Night of the Grizzlies (21 page)

An hour later, the body had been placed on a Stokes litter and flown to Kalispell; the two young boys had salvaged what they could from the disorderly campsite and had headed back over the ridge with the helpful Andy Sampson, and Gildart and Landa were alone. “What do we do now?” Gildart asked.

“Before we do anything else, we’ve got to clear the area,”

Landa said. “There’re some people up at Arrow Lake.”

The two strong young men headed north on the heavily wooded trail, hunting for the killer bear as they walked. At Arrow Lake, they found six hikers: four young park employees and a father and son from Roseburg, Oregon. The father and son were the same two people who had been treed the day before, but they had not let the two-hour wait in the branches interfere with their vacation, and they were busily fishing when Gildart and Landa came rushing up. “Grizzly trouble!” Gildart said. “You’ll have to leave with us.”

Landa found the four park employees and gave them the same message, but the two young men wanted to stay. “You can’t stay,” Landa said. “Now please pack your things, and let’s go.”

When neither of the young men made a move and one of them gave him a look of disbelief, Landa said simply, “Look, a grizzly killed a girl down trail last night.” The two girls began throwing equipment into packs, and the two men rushed to strip their camping gear, and within a few minutes, the armed party, with a ranger at front and rear, was moving back down the trail toward Trout Lake. It was a slow trip; the two girls alternately verged on hysteria and collapse. At 6 p.m., Gildart and Landa phoned headquarters from the Lake McDonald Ranger Station and reported that the area had been cleared. They were told to get a good night’s sleep and report to headquarters the next morning.

About an hour after they passed the motley group of hikers headed down the Loop Trail, the search-and-destroy mission of four Park Service personnel reached Granite Park Chalet in a state of puzzlement. On the last part of the three-hour uphill hike, they had begun hearing fragments of radio messages over their portable pack set. There were some cryptic remarks about bears, another request for a helicopter, some instructions about carrying rifles, and finally a short crackling message consisting of three letters: “DOA.”

“It sounds like another bear attack!” one of the men said, but this made no sense, and finally they decided that they were allowing their imaginations to run rampant.

Each of the four men had his own attitude about grizzlies and his own attitude about the assignment ahead, which was to kill every grizzly that frequented the Granite Park area. Francis Elmore, the chief naturalist, was relieved that his part of the mission would consist only of tape-recording the reports of survivors and measuring distances and describing the various venues of the attack. He would function, in other words, as a sort of wildlife detective. The other three carried high-powered rifles, and there was no doubt in any of their minds that they were to use them. Robert Wasem, an experienced park biologist, was more or less in charge of the killing group, and the assignment did not sit comfortably on him. A mild, soft-spoken Ohioan, Wasem had the dedicated biologist’s inevitable tendency to think of the park as a closed receptacle full of life forms that must be allowed to live as normally as possible. In such a setting, man could be the only disruptive influence. Although Wasem had hunted grouse a few times, he did not enjoy killing. He preferred to bag his wild game through the end of a spotting scope.

Cliff Martinka, originally from Pennsylvania, was a newly hired research biologist; he had just completed two and a half years with the Montana Fish and Game Department and had come to his new post in Glacier Park two weeks before. In his own way, Martinka was as dedicated a scientist as Wasem. He was so steeped in the jargon of biology (he had both bachelor’s and master’s degrees) that he was sometimes difficult for the layman to follow. In the world of Cliff Martinka, animals did not eat berries; “they utilized them for consumptive purposes.” Bears were not killed; they were “dispatched,” “taken care of,” or “eliminated.” Nor did Cliff Martinka have any compunction about dispatching or taking care of or eliminating bears, provided, of course, that there was no alternative. As he later explained, “I’ve been a hunter all my life. I’ve killed more than my share. Regardless of the situation, it doesn’t disturb me at all to see something dead or to have to kill it. I was thinking as we climbed up there that this was something that had to be done, and if it had to be done, I preferred to be involved. I felt competent enough with a rifle, and perhaps other less experienced people may not have been able to handle the situation.”

