Free Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olsen Page A

that someone had bought the wrong size. The incinerator would barely burn away the garbage of the eight or ten members of the chalet staff, and Walton told his wife that as soon as the guests began arriving they would have to figure out another system. They had been told to avoid dumping too much garbage out in the gully behind the chalet, because that would attract grizzlies, and grizzlies would be dangerous to the guests.
    The young couple had given little thought to the big bears in the general busyness of their first two or three days in the lonely place. Everyone had told them that they would see grizzlies galore during the summer; indeed, grizzlies were the main attraction at the chalet, and everybody for miles around knew it. When tourists would check in at the visitors’ centers at St. Mary and Rising Sun and Logan Pass and the ranger headquarters on the west side, they would soon find out that the most exciting trip in the park was the one to Granite Park Chalet to see the grizzlies.
    But after several days, the Waltons began to wonder, and a few veteran members of the housekeeping staff, mostly young girls, began to worry. “Tom,” one of them said one night, “we haven’t even seen a sign of a bear. Maybe they’re not gonna show up this summer.”
    “Oh, that would be awful!” said another. “They’re our main drawing card.” Drawing card or not, the bears could take their time so far as Tom Walton was concerned. He was not in terror of the big animals, but he entertained no illusions about them, either. Walton was a native of Idaho; he had been stomping around grizzly woods all his life and listening to tales about the great beasts, and while he knew that they were relatively harmless, he also knew that the house was four miles from the nearest road and had absolutely no medical facilities and not so much as a twenty-gauge shotgun to drive rogue animals away.
    By the third night, the chalet staff was intact, and everything was in readiness for the guests, who would begin arriving shortly after the official opening on July 1. It was nearly midnight; two of the girls were sitting around downstairs drinking a final cup of coffee, and the Waltons were almost asleep in their room just above, when the door to the outside began banging and a very annoyed Tom Walton climbed out of bed in his boxer shorts to secure the lock. He opened the door momentarily and flicked his flashlight beam down the back stairs and picked up the bright-orange eyes of a big animal. He realized that he was looking at a grizzly, standing on top of a snowdrift not twenty feet away, and he slammed the door and locked it. “Don’t go out there!” he shouted through the cracks in the floor. “There’s a grizzly outside.” The girls jumped up, ran out the back door, and began searching for the animal. Luckily it had fled. Trying to get back to sleep upstairs, Tom Walton wondered what would possess a person to walk out into the snows of midnight to try to get a close-up glimpse of a monstrous terrestrial beast of prey.
    For the next few nights, grizzlies would arrive, sniff around the chalet while everyone was asleep, and be gone by the next morning. The Waltons were fascinated by their tracks, especially the persistent track of an adult with cubs. Every morning, they would see the same signs, but no matter how late they stayed up at the darkened windows, bear watching, they could see nothing. Wearily they would tum in, and the next morning the tracks of mother and young would be clearly marked in the packed drifts. Once the couple mixed up a batter of plaster and water and tried to make a cast in the snow, but the process did not work. Soon there were so many tracks that one would lap over another as though the animals had been staging sprint contests around and around the chalet in the small hours of night, and every morning the Waltons would find tracks running right up to the front door. A couple of old hands explained to the