Night of the Grizzlies (19 page)

Then there was the matter of the bear. Twice Ranger Landa had gone to Kelly’s Camp to assist in setting up a trap for the marauding animal, but nothing had come of that, and now he had been hearing about a similar bear, if not the same specimen, chasing and harassing campers at Trout and Arrow lakes. He supposed he should hike in and see if he could find the animal, but then again, there were certain complications.

Undoubtedly, the bear should be destroyed, but did the Park Service really want him to put a bullet in the grizzly’s skull? The order had been out for a month to shoot the animal, but Ranger Landa knew that some orders were different from others. The chief ranger, in his second summer in the park, was known to be extremely sympathetic to the plight of the grizzlies, and Landa could not rid himself of the feeling that the order to kill the bear was merely a formality that park officialdom hoped would not be carried out. Twice Landa had conferred with one of his superiors about the troublesome bear, and twice he had been told to wait and see. Then the execution order had been issued, but headquarters had done nothing to implement it. As usual, the matter was left up to the ranger in the field, in this case Leonard Landa. Several times he had picked up his .300 H&H Magnum and driven up to Kelly’s Camp to look for the bear, but the residents told him that the animal always bolted up the hill as soon as the sound of the engine reached its ears. There remained an almost certain way to eliminate the bear, and that was to pack into Trout Lake, set up camp, and stay until the bear came sniffing around, but that could take three or four days, and Ranger Landa was hard-pressed to find three or four hours, let alone days.

Tossing against his pillow in the cabin that he shared with his wife and two sons, the handsome young man said to himself that the problem of this particular bear would have to be met squarely sooner or later, and not by that vague organization known as the National Park Service, but by himself, Seasonal Ranger Leonard Landa. It was embarrassing that the animal had made the newspapers at least twice: once a few weeks ago when Steve Ashlock and John Cook had been chased, and again just two days earlier, when Girl Scout Troop 367 had been forced to flee over the ridge. Nothing official had come to Landa from his superiors as a result of the Ashlock Cook article, but he had heard through the grapevine that the discussions at headquarters had been long and loud after the bear’s picture had been printed on page 1 of the Daily lnter Lake. This time, he had expected a blast from the chief ranger and a demand for a complete explanation of the fact that the bear was still running loose after misbehaving for an entire summer. But there was no official reaction whatever. As he said to himself wonderingly, “No one called and said, ’Leonard, about that bear up there, we’re getting a lot of kickback, we’d better go shoot it.’ It’s just like the Army. You don’t make a decision yourself, you let it get to the top and then they talk about it for three or four months. But you can’t just go out and plug a bear that’s fooling around a campground. Seems like the Park Service feels that as long as we don’t have anything serious or it doesn’t look like it’s gonna develop into a big problem, then don’t shoot the bear.”

So on this Saturday night, August 12, 1967, the Trout Lake bear remained unshot, and Landa knew that it would have to remain unshot at least for the foreseeable future. A dry lightning storm had sent more than 100 hot strikes lashing into the parched forest, and every available ranger was out on the fire lines. Seasonal Ranger Leonard Landa, one of the lowest men on the park’s totem pole, was in charge of the whole district; all his immediate superiors were out in the field, and even the two fire fighters normally assigned to his ranger station were gone. To Landa, it seemed a fitting end for the summer. The overworked were to be overworked some more. He went to sleep on the thought.

Sometime after midnight, Landa realized that the shortwave radio next to his bed was handling more than the normal whispered communications of early morning, and he reached across and increased the volume. He heard a female voice speaking indecipherable words; it sounded as though the girl were on the verge of hysteria. Then he heard the calming voice of Gary Bunney responding from the Fire Cache nearby. Landa awoke his wife, and the two of them sat in the dark and gradually pieced together what was going on. When the Landas heard Bunney promise to send an armed ranger to go after a missing girl at Granite Park, Leonard jumped to the telephone and called Bunney and volunteered for the job.

“You’ve got too much to do already, Leonard,” his superior officer said. “I’m going in myself.”

