Night of the Grizzlies (17 page)

Denise comforted Squirt, imprisoned for his own safety under the sleeping bag, and tried to stay awake. Dawn was not far off. More than once, Denise thought she heard noises around the edge of the campsite, and each time she patted and stroked the dog to keep him from making a sound. Except for the single low growl earlier when the bear had been wading around the edge of Trout Lake, Squirt’s behavior had been perfect, but there was no doubt that the dog’s scent was on everything in the camp, and especially on the two girls, Denise and Michele, who had spent more time than the others babying him in their arms. Denise tucked her pet farther under the bag till he was completely hidden.

It was 4: 30, and the fire had fallen to low flames and embers again when she heard a splash and narrowed her eyes to peer into the night and saw a bear coming at a lope straight from the shoreline toward the center of the camp. When the bear was four or five feet away and she could make out its head and upper body clearly, Denise pulled the sleeping bag over herself and Squirt, just as the dog began a high-pitched squeal. Lying perfectly still inside the warm bag, the terrified girl heard a ripping noise that sounded like shredding canvas, but then there was a silence broken only by the deep breathing and grunting of the grizzly. She held Squirt tightly in her arms and felt his trembling mingle with her own. She tried to keep the dog from bawling out its fright, as the bear sniffed rapidly at the bag.

Paul Dunn woke up and peeped from his own sleeping bag to see the huge wet form of the bear standing next to him. Noiselessly, the boy slithered into his bag and tried to remain absolutely still. He heard the bear making more sniffing sounds, and suddenly he realized that the sniffs were getting closer and closer. Then something crunched into his sleeping bag and took a firm grip on his sweatshirt. Instinctively, the boy threw back the flap of the bag and scrambled to his feet, slamming into the bear in the process and shouting to no one in particular, “The goddamn bear tore my shirt! ” When the grizzly reared up on its hind feet as though to attack, Paul dashed to a tree and climbed thirty or forty feet in a matter of seconds, ripping and cutting his chest and his legs on the desperate ascent. When he reached the safety of the top, he looked down and saw the bear circling lazily below.

Lying in bags side by side, Denise and Ron Noseck saw the bear amble over to Paul Dunn’s tree, a few feet outside the semicircle of campers, and Ron decided that the time had come to run for trees of their own. “We have to get out of here!” he yelled, and Denise replied, “I can’t. I’ve got to undo the collar around Squirt’s neck.” Once again, Noseck told his girlfriend to run, and when she did not move, the 21 year-old dental student yanked the girl full-length from her sleeping bag and gave her a shove toward the southern end of the lake. The couple ran about fifty yards in the direction of the original camp, and as they ran, they heard Paul Dunn shouting down from his treetop. He seemed to be telling Ray and Michele to get out of their sleeping bags and make a break for it, but in their own headlong flight down the lakeline, Denise and Ron could not be sure. They reached a slight incline, and as they stopped, gasping for breath, the puppy came bounding up. Ron boosted the girl up a tree, threw the dog after her, and shinnied up a tree of his own. Neither one could see distinctly to the new camp fifty yards away, but they could still hear Paul Dunn shouting, and they added their own cries to the pandemonium. “Get out! ” they yelled toward the camp. “Find a tree!” From his observation point almost directly above the camp, Paul Dunn saw everything that happened within the small circle of reddish light thrown off by the dying fire. He saw Ron and Denise run down the shoreline, followed by the puppy, and then he saw the grizzly walk toward Ray Noseck’s sleeping bag and begin sniffing rapidly. When the bear turned momentarily toward Michele’s bag, Ray came out of his own as though shot from a gun and headed down the lake toward Denise and Ron, shouting as he ran, “Get out of your bag and run for it!”

Paul hollered at Michele, “Get out! Get out! Unzip and get out!”

The bear clamped its jaws on the side of the sleeping bag, and Paul heard the girl begin to scream. When the animal raked the bag with its claws, Paul heard Michele cry out, “He’s ripping my arm!”

“Michele!” Paul shouted. “Get out of your bag! Run and climb a tree!”

“I can’t,” the girl screamed. “He’s got the zipper!”

Then the defenseless girl shouted, “He’s got my arm... My arm is gone! Oh, my God, I’m dead!”

