Night of the Grizzlies (15 page)

Her lanky husband stirred in the sleeping bag and Janet helped him awake with a brisk shove. “What made that noise?” Robert Klein said.

“I don’t know,” Janet said. “Listen!”

After a few seconds, the screaming began again, and this time the words were more distinct. “Why, it’s a child having a nightmare!” Robert said. “But there’s no child in the campground.” “They might have come in after we went to sleep.” Once again, the screaming started, but now it sounded farther away, as though the child were running down the slope of the broad bench of the campground. Then there was one long scream and silence. The Kleins had no idea what to do; the bright sliver of incandescent moon had gone down behind the mountain, and the geologist and his schoolteacher wife sat together looking into the wall of night, as though waiting for someone to come out of the void and make everything clear. The sounds did not resume. Robert Klein looked at his watch; it was twelve fifty.

∞

If there was anything of which young Donald Gullett was certain when he crawled into his sleeping bag alongside the trail cabin, it was that he was going to enjoy a long and deep and dreamless sleep. He had hiked something like twenty miles that day, and another twenty miles the day before, and his body throbbed with fatigue. He should not have stayed up to see the bear come into sight behind the chalet; this had kept him up till ten or ten thirty; so instead of planning to continue his international hike at dawn, he simply decided to sleep out his fatigue and awaken when he awakened, even if it was some disgustingly late hour of the morning, like seven or seven thirty.

But now it was almost one o’clock in the morning, and Gullett was lying in his sleeping bag, looking at his watch and wondering what had awakened him. It took him a few seconds to recall that he was camped 500 yards below Granite Park Chalet and that he was in the middle of a long hike from Glacier National Park across into Canada and back again. He heard a noise but thought he was dreaming, and was surprised when he rolled over on his side to see someone standing at the foot of his sleeping bag. As he watched sleepily, Gullett saw the dimly outlined figure slump to its knees, then fall flat. Gullett looked closely into the eyes of a teenage boy and recognized Roy Ducat. Young Ducat was alternately giggling and babbling, and Gullett realized that he was in shock. “A bear got a hold of me,” the boy was saying. “I tried playing dead, but it didn’t help. He dragged her off in the brush. You have to go after her! Oh, please, forget about me! The bear dragged her away. Can’t somebody go and find her?”

Everything had happened in seconds, and Gullett was still not entirely awake. He slid out of his sleeping bag and said to himself, “This guy can’t be real.” To the boy, he said simply, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” But then he saw that the boy’s arm was dangling as though it had been wrenched out of the socket, and blood stains were creeping along the upper pant legs, and all at once Donald Gullett was wide awake and running toward the chalet for help.

“Wait! ” the younger boy shouted. “Come back! Don’t leave me here. Take me to the others!”

Gullett helped the boy crawl and lurch toward the Kleins’ camp about thirty feet away. All the way along the painful journey, Roy kept repeating, “The bear got the girl! It got the girl! Somebody has to help her! The bear dragged her away!” and he repeated words like these when the two of them reached the Kleins.

By now, there were no doubts about what had happened or about the fact that a dangerous bear was loose in the area, and everyone headed for the safety of the trail cabin. It was securely locked. Roy had begun to tremble violently, and Gullett wrapped the wounded boy in his own goose-down mummy bag and laid him gently on the level ground.

“Get up on the roof!” Gullett said to Janet.

“No,” she said, “not without Bob.”

Robert Klein, who had been gathering up clothes and boots and a flashlight, came puffing up to the side of the trail cabin and helped his wife climb the jutting logs to the tin roof. “Aren’t you coming up?” Klein asked Gullett.

“No,” the 19 year-old Californian said. “If the bear comes back, I’ll be down here with Roy. You can be signaling for help.”

On top of the cabin, Robert Klein remembered that danger signals came in threes, and he began blinking the weak flashlight toward the chalet high on the hill. It seemed no time at all before the beam grew weak, along with the couple’s hopes. Robert flashed the light around the area a few times, but there was no sign of the bear, and once the beam caught Gullett and the wounded boy, lying just beneath the wall. “How is he?” Robert asked.

“Bad,” Gullett said. “He can’t walk now.”

