of an ancient sea and scalloped out the valleys on each side of the cliff. Where the two glaciers had almost come together on their parallel routes, they had carved out a thin slice of wall that towered, serrated and crumbling, high above the hikers. A few hundred feet down from the top, white dots moved slowly about; they were mountain goats, finding something to nibble in an area that looked bare of all life. Now and then, one would frolic in a little mountain goat two-step and then look wisely down at the tourists below. Somebody in the crowd said that this was typical mountain goat behavior; so long as they had the upper foot, they acted relaxed and unperturbed.
It was just before noon, and the caravan had been on the trail for nearly three hours, when Joan led the hikers up a sharply contoured switchback and into sight of Granite Park, two miles away on the lava flow. The view was always inspiring to panting hikers, and Joan ordered a lunch break alongside a field of asters. The rest of the hike was uneventful, except that the birdwatchers were excited when a calliope hummingbird, slightly larger than a bee, buzzed into sight, followed quickly by a golden eagle. Joan was no birder, but she shared the thrill at the sight of these two spectacular specimens. By one thirty, the weary party had crossed the last two miles of subalpine terrain, alongside alder and fir trees and an occasional limber pine, and reached the bulky old chalet. On the schedule was a short rest and a hike to the nearby Mount Grinnell overlook, but the day had been fiercely hot, and not one of the young naturalist’s charges opted for the pleasure. Mostly they sat around the front porch of the chalet and watched the smokes that signaled distant fires. A few picked flowers, and some went inside the giant mountain hut to form one of those laughing, happy round-table groups that can be found not only in Glacier Park but on the Mont Blanc, the Swiss Alps, the Dolomites, wherever people gather to cast aside their inhibitions and their cares in the special giddiness of altitude. Joan went from group to group, answering questions, trying to be of assistance, and she could not help laughing with the revelers when one of them pointed out the last item on the blackboard menu next to the kitchen. “Grizzly burgers,” it read, “all sold out.”
As she was standing at the main entrance to the chalet, the girl in the green Park Service uniform was approached by a young couple whom she did not recognize from the tour. They told her that their name was Klein and that they had hiked in alone, and they wondered if she could tell them where the overnight camping area was. Still in the gay mood of the crowd inside, Joan pointed down the hill toward the Granite Park campground and said, “Did you bring your grizzly repellent with you?” When Mrs. Klein seemed concerned, the young naturalist told her that there were some grizzlies around, but that people did indeed camp in the area below the chalet, and they were welcome to do the same. The Kleins thanked her and walked off, talking animatedly to each other.
After dinner, the traditional community sing began, slowly at first, but at last threatening the heavily timbered walls of the building. Right in the middle of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” a young girl burst into the big dining room and shouted, “They’re here! They’re here! Here’s the big attraction!”
Joan knew what the girl meant, and she hushed the group and announced in a flat voice, “Well, supposedly they’re here. The bears, that is. I’m sure you’ve all heard about them. Now why don’t you just go quietly around this way and up to the balcony and watch them from a safe place?” But she had not even finished her suggestion when the crowd, by now swollen to sixty or sixty-five by hikers who had arrived later, began to elbow past her toward the back door. They spilled into the night and milled around at ground level trying to see over one another. About fifty yards away, a small silvertip nibbled at something on the ground.
Joan Devereaux looked briefly at the bear and found herself in instant agreement with the idea she had heard expressed so often by her senior naturalists. She did not profess to be an expert on bears, let alone on the huge grizzlies, but it seemed to her that there was genuine danger in the proximity of murmuring humans and feeding bears. Over and over, she had heard naturalists say that sooner or later something had to happen, and now she could see why. A few of the bolder onlookers crept down the gully to be closer to the feeding animal, and the young lady naturalist turned away from the scene and walked to the front porch of the chalet. For a while, she stared across the valley of McDonald Creek toward Heaven’s Peak, 9,000 feet high, and watched the sun sink in shades of purple and pink and crimson and give way suddenly to a crisp slice of moon, vivid and sharp in the early evening. Thin shafts of smoke from a few small fires in the valley stood straight and tall in the moonlight, like columns of pale steel, and there was the faintest smell of burning wood on the air. Joan thought briefly that she had never seen so calm or so beautiful a night, and then the deep fatigue of the long, hard day set in, and she went inside to bed.