Night of the Grizzlies (20 page)
When the expedition returned to the chalet shortly before nine, people were getting up slowly, and the few who had slept through the night were learning, to their amazement, what they had missed. Robert Klein stood on a cleared area in front of the chalet, still trying to assimilate all that had happened, and he recognized one of the three medical men, Dr. Olgierd Lindan, approaching. Lindan looked drawn and haggard, and to Robert Klein it appeared that the internist from Ohio and points east was suffering from more than tiredness. “What is it?” Klein said to the softer spoken Lindan. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Dr. Lindan said. “I suppose I’m just realizing what happened.”
Klein lowered his voice. “Doctor,” he said, “do you think the difference was that we didn’t go and get her right away?” Lindan was quiet. Then he said, “After it’s all over, you always think you could have done something different. ” “Would she have lived if we had gone straight after her?”
“Maybe she would,” Lindan said in a voice barely audible to the man standing next to him. “At least she wouldn’t have bled so much.” The doctor moved away, and Klein thought that he had never seen a man appear more depressed. The realization surprised him. He had always thought that doctors were cold and unemotional, and it pleased him, as much as anything could please him on this dismal morning, to meet one who acted warm, human and sensitive.
Loud voices caught the young geologist’s ear, and he turned to see two men having a brisk conversation. Klein recognized them as the same pair who had set themselves up as the resident experts on birds. While he had not wanted to start an argument, he had wanted several times the evening before to tell them that they were making some very serious misidentifications. Klein listened.
“Stupid, dumb kids, that’s all they were!” “Absolutely right! They shouldn’t have been out there in the first place, but you can’t tell kids nowadays.” “Inexperienced kids, they didn’t know what the hell they were doing.” “And now they’ll come in and kill all the bears, all on accounts of a couple of dumb kids.”
Klein realized that but for a minor difference of a few hundred yards, he and his wife might have been the victims of the grizzly and might now be the object of the two bird watchers’ eulogistic scorn, and when one of the men wandered over near him, Klein said, “I heard what you were saying. Don’t you realize that this bear killed a human being?”
The man said, “It was the kids’ own fault. Why blame the bears? They shouldn’t shoot a single bear because of a couple of inexperienced, dumb kids. Those kids shouldn’t even have been here.”
It had been a long, difficult night, and Robert Klein, normally the least contentious of men, felt his gorge rise. “Listen,” he said sharply, “those kids had just as much right to be here as you do. What the hell are you doing here anyway?”
“We came to see the bears,” the man muttered.
Klein laughed. “You came to see the bears?” He affected a look of massive incredulity. “You mean to say you hiked all the way out here to stand on a porch and watch bears eat garbage?” He walked away with the air of a man who could not believe his ears, but only a few minutes later, he saw that the victim of his angry tongue had not been chastened. The man was still buttonholing people and asking them to support his plea that the grizzlies be spared. Klein shook his head and wondered about mankind.
Back inside, the .process of feeding about seventy people was going slowly, and plainly the plan to leave at 9 a.m. was not going to work out. It was close to 11 when Tom Walton walked into the dining room and rapped on the side of a glass for attention. The Kleins and the others listened attentively as the young chalet keeper said, “I’m sorry about what happened. . It was a tragic thing, and I appreciate all that you did. You’re nice people. I don’t know what to do about charging you. Some of you didn’t even sleep in your beds. I talked to my boss, and he said, ’Tell them to pay what they think they should pay.’ God knows it was an awful experience, and if you don’t want to pay anything, don’t feel guilty.” A line formed at the desk, and it appeared that most of the guests were going to pay the full amount.
Joan Devereaux did not know how long she had slept, but she suspected that it had not totaled more than a few minutes. Each time she had dozed off, she had found herself rounding a bend on a lonely mountain path and coming face to face with a charging grizzly. Under the circumstances, she preferred lying awake and staring at the black ceiling. By nine, she was radioing headquarters about her plan to take the group down the Alder Trail, five miles of fairly easy path. The conversation went on for several minutes, and the young ranger-naturalist began to sense a reluctance on the part of headquarters to make a decision. After she explained her reasons for selecting the Alder Trail-it was fast and easy and most of the people were overwrought and tired and needed to get away from the chalet as quickly as possible-she waited for someone to tell her she was right or wrong, but instead she was told to stand by. Then she heard someone she recognized as Francis Elmore, the park’s chief naturalist. “Four of us are coming up the Loop Trail,” Elmore was telling somebody on the radio, “and I think she should take them out that way.”
