Night of the Grizzlies (16 page)

Sitting on the ground in the pulsating light from the pot of fire, surrounded by shadowy forms and the menace of an invisible grizzly, Joan Devereaux seemed to become momentarily distraught. She picked up the microphone, brought it almost to her lips, and cried out, “A mauling! We had a mauling!”

Again the calm voice came from the other end. “Granite Park, you are overmodulating. Move the mike away from your mouth!”

But the naturalist only seemed to become more nervous, and she shouted once again, “A mauling! We had a mauling!” “Ten four,” the calm voice returned. "You had a mauling.

What do you need?"

Now the nervous girl seemed to calm slightly, and spacing out her words, but still almost shouting, she said, “We-have-a-doctor. We-do-not-need-a-doctor. We-need-medical-supplies.”

“Ten four,” the calm voice said. “Tell me exactly what supplies you need.”

Dr. Lindan took the microphone and began listing what was needed. “Sutures, transfusion apparatus, plasma or whole blood, morphine, gauze...”

Ranger Bunney interrupted and explained that he was not getting the transmission clearly, and Dr. Lindan realized that the combination of his thick European accent and the weak radio signals were confusing the issue. He handed the microphone back to the naturalist and repeated the list to her for relay. When the medical information had been transmitted, Devereaux informed headquarters that there was a possibility that another person had been dragged away by the bear, and Bunney told her that help was
en route
.

“All right,” Dr. Lindan said to the group when the last “ten fours” had been exchanged and the radio again fell silent, “now we go and find the girl.” Tom Walton said, “Wait a minute, let’s think about it.”

Everyone looked toward Joan Devereaux. She was a slip of a girl and barely out of college and no more experienced than anyone else in the party when it came to the special problems of that night, but she was wearing the dark-green uniform of the National Park Service and therefore she was de jure the leader. She did not shrink from the task; as the daughter of an Army officer, she knew about chains of command and ladders of responsibility, and she thought for a moment and announced flatly that no one was going to head into the black night and look for the girl; they were going to return to the chalet and wait for professional help. Dr. Lindan said he did not understand. “We must save the girl,” he said. The ranger naturalist replied that it would be a fool hardy move when they did not even know in what direction she had disappeared.

Hurried conversations broke out. Father Connolly sided with Dr. Lindan. “There’s no time to stand here arguing,” the priest said. “The girl might be bleeding to death while we talk.”

The naturalist said that there was no point in risking anyone else’s life when help was already on the way. Father Connolly whispered to his Indian friend, “Is she right? Is it possible the bear could attack us all?”

“Everything is possible with bears,” the Indian replied. Father Connolly shook his head in perplexity. He felt a strong impulse to go after the girl, but he did not want to be responsible for any unnecessary loss of life. He asked a few others how they felt, but no one seemed to know his own min d. Only Dr. Lindan stood his ground; he wanted to head into the night at any cost. Tom Walton pointed out that their flashlights were dimming and they could barely see; most of their illumination was coming from the tub of fire tended by the priest and the Indian. Surely it would be better to wait until help arrived and the search for the girl could be carried out in a calm, orderly manner.

Led by Walton and the naturalist, the party turned back toward the trail that led to the chalet. The priest and the Indian had fitted the fire tub with wire handles, and thus they were able to carry it between them without burning their hands or arms. Everyone stayed as close as possible to the fire as they picked their way along the trail, but they had hardly gone fifty feet when Walton suddenly stopped and motioned for silence. They all heard the same sound. It was coming from the left, up on the lava flow, and it sounded exactly like the low woofing noises that the grizzlies had been making all summer to intimidate one another at the garbage dump. “For God’s sake, that’s the bear!” somebody said.

“Yes,” said Tom Walton. “That’s the sound they make when they’re mad.”

Dragging and straining at the tub of fire, the party double timed up the narrow trail toward the chalet.

Nancy Walton had been sitting on the balcony with some of the other women, listening to a strange sound in the, night. It sounded like a low moaning. Someone had suggested that it might be an owl, but someone else pointed out that owls were rare around Granite Park. It was only later that Nancy and the others realized they had heard the moans of the grizzly’s victim.

