Night of the Grizzlies (23 page)

Landa said he had to agree that the bear had not acted normally. The two men waited for orders to call off their hunt, but when no such orders came, they wandered back down the trail toward Trout Lake to search for more grizzlies. They saw plenty of fresh sign, but no bears.

The rangers at Granite Park maintained their watch through the rest of the dark hours of Tuesday morning, on the off chance that there was still another anonymous bear coming into the dump at night, but they heard nothing except the soft sighing of a light breeze and the occasional distant bawling of the cubs. Wasem drew the final shift, from 4 to 6 a.m., and he heard nothing whatever, not even a breeze. He sat in a canvas chair on the upper balcony and wondered where the cubs had gone and what would happen to them now that their mother was dead. He was thankful that no one, in the wild excitement of the shooting, had pegged a bullet at the young bears. By now, they were 8 or 9 months old and weaned to a normal diet, and there was reason to believe that they had a chance for survival.

When daylight came, the biologist walked across the ravine and up the steep side of the lava flow where the cubs had been seen last, but there was no trace of them. Wasem’s shift was over, but he had been up almost all night, and he figured he might as well finish his assignment. The evening before, park headquarters had radioed that one of the most obstreperous journalists in the area, G. George Ostrom of Kalispell, would be arriving at the chalet the next morning, and a high-ranking ranger executive had ordered Wasem and the other members of the party to remove all traces of dead bears before the arrival of the press. With his bandaged assistant, Dave Shea, senior biologist Wasem started down toward the trail cabin at about 7:30 to get some rope to drag the carcasses away. The two men had gone a short distance when Shea heard a bawling noise and spotted the cubs on some rocks about 150 yards below the chalet in the draw that led to the campground. Shea turned· toward the chalet and saw Cliff Martinka standing several hundred yards away. “There they are!” Shea shouted up to the other biologist and gave chase with Wasem. As they ran across the rocky ground near timberline, shots rang out. Both men looked up and saw that Martinka was taking aim for another shot at the young bears. Now the cubs seemed to double their pace and headed for the far edge of the bench and the underbrush that ran down the hill on the other side. Martinka fired a few more times, but soon the bears were gone. In the bushes not far from where Julie Helgeson had been killed, Wasem and Shea found fresh spots of blood, and they knew that one of the cubs had been wounded.

When G. George Ostrom turned on the radio in his house in Kalispell and heard the news that two 19 year-old girls had been killed by grizzlies during the night, he turned to his wife and said, “My God, there goes the last grizzly in Montana! ” Like a movie preview, a whole sequence of future events passed through Ostrom’s mind. He could see the letters to the editor mounting up and finally reaching a fortissimo; he could hear the voices on the floor of the state legislature and all the way to Washington, demanding that Glacier National Park be made safe for the public; he could see the National Park Service bending with the public pressure, and finally he could see bands of official hunters entering the park from all comers, bearing with them .30-06 rifles and widemouthed bear traps and cyanide charges and orders to kill every last specimen of
Ursus arctos horribilis
or drive them across the border into Canada.

It was not that George Ostrom was a fanatical protector of grizzlies or any other predator. He was a hunter, an enthusiastic one, and he had shot his share of bears, including a massive grizzly when he was a young boy. But like certain members of the Park Service staff, Ostrom had a deep respect for this biggest of land carnivores and a deeper respect for nature’s checks and balances. He also knew that there were times when a grizzly or two had to be exterminated in the greater interests of both bears and humans. Certainly this was one such time, and Ostrom wished that he could be whisked into the park to help do the job crisply and efficiently.

At 32, G. George Ostrom had been a smoke jumper, banker, photographer, journalist, radio announcer, advertising man, and lifelong student of bears and nature. With his black wavy hair and mustache, strident voice, earthy vocabulary, and deep sense of anger and righteousness, he was a one-man
cause celebre
around his home town of Kalispell. His prize-winning column in the prize-winning weekly, the Hungry Horse News, was read and discussed and praised and condemned by everyone who could read, especially by the National Park Service. For several years, Ostrom had been dissatisfied with the operation of the park that he had been visiting all his life, and his columns had made him persona non grata with the ranger executives. Every host in the nearby towns of Columbia Falls and Martin City and Kalispell and Whitefish knew that one either invited G. George Ostrom or the top rangers, never both. Years before, someone had invited Ostrom and two ranger executives, and when a question-and-answer session began, Ostrom stood Night of the Grizzlies up, announced that he was speaking in his capacity as president of the local wildlife federation, and asked the rangers, “Is it true that you allow the concessioner to feed grizzlies at Granite Park?”