Joan Devereaux was glad to hear that more help was on the way, but it did not make sense to her to steer the distraught party down the Loop Trail. To be sure, it was the shortest way out to the blacktop, four miles of steep, rocky path hemmed in by berry bushes, but it was also the most precipitous, and there were several elderly people in the group who surely would have difficulty negotiating it. Also, a trip down the Loop Trail would take the party near the campground site where the attack had been made; Joan wondered how some of the hikers would react to that news. At first, she told herself that very few of the chalet guests knew the exact location of the attack, but this notion was canceled when a small boy pointed down to the campground and said, “Mommy, that’s where the bear killed the girl, isn’t it?” And as if all these reasons did not dictate staying off the Loop Trail, there was one even more important. Joan was only in her second year in Glacier Park, but along with all the other naturalists, she knew that the Loop Trail was popular with grizzlies. She had talked to some of the older guests, trying to calm their fears about being attacked on the way out, and she knew that the sight of a single bear would have sent some of them into stumbling flights of panic. The young naturalist did not want to be around when that happened.
On the other hand, she was still an Army officer’s daughter, and the discipline that had enabled her to take charge the night before enabled her to take charge once again. Orders were orders, and if Francis Elmore dictated that they take the Loop Trail, there must be good and sufficient reason, regardless of her own personal fears. At least they would have the advantage of knowing that someone would be meeting them on the way out. The mere sight of an incoming party in ranger green would be good for morale.
By 10:45, the last guest had been fed, and Joan asked those who were going with her to assemble at the back of the chalet and count off. The count reached fifty-nine, but Riley Johnson, the backpacking father who had been so helpful on the rescue missions the night before, corrected it. “I counted the baby, but I didn’t count myself,” he said. That made sixty. Another five or six, including Father Connolly and Steve Pierre, were going out by different routes.
The mass exodus had hardly begun before the hikers encountered four men coming up the trail toward them. Three were carrying rifles ;Joan recognized the fourth as the grayhaired Elmore, breathing hard but staying abreast of his juniors. Before anyone else could speak, two men in the departing group ran up to the four newcomers and begged them not to hurt the bears. “They were only acting naturally,” one of the men said. “It was the kids that were at fault.”
The park officials brushed by without comment and disappeared up the trail, and the others continued their long downhill hike under a relentless summer sun. At first, the trail ran through a semi-wooded area, where marmots bounced their shrill whistles off the boulders and ground squirrels stuck their heads out and suddenly disappeared behind glacier lilies without any apparent motion. Joan recognized the telltale signs of grizzly country, and she suggested that the best way to avoid any bear problems was to make noise. For the next three hours, there was bedlam on the trail. The hikers sang “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb ,” and the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and when they had exhausted their common repertoire, they took the list from the top several more time s. At the infrequent lulls, someone would shout out, “This is Number Forty-four. How is Number Twelve doing?” The yells would fly back and forth. There was a young woman in the middle of the line who possessed unlimited amounts of energy, and at the slightest suggestion of silence, she would run up and down the line like a cheerleader, raising her hands in the air and waving and exhorting everyone to higher and higher decibel levels.
After an hour or so, the group came to a long series of steep switchbacks and had to slow down. A fire flared brightly on distant Heaven’s Peak, and the smell of burning pine and spruce was bridging the valley on a light, hot breeze. Below them, the hikers could see the unhealed scars of earlier forest fires: great bare V’s of denuded land, the apexes of the V’s marking the points where the fires had started and rushed up the mountain in widening swaths.
Here and there a big stump of limber pine or spruce looked as though it had been sent through a shredding machine, and those who recognized this as the work of insect-seeking bears had the good judgment to keep the information to themselves.
The Kleins marched a few paces ahead of the two birdwatchers who had annoyed Robert earlier in the day, and the same kind of loud, tasteless conversation continued, to the annoyance of the normally placid couple from Colorado. It seemed that the two men were seeing golden eagles by the score; whenever a bird flew over, one of them would shout, “Look, another golden eagle!”
The scientist in Robert Klein became so annoyed that he waited for the next inaccurate identification and then said loudly to Janet, “Did you see that golden eagle? It was a Clark’s nutcracker. ” But the men apparently did not hear him, and soon they had spotted several more golden eagles, a few goshawks, a snowy owl, and a yellow-bellied sapsucker.
