Night of the Grizzlies (18 page)

Bunney, Tom Walton, and Steve Pierre were the first to reach the scene. The girl lay on her face in a hollow. Her body was ripped and torn, and she was covered with blood, and to the first observers, it appeared impossible that she could be alive. But when Dr. Lindan came running up and dropped to his knees over the prostrate form, the girl began to move her lips, and then everyone could hear her say, “It hurts.”

“Get something to carry her on,” Dr. Lindan said over his shoulder, and Monty Kuka and Don Gullett and a few others dashed toward the trail cabin, 250 yards away, to rip off another bedspring. Dr. Lindan examined the girl. Somehow she had managed to roll her blood-drenched blouse into a ball and slip it under her head for a pillow. She wore cutoff blue jeans, and there were puncture holes and long rips in the back of her pant legs. The girl’s hair was matted with blood and dirt. Between the hand and the elbow of her right arm, there appeared to be nothing but bone, and a foam of blood was oozing from holes in both left and right thorax regions.

Dr. Lindan recognized these “sucking wounds” as an immediate threat to the girl’s life: One lung was already collapsed, and the punctures made it impossible for her to breathe normally. Her facial and neck muscles were contorting and throbbing as they worked to replace the oxygen that was hissing out of the holes in her chest faster than it could be replaced. Quickly, Dr. Lindan placed compresses on the holes and bandaged them as tightly as he could. When he started to turn the girl over gently, she said, “Cold, cold,” and Dr. Lindan ripped off his own shirt and covered her. Most of the others removed their jackets and shirts, and soon the wounded girl was lying under a layer of borrowed clothing. The doctor called for more shirts and began tearing them into long strips, and while the crew was still
en route
for the bedspring stretcher, he bandaged the girl ’s wounds and tried to stanch the flow of blood. By now, despite the profusion of coagulated blood all over the scene, there was little fluid coming from the gaping holes; it appeared that in the two hours since the attack, most of the girl’s blood supply had drained away into the earth. To Dr. Lindan, it was a miracle that she had managed to stay alive so long.

Tom Walton was one of those who had ripped off shirts and jackets and sweaters and awaited the doctor’s next command, but suddenly he found he was unable to look on any longer. He felt that he would faint if he did not sit down, and he staggered backward and landed heavily on a rock. After a few minutes of holding his head in his hands, he looked up at the back of the crowd congregated around the scene and wondered why a few of the men still wore not only their shirts but their parkas. He figured that they must not have heard the request from the doctor. Then his attention was carried to a slightly built man of about 30 or 35 with a crew cut and a mustache, studying something in his hand. While the stricken Walton sat and watched dazedly, the mousy-looking little man pushed his way through the ring of onlookers, dropped to a squatting position, and snapped a picture. It occurred to Walton that he should stand up and smash both camera and man, but he decided to vomit instead.

Under the energetic direction of Joan Devereaux, the dining area of the chalet had been turned into an emergency room. At first, some important items had been missing, but the young ranger-naturalist refused to believe that the medical specialists back at headquarters could have left out anything as vital as intravenous needles and morphine, and she practically ripped the packages apart inch by inch looking for them. Now she held the missing items triumphantly in the light of the lanterns that hung from rafters to illuminate the place, and several women joined her in setting up the makeshift operating arena. They pulled two long dining tables together and covered them with sheets, connected the plasma bottle with its tube and needle, and made everything as neat and clean as anyone could make a rough mountainside chalet at 3:30 in the morning. When someone reported that a slow procession of shouting men appeared to be approaching up the mountain, Joan awoke Dr. Lipinski. The surgery was as ready as humanly possible. “Please leave now,” she told the knot of women sitting at the other tables. “We’ll let you know how everything is going.” Some of the women left; some remained.

As soon as Julie Helgeson was transferred from the bedsprings to the operating table, the doctor gave her an intramuscular shot for pain and began removing the first-aid bandages that covered the severe sucking wound of the left thorax. The puncture was about an inch and a half wide. Dr. Lipinski placed his hand across it and realized that there was no way to improvise a perfect seal. Indeed the surgeon doubted that the problem could have been solved in the operating room of a major hospital; too much time had passed. As he hurriedly applied a dressing to the wound and tried to cover over each pinpoint of air leakage, he saw that the girl’s body was calling on the last reserves of respiration: Muscles in the neck and the intercostals between the ribs were standing out clearly as they tried to assist primary muscles of respiration like the diaphragm and the abdominal muscles, and still there was that terrible suck-suck of the air being lost through the hole. Dr. Lipinski looked at the girl’s face. It was almost the only undamaged part of her. He could see the signs of the terrible fight her body was making. As she fought to get air, her mouth opened and her teeth showed, and the muscles in her cheeks throbbed with effort.

