Night of the Grizzlies (3 page)
The cubs are born in hibernation in the dead of winter and, at birth, are blind, helpless and small. But after a few months of constant suckling of the mother, the young bears come out of hibernation weighing as much as 25 pounds, glossy of coat and ready for instant mischief. Up to a point, the mother grizzly will play happily with her cubs, sometimes for hours at a time. She will cuff them about gently, sitting on her rump and beckoning them to come on in and mix it up, and she will suffer their scratchings and clawings almost to the point of drawn blood before calling off the fun. Hikers have seen mother bears and their cubs lying in seep pools and swamps against the summer heat or splashing one another with water in a brook. Others have seen bear families enjoying snowslides and snow fights just before hibernating together for another year. The mother grizzly seems possessed of an almost infinite amount of patience and love for her cubs, and she will fight to the death for them. It is only when the young bears are willfully disobedient, especially in the training courses given by the mother on such important subjects as berry hunting, squirrel digging, and man avoiding, that she will insist on absolute obedience, reaching out to smack a feckless cub with the same paw that can brain a Percheron.
Except for their offspring, the grizzlies of North America appear to live for their stomachs. Wrote Canadian Andy Russell, in his fascinating book Grizdy Country (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1967):
The grizzly joins man, the hog, and the common rat in being the four outstanding omnivores on Earth. Like them, he will eat almost anything when hungry and a great variety of things most of the time. It would be much easier to list the things the grizzly does not eat than those he does... Most of the time the grizzly follows his nose through life; wandering from one smell to another, always seeking, nearly always hungry, but as carefree and happy as an animal can get. He makes use of his natural endowments to the fullest, fitting his way to conditions as they are found. Probably a grizzly bear’s idea of pure heaven is a mountain slope glistening with the blue-black shine of huckleberries hanging thickly on the bushes, the brilliant glow of buffalo berries, or the luscious smell of acres of wild raspberries, strawberries, and saskatoons. For the grizzly, life is a glorious saga of nip and crunch and lick and swallow, and it matters little what is being nipped and crunched and licked and swallowed. The same grizzly that will devour 40 pounds of maggoty venison that has been lying in the sun for a week will stop by the nearest anthill for a nightcap on his way home, probably for the tangy taste of the formic acid that abounds in the ants’ bodies. Grizzlies will watch pine squirrels bury hundreds of nuts from white pine cones, then spend days digging up the industrious workers’ winter storage. There is no other way for the bears to get the tasty nuts; they grow at the very tops of the trees, far past the reach even of the lighter black bears, and if it were not for the squirrels, the grizzlies would never know this delicacy.
The long, sharp claws on a grizzly’s forefeet are perfectly suited to the job of digging, and except for the berries that he strips from bushes and crams into his mouth at a breakneck pace, the big animal gets most of his food by using his paws as pick and shovel. When glacier lilies begin to appear, grizzlies cannot be far behind. As the flowers burst into bloom higher and higher on the mountainsides, the animals follow the harvest like
braceros
. In their compulsion to get the succulent glacier lily bulbs, sometimes they manage to convert solid swatches of real estate into disaster areas. When they come to a patch of grass, they will graze on it like cattle, and when they come to the burrow of a Columbia ground squirrel or a gopher, they will flail away at the earth with such unabashed enterprise that they will sometimes dig themselves almost out of sight, expending far more energy than ever could be regained from the insignificant food value in the victim. Grizzlies are disproportionately fond of marmot, the so-called whistle pig that weighs up to a dozen pounds and builds its home in cracks in solid rock or under stones so huge that not even the most powerful grizzly could budge them. Nevertheless, grizzlies persist in trying to eat up every marmot in sight, sometimes spending hours on their labors and enlarging great cavities in the side of the mountain, while the marmots sit securely inside their impenetrable strongholds, whistling merrily and picking their teeth. A visitor to Glacier Park swears that he watched through binoculars as a grizzly dug for a marmot for two hours. Every now and then, the bear would stop to inspect the point of attack and scratch his ear, for all the world like a puzzled demolition engineer working out a special problem. At the end of the time, a new cave had been added to the rocky talus, and a very weary bear was trudging away, looking back over his shoulder in some sort of ursine embarrassment, perhaps to see if any other animal were watching. Grizzlies do things like that. Outdoorsmen have told of stumbling on grizzlies in the deep woods, to the great surprise of both man and beast, and watching as the frightened animals ran several hundred yards before turning around and beginning a charge right back toward the scene of the encounter. Twenty or thirty yards away, they will pull up in a cloud of dust and then march imperiously away. “There is only one conclusion I can draw from that,” said the victim of one such strange encounter, “and that is that the grizzly has pride. He wanted to run away... and
stay away
, but first he wanted me to know that he wasn’t afraid to come charging back. He was embarrassed at the way he ran the first time!”
Years ago, there were few such anthropocentric attempts to understand the mighty bear that stalked the Western plains by the hundreds of thousands. The early settlers were oriented toward hunger and pain and vicissitude, but most of all they were oriented toward menace, and the first interpretation of the huge bears with the long, canine teeth and the massive curving claws was that they were a threat to life. When it was discovered that each such “threat” also produced several hundred pounds of edible meat, the grizzly’s fate was sealed. The subsequent history of the great bear can be told in a word: attrition. Grizzlies were shot, strangled, poisoned, trapped, and generally harassed all across the old range that extended west from the Mississippi River and south into Mexico and north as far as Alaska. In the High Sierras of California, home of a tawny subspecies called
Ursus magister
, farmers and ranchers distributed poison with utter disregard for all forms of animal life and killed off the last golden bear in 1922. The state that had presided over the annihilation of this grizzly subspecies selected an official state animal:
Ursus magister
. The University of California still calls its athletic teams the Golden Bears; they are the only such bears in the world.
