Night of the Grizzlies (22 page)
It was still fresh, and in the middle of it was a tiny white bone.
Gildart took a closer look and saw that the bone was from a small mammal, perhaps a ground squirrel or a chipmunk. The two hunters poked holes in several cans of salmon and walked around the logjam campsite, distributing the aromatic juice on the ground. Then they spread bits of the delicacy around the fire grate and the open beach where the hot sun could do its work. Within an hour or so, the place had begun to smell like a cannery, and Gildart and Landa waited expectantly for the bear to come out of the underbrush as it had so many times before. But when the grizzly did not appear after several hours, Landa suggested that it might make more sense to search around the area, returning from time to time to the logjam campsite to see if the bear had shown up, and thus the two men occupied themselves until early evening. When the sun dropped behind· Rogers Peak, they decided that the bear might have moved uptrail toward Arrow Lake, and since they intended to camp at the Arrow Lake shelter cabin that night, they began a slow hunt toward the north, always staying near the trail that ran narrow and tortuously through high walls of berry bushes and trees. They had gone about a mile up Trout Lake when they began to notice fresh bear tracks and scats at almost regular intervals, but they had mistimed their departure, and all at once, night closed down on them. There could be no more hunting in the darkness; they were hit with the chilling realization that they had inadvertently switched roles with the killer bear, and now they had to get to the shelter cabin as quickly as possible. There was no doubt in their minds that the bear had fled in this same direction, and no doubt that it would attack human beings, and the two young rangers broke into a jog, stumbling into bushes and stopping occasionally to probe for the lost trail with their flashlights. Once Landa said breathlessly, “What was that?”
Gildart stopped, and both men heard a rustling noise in the bushes alongside. “I think it’s a squirrel,” Gildart said, “but let’s not wait to find out.”
The shelter cabin was empty; the trail had been closed by order of the park superintendent, and the two men had the 20-by-10-foot cabin all to themselves. They brought in a supply of water from the stream just down the bank, one of them doing the carrying while the other stood guard with a rifle, and after a short snack and a radio report to headquarters describing their futile day, the two men went to sleep.
Shortly after dawn on Monday, biologist Cliff Martinka was studying the carcasses of the two bears at Granite Park when he realized that the bread dough and bacon strips were gone from the dump. At first, he thought that there must be thousands of hungry ground squirrels and other small mammals around the area, but he discarded the idea almost as quickly as it came to him. Only a big animal could have done away with so much food in just a few nighttime hours. Once again, he asked Tom Walton if there were any other bears that came to the garbage dump, and once again Walton said that there were no others. Earlier, when there had been snow on the ground, the tracks of an adult bear with two cubs had been seen often, but Walton said that there had been no trace of this bear family for several weeks.
The rangers pondered the matter all morning long as they busied themselves making measurements, taking more pictures of the dead bears, and patrolling the environs of the chalet for other grizzlies. Shortly after 2 p.m., the tall, red-haired Dave Shea came up the trail, carrying a rifle. He was listed on the park records as Wasem’s assistant, and headquarters had ordered him to interrupt an elk research project on the Belly River and join his boss at Granite Park. When the young seasonal ranger-biologist saw the two bear carcasses lying behind the chalet, he said, “Where are the other ones?”
“What other ones?” Wasem asked. “There’s a sow with two cubs that comes late at night,” Shea said. “Bert Gildart and I saw them here last week.”
Martinka and Wasem exchanged meaningful glances, and after dinner, the firing squad, now augmented by Shea, again took up its position behind the chalet. There was no garbage at the dump, but the bodies of the two dead bears lay redolent in the moonlight, and now and then Luding and Walton poked their light beams to see if anything had begun to gnaw at them. Nine o’clock passed, and 10, but Dave Shea said the sow and cubs had not arrived until nearly midnight the week before, and if they came at all, it probably would be an hour or so later. A few of the hunters went to bed and left instructions that they be called at the first sign of the bears. At 10: 30, a woofing sound came from the draw below the chalet, and the alarm went out to awaken the riflemen. For a few seconds, cubs could be heard squealing, but then the squealing turned into bawling and the bawling into the woofing grunts that grizzlies make when they are ready to fight. Standing at ground level in the back of the chalet, Tom Walton said to himself that he had never heard a bear sound so ferocious, and he commented to Luding that the animal must have caught the scent of the two carcasses at the dump. Just then, he heard a noise behind him and turned to see Kerel Hagen lying in a heap at the foot of the stairs, clutching his ankle. “I think I’ve sprained it,” Hagen said. “I missed the last three steps in the dark.” Out in the draw, the woofing and bawling sounds continued, but now they were plainly moving away.