The rangers said that they doubted that it was true, but they certainly would look into the matter on the earliest possible occasion.

“It’s true, isn’t it, that the feeding of bears is one of the most dangerous practices in the park and that it’s strictly against the law?” Ostrom said.

The rangers said that he was absolutely correct and that the law was enforced impartially. “Well, then, tell me how many people have been arrested in the last ten years for feeding bears,” Ostrom said.

The rangers said they would have to check the records. Ostrom asked them for an educated guess. The rangers said that they did not deal in educated guesses, and they would have to look in the files.

Ostrom said, “Don’t bother looking in the files. I’ve already looked in your files. In the last ten years, you’ve arrested nobody for feeding bears. Nobody. Zero. And everybody on the main street of Kalispell knows that you can see grizzlies any night of the summer by watching the garbage dump at Granite Park. Now what are you gonna do about it?”

The rangers said that they would have to check the facts, and from then on, no ranger would go to a public event if the name of G. George Ostrom was on the guest list. Ostrom did not mind. He found that the turnover of rangers and ranger officials was so rapid that hardly any of them stayed on the premises long enough to learn more than the minimum about the park that was under their stewardship; it was not like the old days when a ranger might be stationed in the park for fifteen or twenty years and one could throw him a barrage of questions and get an answer to everyone. Ostrom had his own coterie of friends inside the ranger headquarters-men who did not agree with park policies but could not afford to say so out loud-and it amused him a little and frightened him a lot that when difficult questions would come up, these friends would telephone him instead of turning to their superiors. G. George Ostrom was the ex officio authority on Glacier National Park, and nobody knew it better than the top rangers.

“My God, it happened,” Ostrom told his wife on the morning of August 13, “and it happened exactly the way we were afraid it would happen.” He had to dial park headquarters several times before there was an answer, and then he was told that there was nothing to report “Well,” Ostrom said, “can I hike in and see for myself what happened?” “The trails are closed,” the voice from headquarters told him.

“Even to the press?”

“Even to the press.”

As the day went on, journalist Ostrom fidgeted and fumed and tried to figure out what to do. He went to the hospital in Kalispell to interview Roy Ducat, but nurses whisked him out of the room before the conversation could begin. He called headquarters again and was told that the trails were still closed to everyone, including the press. Now the radio stations around Kalispell began listing the park’s various explanations and theories about the twin killings. The bears had become crazed by the 100-odd lightning strikes of two days before; the bears had been made cranky by the long hot spell; the bears had become panicky from the fires; the bears had been excited by the fact that both girls wore cosmetics; the bears were upset by a sonic boom; the bears were aggravated by tourists who threw rocks at them. No hypothesis was too wild to escape mention, and George Ostrom thought he had never heard so much buncombe in his life. One commentator reported that there was a rumor that bears had been fed at Granite Park, but the very next newscast carried the park’s denial: There was a gas incinerator at the chalet, and any leftover scraps were buried. Listening to such information, Ostrom worked up a powerful head of steam.

On Monday, the press embargo continued, and Ostrom called a friend on
Life
magazine in New York and asked for a formal assignment to the case.
Life
and the Associated Press and United Press International and the
New York Times
and all news media had the same problem as Ostrom: The only information that was coming out of Glacier Park was being funneled through park headquarters, and no firsthand observers were being allowed in. Ostrom’s friend on
Life
told him to consider himself assigned and wished him luck on breaking down the embargo.

Now the angry journalist rang up the park once again and identified himself as “G. George Ostrom of
Life
magazine.”

“Who?” the switchboard voice said.

Ostrom said, “I’m covering for
Life
, and I want to talk to the superintendent.” By late afternoon, G. George Ostrom of
Life
had had several conversations with park officials, but nothing had changed.

Just before nightfall on Tuesday, almost three full days after the attacks on the girls, he picked up the phone, dialed headquarters, and announced that he was going into the park the next morning with or without permission. The voice on the other end said the trails were closed, and Ostrom said that he was going to open them singlehandedly at dawn the next day. Within an hour, permission had been granted.