Paul Dunn saw the bear lift the sleeping bag in its mouth and drag it out of the circle of fire and up the hillside into the darkness. He heard a sound like bones crunching and shouted down the lake to the other three, “He’s pulling her up the hill!” and then, “She’s dead! She’s dead!”

In the hysteria of the moment, it seemed to the 16 year-old boy that he must get dressed and join his friends, and when he figured that the bear and its helpless bundle were at least fifty yards up the hill, he scrambled down the trunk and slipped his trousers over his underclothes. Then he sprinted along the lake to the others and climbed another tree, and the four survivors of the attack comforted one another and waited for the dawn. It came at 6 a.m., an hour and a half after the attack, and while Ray attended to Denise and the dog, the two younger men ran back to the campsite and gathered up shoes and jackets.

They listened for any sounds coming from the dark woods that might indicate Michele was still alive. From somewhere up the hill in the direction the bear had taken, Ron was sure he could hear the sound of bones being snapped. The four terrified campers yanked on their shoes and ran down the trail toward the turnoff that led up and over Howe Ridge. Denise thought she saw the bear in the brush as they ran, but she said nothing, and two hours later, after running and stumbling and lurching four miles up and down the 2,000 feet of hill, the campers burst out on the road that ran from Going-to-the-Sun Highway along the northern edge of Lake McDonald to Kelly’s Camp. A fisherman and his wife had parked at the trailhead and were just starting to hike in, but they took one look at the panicky group coming out and urged them into their car. When they pulled up at the path that led to the lake and the small ranger station, the four refugees from Trout Lake asked their benefactors to keep the dog in the car. Then they rushed off to tell their story to the ranger.

Fire Control Officer Gary Bunney and his rescue party had begun their mercy mission at 2:45 a.m., almost exactly two hours after the attack in the Granite Park campground. Since they were not sure where the young couple had been camping, the rescuers decided to go straight down the path to the trail cabin and try to fan out from there in the general direction of the campground. Bunney was in the lead, a powerful miner’s lamp strapped to his forehead and his finger lightly touching the safety of his .300 Winchester Magnum. Right behind him were the Indian, Steve Pierre; the innkeeper, Tom Walton; the geologist, Robert Klein; the priest, Tom Connolly; the doctor, Olgierd Lindan, the strong young man from Montana, Monty Kuka; the hiker from California, Don Gullett; the anonymous former pilot who had assisted in the landing; and six or eight others. They had not gone more than 100 yards downtrail when they had to step over bear droppings, fresh and steaming in the cool night air, and Gary Bunney slowed the pace for a short consultation. He adjusted his head lamp so that it would shine dead ahead, and he said, “If the bear comes into sight, we’ll be in a tough spot. There’s only one chance, and that’s for you to shine your lights right on him and keep them shining on him, because I can’t hit him in this kind of darkness, and whether you know it or not, a grizzly can move. And remember this: Stay back! Don’t go moving out ahead of me, because if you do, we’ll just be one big jumble of bodies out there, and I won’t know where I can shoot and where I can’t, and a lot of people could get hurt.”

As the group continued toward the trail cabin, stepping gingerly across more fresh sign, Walton focused his five-cell flashlight out ahead of the ranger, but he could see that even this powerful torch was dimming after several hours of use. Behind him was a small amount of diffused reddish light coming from the fire tub dragged by the priest and fed by some of the others, but not enough to shine more than a few feet into the bushes and scraggly trees of the timberline area. Some of the men were keeping up a steady shouting to frighten the bear, and a few of the voices had turned hoarse and quavery. “Whoa, bear!” one man shouted tremulously. “Whoa, bear!” Walton had to admire the man, whoever he was. He was plainly stricken with terror but nevertheless proceeding down the trail to provide his share of help to a suffering human being.

Walton and a few of the others toward the front of the line began making sounds; their primary mission was to find the missing girl, not to kill the bear, and the best way to find the girl was to avoid a diversionary episode with the bear and the possibility of even more bloodshed. The innkeeper thought about the grim differences between this trip toward the trail cabin and the one a few hours earlier. Now he had seen the massive rips and punctures in young Ducat’s body; the menace of the bear was, therefore, no longer an imaginary one. Real blood had been shed, real tissue tom, and somewhere in the night that enveloped them, the instrument of damage was running at large, perhaps following them soundlessly. Tom played his light from side to side, but there was nothing except a few stunted trees to the left and the grayblack of the lava flow stretching all the way up to pinpoints of stars on the right.

