Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olsen Read Free Book Online Page A

chances on coexistence. Kellys and grizzlies had been living together amicably since the 1800s, and Mrs. Berry felt that the ranger official ought to know that and ought to have taken her complaint more seriously.
    ∞
    The next weeks were spent in a state of tension. The grizzly came back periodically, and the residents of Kelly’s Camp drove about with rifles and shotguns on the seats of their cars and kept careful watch on their children and their pets. The Park Service, badgered by dozens of complaining calls from the families of the camp, installed a big, green trap, but the strange grizzly ignored it. Several times, rangers arrived with guns, but they were always a few minutes behind the wary animal. It seemed to have a particular fear of automobile or truck engines, a fear that was not accompanied by a similar response to marine engines. Several times, the bear walked right up toward motorboaters trolling the edge of the lake, but the instant an automobile engine would come into earshot of Kelly’s Camp, the grizzly would scamper off.
    One morning, in the last cool hour before dawn, an elderly resident of a camp a few miles down the lakeshore heard a noise exactly like a thumbnail screeching across a violin sounding board. Jim Hindle jumped out of his bed and grabbed his gun; he thought he knew exactly what was making the sound-he had been hearing about a peculiar bear for weeks-and he wanted to put an end to it once and for all. Hindle dashed out of the bedroom toward the screeching sound, and sure enough, two panels had been neatly slashed and bits of light screen were flapping in the morning breeze. Hindle could see the bear, a tall, skinny grizzly, standing about ten feet away, but when he poked the barrel of the gun through the hole in the screen, the bear moved behind a butane gas tank and out of the line of fire.
    Jim Hindle had been coming to Glacier National Park for nearly four decades, or about four times as long as any of the park rangers, and it infuriated him that this misshapen grizzly with the collection of weird habits was still at large to rip open his screen and endanger both him and his wife. He shoved the slugloaded, double-barreled shotgun under his arm and pushed open the door to the outside to solve the problem, just as he had solved any number of bear problems around the camp in the past. His right hand was missing, but Jim Hindle was not afraid of mischievous bears, whatever their dimensions.
    Outside, it was still half dark, but Hindle could see a portion of the bear as it ran behind a tall fence on the other side of the lawn. For an instant, the bear rose to its full height above the six-foot fence and exposed part of its head and shoulders, but before Hindle could fire a single barrel, the animal was off and running. There was no possibility of taking a shot at the fleeing shadow; the camp was full of people, including many children, and a wounded grizzly was the last thing Jim Hindle wanted. He waited a few minutes for the animal to return, but then he heard a dog barking excitedly a mile or so up the lake, and he knew that the bear was making tracks.
    At nine that morning, Jim Hindle knocked loudly on the door of the nearby Lake McDonald ranger station, but the ranger was away. The angry man telephoned his information straight into headquarters, and there was no time lost on cordial conversation. Hindle was a well-known critic of the National Park Service; for forty years he had been telling the park how to get by, and for forty years the park had been ignoring his every suggestion. His latest suggestion was that something had better be done about this crazy grizzly before somebody was killed.
    Park officials answered the retired schoolteacher’s latest blast by sending a part-time employee, a college student, to conduct an interview. “He wanted to know if I was sure it was a grizzly,” Hindle told friends later, “and I said, ’Son, I’ve seen more grizzlies than you have