Night of the Grizzlies (6 page)

Not long afterward, Teet Hammond was being visited by a good friend, Lou Feirstein, a Montana lumberman and rancher, when the telephone rang and one of the Berry children announced that their mother was off shopping and the bear had arrived. What should they do?

“Just wait right there, honey,” Teet said. He and Feirstein grabbed up rifles, walked to the big house, and tiptoed through the front door to a rear bedroom that overlooked the trash cans. The bear was only six or eight feet from them, going about its business of pilfering garbage and swatting millers, and all that separated men from grizzly was a window with tiny panes. Wordlessly, Hammond and Feirstein stretched out on the cot in the darkened room and sighted their rifles on the bear’s head from a prone position. But no shot rang out; each man was waiting for the other. Teet was troubled by the memory of a woman in the camp who thought the grizzly was cute. One day, when the bear was standing just outside the window, the lady had tapped on the pane and said baby words to the big teddy bear. What would someone like that say if he blasted the animal’s brains out? Teet held his fire while he puzzled out the situation. Finally, he said, “You know we’re not supposed to shoot him unless he comes in a building or destroys something.”

“I’m just a visitor, and I’m not supposed to shoot him at all,” Feirstein said, “but I sure would if I owned property here.”

The two cronies watched the bear through their sights for ten minutes, then ten minutes more and ten minutes more. Once, the grizzly flew into a rage over nothing and slapped the window in front of their eyes, but the thick glass held, and just as suddenly the bear returned to its battle with the garbage cans, turning them upside down and scattering the smelly refuse all over the ground. When it appeared that all the edibles might be gone and the bear about to go on its way, Hammond said in a soft voice to the visiting rancher, “I’ll tell you how we can do it and nobody’ll ever know who shot him, Lou. We’ll count one-two-three, and we’ll both pull the trigger, and we’ll blow him in two.” But before Lou Feirstein could comment, the grizzly was gone.

When August 1 arrived, the inhabitants of Kelly’s Camp recapitulated the bear’s pattern: Since the middle of June, it had visited the place some fifteen times, starting at first in a cycle of every three days, extending this to four, and now arriving every fifth day on a rigid schedule. But then a ranger dropped by and told some of the residents, “You shouldn’t be having any more trouble. Your bear’s at Trout Lake, tearing up camps.” For the first time that summer, Kelly’s Camp relaxed.

That Summer: Trout Lake

F
our miles up and over Howe Ridge, the place called Trout Lake was popular with fishermen because of a peculiar combination of circumstances: It was close enough to an automobile road to be reasonably accessible, but the climb up and down the spiny back of the ridge was steep enough to keep out the dudes who were beginning to clutter up certain other wilderness campsites in the park. To get to Trout Lake from Lake McDonald, hikers had to hit the trail not far from Kelly’s Camp and climb 2,000 feet in two miles, a rate that quickly eliminated any but the most serious of hikers. Once on top of the ridge, it was an easy 1,5 00-foot descent through the forest to the lush stand of vegetation that made the place popular with another sort of wildlife bears, both grizzly and black. There was hardly a spot in Glacier Park where more grizzly sightings had been made; in fact, a trio of visitors to Trout Lake once reported being treed by no less than five grizzlies simultaneously, something of a record for the National Park Service.

In recent years, the trail register just below the lake had been crammed with entries about bears. If they chose, campers could make comments in the book, placed in a small cabinet alongside the road. Rangers had to laugh when they read one day, “I just came face to face with a grizzly bear,” followed by an entry that said, “I saw the pile that the lady left that came face to face with the grizzly bear.”

The reason for Trout Lake’s surplus of bears was Trout Lake’s surplus of berries, the strawberries and raspberries and most of all the huckleberries and serviceberries that constitute the bear family’s basic diet There are other berries that grow in the region of Trout Lake, but they are less tasty, and bears ignore them until they have no choice, like children eating their cauliflower last Typical of these unloved specimens are the thimbleberries that grow all around the lake; the fruit resembles raspberries and comes in a beautiful dull-red color, but the flavor is flat and insipid and does not live up to its promise. Neither does the bearberry, with its dry and seedy fruit The Indians found a better use for the bright red bearberry; they ground its leaves, called it
kinninnick
, and smoked it incessantly. Bears eat it, instead, but only as a last resort.