One by one, the conservationists of other Western states reported the extirpation of the grizzly within their state borders, and when the West was finally and irrevocably won and hundreds of thousands of Americans rolled across the United States to take up their homes and homesteads in the grizzly’s old domain, the big bear was visited with the ultimate punishment: the destruction of the forests in which he could hide, the plowing of the plains on which he grazed, the stringing of thousands of miles of barbed wire, and the pervading, unpleasant stink of man, who only smells good to himself and his fellow man, and not always then. The grizzly of the plains, as was his custom, backed into the final square miles of American wilderness, avoiding a fight. He is holed up there today, his numbers reduced to less than 1,000, perhaps as few as 500, his range restricted more or less to a few states: Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, with eight or ten individuals in the Cascade Mountains of Washington and perhaps two or three more in Colorado. (There are some 25,000 to 35,000 grizzlies of varying subspecies in Canada and Alaska, but they may be considered permanent exiles or foreigners; those grizzlies that fled northward from the continental United States will never return, and the native grizzlies of Canada and Alaska are slowly disappearing as the bulldozer and the road grader continue their implacable march northward.}
The tragic flight of the grizzly, the species’ gallant battle merely to remain alive as an American species, has not gone unnoticed, and a mystique has grown stronger since
Ursus horribilis
has been placed on the endangered list and the future is uncertain. There is a protectivism about the grizzly, and humans-who might have gleefully hunted the noble animal some 75 years ago-now go about bemoaning the fact that certain states still permit his slaughter. There has developed a mixed sense of admiration and solicitude and pride about the grizzly; he is seen as the prime example of America’s maverick own, something that did not come over in a ship, something unmistakably native to the land.
A psychologist might say that some of this protective attitude toward the grizzly is related to the country’s guilt about the cruel treatment of the species, but a simpler explanation is the traditional Yankee veneration of the courageous underdog. “Dogs, guns, poison and traps have swept the majority of grizzlies away,” Enos Mills wrote in
The Grizzly
. “Their retreat was masterly and heroic, but the odds were overwhelming.” Gradually the great bear ceased to be a menace and became a source of pride, and readers could stir to the words of dedicated conservationists like Andy Russell, who bared his own feelings in
Grizzly Country
:
The animal that impresses me most, the one I find myself liking more and more, is the grizzly. No sight encountered in the wilds is quite so stirring as those massive, clawed tracks pressed into mud or snow. No sight is quite so impressive as that of the great bear stalking across some mountain slope with the fur of his silvery robe rippling over his mighty muscles. His is a dignity and power matched by no other in the North American wilderness. To share a mountain with him for awhile is a privilege and an adventure like no other.
Russell, who may be the ranking nonscientific authority on the grizzly, calls him “the living symbol of the mountain wilderness” and new generations of outdoor Americans, the backpacking fresh-air seekers who are spilling into the national parks in record numbers, are inclined to agree. There is no thrill like returning to St. Louis or Chicago or New York with a tale about a grizzly that came in the night and stole a package of cookies and ran off when someone shouted, “Get out of there, you old son of a gun, you!” The thrill comes from close camaraderie with “the living symbol of the mountain wilderness,” the kinship of sharing the forest together, and ultimately the feeling that the huge animal with the consummate tools of murder on his paws and in his mouth chose instead to run away like a shy child.
Out of all these commingled feelings about the great bear, conscious and unconscious feelings, expressed and implied feelings, has come an admiration of the grizzly that borders on hero worship, especially on the parts of those who live near the final haunts of the animals or come into these areas to hike and enjoy nature. When a rogue grizzly must be exterminated by government officials, the laments of these new ursophiles continue for months, and letters to the editor run four or five to one in condemnation of the exterminators. On those rare occasions when a grizzly makes an attack on a human being, or appears to make an attack, there is an automatic response by those who control wildlife areas to give the animal another chance, to wait and see. Says Mel Ruder, Pulitzer Prize-winning Montana editor and longtime student of grizzlies and people, “Montana is one of the last remaining places that have grizzlies, and there’s a strong sentiment to protect the grizzly. And in the national parks, that feeling is even stronger. ’Grizzlies must be preserved at all costs’ —that’s what they’ll tell you. So when any attacks would happen, the park officials would just let nature take its course, hoping that nothing else would happen.”
Ruben Hart, a former chief park ranger at Glacier National Park, was not reluctant to express his feelings about grizzlies.
“I’ve got all the respect in the world for those critters,” Hart says. “They’ve been pushed back by man, pushed back and pushed back, all the way into the mountains. We have to think twice before we kill one, and think twice again.”
Park officials like Ruben Hart are the stewards of the grizzlies’ last days as an American species, and most observers will agree that they are performing the difficult task as well as can be expected. When Yellowstone Park was created in 1872, grizzlies imploded into the protected area, where probably 200 or fewer of them remain, and when Glacier Park was set up in 1910, the grizzlies seemed to sense once again that this was a place where hunters could not follow, and something between 100 and 140 of the great bears remain within the relatively narrow confines of the park today. The number varies with the month; when the Montana hunting season begins, grizzlies scurry out of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area and the Flathead National Forest and the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, all contiguous with Glacier Park, into the safety of the area where firearms are not allowed.
The men who preside over America’s national parks operate under a clear and simple mandate. The act of August 25, 1916, creating the National Park Service, said that the function of the new government agency would be “to conserve the scenery, the natural and historic objects and the wildlife” and “to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Later, the same philosophy was laid down in the Park Service’s administrative manual:
The animals indigenous to the parks shall be protected, restored if practicable, and their welfare in a natural wild state perpetuated. Their management shall consist only of measures conforming with the basic laws and which are essential to the maintenance of population and their natural environments in a healthy condition.