It was almost two in the afternoon before the sixty hikers, stopping often for the benefit of the older members, reached the trail head at Going-to-the-Sun Highway and found a newly strung sign:
TRAIL CLOSED BY ORDER OF PARK SUPERINTENDENT. DANGEROUS BEAR. AUGUST 13, 1967.
Another hour passed before the last guests had been shuttled back and forth to their cars, most of which were parked five miles away at Logan Pass, and at last a semistuporous Joan Devereaux found herself seated alongside a park employee and on the way to her trailer near the St. Mary entrance on the east side. “What did you say?” she asked, dimly aware that the driver had made a comment.
“I said there’s been another bear incident,” the man said. “They’re checking on it now.”
Joan Devereaux told herself that he must be talking about the same incident; he must have heard about it on the radio and become confused. The man would find out soon enough, and she was too tired to explain to him. At last she reached her trailer. The sun had been beating on the aluminum sides all day, and now she had the feeling that she was entering a large tin can. She dropped on top of her bed, looked at the ceiling and said to herself over and over, “Did this really happen? Could this really happen?” She fell asleep on the confusing idea that nothing so bizarre could happen, but somehow it had.
Leonard Landa was not the only ranger who lost sleep on the night of August 12-13. Seasonal Ranger Bert Gildart, the same young man who had hiked into Granite Park a few nights earlier to see the bear show, had been up till 3 .a.m. Sunday, relaying radio messages from his patrol car high on Logan Pass, and when he returned to headquarters, he waited for another half hour, hoping to be sent out on fire duty.
At 27, Bert Gildart was a very eager ranger. If there was the slightest possibility of being assigned to a trail job, to any task that would take him into the woods, Gildart would hang around for hours hoping to land it, even at three in the morning. The woods seemed to fit this Army brigadier general’s son. He was quick and light on his feet, as befits a former Golden Gloves welterweight finalist, and he could move all day through the forest as quietly as an Indian. For a year, Gildart and his wife had lived on the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation in northern Montana, where they eked out a living and learned the Indian ways; she taught school on the reservation and he ran a trapline for beaver and mink. Now Gildart was in his sixth summer as a seasonal ranger and in his third winter of studying fish and wildlife management at Montana State University, and making a success of both.
But it was not because of his good rating and reputation, nor because of his known skill with a rifle, that Gildart was awakened on Sunday morning and ordered to assist Leonard Landa on a bear problem at Trout Lake. It was simply because there was no one else available. Rangers all the way up to executive rank were off in the woods beating at fires, and Chief Park Ranger Ruben Hart had to scratch through his personnel listings before coming up with the name of the young ranger who had worked almost all night and now was at home asleep.
The phone rang at 8:30 a.m., about four hours after Gildart had gone to bed, and a headquarters ranger sketched the situation rapidly. A girl was dead at Granite Park and another missing at Trout Lake. No, it was not possible that the same bear killed both girls. Gildart understood the voice to say that Landa was waiting for him at the Lake McDonald Ranger Station and that Landa had firearms for both. Without waiting for another word, Gildart jumped out of bed and into his clothes and drove at top speed toward the station. When he arrived, Mrs. Landa explained that Leonard and two boys had just disappeared over Howe Ridge, looking for a girl who had been attacked by a bear. There was no extra rifle, so Gildart grabbed up a long-handled ax and hit the trail. The hike that usually took about two hours took the wiry young ranger forty-five minutes, and as he reached the sloping meadow overlooking Trout Lake, he could see all kinds of action beneath him. A helicopter was trying to land in the shallow water at the lakeside, and it churned up torrents of water before rising straight into the air and flitting toward a flat spot in the meadow nearby. A man whom Gildart did not recognize was trying to calm a frantic horse, and Gildart’s friend, Leonard Landa, and two young boys were standing on the trail that led to Arrow Lake. Gildart waited to meet the helicopter crew and guide them toward the others; he was relieved to see that the pilot, Jack Westover, was accompanied by Chief Park Engineer Max Edgar, and Edgar was accompanied by a .300 H&H Magnum. With no further ado, Gildart appropriated the weapon and told Edgar he would return it when the bear was dead. A few minutes later, they heard someone shout, “Here she is!” and they hurried to the grove of trees where the mutilated body of the beautiful Michele Koons lay in the indignity of sudden and violent death.