In those rare years when the huckleberry crop comes up short around Trout Lake, the bears have even been known to tum to tart, unpleasant berries like those produced by the twinberry varieties, red and black, and even the Pacific mountain ash, whose red-orange berries form a large, fiery clump that one often sees decorating the front yards of North American towns. But no bear will touch a shrub called smooth Menziesia, or fool’s huckleberry, which grows in the region of Trout Lake and confuses the tourists. Through the years, the bears have learned that the blue-black berries of the Menziesia are small, hard, and totally inedible, and the leaves are poisonous if consumed in large quantities. The grizzlies do not consume them in large quantities, or small quantities either, nor are they fooled by two other tempting plants of the region: showy crazyweed (also known as hairy locoweed) and little larkspur, both of which are poisonous.

Almost all of these specimens, the tasty ones and the flat ones and the downright evil ones, are to be found struggling for Lebensraum on the mountainsides around Trout Lake. In places, the greenery looks almost tropical, as though patches of Brazilian rain forest had been laid down intact like thick green throw rugs. Old paths wind through the brush, and there are places where one can stand and pick whortleberries from both sides of the trail, if one is so inclined. A thousand bears could hide in this thick growth of bushes and flowers and shrubs and never be seen by man, and many a fisherman has whipped his dry fly on Trout Lake in happy ignorance of the fact that a collection of burping grizzlies was lapping up berries just a few hundred yards away.

The lake itself lies in a bowl rimmed by mountains that tower thousands of feet above and duplicate themselves almost perfectly in the clear blue-green of the water. Camas Creek flows in the north end and out the south, and at the lower outlet of the lake, several hundred huge tamarack trunks are crunched together into a logjam that will support a man’s weight almost all the way across the water; the tamaracks have long since lost their bark and their branches to the grinding action of the weather, and now they flash white in the sun like a stack of bleached bones. To one side of the logjam, a small clearing has been hacked out of the spruces and thick bushes that march down to the water’s edge; in its center, the Park Service has installed an iron grating for cooking, and the spot is popular with campers, who pitch their tents, drag a few cutthroat trout out of the lake, and enjoy an epicure’s feast in the forest.

On the afternoon of June 25, 1967, a week or so after the strangely shaped grizzly had first been spotted at Kelly’s Camp, a pair of 22 year-old honeymooners arrived at this camp site. Peter Cummings, a medical student at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and his law-student bride, Ellen, intended to spend the night in the open and then push on for a three-or four-day hike into the vast interior of the 1-million-acre park. Their plans had been made with meticulous care. Before setting foot on the trail, they had checked out the possibility of grizzly attack. They had been told that the only genuine danger might come from stumbling across some cubs and being chased by an overprotective mother who thought she was defending her young. They were advised that the possibility of attack was so remote as to be almost ludicrous, but if they were nervous, they could carry bear bells that jingled on their packs and presumably warned all wild animals that humans were coming. The young honeymooners armed themselves with the bells, and just before pushing out into the wilderness, they talked briefly with a ranger who told them that they had been in far greater danger on their drive from Cleveland than they would be on their hike.

Toward the end of this first day on the trail, Peter and Ellen had begun to accept the idea that the ranger was right. They had reached the logjam without so much as seeing a trace of bears, either grizzly or black, and now they were getting ready to enjoy their dinner. Peter had pitched their tent, and Ellen had dished out heaping hot portions of canned ravioli, and they were about to dig in when a crash came from the fire-grate area, where their provisions and gear were piled temporarily. Unconcerned, Peter Cummings told his wife to look out and see what was there; she was sitting closer to the tent flap. When Ellen refused on the reasonable grounds that she was a woman and strange noises frightened her, Peter pulled the flap aside and saw that a grizzly bear had walked into the middle of their camp and was engaged in popping open tin cans with its teeth. He motioned to his wife to be silent, then gripped her hand and half pulled and half led her out of the tent and up toward the trail. The bear showed no interest in them as they passed eight feet away. When they had reached a point about 150 feet up the lake, the young couple stopped for breath, and then they saw two people fishing a little farther up the shoreline. The four gathered together on the trail and exchanged ideas. Everyone was nervous, but no one was very frightened. They all had been informed over and over that wild bears in this wild park could be counted upon to run from humans, and they assumed that it was just a matter of minutes before the bear would realize that it was acting in a very bizarre manner and move on. They stood and watched; their view was limited in the gathering dusk, but the bear appeared to be a skinny brownish grizzly with a peculiarly long, thin head. It was busily biting into cans and ripping into the canvas packs. When Peter Cummings saw that their entire supply of food was being ruined by this presumptuous animal, he began to shout, and others joined in the clamor. “Hey, get out! ” someone said, and the others cried, “Go home, bear!” “You’re not wanted!” The situation was annoying, to be sure, but not without its lighter side.

