Night of the Grizzlies (25 page)

Two weeks after the killings in Glacier Park, a grizzly chewed off his keeper’s arm in the Milwaukee County Zoo. A month later, a hunter named Bert Bell, of Cody, Wyoming, was badly lacerated by a wounded grizzly that was not strong enough to push the attack to a conclusion. The rangers in Glacier Park read about these incidents and worried. As Chief Ranger Ruben Hart said, “For fifty-seven years, no one was ever killed or seriously injured here, and suddenly in one night it happens twice. Then you’re on the spot from that point on.”

Less than three months went by before the next attack in the region of Glacier Park. A burly 47 year-old Californian named Robert Gilmore was hunting in the North. Fork of the Flathead River just outside the park boundaries when a male grizzly jumped him and inflicted deep cuts on his face and head. The bear was still clawing and chewing on Gilmore when his hunting companions dispatched the animal with eight shots.

The next spring, a schoolteacher-naturalist named Robert Hahn was on a one-man hike near Siyeh Creek in Glacier Park when he spotted a grizzly sow and her cub at a range of several hundred yards. The 30 year-old amateur photographer began filming the animals with a telescopic “zoom” lens, and he became so engrossed in his work that he failed to realize that the bears were coming dangerously close. They were, in fact, only 65 feet away when Hahn stood up to signal his presence. The cub retreated, but the sow charged instantly. Hahn had barely started up a tree 15 feet away when the bear’s jaws gripped his leg and wrenched him to the ground. The embankment was steep and covered with snow, and the two combatants rolled and tumbled 200 feet down the slope before Hahn grabbed another tree and tried to climb out of the enraged sow’s range. This time, the mother bear scrambled 20 feet up the tree after him and nipped at his feet and legs before falling to the ground and disappearing in the brush.

Hahn recovered without difficulty at Cardston Hospital across the international border in Canada, and from his bed, he issued a request that the two bears not be hunted down and destroyed. “It was my fault,” he said. “I was intruding in her territory, and I had no right to be there.” Glacier Park officials closed the trail for a week, found no sign of the two grizzlies, and reopened it. But despite the relatively happy ending to the story of this attack, ranger executives were shaken to their boot tops. The killings of the year before could no longer be viewed as flukes, as one-in-a-trillion shots that would never happen again. Twice in the intervening months, once inside the park boundaries and once just outside, grizzlies again had committed the unthinkable.

When Glacier Park opened for the summer season of 1968, rangers and staff biologists had laid down the most rigorous system of bear control in National Park Service history. Grizzlies were placed on the strictest probation. If a bear bothered human beings more than once, it was to be shot summarily. If a grizzly was trapped, ear-tagged and removed to another area, and then returned on its own to the point of its first capture, it was shot. Rangers had the authority to kill instantly any bear, black or grizzly, that showed aggressive tendencies near developed areas. When a grizzly tore the seats out of a car parked near Kintla Lake, it was tracked down and killed with no further ado.

Dozens of other steps were taken. Trails were closed at the first sign of a grizzly. Campsites were shut down and reopened only when foraging grizzlies had moved away. Warning signs were posted everywhere, and information about bears was placed at every trail head. A strict “pack in, pack out” policy was initiated; hikers had to haul out their empty cans and other trash, and one ranger was placed on ’Permanent horseback patrol throughout the park to see that the rule was obeyed. All unnatural sources of food, such as the dumps at Polebridge and Granite Park, were removed, and the Park Service’s long standing rules against feeding bears were strictly enforced for the first time in anyone’s memory.

Ironically, the stem program of 1968 seemed to have a more telling effect on the park’s relatively harmless black bears. Twenty black bears were put to death, or about three times the summertime average. But the grizzlies seemed to sense that a crackdown was on, and relatively few sightings were made. The only grizzlies to be executed were the one at Kintla Lake and the cub that had been wounded the year before at Granite Park. Early in 1968, the young bear was seen near Many Glacier, but it was in poor physical condition and unable to feed properly with its shattered jaw. A ranger put the pathetic creature out of its misery.