“If nobody’s awake to help us,” Janet Klein said softly to her husband, “he’ll die from loss of blood.” Hardly had she uttered the words when they began to see flickerings of light from the chalet. Someone was up and around, and Robert Klein flashed frantically in triplicate. Soon, a voice came booming down the mountainside, asking, “Is everything OK?” Robert Klein shouted back with all his strength, “No!”

∞

As the little group waited for the help that they now knew was on its way, Roy Ducat slipped in and out of panic but never out of consciousness, and he remembered clearly what had happened. He had been sleeping soundly when all at once he had heard Julie telling him to play dead. While he was still trying to figure out what she was talking about, a single blow from a huge paw knocked both of them five feet away on the ground, and the air was full of an unpleasant smell, as though a dozen dirty sheep dogs had come in from the rain. Roy had landed on his stomach, and out of the comer of his eye, he could see Julie a few feet away. Then he felt something bite deeply into his right shoulder and scrape against the bone, and with a tremendous exercise of his will, he neither cried out nor moved. The biting stopped, and Roy opened his eyes long enough to make out the shadow of a bear standing on all fours above the helpless girl and tearing at her body. He shut his eyes tightly in time to feel the bear return, plant its feet firmly in the small of his back, and begin snapping its teeth into his left arm and the backs of both his legs, just below the buttocks. Still he remained silent, and once again the bear returned to the girl. Now Roy could hear bones crunching and Julie screaming out, “It hurts!” and “Someone help us!” He realized that the girl’s outcries were receding down the hill, and he thought that the bear must be carrying her off. When the screaming stopped, he jumped to his feet and ran uphill as fast as he could, unaware of his own pain, and slumped alongside the first sleeping bag he saw. All he could think of was Julie Helgeson and her helplessness and his own helplessness in the face of the attack, and he begged everyone who came into sight to forget about him and save the girl.

∞

In his own mind, Tom Walton thought he knew exactly what had happened, and he was not especially happy about it. He knew that hysterical women were a fact of life, but he wished that they would stay away from him. The second he had laid eyes on Janet Klein, he had seen the panic in her face. Walton wondered why a husband would insist on camping out with his wife when anybody could see that the woman was stricken with fright and would have given anything to be safe inside. “Now look what happened,” Tom Walton said to himself. “A bear comes sniffing around and the woman starts to scream, and now half the chalet is awake and ten or fifteen of us have to form a party and go down the trail to bring help.”

Now they were all fumbling along the path, with Tom and a few of the girls from the kitchen staff in the lead. One of the girls seemed edgy herself-they had all been awakened out of sound sleep-and she kept repeating shrilly, “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?”

Walton had had a summer full of dealing with this particular teenage girl, and he knew that she was a potential hysteric herself and had to be handled firmly. “Shut up and get in line!” he snapped. “That’s what you’re gonna do!”

The young chalet keeper counted thirteen besides himself as they headed down the rocky, shaly path at the lower edge of the lava flow toward the trail cabin, where a light seemed to be blinking off and on. First came Walton and the two girls, and behind them he recognized the man in the Gonzaga sweatshirt and the Indian, a couple of medical doctors named Lipinski and Lindau, the ranger-naturalist Joan Devereaux and her trusty two-way radio, a strong young man from Montana named Monty Kuka, and several other guests. Steve Pierre said that there was only one thing on Earth that would frighten a crazed bear, and that was fire. With Father Connolly and several helpers, the Indian grabbed up a galvanized metal tub, filled it with scrap wood, set it to blazing, and dragged it with them. One of the guests toward the rear of the line said, “What are we going for?” and a few minutes later said it again. Walton also wondered why so many guests were going, and why the complainers did not just turn around and go back to bed. But he held his temper and continued down the trail.