Late on Tuesday morning, a weary George Ostrom, necklaces of cameras beating on his chest, staggered up the last switchback and headed across the bench toward the Granite Park Chalet. As he approached, he recognized Ross Luding and the kitchen superintendent, Eileen Anderson, and four or five young girls, plus the execution squad of four park personnel. Immediately, one of the rangers turned to a two-way radio and began talking, and as soon as the conversation had ended, Ostrom began receiving terse instructions. The carcass of one bear was waiting to be carried out for autopsy, he was told, but the other two had been dragged down the hill and were not to be photographed. “Why not?” Ostrom asked. “We don’t want any publicity on it,” one of the rangers said.

For the first of several times during that day, Ostrom lost his temper. “It’s none of yol.lr business what you get publicity on and what you don’t,” he snapped. “This is my park as much as it’s yours, and I’m taking the pictures.”

As he walked down the hill to find the dead bears, he saw that the radio was in use again. “How about coming down and standing over your trophies?” Ostrom said.

“No, thanks,” the bear killers told him.

He saw two men heading down the mountain with rifles, and when he asked them what they were doing, they said they were hunting the cubs. “Cubs?” Ostrom said. “Were there cubs?” He was told that there had been two, that they had been sighted earlier in the morning, and that attempts to shoot them had failed.

“You tried to shoot the cubs?” the puzzled Ostrom asked.

It was explained that the young animals would not have survived the winter, and killing them would be an act of mercy. Ostrom fought to control his temper. “Who says that cubs can’t make it through the winter?” he said evenly. “I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about grizzly bears, and there are a lot of guys that lived their whole lives with grizzlies, and they think that a cub has a chance to make it, and two cubs together have an even better chance to make it.”

One of the men said, “There was another reason. Those cubs were trained to eat at the dump. If they’re not killed, they’ll keep coming back to the garbage.”

Ostrom stood up, unsheathed his knife, and flung it into the ground in a fit of blind rage. “God damn it! ” he said. “The cubs won’t come back to the garbage if there isn’t any garbage to come back to! It’s that goddamned simple!” The enraged Ostrom finally brought himself under control and said in a milder tone of voice, “I would like one of you to tell me who decided to shoot the cubs. Whose decision was that?” But no one answered.

Just before noon, a helicopter arrived at Granite Park Chalet with two cases of lye. The Park Service wanted to hasten the complete eradication of the carcasses of bear No. 1 and bear No. 2 before other grizzlies were attracted by the odor. The carcass of the third bear, thought to be the killer, was stuffed into the cabin of the helicopter, and Martinka, Elmore, and Hagen climbed inside with the smelly grizzly for the return to headquarters. Later in the day, Martinka was ordered to fly into Arrow Lake and examine a bear shot by Bert Gildart and Leonard Landa. The pilot landed about a half mile away, and the young biologist had to bushwhack his way to the shelter cabin. He found the grizzly lying where it had been shot; he removed the head and paws for evidence and then took a single slice into the dead animal’s stomach. Undigested matter oozed out, and in the middle of it was a ball of hair.

By Wednesday morning, four days after the double killings, Bob Wasem and his assistant, Dave Shea, were the only representatives of the National Park Service at Granite Park Chalet, and since no grizzlies had been sighted after Monday night, they decided that the mission had been accomplished. Wasem radioed the chief ranger’s office, learned that the trails into the chalet were closed, and received permission to hike out via the Alder Trail to Logan Pass. Before the two biologists departed, they sprinkled fresh lye on the carcasses of the dead bears. The bawling cubs had been hanging around the corpses, and apparently they would not leave until both grizzlies had been converted into dust. At 10:15 a.m., Wasem and Shea tightened the hitches in their packs and said good-bye to the overwrought staff of the chalet. The two men had not gone far along the trail when they came to a high point, and they stopped to take a last look at the wooded valley below. “There they are!” Wasem said, pointing to a narrow stream far down the slope. The two cubs were running along the banks, and every few minutes one of them would dip its head in the water and shake it vigorously from side to side. Shea pulled out his binoculars for a better look, and he saw that part of the cub’s jaw had been shot away.