Night of the Grizzlies Read online

  The younger couple laughed. “Oh, that’s nothing to worry about,” the boy said, and his companion, an attractive girl of about the same age, laughed again as though the subject were a joke. The teenage boy proceeded to tell a humorous story about grizzly bears, but later on no one was able to remember it. The girl, Julie, flashed a beautiful smile and said, “Well, let’s get going,” and the young couple bounced away toward the campground. The Kleins finished their dinner and carried all their refuse up to the chalet trash cans, hung around to talk, and returned by way of the upper edge of the lava flow, the better to watch the spectacular sunset. Then they covered their provisions with plastic and hauled them to the top of a medium- sized subalpine fir and climbed into their sleeping bag. “Now tell me again, ” Janet said, as the two of them lay under the bright moon and stars and tried to get to sleep, “what do we do if a bear comes?”

  Robert Klein had carefully placed the flashlight and their boots within arm’s reach. “We grab these,” he said, “and we go up the side of the cabin to the roof.” Not long after, the Kleins heard Don Gullett come back down the trail and prepare to turn in, and by ten or ten thirty, they were all asleep.

  The campground would never be confused with the Ritz, but to the two young hikers, their heads already filled with the wonder and joy of the wilderness, it was luxurious. The place was in obvious disrepair; the sign-“GRANITE PARK CAMPGROUND”- lay on the earth, as did beams and metal braces and other building materials, but at least there was a fire pit, and someone had left a few logs for the next campers. The boy and the girl looked at each other and smiled and nodded and headed back to the chalet to pick up the packs that they had left behind while they reconnoitered the area.

  Except for the fact that they were an exceedingly handsome young couple, there was little to distinguish Roy Ducat and Julie Helgeson from the 850 other students who worked for park concessioners as waiters and busboys and cooks and clerks and valets and on other assignments befitting their tender years and their willingness to work cheaply. If all these young people had one characteristic in common, it was the brashness of youth. Early each summer, the park rangers would give lectures about the park and its dangers, and attendance was compulsory for the young employees, but none of them seemed to learn much from the lectures-or so the older rangers grumbled. It was a fact that the death and accident rates were high among the youngsters. Nobody kept score, but Mel Ruder, the newspaperman who kept a studious eye on the park from a range of fifteen miles away, once estimated that an average of one employee per year did not return home alive. They died on mountain climbs for which they were not prepared, on narrow roads they refused to respect, and in high-altitude lakes that were twenty degrees colder than the lakes back home. “But thank God none of them ever died at the hands of grizzlies,” Ruder said, “and maybe this is why the kids would yawn and hold hands and close their ears when the rangers would tell them about the danger from bears. The kids would sort of say to themselves, ’What danger? Name me one kid that’s been killed and I’ll listen to you.’”

  Dorothy Love, manager of the gift shop at Lake McDonald Lodge, put it another way. “These kids come in from everywhere. Some of them do know something about the outdoors but only where they came from. They may be Pennsylvania knowledgeable, and they might be Tucson knowledgeable, but they aren’t Montana knowledgeable.”

  Roy Ducat, working for the summer as a busboy at East Glacier Lodge, was Ohio knowledgeable and a cut above most of his young colleagues, both intellectually and physically. At 18, he was already a sophomore in biology at Bowling Green State University, not far from his home in Perrysburg, Ohio. He was not overpoweringly strong, but he could hold his own on an all-day hike; he had worked as a lifeguard, and he kept himself in shape.

  His companion, Julie Helgeson, was Minnesota knowledgeable, a lovely slender girl with brown hair and blue eyes and a deep interest in nature. At 19, she was already two years out of high school, where she had been a pompon girl, a singer in the school choir, and a class leader. Now a sophomore at the University of Minnesota, she kept up her active life in the church. Her father liked to describe her in a short phrase-“a beautiful, bubbling girl.”

  Julie had been in Glacier Park for two months, working in the laundry at East Glacier Lodge, before she felt ready for her first overnight hike into the wilderness. A few days earlier, she had said goo d-bye to her parents, who had headed back to Albert Lea, Minnesota, after a two-day visit in the park.