Lying in bed, Landa felt bad about the decision. As many responsibilities as he had himself, he knew that Fire Control Officer Gary Bunney had more. Bunney was coordinator of the fight against several dozen fires that were already burning, some of them dangerously, and now he would be missing from his post for at least several hours. Landa told his wife that the rescue mission should have been left to him. At least he could continue to monitor the messages between the Fire Cache and Granite Park and be ready to leave on a minute’s notice if his services were needed. The young couple listened to the call for the helicopter, the progress reports through the long night, the second call for a helicopter, and finally the request that the coroner be alerted in Kalispell. “The girl must be dead,” Landa said aloud. To the highly sensitive teacher of English, it was no consolation that she had been killed in another ranger’s territory.

At last, the radio traffic quieted, and just before dawn on this busy Sunday morning, Leonard Landa dozed off to sleep. At eight o’clock, he jumped up to the sound of his alarm and began going through the motions of dressing and bathing and stuffing a few crumbs of breakfast into his mouth. By 8:10, he was going into the cramped office alongside his bedroom, still rubbing his eyes and thinking about the events of the long night, and then he heard the sound from down the lake. Somebody was hurrying along the flat stones behind the station, and Leonard Landa prided himself on being able to read these familiar clattering noises with almost perfect accuracy. This time, he told himself that there were several people on the stones, and they· were in trouble. He opened the door of his office and fell back as four youngsters in extreme states of disarray tumbled inside and began talking simultaneously. “You won’t believe this,” one of them said, and another was repeating, “It seems like a bad dream, but...” A young man who appeared to be the oldest in the group was shaking violently, and Landa heard him say, “Maybe I’m not making any sense, but...” and the rest of the sentence came out so fast that Landa could not understand a word.

“Wait,” Landa said. “Wait! ” he pointed to one of the three young men. “You talk!” he said.

With frequent disorderly interpolations from the others, the man who identified himself as Ray Noseck told Landa a rambling story about a bear coming into their camp at Trout Lake and chasing them up trees. As Noseck spoke, Landa remembered issuing a fire permit to the group the day before, but it seemed to him that someone was missing now. Yes, there had been two girls the day before, one tall and one shorter, and now there was only the tall one, shivering and shaking as the man rambled along with his story. “Wait! ” Landa said once again. “Where’s the other girl?”

“She’s still up there,” Noseck said. “The bear dragged her away.”

An involuntary shudder went through the young ranger’s body, and he was not absolutely sure that he was wide awake. Events shaded into events. He had gone to bed musing about the Trout Lake bear, and then he had sat up all night listening to the crackling suggestions of a deadly bear attack over the radio, and now it seemed like the whole process was about to repeat itself. “All right,” Landa said, trying to pull himself together. “All right! One of you has got to go back with me so I can figure out what the situation is. You can show me where you last saw the girl. She might be OK. She might be waiting up a tree for us.”

“She’s not up a tree,” one of the boys said.

“We’ll find out,” Landa said. He picked up the phone and called headquarters. “Chief ranger’s office,” a voice answered, and Landa explained that a girl was missing, and he was going in to Trout Lake to look for her.

“Another girl?” the man at headquarters asked.

“It looks that way,” Landa answered.

“Take your rifle,” the man said, “and be careful!”

Landa loaded his .300 H&H Magnum and made sure a bullet was in the chamber. Then he pointed to the two younger boys and ordered them to accompany him over the ridge. “You take the girl back home,” he said to Ray Noseck, who was comforting the distraught Denise Huckle. The young couple walked to the car that had been waiting down the lakeside road for them, and Landa, Paul Dunn, and Ron Noseck rode in the Park Service pickup a half mile to the Trout Lake trailhead. They had run and walked about a quarter mile up the steep trail when Landa realized that he had forgotten the first-aid kit in all the excitement. “You go back and get it,” he said to Paul Dunn, “and catch us up the trail.” The 16 year-old boy, a high-school quarter miler, hurried off without complaint, and to Landa it seemed like only a few minutes before the sturdy young boy had rejoined them, the medical supplies held tightly in his hand. Soon, someone else caught up, a man on horseback who identified himself as Andy Sampson, a weekend fisherman from Kalispell ell. “What’s going on?” Sampson asked.