When the party had almost reached the trail cabin, Walton asked for silence; they were at the same place where bear woofings had been heard on the trip up. When the last “Whoa, bear! ” died down in the stillness of the night, Walton and the others began to hear the same woofings up the hill, and all at once the young innkeeper knew what was causing the sound. He explained to the others that the noise was coming from the water ram, a device that was installed in the stream up above and was a part of the chalet’s pumping system. He apologized for frightening some of them earlier, but in all the excitement and terror of the attacks, he had forgotten about the water ram.

At the trail cabin, the searchers stopped for another conference. They had an idea where the attack had taken place, but no one knew in which direction the girl had been dragged. Steve Pierre said he doubted that a bear would carry a human for more than 100 yards or so and suggested that they go to the campground and locate the couple’s campsite and spread out from there. Once again, the armed ranger took the lead, and this time he kept the Indian and Robert Klein just behind him. Klein had heard the girl’s screams; he could steer them toward the place where Ducat and Julie Helgeson had been sleeping.

The couple’s little camp turned out to be in the middle of the cleared area where the Park Service had hauled in material for tables and toilets and benches but had not yet put them together. On the ground lay a sign: “GRANITE PARK CAMPGROUND.” Sleeping bags and shoes and camp gear were strewn about, and there was an indistinct trail of blood heading up the hill toward the trail cabin, and a pool of blood soaked into a trampled patch of false hellebore a few feet down the hill. “Didn’t the boy say he came uphill all the way?” Steve Pierre asked Don Gullett.

“Yes,” Gullett said.

The Indian and Bunney reached the same conclusion at once. “This must be the girl’s blood down here,” the ranger said. “The bear must have carried her downhill.”

This deduction narrowed the arc of the search area to 180 degrees, and the group spread out and began to move haltingly down the mountain. Instead of shouting “Whoa, bear!” they were calling, “Julie, Julie, where are you, Julie?” But the fact of the bear’s existence was uppermost in all their minds. Tom Walton choked back a rising sense of panic and moved just behind Bunney, expecting the bear to come charging out of the brush at any second and knock them all to the ground before the ranger could get off a shot. Some of the men were banging on pots to add to the noise, and Father Connolly and an assistant continued to drag the fire tub along the ground while others ran around trying to find scrap wood to keep the blaze high. Now and then, an ember would bounce out of the tub, and someone would stomp it out and rush to rejoin the search line. No one wanted to be alone, but neither could they stay in a big mass and hope to find the missing girl. So the line expanded and contracted with the courage of the men and the menace of the night.

Now the Indian called out that he had found a trail of blood specks along the asters and the glacier lilies, and the group knotted up behind him. Within a few yards, he leaned over and picked up a bloody purse, empty except for a single dollar bill. The Indian increased his pace down the slope below the bench, and several times Bunney had to tell him to slow down and get behind the gun. The men followed the Indian far down the mountain, out of sight of the chalet light, and then the bloody trail disappeared. “I’m sorry, ” Steve Pierre said, “but it’s gone. We’ll have to spread out again.”

The searchers had traveled the length of a football field from the campsite; there were neither trails nor cleared areas nor signs to guide them, and they widened reluctantly and began creeping down the slope trying to cut the trail of blood again. Their flashlights had been off and on for two hours, and now they barely illuminated the ground. The men made more noise than ever; it had occurred to more than a few of them that the girl might be lying dead just a few feet away with the bear standing guard, and they had heard what grizzlies will do to protect a kill.

The line of search had dropped down another twenty yards when an alien sound began to intrude itself into the noisemaking. “Quiet! ” Bunney begged, and slowly the group brought itself to order. From off to the left and slightly farther down the slope, they heard a muted cry for help. At the sound of the tiny voice, the strung-out searchers reacted as a single person. Now it was as though there were no bear, as though the suffering girl were the only reality on the dark flank of the mountain. Now they were adult men listening to a suffering human, and they dashed headlong, tripping over logs and bushes, toward the small, weak voice.