  Now Julie had met a personable young man named Roy Ducat, and he was to be her companion on the trip to Granite Park Chalet. The two youngsters had filled their packs with camping gear and goodies, picked up sack lunches from the kitchen of the lodge, and hitchhiked the twenty miles to Logan Pass, jumping off point for the eight-mile Highline hike to Granite Park. It was 7 p.m. when they arrived at the chalet and talked to Gullett and the Kleins, and 8 p.m. before they had looked around and finally settled on the official campground for their headquarters. Back at the chalet, getting their packs, they noticed table scraps behind the back wall, but Roy had already heard about the bears that visited the place, and he was not especially worried. They would be sleeping 500 yards away. Just before they started down the trail for the night, a woman asked them where they were headed. “To the campground,” Roy said.

  “But that’s exactly where the bears come from,” the woman said. “Aren’t you afraid? ” The two young people laughed and said they were not afraid. They laid out their sleeping bags, nibbled at their sack lunches and enjoyed the sunset, and just before dark, Roy remembered something he had heard about bears. He carried the dinner leftovers to a log about 200 yards away and cached them underneath. The chill of nighttime was descending on the campground, and the youngsters decided to sleep in their clothes, except for their hiking boots. Roy wore blue denim pants and a short-sleeved shirt, and Julie wore cutoff jeans and a blouse. Snuggled into their soft sleeping bags, they were warm and contented, and they chatted for a while as the last slivers of daylight faded down the mountain. Then they were asleep. Sometime later, Roy was awakened by a rustling noise; he sat up and saw a squirrel working the night shift. The boy tiptoed to the nearby brook for a drink of water and then went back to sleep.

  ∞

  The bear’s agility amazed Dr. Lindan. “It moved with terrific speed and grace,” he told friends later. “So smooth! At the zoo, you have the impression that they are sluggish and slow, but the speed of that bear as it moved up and down was absolutely amazing. After it had fed, it ran like a kitten into the trees, and I remember saying to myself, ’My God, there is no way to escape a beast like that.’ It was remarkable.”

  In his own way, Dr. Olgierd Lindan, associate professor of medicine at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, was as remarkable as the bears. Born in Riga, Latvia, he had lived in Russia and Poland and England, worked as a doctor in Africa, crossed the Sahara, and once walked from southeast France across Andorra and Spain and into Portugal, fleeing the Nazis. As a result of all his meanderings, he spoke English in a jumbled accent that totally confused the amateur etymologists who tried to pin down his origin, and at least three times a day, the patient, middle-aged internist would have to explain that, yes, he had been born in Latvia, but, no, he had not learned to speak Latvian very well, and, yes, he had once considered Polish as his first language, but then he had gone to school in England, and of course there were the years learning to speak French and Russian and German, and, well, he was really sort of a language potpourri. No sooner would the explanation be finished than someone would come up and say, “By the way, Doctor, where you· from?” Olgierd Lindan was used to this, and it troubled him not at all. He was a man for all seasons and all people and all countries. Now his wife had gone to visit relatives in England for the summer, and Dr. Lindan and his teenage son, Nicholas, were hiking in Glacier National Park while she was gone. They had taken many of the trail hikes, and then someone had told them about the bears at Granite Park Chal
et, and they were not sorry that they had made the long walk into the chalet to see for themselves. True, they had not been able to distinguish the bear very clearly in the dusk, but then how many people had ever laid eyes on grizzlies in their wild state, clearly or otherwise? Dr. Lindan and his son, Nicholas, returned to the chalet dining room more than satisfied with their experience.

  After a while, the other onlookers assembled in the dining room, where the sleeping bags of supernumerary guests already were being unfolded, and a minor argument broke out. Dr. Lindan and his son sat and listened, amused, but did not take part. A middle-aged man had asked for a bottle of beer, and a young employee of the chalet had explained that they did not serve beer. The only liquid refreshment was coffee and lime Kool-aid, neither one of which required hauling bottles or cans up and down the long trail to civilization.