“We’ve had bear trouble,” Landa said. “I don’t know just what it is, but let us go ahead of you.” Landa did not want the unarmed Sampson to reach the attack scene first and confront the bear single-handedly. All the way up and over the ridge, Sampson and his horse stayed on their heels, and once, when Sampson tried to pass, Landa moved into the middle of the path to block the way. He had the clear-cut feeling that Sampson thought they were acting hysterically, delaying his fishing trip for no good reason whatever, and the two men hardly spoke as they moved in tense procession over the ridge toward Trout Lake. Landa looked at his watch as they were beating their way through the final patch of berry bushes above the lake, and it was 10 a.m. When they reached the logjam and saw the ruins of the original camp, the ranger looked over his shoulder and watched Andy Sampson unsheathe a long ax. Landa was relieved that his unwilling companion now seemed to understand the situation. Maybe they were all acting slightly silly, and the girl would be waiting for them in a treetop perch, but maybe she would not, too, and maybe another bear had chosen this same night to kill. It would be extraordinary after fifty-seven years without a single death, Landa told himself, but it would not be impossible. “All right,” he said to Paul and Ron, “what was her name again?”

“Michele,” the boys said.

The party of four spread out a few feet and began walking through the brush, calling the girl’s name softly. When they reached a point about fifty yards up the lakeshore, Paul Dunn pointed to the earth and said, “This is where she was.”

Landa wondered if the boy could be correct. There was no sign of the girl, none whatever. The sleeping bag was gone, nor was there an indication that a sleeping bag had ever been there. “You’re sure she was here?” Landa said.

“Positive,” said Paul, “and the bear dragged her up that way.” He pointed into the woods up the hill.

Slowly, the four searchers worked their way up the bank and into the shadowy woods, with Landa and his cocked rifle in the lead. When they crossed the trail, the ranger’s eye was caught by a patch of white lying on the path, and almost without thinking, he leaned over and picked it up. It felt like a piece of human flesh, and he took a closer look and realized that he was holding an ear. The realization came as a shock, and Landa said to himself that a human ear does not look like a human ear when it is detached from the body. There was no blood and no raggedness to the edge; it was as though the ear had been dissected neatly in a laboratory. All at once, Landa felt sick. “Here’s her ear!” he blurted out, but the two boys and Andy Sampson remained calm outwardly, and the little party of searchers resumed its slow walk up the hill.

They had gone only a few feet farther when they came across the remains of the girl’s sleeping bag, and from there up the slope, a trail of feathers marked the direction of the bear’s travel. The searchers found themselves walking under spruce trees festooned with mosses and lichens. The ground was springy and thick with needles, and the trail went directly over several downed tree trunks spiked with jagged branches. Soon they came to a blue lightweight poplin jacket decorated with flowers, and a lightweight blouse; both were soaked with blood. Landa was studying the two articles of apparel when one of the boys called down, “Here she is!”

The ranger dropped the clothing and rushed up the hillside, almost tripping over two large logs before coming to a depression in the earth that marked where grizzlies or humans or both had once buried food and garbage. The sky was almost shut out by a canopy of spruce trees; there was squaw-hair lichen, “grizzly hair,” everywhere, and some of the trees were losing their purchase in the thin soil and beginning to angle down toward the earth, mingling their upper branches with the tops of thimbleberry and mountain-ash bushes. Inexplicably, Landa found himself thinking how peaceful the scene was, and then he reached the boys’ side and looked down at the remains of Michele Koons. The girl was on her back and mutilated beyond recognition. Landa could hardly tell that she was a female; her stomach and abdomen were gone, the hair missing from her head. The ranger covered his face with his hands and backed down the hill into the approaching Andy Sampson. “Don’t leave the two boys up there alone!” the fisherman said, but Landa’s face was pale, and it took him a few minutes to pull himself together.

The Kleins, geologist Robert and schoolteacher Janet, had slept on the floor of the chalet dining room, along with eight or ten others, and when they awoke Sunday morning, they felt as though they had been up all night. With Don Gullett and one or two others, the fatigued couple hiked down to the trail cabin to pick up the equipment they had left behind, and because they were so close, they walked the 150 or 200 yards to the place where the boy and girl had camped. They retrieved the couple’s knapsack and a few other small items, then retraced the harrowing journey of the night before, down the trail of bloody glacier lilies and false hellebores to the place where the bear had dropped the girl. By daylight, the trail was plain, and next to the flattened bloody spot where Julie Helgeson had lain alone and wounded, they found a Hershey bar wrapper and a full package of Lifesavers. Perhaps they had fallen out of the girl’s pocket when the bear dropped her. Someone said that Julie’s watch was missing, but a short search of the area did not locate the watch, if indeed it was missing in the first place.