Night of the Grizzlies (24 page)
“Let’s go,” he said to Wasem, and the two saddened biologists resumed their long walk back to civilization.
EPILOGUE
F
or weeks after the killings, Glacier National Park remained in a state of shock. The unthinkable had happened; the impossible had become possible, and the wondrous world of glaciers and limber pines and water shrews and wolverines and grizzlies now had new and indefinable dimensions.
People berated themselves because two innocent girls were dead. W. R. “Teet” Hammond told a friend: “I met Michele Koons and talked a little bit in the gift shop where she worked. She was a cute-looking little blond girl, and the thing you remember about her is she was so pleasant and nice to old folks like me. She died a horrible death up there, and I could have killed that bear a thousand times.
I could have killed him a thousand times.”
Characteristically, the retired New Mexico sheriff failed to mention that it was not his job to kill the bear, that it was the job of others who failed.
There were more self-recriminations about the death of Julie Helgeson at Granite Park. A member of the chalet’s kitchen staff wrote her parents: “All I could think of was the girl laying there, hearing us come and building up her courage and hope and then to hear us leave without finding her. How she must have felt!”
209 Tom Walton spent hours going over what had happened and then going over it again. With a clear objectivity that is vouchsafed to few, he summed up his thoughts one day. “I often say to myself that we should have gone down and got the girl right away. I wish I would have. And I say to myself that I would go straight after her if I had it to do over again. We had no arms, nothing, not even a pocket knife. But you still have to wonder. If she hadn’t been out there for two hours in the cold, bleeding to death...” Naturalist Joan Devereaux, winner of $250 and a National Park Service medal for her plucky behavior on the night of the attack, was one of the few who entertained no self-doubt. “I guess, in a way, I’m the reason why we didn’t go charging out in the woods looking for the girl,” she said, “but I didn’t know what the situation was, and there was no sense in risking anybody else’s life and go out there.”
At ranger headquarters, the slightest mention of the case for months afterward was enough to send executives dashing from office to office for consultation, preening the files by the hour, and repeatedly dialing Washington for guidance. The press, along with the general public, was barred from the venues of the tragedies, and the facts that were hand-fed to newsmen seemed to be carefully selected by ranger officials for their irrelevance. Eventually, it was learned that the Montana Livestock Sanitary Board examined the brains of all four dead bears and reported that none was rabid and that the blood around the claws of the Granite Park bear was tested by the FBI and proven to be of non-human origin. Nor was there any other physical evidence against the old sow; like Bruno Hauptmann, she was convicted on strong, circumstantial evidence. Days later, the FBI reported that the Trout Lake grizzly had in her stomach “65 light-brown to dark-brown head hairs of Caucasian origin ranging from 3/4 to 5 1/8 inches,” leaving no doubt as to that bear’s palpable guilt.
If facts were rare, theories were cheap, and the news wires hummed with them. Early in the theorizing, an official of the park had told a journalist that the 100 or so lightning strikes less than two days before the killings might have crazed the bears, and the report turned up in many newspapers.
Glen Cole, the research superintendent for the Rocky Mountain National Parks, announced, “We may have to impose more restraints on hikers. Maybe they shouldn’t have been in there. You just don’t take a dog into that country.”
Joan Devereaux, blooded now and no longer the insecure rookie naturalist of the past, said, “We have a lot of accidents throughout the summer involving these young people. The problem is that after they’ve been here a week or two, they figure they know everything there is to know about everything- climbing, hiking, camping—and they just don’t.”
A humane society worker telephoned a high official of Glacier Park, and the details of the conversation were recorded in an office memo. The ranger official wrote:
This lady wanted to know why, after 50 years, the bears would go on a rampage in the park. Also, does the park feed the bears? She was told that the bears go to the dumps in campgrounds, are fed by people, from garbage cans. They smell the cooking of campers, find scraps, spilled food. Bears know that people mean food and they go to the area to find something to eat-are scared away for a while, but eventually become bolder and will attack to get fed. They dragged off the sleeping bags for food possibilities, occupants struggled and were killed... She also wanted to know if it was against the law to sleep on the ground in campgrounds-was told that many people do this, all over the park. The newspapers like to make the stories sound exciting and attract attention by headlines. The park makes no attempt to kill all bears-only the troublesome ones who cannot be discouraged from molesting humans. She wanted to know if bears change their disposition overnight and was told that the people spoil the bears by feeding them until they become bold and cannot be frightened off and they will hurt people to get food. No more bears will be shot as it seems certain that the culprits have been eliminated.