  “Look,” the man said, “I want a beer. I know you’ve got some here. Don’t worry. I’ll pay for it.”

  The girl explained again that there was no beer, and the man flew into a rage. “Listen, damn it, I want a beer!” he shouted. “I’m ready to pay, so bring it! ” The girl reddened and disappeared into the kitchen, and when she did not return, the man and his female companion, also of middle years, grumbled some more and disappeared up the steps. “Oh, my,” Dr. Lindan whispered to Nicholas, “I’m afraid they’re heading for our room.”

  A few minutes later, father and son went to their assigned room and learned that their worst fears had been realized. The room slept five, and two of the five were the annoyed couple. The man was still mumbling to himself, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, a man can’t even get a beer!” The woman slid under the covers and within seconds was emitting snores that set the walls to rumbling. “I have heard snoring,” Dr. Lindan said later, “but this was snoring! Exceptional snoring. Worldclass snoring. And she kept it up.”

  The Lindans, père et fils, slept fitfully.

  In the cast of characters assembled at Granite Park Chalet on the night of Saturday, August 12, there were two men who kept more or less to themselves and did not join in the community singing or the gawking at the bear show or the general chumminess of the chalet. The Reverend Thomas Connolly, SJ, and his friend, Steve Pierre, a full-blooded Kalispel Indian, had been on the trail all day long, and now they were tired. They figured they would have a bite to eat, sleep on the floor of the dining room, and resume their hike at dawn on Sunday.

  Like so many Jesuits, Tom Connolly spent far more time out in the open working with people than he did in the faintly scented confessionals and sacristies of the formal church. At 38, he had been working for several years with the impoverished Indians of the Northwest, and there were monuments to his energy throughout the region. One of them was the Indian community center in Spokane, where Steve Pierre worked as a counselor. The two men had become fast friends, and after a certain number of eighty-hour weeks in a row, the priest. and the Indian liked to hike as far as their legs would carry them into the wilderness, there to replenish themselves for another sequence of eighty-hour weeks. On such trips, Father Connolly would wear a beat-up old jacket issued by Gonzaga University, where he was based, and few would ever know he was a priest.

  The two men were sitting in the dining room of the chalet, listening to the community sing, and eating sandwiches that were prepared by the kitchen staff for those who arrived after the dinner hour, when someone shouted that the bears had arrived. The priest and the Indian were famished, and they continued to eat while the room suddenly emptied, and it was not until they had finished their meal that they wandered outside to see what was going on. Two men were standing on the balcony, focusing flashlights across the gully, and there in the splotches of white light, a big grizzly bear was feeding. “Those crazy white people!” Steve Pierre said angrily. “They don’t know anything about bears! They don’t know what they’re doing!” To Father Connolly, there was something vaguely obscene about the grizzly display, and he followed his disgusted Indian friend back into the chalet. Mattresses had been laid out in a front lobby, and the two good companions pulled their heads into their sleeping bags and called it a night. Not long afterward, the last lantern was snuffed out, and the blockhouse chalet was asleep.

  Earlier on that same broiling Saturday, August 12, a party of youngsters had pushed up and over Howe Ridge with the easy stride of youth. Only the puppy, Squirt, a mixed breed with oversized feet that suggested a trace of German shepherd, had tired once or twice, and when he did, one of the strong young people would carry him like a baby until he had recovered his breath. They were all in a hurry; they had gotten off to a late start, and they wanted to reach Trout Lake in time for some fishing and a relaxed outdoor meal.

  There were five in the party, all of them employees of concessioners and all but one of them veteran campers in the backcountry of Glacier National Park. The exception was a 16 year-old boy, Paul Dunn, who had arrived in the park three weeks earlier on a visit with his parents and promptly accepted a summertime job as busboy in the East Glacier Lodge. The season had only a little more than a month to run, and Paul’s parents, Barbara and Donald Dunn, had headed back to Edina, Minnesota, and told Paul they would see him after Labor Day. When the boy was asked if he would like to accompany two couples on a weekend campout near a place called Trout Lake, he accepted happily. He had heard nothing in particular about grizzly bears around Trout Lake; indeed, he had barely heard of the lake itself, since he was stationed on the opposite side of the park, across the Divide. But bears did not occupy much of the attention of any teenagers in the park, and Paul Dunn was no exception. Before his parents had gone home, the boy and his family had listened to an orientation lecture by a park ranger, and about all Paul remembered from the talk was the information that a grizzly will not attack you if you do not attack it, and if you see one, just climb a tree. Oh, yes, there was one other point that the ranger had made: “Never take a dog on a trail.” The ranger had said something about a poodle or some kind of dog being mangled by a bear the year before, dogs and bears being natural enemies.