Roy Ducat was placed gently on a dining-room table, and as the two doctors, Lindan and Lipinski, looked him over, another man came out of the darkness and introduced himself as a physician from Malmstrom Air Force Base. When Joan Devereaux heard the news, she breathed a silent prayer of thanks. Not only were there three doctors in attendance, but Dr. Lipinski’s wife was a registered nurse, and except for the fact that there was almost no medical equipment on the premises, there was every chance to hope for the boy’s recovery. As for the girl, Joan told her companions once again what she had been telling herself ever since she had first realized that a young girl was missing. The child was suffering, perhaps dying, but Joan pointed out to the others that a lunatic bear was on the loose, and it would be suicidal for a search party of chalet guests to go out into the black night armed only with a bucket of fire and some kitchen knives. Headquarters had radioed that a helicopter would arrive in twenty or thirty minutes with medical supplies and an armed ranger. The rescue operation would simply have to wait. The young naturalist knew that she had a responsibility not only to the young girl moaning in the woods, but also to the sixty-five people in the chalet who looked to her for direction. She stood firm. And Tom Walton stood firm with her.

While the doctors were working on Ducat in the light of hand-held Coleman lanterns and flashlights, Father Tom Connolly and his Indian friend, Steve Pierre, were trying to recruit a rescue party. Dr. Lindan had stepped back as the surgeon, Lipinski, had taken over the medical procedures, and at the quiet approach of the priest, Dr. Lindan reported softly that the boy was going to survive, and he would like to begin on the rescue of the girl as quickly as possible. Father Connolly agreed and went to round up others. In a few minutes, a party of eight or ten would-be rescuers was ready to depart, but Joan Devereaux intercepted them and told them that a rescue helicopter and an armed ranger would be on the scene within minutes and ordered them to wait. The priest did not want to lose any time; some of the rescue party turned to Tom Walton for support, but Walton said, “No, we’re not going. There’s an armed ranger coming right in. There’s nothing we can do now. The bear could eat us all up. We ’re not going!”

To himself, Walton remembers saying, “OK, we’ve got to be realistic about this. There could be fifty of us going down there, and the bear could gobble us all up. And we have no idea where she is. We don’t even know where they were sleeping. And all we’ve got to defend ourselves with is the fire-and if the bear’s really riled up, the fire won’t stop him. Sure, this man is a priest, and maybe he’s got some protection from above, but I’m not so sure that I do. I have no reason to believe that the bear won’t eat me and everybody else.” And once again, he said aloud, “You’re not going! Nobody’s going down there! It’s stupid!”

With the helicopter due any minute, Walton and the naturalist hastily impressed about twenty chalet guests into duty preparing a landing site. Several days earlier, a helicopter had landed in a flat space behind the chalet, but that had been in broad daylight, and now it was the densest of nights. Joan set some of the guests to work building fires to mark the comers of the site, and Walton ordered others to bring buckets of water in case the fires got away. Several young guests grabbed axes and chopped down a wooden hitching rack that represented a hazard to the helicopter, and others draped warning lanterns on a few big stakes and pipes that could not be moved.

The landing pad was almost ready when the throbbing lights of the helicopter came into sight over the mountains to the south, and Joan took up her station at the two-way radio. She heard a flabbergasted fire guard saying on the air, “Hey, they’re building fires down there!” and the comforting voice of Ranger Gary Bunney replying, “That’s OK, that’s OK, that’s OK.” As the helicopter moved into position about 500 feet above the landing site, a man came out of the shadows and told the girl ranger that he had flown helicopters and would be glad to help talk the aircraft in. Joan nodded her thanks and radioed to the pilot, “You can see the four fires. Try to land right in the middle of them. It’s exactly the same place where you landed the other day.”

The helicopter began settling down for the landing; the four corner fires blazed high into the sky, and a wide circle of guests pointed flashlights upward. Suddenly the aircraft zoomed away, and Bunney’s voice crackled over the radio, “We can’t see! All that light makes a reflection on the dome and blinds us.”

“What should we do?” the naturalist asked.

“Have them point the flashlights down on the ground,” Bunney replied, “and put some people in front of the fires to block out the direct light.”

Joan issued the new orders in top-sergeant style that surprised herself, and within a few minutes, the helicopter was in another descent, assisted by advices from the former helicopter pilot on the ground and relayed by the girl naturalist. As the aircraft came within range of the fires, embers swirled into the night air, and Walton and his crew of fire watchers rushed with their buckets to track down each tiny glow. Then, with a gentle bump and a whoosh of settling air, the helicopter was down. Even before the rotor had stopped turning, the onlookers could see a man in ranger uniform open the door and run out, cradling a rifle in his arms. Willing hands reached into the aircraft and lifted the medical supplies, and everything was rushed into the improvised operating room.