The fourth member of the execution team was a seasonal ranger and wintertime high-school teacher named Kerel Hagen, a short, wiry Montanan who had worked his way up to a high rating on the park’s personnel charts despite his part-time employment. The word had gone out many summers earlier that Kerel Hagen was uniquely adaptable to the special problems of the park’s backcountry, and whenever the rangers needed a wilderness troubleshooter, they tried to get him. Still in his 30s, Hagen was able to hike nonstop from one end of the park to the other, and he handled horses and rifles like a typical Montanan.

The four men arrived at the chalet just before noon and sat down for a quick lunch. The atmosphere was uneasy in the big stone-and-log building; usually there were dozens of giddy dudes milling around and occupying every space at the tables, but now there was only the chalet staff. Some of the girls had reddened eyes and disappeared around corners, sniffling, and even the ones who were not on the verge of tears looked miserable and afraid. The young innkeeper, Tom Walton, joined the newcomers and confided, “I hate to do it, but I’ve had to be a little tough on them. One of them keeps walking around crying and saying, ‘Keep a stiff upper lip.’ I told her to knock it off. She was just upsetting everybody else. Then another one said, ‘We’re gonna march right out of here. We can’t stand it anymore. This is a house of death.’ Even my wife and Gracie Lundgren were acting spooky. I had to give’em hell to straighten’em out.”

Wasem asked Walton to describe the bear situation around the chalet, and the young man from Idaho said that so far as he knew there were only two bears: a big silvertip that came around nine or nine thirty at night, and a smaller brownish bear that arrived later and chased the silvertip away. The rangers told Walton that both bears would have to be killed, and Walton said that he had expected as much, and he hoped that the girls in the chalet would be able to control themselves during the executions; some of them had become attached to the big animals.

While Francis Elmore went to work with his measuring tapes, his camera, and his recorder, the other three men took their rifles and reconnoitered the area around the chalet. For several hours, they saw nothing out of the ordinary, but at about four o’clock, a dark silvertip grizzly and a single cub were picked up in the binoculars at a range of almost two miles. The bears were feeding on berries near a small lake southeast of the chalet, and there was no reason to suspect that they were among the scavenging bears that came to the garbage dump nightly. Tom Walton took a look, and he said that he had never seen this pair before. The hunters glassed the animals off and on until 6:30, when they disappeared into the scrub.

By 8:30 that night, the three hunters were staked out under the clotheslines behind the chalet, waiting for bear No. 1. The garbage dump had been baited with a gallon glob of bread dough, laced with a half-pound of bacon. Tom Walton and Ross Luding stood by with powerful flashlights, and several times they focused the beams on the dump so that the hunters could twist their scopes in. The range was about fifty yards; the men had comfortable shooting stances in canvas chairs, and no one doubted what was going to happen to each bear that appeared. From up above on the rear balcony, several of the chalet employees watched, and now and then the rangers would have to tell them to quiet down; they did not want to risk the slightest possibility of frightening away the “regular” bears.

Shortly after nine, someone came running out the back door with the news that the aggressive smaller bear, No. 2, was down at the bottom of the draw that led from Granite Park campground and appeared headed up to the dump. Minutes passed, and the rangers pushed their safeties off and on nervously, but no bear arrived. “What do you think happened?” Wasem asked Walton.

“Nothing,” the innkeeper replied. “They’ll be in. Just wait.”

By now it was dark, except for a slight glow from a quarter moon tinted yellow-orange by a thin film of smoke from distant fires. A light breeze was blowing, and the temperature already was tumbling down toward the low fifties and forties, where it customarily spent the night. The men sat quietly, their rifles in their laps, and Walton and Luding kept reassuring them that sooner or later the bears would be in. At a few minutes after ten, a large silhouette lumbered into the gully and began scrambling up toward the dump. Instantly, Walton and Luding caught the animal in their big flashlights and were surprised to see that it was not the small grizzly, No. 2, but the beautiful silvertip, No. 1. Wasem whispered, “One. Two. Three!” and each man fired. The bear staggered and fell to the ground, and another volley of bullets slammed into its body. The animal thrashed about for a few seconds and lay still, its eyes gleaming like bright red reflectors into the direct beams of the flashlights. From the balcony above, a young girl began to sob violently.