Occasionally, Dr. Lipinski glanced around to see what the others were doing. With the almost soldierly discipline that well-trained physicians bring to their work, each man had found a role: Lipinski, the surgeon, working on the chest wounds; Lindan, the internist, splinting the girl’s ruined arm with two heavy pieces of cardboard; and the Air Force doctor, the youngest of the three, improving the dressings that had been applied in the field. Dr. Lipinski raised a gentle, admonitory hand in the young physician’s direction, signaling him not to try to do too much with the dressings. The surgeon operated on a number of established precepts, one of which was the triage system, and another of which was the principle of “skillful neglect,” which taught that if one could do next to nothing to improve a medical situation, sometimes it was better to do nothing at all. In this case, he felt that the dressings had better be left alone, but he communicated his instructions to the young doctor as gently as possible, realizing that the Air Force medic was trying as mightily as any of them to save the victim’s life.

For the first several minutes of the emergency procedure, the tall surgeon had allowed himself to believe that the patient had a chance for survival, but as he took inventory of the injuries, he realized that he had been optimistic. In addition to the mangled arm and the punctured thorax, there were gashes and cuts all over the girl’s body, perhaps made by the timber and rocks she had been dragged across, and the injuries to the upper legs turned out to be more than cuts and scrapes: There were whole sections of flesh chewed away.

Lipinski ordered his teenage daughter, Terese, to hold the flashlight close while he began a cutdown to try to find a vein in the girl’s ankle, but no matter how deeply he probed, he found nothing but chalky white flesh. The loss of blood had been extreme, and now it appeared that the veins were collapsed. The surgeon abandoned the ankle and cut into the wrist, and after much effort, he succeeded in finding an uncollapsed vein and inserting the needle. The plasma bottle was hung from a rafter high above, and the precious fluid began seeping into the girl’s circulatory system.

Tom Walton had been standing on the outer fringe of the medical team that consisted mostly of Joan Devereaux, Terese Lipinski, a helpful member of the res cue team named Riley Johns on, all of whom had been holding, lights, Lipinski’s wife, Ann, the registered nurse, and the three doctors themselves, but there seemed nothing that Walton could contribute to the operation, so he headed out to help keep the fires blazing for the incoming helicopter. As he left, he saw the priest, still wearing his Gonzaga jacket with the black and white piping, take up a station at the end of the table and begin whispering to the girl.

The presence of Father Connolly puzzled some of the medical staff who did not recognize him as a priest or did not know who he was, but his easy confidence quickly made it plain that he was a person skilled in the art of bringing spiritual succor to the suffering. The balding young man began speaking of God’s love and concern, and the girl, momentarily at rest, seemed to respond. “The doctors are doing everything that can be done to take care of you,” the priest said, “and you know that God will watch over you and take care of you.”

Weakly the girl said, “Yes, I know He will.”

Father Connolly looked down the table at Dr. Lipinski and, without saying a word, asked the surgeon if the girl was going to live, and with the merest side-to-side motion of his head, Dr. Lipinski told the priest that the end was very near. “Can you get some water?” the priest asked Ann Lipinski, and the nurse rushed away toward the kitchen. When she returned, she cautioned Father Connolly not to let the patient try to sip the water, but simply to wet a rag and let her suck at it. The priest said he wanted the water for another purpose.

“You know that God loves you, don’t you?” he said gently, but the girl was no longer able to speak. The priest took her hand and said, “God loves you, did you know that?” She squeezed his hand with the lightest of pressure. He asked if she had been baptized, but she did not answer, and he told her that he was going to baptize her conditionally. In a soft voice, just above a whisper, he told the girl that he would trace the sign of the cross on her forehead, and if she had not been baptized before, this would serve as a baptism. While the doctors watched in the soft glow of the yellowing flashlights, the priest anointed the girl with water, traced the sign of the cross, and whispered, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” He gave her absolution for her sins, and when he said the Act of Contrition, they all saw to their amazement that the girl seemed to be trying to follow with her lips. Then suddenly her breathing became loud and shallow; she hiccupped once or twice and lay silent. It was 4:12 a.m.