With Hagen rubbing his ankle gingerly, the hunting party discussed the situation and decided to take up watches from the balcony above to avoid spooking the wary animals again. By now, it was clear why Walton and the chalet employees had never seen the sow and cubs; the slightest sound would send them racing back down the draw. Unlike bear No. 1 and bear No. 2, these were not circus performers to eat in a puddle of light as dozens cheered. They were wild bears. Shortly after midnight, Shea and Walton were alone on the balcony when they heard another woof from the draw. But before they could even alert the other men, someone in search of a midnight snack ignited a lantern in the downstairs part of the chalet, and with the first glimmer of new light, the bears once again dashed away. “Well, that’s that,” Walton said, preparing to go to bed. “They’ll never come back a third time.” Shea remained on watch.
Just before 1 a.m., Shea thought he heard a shuffling sound coming from the path that led from the trail cabin to the chalet. He strained to hear and made out a low cough; instantly, he slipped back inside the chalet to awaken the crew. Within a few seconds, Elmore and Luding were manning flashlights at the corners of the balcony, and all four riflemen were sighted in on the little circle of bare earth that marked the dim outline of the garbage dump. For a few minutes, there was no sound except the breathing of the men. Then a large shadowy form began to infiltrate its way across the open gully between the chalet and the dump, and Elmore and Wasem flipped on their lights. They picked up the outline of a medium-sized grizzly about five feet from the dump, and Hagen snapped, “One! Two! Three!” and all the guns sounded together. The bear spun around wildly and began to bawl at the cubs, but the lights stayed sharply on the adult bear, and another volley sent it sprawling and flopping to the ground. It was exactly forty-eight hours and five minutes since the attack on Julie Helgeson.
In all, eleven shots had been fired, but only one by Dave Shea. On the first round, the scope of his rifle had kicked into his eye and cut it open, and now a thin stream of blood ran down to his chin. When the last reverberation had come back from the surrounding mountains and died away, another sound could be heard from the hillside above the dump. The two cubs were running away, whimpering and bawling, and after a few minutes, they were hidden in the rock cover.
Everyone in the hunting party, including the bloodied Shea and the limping Hagen, rushed across the ravine to inspect the latest kill. Martinka dropped to his knees and examined the bear’s paws. There was a reddish substance that looked to be blood matted in the hairy spaces between claws. A pad hung loose from one of the hind paws like a flapping half-sole, and the biologist realized that the old injury must have kept the bear in constant pain. Quickly, he ran the salient facts through his brain: The bear apparently was in the habit of coming to the dump after the chalet had closed for the night, at about the same time that Julie Helgeson had been killed; the bear was a sow with cubs, and this was the most volatile kind of grizzly; the bear’s ripped foot would have kept it in an angry mood; and the bear was bloodstained. Kneeling alongside the carcass, Martinka looked up at the others and said, “We got her. This is the one.” Wasem cut into the stomach and found undigested bread dough, and pictures were snapped and measurements taken, and gradually the participants in the midnight execution became of a single mind about the grizzly. Twenty-four hours after the word had gone out that the killer bear was dead, the killer bear was dead.