The animal did not even cock an ear in the direction of the sounds. Slowly, systematically, it went about the business of destroying the camp. When the provisions and gear were littered about, the grizzly turned to the tent and ripped it open with a single claw, as though it were pulling down a zipper. Inside the tent, it continued the job of demolishing the worldly effects of the young couple from Cleveland. Twenty-five minutes after the attack had started, the grizzly casually ambled down to the lakeside, about 30 feet from the wreckage, and began lapping at the cool water. “Come on!” Peter Cummings said to his wife, and the two of them tiptoed back to their camp. While the bear occupied itself a few bounds away from them, they looked for salvage. Of their fifteen or so cans of food, all but two had been opened. Peter’s extra set of long underwear had been chewed into strips and now stank of bear. The first-aid kit was ripped open. The aluminum pack frames were bent out of shape. The tent was shredded. Once again, the young husband put his fingers to his lips to caution his wife against making a sound. They picked up the undamaged sleeping bags and reached for the remains of their packs, and one of their warning bells, tied to a pack, began to tinkle. The bear looked up and headed immediately in their direction. Peter and Ellen held onto what was left of their belongings and raced up the trail to a shelter cabin two miles away near Arrow Lake.

On their way out by daylight, the couple spotted fresh bear scat, but they saw no grizzlies, and after an hour’s walk, they reached Trout Lake. There they recognized a short-time acquaintance from the village of West Glacier, a young man who had told them a few days before that his father worked for the Park Service. He was fishing, and he gave the famished couple a trout, which they cooked and ate on the spot. When they told him what had happened, the young man expressed no surprise. “That same bear bothered some people a few weeks ago,” he said. “They’re gonna tranquilize him and ship him north of here.”

At ranger headquarters just outside the village of West Glacier, the couple filled out a report about the ruined gear. A courteous ranger seemed to enjoy talking to them, but he asked one question that was perplexing. “What was the bear’s name?” the ranger said.

The couple answered, “Huh?”

“What was the bear’s name?” the ranger asked. When Peter and Ellen persisted in looking blankly at him, he explained that sometimes bears get nicknames after they have disturbed a sufficient number of people.

“No,” Peter Cummings said finally. “We didn’t get his name.”

∞

For the next month or so, the bear without a name alternated between harassing the people of Kelly’s Camp and making raids on the itinerants who were flowing in and out of Trout Lake in great numbers. No physical contact was made between man and bear, although there were times when the peculiar animal would follow campers for hundreds of yards, always staying twenty or twenty-five feet away, and scare them half to death. Almost always the victims of such encounters berated themselves later, the tenderfeet for not knowing that grizzlies are relatively harmless, and the old-timers for realizing it and still being afraid. There was something about this persistent grizzly that alarmed even the most knowledgeable. Grizzlies had been snooping in and out of the campsites of North America ever since the first primitive man had pitched the first camp, but they had rarely made their intrusions while the campsites were occupied, and certainly not while people were in the middle of meals and other activities. The oddly shaped grizzly did not seem to know fear, nor did it seem to understand the ground rules that always had been followed by man and bear in Glacier National Park. It stormed into camps and bowled over fire tripods, tents, and packs; it stayed exactly as long as it wanted to stay; it ignored the shouts and screams and sometimes the rocks of annoyed and displaced campers.