∞

From the instant that the rescue party rounded the last bend and came upon the scene at the trail cabin, the place exploded into action and confusion, some of it orderly, much of it understandably disorderly and futile. The sight of the young Ducat, pale and blood-streaked and wrapped like a mummy in Don Gullett’s blue sleeping bag, dispelled any feeling of lighthearted adventure; every person in the group now knew that a dangerous grizzly was somewhere in the blackness around them. In the flickering light of the blazing tub, Dr. Olgierd Lindan looked at Ducat and asked for a first-aid kit, but it developed that no one in the rescue party had brought one. “I have one,” Robert Klein said; he handed it to Lindau, and in a few seconds the doctor from everywhere was applying makeshift compresses and tourniquets to the boy’s gaping wounds. The surgeon, John Lipinski, stood by, ready to take over the case as soon as the first-aid was completed. Like everybody else, Lipinski had heard Roy Ducat beg them to find the girl, but he knew that the search for the other victim would have to wait. He was thinking about the triage system of medical priority under which the doctor’s first responsibility was to those who can be saved, while those who were beyond help were left to die or treated last. He had learned about triage on a brief tour in Vietnam, and he did not spell out the system now, knowing how brutal it would sound to civilians, but in his own mind he knew that they would have to tend to Roy Ducat first and worry about the girl when Ducat was out of danger.

“Find something to carry him on,” Dr. Undan said over his shoulder, and Monty Kuka and one of the girls ran to the trail cabin and began pounding on the door. When it gave, the frightened girl rushed in and grabbed a butcher knife, but the calm young Kuka remained outside and began ripping down a set of bedsprings that had been nailed across the outside of one of the windows to keep out bears. It came off neatly, and several of the men took handholds on Ducat’s sleeping bag and lifted him gently to the middle of the springs.

The weakened boy kept asking about the girl. “Where is she?” he said. “Did you find her yet?” Dr. Lipinski told him to rest and save his strength, and a small party of stretcher bearers under the surgeon’s direction began climbing up toward the chalet. Among the group were the geologist Robert Klein, heaving and straining at the awkward load, and his wife, Janet, shining her flashlight under the men’s feet so they could find their way.

At the beginning, the stretcher party took the wrong direction, and the Kleins, who had hiked the trail three times earlier in the evening, could not seem to convince anyone that a mistake was being made. Instead of proceeding along the meadow for fifty yards or so before following the trail directly up to the chalet, the stretcher party blasted straight up the lava flow, on the principle that the chalet was above the trail cabin and so the most direct route must be up. “Look,” Robert Klein said, “we’re not on the trail,” but in the general confusion and terror of the night, no one seemed to hear. Soon they began coming to big boulders, locked into the lava, and soon after that they reached a lip of basalt that was impassable. They had to retrace their steps back down the slippery lava flow to the trail, and by the time they came into sight of the chalet, a ten-minute carry had extended into a half hour. The boy was taken inside and placed on one of the dining-room tables, and Dr. Lipinski rolled up his sleeves to go to work.

∞

About half of the original rescue party had remained below at the trail cabin, some of them in the expectation that they would start searching for the girl, others simply to give aid and comfort to Joan Devereaux, who was frantically trying to raise headquarters on her pack-set radio. At first, the 22 year-old woman had pushed all the wrong buttons in her confusion, and when she finally got the technology figured out, she could not remember the park’s radio procedure. Rangers had given her a single quick run-through on the tricky equipment, but establishing radio contact in the middle of the night was not a normal part of the work duties of a ranger-naturalist.

Joan remembered that the headquarters call number was 72 0, and she said over and over, “seven two oh, seven two oh, this is Granite Park Chalet. We have a bear emergency here.” When this brought no response, she began repeating the park’s emergency code. “Code three emergency!” she said. “Code three emergency! Bear attack! Bear attack! There’s been a bear attack up here at Granite Park Chalet!”

Again there was no answer, and the excited young naturalist regretted her lack of familiarity with the equipment that she had never expected to have to use.

“Keep trying,” somebody said. “I know their receivers are on because of the fire watch.”

“Code three emergency!” the young woman said, and suddenly a clear “ten four” crackled across the still night air in response. The speaker identified himself as Seasonal Ranger Bert Gildart, said he was on his way over the Divide in his patrol car, and instructed Granite Park Chalet to stand by while he contacted headquarters and tried to put the two in touch with each other. Minutes later, another voice, deep and calm and reassuring, came through the speaker. It was Fire Control Officer Gary Bunney, speaking from the park’s fire headquarters, known as the Fire Cache, and asking what the trouble was.