The import of such messages, flowing out of park headquarters by the dozens, was that somehow “the people” had caused the bears to attack, and “the newspapers” had blown the stories up.
Almost a year went by before the Park Service issued its own report on the incidents, and by then the facts had been so obscured that the public was ready to accept anything. The unsigned report managed to convey the impression that a combination of curious events had combined to cause the deaths of the two girls. The report admitted offhandedly that grizzlies had been known to dine on table scraps in the park and that the Trout Lake bear “had obtained food several times earlier at the same location,” but these two most significant of all facts were buried under thousands of words of supposition about lightning strikes, cosmetics, atmospheric pressures, menstrual cycles, availability of natural food, bear psychology, and other extraneous matters. Nowhere in the report was there the flat statement that the National Park Service had countenanced summerlong feeding at Granite Park, established a campground in an area that had been frequented for decades by feeding grizzlies, and allowed a marauding bear to terrorize campers for three months.
A larger question remained: After nearly six decades of relative innocence, why had
Ursus arctos horribilis
chosen a four-hour period on the morning of August 13, 1967, to kill two 19 year-old girls? Philip Youngman, curator of mammals at the National Museum of Canada, spoke for many. “It is just too much to buy the story that sheer coincidence caused two grizzly bears only twenty miles apart to attack two similar camping parties at almost the same time,” he said. Immediately, a statistician began punching away on a computer and reported that the odds against one such killing on a single night were 1 million to 1; the odds against two in the same night were 1 trillion to 1. But a computer is only as accurate as the information fed into it, and the primary statistic fed into this particular computer was the fifty-seven-year record of no deaths from grizzlies. The phrase “zero out of fifty-seven” is arithmetically meaningless, of course, and can only lead to mathematical mischief. Had the computer been fed all the data, including the real data concerning the events of the summer of 1967, it would not have posted such long odds. As it was, the machine only compounded the mystery of the two attacks.
To understand the simultaneity of the incidents, it is better to begin with ancient history than modem mathematics. Man and grizzly had been on a collision course for tens of thousands of years. At the precise second when the first man stepped onto the North American plains and the first grizzly looked up from his grazing to try to catch the scent of the pale, upright intruder, the biological alarm clocks had been set. But why did two of them go off on a single night eons later? There seem to be two reasons: By 1967, man with his hated smell and his bumbling manner was pushing harder and harder on the grizzly, and the National Park Service chose that summer to present the annoyed and harassed bears with engraved invitations to strike. It is pure coincidence indeed that two grizzlies chose a few hours of a single night to take two victims who had much in common, but it is no coincidence at all that the year in which this happened was 1967, and the place Glacier Park.
Consider the grizzly’s well-documented ways, his insular nature, his abhorrence of man. The myriad grizzlies that used to feed on the plains of Kansas and dig for pocket gophers in South Dakota and hunt berries in the front range of the Colorado Rockies took refuge in the farthest reaches of frontier Montana and Wyoming simply to get away from man, and then one day they found themselves backed into a few thousand square miles of their native land. For a few decades, the situation was tolerable, but after World War II, the great bear began to lose his freedom once again. Hikers were beginning to march at him from all directions, and the grizzly retreated farther and farther into the dark recesses of the two great parks where he was concentrated: Yellowstone and Glacier. Relief came easier in Yellowstone; it was not essentially a trail park, and there were vast areas where no human beings set foot. But as the postwar years went on, almost 1 million tourists were showing up each season at Glacier Park, and a goodly number of them were taking to the beautiful trails that led straight into the domain of the grizzly and were camping out in areas the bears had considered their own. By human standards, the percentage of people in the 1,600 square miles of the park was low. By grizzly standards, the place was as crowded as Times Square on Saturday night. A normal grizzly thinks nothing of foraging over eight or ten miles at a time, and if he sees a single human, he runs away. Now the grizzlies were seeing humans wherever they turned and seeing them again when they fled.