In the darkness and confusion, someone had mislaid the needle for administering intravenous blood, and when Dr. Lipinski heard that the needle was missing, he recommended that the boy be airlifted immediately to the hospital thirty air miles away in Kalispell. Ducat’s wounds were serious but not critical; muscles and tendons had been torn away in his arm, and there were deep lacerations on his legs and back, but the only danger to his life was the loss of blood. Still in Don Gullett’s blue mummy bag, the 18 year-old former lifeguard from Ohio was lifted gently to the seat alongside helicopter pilot John Westover and whisked away in the night. All this was completed in ten or fifteen minutes, and at last Joan Devereaux turned to her superior ranger and said, “Now we’ve got to go find the girl.” Gary Bunney said, “You stay here .and handle the radio. I’ll take the men and go down.”

As the posse of searchers disappeared on the trail to the cabin below, the weary naturalist went inside the chalet dining room to put the radio back on the air. Dr. Lipinski told her, “Let me know when they bring in the girl,” and disappeared in the direction of his room. A few women sat around sobbing; their husbands had gone off with the search party. An older woman clomped halfway down the stairs and asked what was causing the gassy smell. “We’re making coffee in the kitchen,” said Eileen Anderson. “That’s probably what you smell.” The older woman nodded her head, as though this simple explanation accounted for the helicopter sounds and the medical apparatus in the dining room and the sobbing women and the general air of emergency. She turned and headed back to her bed.

Joan was sitting at one of the dining-room tables, fiddling with the controls of the Motorola radio when a man sat down alongside. She turned and recognized the young Air Force doctor from Malmstrom. “I’m sure you’re aware of this already,” he said, “but I want to tell you one thing.”

“What’s that?” the ranger asked. “The boy was in bad shape,” the young doctor said gently, “but the girl is going to be much worse.”

Joan Devereaux nodded her head and told him that she understood. Off in a corner, a man was saying to his wife, “I wouldn’t go down there. If those damned fools want to go down there and get caught by a bear, let them go. I’m not gonna risk my life.”

His wife said, “Well, at least be quiet about it.”

Another man was explaining in vivid detail how the rescue should be carried out, dosing his explanatory lecture with the words, “That’s exactly the way it should be done.”

“Then why aren’t you out doing it?” a voice asked.

“Are you kidding?” the man asked. “My husband shouldn’t be down there,” a sobbing woman said. “His heart isn’t good. I’m afraid they’ll be bringing him back on a stretcher.” Another woman moved over to comfort her, and the two sat with their arms around each other, crying and dabbing at their eyes. Joan turned the volume control to maximum and walked to the window. Far down the slope, she could see the glow of the washtub, surrounded by bobbing points of light like fireflies. A muffled shouting came up the mountain, as though a football game were in progress a mile away, and Joan realized that the men were making noises to scare off the bear. She turned to the radio and told headquarters that the rescue operation was under way.

Sometime between two and three in the morning, Denise Huckle found herself awake and listening intently to a splashing sound that was coming from the shallow water alongside the camp at Trout Lake. Squirt pushed himself up on his front paws and peered into the night toward the sound, and when a low growl began to issue from the puppy’s throat, Denise grabbed him and stuffed him under her sleeping bag. She thought she could make out the silhouette of a bear, and she did not want Squirt to antagonize the animal. When the sounds seemed to move out of the water and down toward the original camp, Denise awoke the others and told them what she had heard. After a few minutes of silence, the Noseck brothers scrambled out and rebuilt the fire, by now only a bed of dull embers. They set the sack of cookies on the edge of a driftwood log, fanned up the fire once again, and returned to their bags. Within a few minutes, the bear had walked to the edge of the camp, grabbed up the cookie bag in a huge paw, and disappeared. Paul Dunn, the deepest of the sleepers, was up now, and the five frightened campers decided to lie awake, feed the fire, and wait for dawn. It was 3 o’clock; first light would be about 5:30 or 6. Paul Dunn inched his sleeping bag closer to the roaring fire but inched it back when his toes became too hot. Once again, the bear began splashing in the shallow water below the camp, and almost simultaneously a woofing sound seemed to come from the woods above. For a few minutes, the companions of the night discussed whether bears attacked in packs or couples and finally decided that they did not. By 4 a.m., the noises had stopped, and most of the campers had pulled the bags over their heads and gone back to sleep.