Gildart was up at 4 a.m., and he shook Landa. Both men peeked through the door of the shelter cabin into the black night. They agreed that there was nothing to be done until daylight, and for two hours they lay on their cots refining their hunting plans for the day. Just before 6, Gildart opened the door of the cabin and took a few paces toward the stream that ran just in front, and out of the shadows to his right he thought he detected movement. The young ranger stopped and turned his head slowly toward the north. At first, he could see nothing; night and day were still a blend, and visibility was slight. But as he peered toward a bend in the trail about thirty or forty feet away, he made out what appeared to be an expanse of fur, and then a grizzly bear, humped and unmistakable, padded out of the brush toward him. Gildart spun around and saw that it was about ten feet to the open door of the cabin. He thought he could make it to safety if the grizzly charged, and he patted his holster and felt the .357 Magnum, hoping all the time that the animal would stop, because a bear with pistol slugs in it was likely to be more dangerous than a bear in good health. There was no movement of air and no sound whatever, and only a second or two passed before Gildart realized that the grizzly was not going to stop. “Bring the rifles out! ” he shouted to Landa. “Here’s the bear!”
At the sound of the human voice, the animal halted, made a few shuffling movements with its front feet as though it were going to continue, then slipped sideways into the thick brush that grew like African jungle along the steep banks of Camas Creek. As he heard Landa rushing around in the cabin, Gildart took careful note that the grizzly had not backed up, not an inch, but only sidestepped into the heavy canopy of bushes. Gildart reminded himself that he and Landa were there to kill grizzlies, not just to protect their own lives, and he realized that the bear’s actions suggested three possibilities : that the animal was crossing the creek and running up the slope on the opposite side; that the bear was using the cover of the stream banks to beat a retreat upstream, or that the bear was proceeding downstream, in which case it would have to pass about twenty five feet in front of the shelter cabin. A normal bear would have taken either of the first two routes, but then Gildart was not certain that he was dealing with a normal bear.
Landa thrust the .30-06 into Gildart’s hands and said, “You’re not kidding around, are you?”
“No,” Gildart said. “There’s a bear right out there.”
The two men stood side by side facing the place where the stream bank dropped off six or eight feet straight down. If the bear was going to attack them, it would have to come from that direction. The light remained as grainy as ever. Neither man spoke, and there was not a sound, not even the rustle of a leaf. The busy stream seemed muted. Two or three minutes passed, and then Gildart said softly, “There he is!” Landa squinted into the half-light, saw the grizzly, and said with awe, “Look at that head!”
The bear had worked its way downstream till it was underneath the bank directly in front of the shelter cabin, and now it was looking over the edge of the bank, reconnoitering the area, turning its head slowly from side to side as though trying to pick up a scent in the dead air. Once, the dark animal seemed to be trying to brace itself for a push up and over the bank, but then the head and shoulders slipped back out of sight, and Landa said, “Let’s don’t let him get away!”
Seconds passed, and inch by inch the head began to rise again above the bank. When its eyes were in sight, the bear made a sudden upward thrust that exposed its neck and shoulders, and Gildart took a step forward to shorten the range. At this motion, the bear slipped quickly from sight again, and Gildart backed off. More seconds passed, and then the bear was in violent motion, hauling itself up and over the bank to charge. In the sights of his gun, Gildart could see nothing but a great expanse of furry neck and chest, and he fired at a range of less than twenty feet. Almost in the same split second, Landa’s .300 H&H Magnum went off, and the bear did a giant back dive and fell heavily into the bottom of the gulch. Gildart rushed across the clearing toward the stream, and Landa shouted, “Take it easy! This is the most dangerous time!” but Gildart was already scrambling down the bank of Camas Creek, and Landa levered a bullet into the chamber of his rifle and followed him down. Instantly, the two experienced hunters knew that the great bear was dead; there were two jagged holes seeping blood, one in the chest and one in the head; either would have been fatal. Gildart dropped to his hands and knees and saw that the bear was a brownish-colored old sow with worn-down molars and a thin, almost scrawny body. “Let’s haul her up to the cabin,” he said, but the bank was too steep and slippery, and the two rangers decided to let the animal lie where it had fallen. They discussed the idea of opening the stomach to see what they could find, but Gildart said he preferred to leave any autopsies to his superiors. After they had radioed headquarters that they had killed a bear, the two friends sat in the little shelter cabin and wondered whether they had shot the right grizzly. Gildart said he was sure they had.
“What makes you so sure?” Landa asked. “Well, what do you think she was doing around the cabin this morning?” Gildart said. “She was stalking us. And that’s ·not normal for a grizzly.”