Habitues
of Granite Park were understandably quick to claim that the feeding of bears in their backyard had nothing to do with the tragedy of Julie Helgeson, and one of them said, “Why, I can remember when there were fourteen grizzlies in a single night feeding on our table scraps, and nobody was ever harmed.” But this was in the distant past when there were perhaps twenty or thirty guests registered at the chalet, all of them inside, and it made no difference how many grizzlies came to the dump and disappeared back into the blackness of the wilderness. In the week that ended so horribly on the morning of August 13, Granite Park had been a crossroads of humanity. Longhaired girls dipped up and down the path used by the grizzlies; hikers stumbled up the same trail at the very time that bears were feeding in the back of the chalet; five or six dozen people at a time jammed elbow-to-elbow every night to watch the grizzlies come in, and human forms in sleeping bags were to be found all over the place. Everyone waited to see the pets, and no one dreamed that the pets would strike. On the night of the attacks, every available inch of space inside the chalet was crammed with humans; several others slept in bags on the porch; a few were to be found at various distances from the blockhouse building; three slept several hundred yards away at the trail cabin, and another couple was in the campground down on the bench. And into this high-density area, grizzly bears were being lured by table scraps with the tacit consent of the National Park Service. No wonder that someone was killed. At Trout Lake, the situation was only slightly different Almost every visitor to the lake during the hot summer of 1967 reported coming upon other humans, and this in an area that demanded a 2,000-foot climb up and another 1,500-foot climb down, or in the alternative, a slight uphill walk of more than seven miles along the Camas Creek drainage; Trout Lake had always been a relatively popular area, but not so popular that day after day the campsite would be occupied, the shoreline dotted with improvised camps, the shelter cabin a few miles upstream completely crammed with humans. The berry crop was lean in the fiery-hot summer of 1967, and grizzlies had little choice but to mingle with the numerous people at Trout Lake. There were few other places where berries were available in quantity, and there were few other places where grizzlies could get away from people anyway. And so they tried to abide the unpleasant man smell, and out of all their numbers a single aging specimen took the process one step too far and became contemptuous of man and even came to covet the smell and flavor of the species’ only living enemy.
One may argue that the rangers should have seen the problem coming, and indeed there are bits and pieces of evidence to show that they did. Still they took no action. Bears had not killed in the entire history of the park; why would anyone assume that they would kill this summer? One does not prepare for the unthinkable. If one “knows” that something will not happen and cannot happen, one may violate one’s own laws accordingly, and no one will ever be the wiser. It was not necessary to enforce the rules about bear feeding at Granite Park or exterminate the rogue bear at Trout Lake; everyone knew that grizzlies did not kill humans, that “it can’t happen here.” This strategy, of course, was valid only so long as the grizzlies continually fled before man. But no powerful carnivore, least of all the proudly independent grizzly, will go gently into the dark night of extinction. At some point, a stand must be made, and in 1967, for a multiplicity of reasons, the grizzlies were finally making it.
Aside from their miscalculations about what the grizzly would and would not do, there was another reason why the dedicated and sincere rangers of Glacier National Park failed to take action when action was so clearly demanded. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.” To the men in the green uniforms of the National Park Service, the grizzly was a hero, the subconscious symbol of the vanishing frontier, the last of the big, footloose omnivores of the American West. Such heroes carry within themselves the stuff of tragedy; people break rules for them, make concessions to them, turn the other cheek to them, until sometimes the heroes wind up destroying themselves. Grizzlies had never killed in the park; therefore they never would kill in the park. It was easy for the rangers to accept such a proposition, especially since it coincided with their inner tendency to think only the grandest thoughts about the heroic grizzly. Generations of naturalists have felt and acted the same.