To many, these killings were insufficient. For the first time in history, a substantial body of public opinion called for the formal annihilation of
Ursus arctos horribilis
in the continental United States. To be sure, the pro-grizzly sentiment outweighed the anti-grizzly sentiment, but no one could remember a time when so many people were willing to stand up and demand that the animal be put to death. The influential Montana Standard, published in Butte, warned that tourist travel would fall damagingly low if the grizzlies were not eliminated. A woman from Chase, British Columbia, demanded that all grizzlies be shot on sight. “Many good people lived long useful good lives and never saw a grizzly bear in any form,” she said. Forest “Nick” Carter, retired chief ranger of Glacier National Park, worked up a plan for a four-man execution squad “to do nothing but hunt and trap the grizzly. ” After a few years of wholesale killing, the squad would be reduced to two men on a permanent basis. Then “all trails in the park would be safe for travel of all kinds,” Carter said. “The national park is for the use of the people. That means every bit of it.”

Defenders of the great bear answered by quoting the National Park Service’s mandate. “The animals indigenous to the parks shall be protected, restored if practicable, and their welfare in a natural wild state perpetuated.” The park might be for the people, as Nick Carter kept saying, but it was also for the grizzlies and the wolverines and the martens and all the other animals that had lived within its borders for centuries. When the anti-grizzly forces argued that it would suffice for the species to survive north of the American border, the conservationists answered by quoting Aldo Leopold, who once said, “There seems to be a tacit assumption that if grizzlies survive in Canada and Alaska, that is good enough. It is not good enough for me. Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness to heaven; one may never get there.”

And so the battle of words raged, not only in provincial newspapers like the
Hungry Horse News
and the
Daily Inter Lake
, but in metropolitan dailies as far removed from Glacier Park as New York and Los Angeles, and on radio stations and public forums all over the country. No decisions were drawn, but certain facts became inescapably clear.

So long as the grizzly had not killed, the issue could not have been joined, and the odds against such tragedies remained infinite and immeasurable. But now two had killed and been killed, and by these killings the grizzly had brought about his own demise as a free-roaming denizen of the American West. The end might be postponed by skillful and energetic game management, but it was nonetheless in sight. Andy Russell wrote, “There is not the slightest room for complacency or blundering, either political or otherwise.” But complacency and blundering are commonplace in all human activity, and more so in such outdoor matters as pollution and conservation and the preservation of wildlife, matters to which man turns his attention too late and spends his time eloquently bemoaning his loss.

The grizzly needs space, and the continental United States no longer has space to give him. If he is denied running room, and the human animal continues to bump against him in ever-increasing numbers, the grizzly will maim and kill.

So long as the National Park Service continues to permit more and more humans to flow willy-nilly into all the nooks and crannies of Glacier National Park, no one will need a crystal ball to see the tragedy that is shaping up. A summer or two, perhaps three or four, may pass without serious injury. But inevitably standards will slip, complacency and human error will return, and along will come another grizzly that is peculiar, like the one at Trout Lake, or another grizzly that has been baited into proximity with humans and lost his respect and his fear, like the one at Granite Park. Then more human life will be sacrificed, almost as certainly as tamaracks lose their needles and beavers eat aspen bark. Those who agree with Aldo Leopold will protest, but after the next such rondeau of death in Glacier Park, the grizzly will almost certainly be banished into Canada, and thence perhaps into Alaska to live out his last years as a species, and all the goodwill and understanding in the world, all the good intentions and pious proclamations, will not alter his eventual fate. Man and grizzly are, at core, antagonists, and with the same ingenious tools that fell the giant redwoods of California and strip the topsoil of western Pennsylvania and pollute the streams of Oregon, man will rid himself of his antagonists. The planet is man’s; he has bent it to his will and made it his to enjoy; his to develop, and his to destroy. The grizzly will be exiled and then destroyed, and Teasdale’s words will be remembered by a few: “What we never have, remains; it is the things we have that go.” The grizzly will not return; he will be lost forever, along with the wild frontier on which he lived his final few years as the mightiest animal of the lost American wilderness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J
ack Olsen is the award-winning author of thirty-three books, which have been published in fifteen countries and eleven languages. Olsen’s journalism earned the National Headliners Award, Chicago Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award, commendations from Columbia and Indiana Universities, the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Scripps-Howard Award and other honors. He was listed in
Who’s Who in America
since 1968 and in
Who’s Who in the World
since 1987. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
described him as “an American treasure.”

Olsen was described as “the dean of true crime authors” by the
Washington Post
and the
New York Daily News
and “the master of true crime” by the
Detroit Free Press
and
Newsday
.
Publishers Weekly
called him “the best true crime writer around.” His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses and have been cited in the
New York Times
Notable Books of the Year. In a page-one review, the
Times
described his work as “a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike.”

Olsen is a two-time winner in the Best Fact Crime category of the Mystery Writer’s of America, Edgar award.

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