About fifteen minutes later, the firing squad could hear a snorting sound from below the dump, and Walton whispered, “That’ll be No. 2.” When they were sure that the animal had reached the bread dough, Walton and Luding switched on their high beams and caught the smaller bear in a cross pattern. The animal looked up briefly and resumed its eating; performing in the glow of spotlights was not a new experience. This time, Hagen barked out the count; on “two” the bear looked up again, and on “three” the rifles sounded, and the animal catapulted into the air and came down heavily. The three men fired again, and now both bears lay side by side in death.

“That’s it, ” Walton said, and the men ran across the ravine. “That’s it, ” Walton said, and the men ran across the ravine. Night of the Grizzlies “That’s it?” Wasem asked.

They found that bear No. I was a female of about 350 pounds; No. 2 was also a female, but it weighed about 100 pounds less than the silvertip. Martinka and Wasem poked flashlights into the bears’ mouths and spread their claws, looking for signs of guilt, but there was not so much as a speck of flesh or blood on either of them. The biologists opened the stomachs and looked for human hair or strips of cloth or skin, but all that was visible were the half-digested remains of leaves and berries and the ends of tapeworms that reached down into the intestines. The team took dozens of flash pictures and then returned to the chalet to report their kills to headquarters, and everyone was asleep by 11 o’clock. It was not long afterward that newspapers and the wire services received the word from headquarters: The killer bear of Granite Park was dead. Or was it?

Sometime before, Seasonal Ranger Bert Gildart had executed a troublesome bear on instructions of his superiors, and he had no doubt about the reason he was to report to headquarters again on Monday, or why Leonard Landa was to be his partner. Presumably, Landa knew the Trout Lake area; it was part of his responsibility to patrol Trout and Arrow lakes. Gildart knew bears and guns and how to track and kill. The two of them formed the logical assassination squad for the Trout Lake bear, so they showed up at headquarters at 8 a.m. Monday, August 14, fully armed. This time, Gildart had remembered to bring his own rifle, a .30-06 converted 1903 Springfield, and he had strapped a single-action .357 Magnum Ruger revolver to his waist.

The two young rangers checked in with the chief ranger’s office and waited for instructions. At 9 a.m., they were still waiting. By now, all available ranger executives had arrived, and they kept walking back and forth past Gildart and Landa at high speed, saying nothing, but appearing to be in a hurry. After a while, Gildart intercepted a high-ranking ranger and asked if they should not be heading toward Trout Lake to eliminate the killer bear. “We’re seeing about that,” the executive said.

Now it was 10 a.m. The two eager young men had been curbing their impatience for two hours, and still no one was paying any attention to them. The pace in the handsome new headquarters building had become more frenetic; high officials dashed in and out of the offices of higher officials and vice versa. Telephones jangled, and secretaries raced up and down the long hall to whisper in their bosses’ ears. Gildart and Landa began to get the impression that no concrete steps would be taken until ordered by someone outside the park headquarters, perhaps someone as far away as the Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C. Once again, they collared a ranger official, and once again they were told to wait. It was after 11 when they were finally instructed to hike into Trout and Arrow lakes by way of the Lake McDonald Trail and to kill every grizzly bear they encountered.

The two young men ran out of the headquarters building and almost bowled over a newspaper photographer. “Wait a minute!” the man said. “I want to get a picture of you with your guns.” The two rangers brushed past without slowing stride, got into their pickup truck already loaded with camping gear and canned salmon, and roared down the blacktop toward the Trout Lake trailhead. They were on the way over Howe Ridge by noon, moving slowly and methodically, studying the terrain. Now that they were started, there was no hurry; their orders specified killing any grizzlies they encountered, and they were to stay until the area was completely clear of the big animals or until the killer bear was executed and positively identified. Sometimes they made wide detours to specific vantage points, but after four hours of silent stalking and glassing every square inch of visible territory, they had seen neither grizzly nor sign. It was 4 p.m. before they dropped down into the Trout Lake area and found their first bear scat.