When the helicopter took off from the improvised pad behind Granite Park Chalet and blinked away in the night with the body of Julie Helgeson strapped to its right landing tray, most of the participants in the long ordeal stirred and watered the outdoor fires and returned to the dining room, where coffee and hot chocolate were still being served by Mrs. Eileen Anderson and the kitchen staff. For a while, nothing was said, but then the busy ranger-naturalist, Joan Devereaux, entered the room and said that she had an announcement to make. In the morning at about 9 a.m., she told the hushed group, breakfast would be served, and as soon after breakfast as possible, they would hike out of Granite Park Chalet
en masse
. She told them that she had selected the Alder Trail for the exit route; it was about a mile longer than the Loop Trail, but slightly less steep and also less likely to harbor grizzlies. If anyone wanted to go out by another exit, that was their privilege. A few people grumbled that they had their own plans, some to go over Swiftcurrent Pass toward Many Glacier, and one or two to go back out the long, flat Highline Trail under the Garden Wall. Joan told them the decision was theirs, but there was safety in numbers, and anyone who wanted to join the regular exodus was welcome. She suggested that they get a few hours’ sleep, and while the guests moved off one by one toward their rooms, she busied herself washing the operating tables and cleaning up the medical supplies hanging useless in the light of the Coleman lanterns and candles. She wanted to make the dining room as neat and tidy as possible by morning, so that it would seem less oppressive. By 5 a.m., the task was completed, and the 22 year-old ranger-naturalist lay on her bed in her full uniform and realized that she had never had an instant during the long night to be afraid. Now the fear flowed over her, and she was unable to sleep.

When all the cots and mattresses and sleeping bags had once again been dragged onto the dining-room floor and everyone else was either asleep or trying to sleep, Tom Walton and his wife, Nancy, and their close friend Helen Lundgren tiptoed to the front porch of the chalet for a final cigarette, and off to one side, sitting quietly in the shadows, they saw Father Connolly and Steve Pierre. The two men from Spokane were in canvas chairs, and they seemed to be staring into the night in the direction of the campground below. Walton and the two girls did not disturb them; the priest and the Indian appeared to be deep in thoughts of their own, and neither of them spoke.

Tom had the portable radio, and now that there was nothing more to be done for the bear’s victims, he signaled headquarters and asked if someone would contact his boss, Concessioner Ross Luding, and give him a full report. “If you can contact Ross,” Walton said into the microphone, “tell him we had a bear attack up here.”

“Don’t say anything more about the incident!” the voice from headquarters snapped back. “We’ll call Ross Luding for you. But don’t say any more on the radio about the incident!” A few minutes later, the voice of Ross Luding crackled out of the two-way radio speaker. “I’ll be there in a few hours,” Luding announced, and Tom Walton acknowledged the message and signed the mountainside station off the air. When the last cigarettes had been smoked, the three walked softly inside the chalet and headed for their beds. “Wait a minute,” Walton whispered to his wife. He pulled out his flashlight and flicked the beam on the blackboard menu that hung next to the kitchen door. Swiftly and noiselessly, he picked up the chalk and made a change in the wording. Instead of “Grizzly burgers, all sold out, ” he wrote, “Goat burgers, all sold out. ” The young innkeeper cursed himself for not making the change earlier.

As he lay in bed unable to sleep that Saturday night, August 12, Seasonal Ranger Leonard Landa could not rid himself of a nagging feeling of frustration. This was the fourth season in the park for the 26 year-old English teacher and, in almost all ways, it had been the most difficult. Supposedly, he was to watch over the upper end of Lake McDonald and the nearby highway and dirt roads and to see that everything went smoothly at Trout and Arrow lakes, a two-hour hike over Howe Ridge. But now the summer season was three-quarters over, and Ranger Landa’s acquaintance with Trout and Arrow lakes had been less than nodding. Early in the summer, he had hiked over the ridge and carried out an inspection visit, finding the campsites and the shelter cabin and the trail registers in order. Everything had appeared in such good order, in fact, that Ranger Landa had not returned to either lake. There were several reasons. One was that Leonard Landa, a tall, apple-cheeked North Dakotan with blue eyes, light-brown hair, and a strong profile like a movie ranger, had neither the time nor the inclination to hike over Howe Ridge and did not mind saying so. In the past, rangers stationed at Lake McDonald had only to draw horses from the park’s pool of stock and ride comfortably into Trout and Arrow lakes on their inspections. But this year, there was .a new system, and horses were harder to get, and anyway Landa doubted if he would have found time for the field trips even if a whole stable had been at his disposal. All week long, the tourists would rap on the door of the little ranger station, asking for fire permits, advice, assistance, and guidance, and the ranger had to stay put. To add to his work load, the Park Service had made its usual batch of transfers, and much of the summer was spent breaking in new men, including a new district ranger. There was hardly any time for working in the field, especially when one was already doing the work of two or three men.