  Now Paul and the two young couples were cresting Howe Ridge and starting on the trail down toward Trout Lake, and assuredly there was a dog with them, but Paul Dunn was not particularly worried. The other four hikers were old hands, and their simple explanation about the dog seemed to make sense: It was true, they had said, that you could not take a willy-nilly stroll through the park with your dog, but it was permissible to walk a dog on a leash so long as it remained under human control. Paul did not know that they were wrong, that dogs were not allowed on park trails under any conditions. But the flop-footed Squirt was under human control, and no one in the party considered him a danger. Red haired Denise Huckle, a 20 year-old summertime room clerk and wintertime college student, had befriended the sick and weakened puppy after it had been abandoned in the park, and before setting out on the hike, she had looked high and low at Lake McDonald Lodge for a leash, finally settling for a strong cord. Now the young animal alternately strained at the cord and begged for attention, and the hikers took turns obliging.

  Besides Paul, there were two other young men in the party: the brothers Ray and Ron Noseck of Oracle, Arizona. Ron was 21, a waiter at East Glacier Lodge and Denise’s date for the overnight trip. Ray was 23, a service station manager near Lake McDonald Lodge and the other girl’s date. Both of the Nosecks were attending dental school at the University of Louisville.

  The other girl was Michele Koons, 19, a frail and beautiful young lady who came from San Diego, California, and was about to begin her second year at California Western University. She was working for the summer in the gift shop at Lake McDonald Lodge, where the manager of the shop described her as “a blessing, a girl with a zest for life.” Michele’s zest for life had taken her to Trout Lake several times before, and unlike Paul Dunn, she was aware that grizzlies frequented the area.

  But bears were far from the thoughts of the five park employees as they moved lightly along the downhill switch
backs that led through the heavy forest to the berry bushes on the slopes above the lake. Denise was proud of her dog; although he was still a semiconvalescent and had required occasional assistance on the four-mile hike, Squirt had not uttered a single bark, and everyone agreed that the pleasant puppy was a welcome addition to the group. If there was anything to complain about, it was simply that the day was hot, like all the days of that particular August. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, dry lightning had flashed out of the sky and started fires in the crackling brush, and the slightest trace of pine and spruce and fir smoke hung in the air along the trail. But the hikers were as unconcerned about fire as they were about bears. No one had ever burned to death alongside a mountain lake.

  It was just before five in the afternoon when the hikers reached the broad patches of berry bushes and looked down on the blue-green waters below. The sun slanted into their eyes from its perch atop Rogers Peak, 7,000 feet high on the west side of the lake, and grasshoppers squirted about in the parched dryness, but the slightest trace of a breeze from the lake promised a cool evening. As they neared the logjam camp where they intended to spend the night, the hikers could see circles dappling the water; the cutthroat trout were already feeding on their evening diet of flies, and it would not be long before the skillet would be popping and crackling and the fragrant aroma of frying trout would fill the air. Not even the somber message of a couple of other fishermen could dampen the enthusiasm of the party of five. The fishermen announced that they had been treed for two hours the day before by a very aggressive grizzly. The information was neither unexpected nor particularly frightening to five hikers; getting run up a tree by a bear was part of the adventure and the fun of Glacier Park; they knew that no one had ever been killed, and they doubted that anyone ever would be. As Paul Dunn told his parents back in Minnesota much later, “If there was one thing that was drummed into us, it was that bears wouldn’t bother us if we didn’t bother them. And we certainly weren’t gonna bother them!”