Free Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olsen Page B

Waltons that the big bears had been coming to Granite Park for years to clean up on table scraps, and that they were probably chasing around the chalet at night wondering where their regular handouts were.
    By the end of the first week of July, regular guests were arriving, and the crew of the mountainside resort was settling into a routine, but not without complications. There were a few cases of cabin fever, mostly after still, breezeless nights, when the young girls would have to face something that few Americans had encountered: total silence, not the silence that comes to the city dweller when he goes to bed at night against an unnoticed drone of automobile engines and generators and house noises and the million ordinary sounds of civilization, but the absolute, utter silence of the wilderness. Even the Waltons were disturbed at first by the stillness; lying in their bed at night, they could almost feel the heaviness of the quiet air, and they found themselves hoping for a light breeze, or the howl of a coyote, or even a honk from an automobile on the Going-to-the-Sun Highway four miles distant Nobody was surprised when one of the sturdy young girls of the kitchen staff took off one morning, hiked seven miles to Logan Pass on the Highline Trail, hitchhiked to Many Glacier, and then walked twelve miles over Swiftcurrent Pass and back to Granite Park. “Now I feel better,” she said, and everyone understood.
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    By the middle of July, the hot summer sun had sliced several feet off the snowdrifts around Granite Park Chalet, and soon the trails were completely clear and visitors were arriving by the dozens. Mrs. Anderson, a stickler for cleanliness, was frantic about the garbage. Each night there was more of it, and the little incinerator could no longer handle the load. Tom Walton punched holes in the side of a fifty-gallon drum and tried to burn garbage that way, but each morning he would go outside and find that the bears had arrived and knocked over the drum to dine on the unburned residue. He talked the problem over with Mrs. Anderson and their boss, concessioner Ross Luding, and soon the garbage was being handled in the old manner. About fifty yards back of the chalet, across a shallow gully and up on the side of a hill, there was a cleared place in the weeds that marked where leftovers had been placed in the past, and each night all the garbage would be put in a pail and carried out to the spot. As though they had been waiting in the wings for their cues, the bears began to show up regularly just after dark. For a while, the dramatis personae changed from week to week, and the Waltons suspected that they were being visited by nomadic bears that had just left hibernation and were still on the road. Two small buckskin-colored grizzlies stayed around for a few days, but they soon gave way to others, and in those middle weeks of July there was only one constant: Each morning, there would be the fresh tracks of a big bear and two cubs.
    Then, for a few days, a consistent pattern seemed to develop. A large buckskin grizzly and an equally large dark bear would slowly walk up the narrow trail along the lava flow and begin to pick at the food with great dignity shortly after dark. While they were dining, sometimes backing off to woof and threaten each other, a small light-colored bear would run at top speed straight up the draw that led from the campground below and catapult itself into the garbage area like a character out of the animated cartoons. Invariably, the smaller bear would meet the same fate: One of the others would knock him flat on his back with a single swipe. Squealing and screeching, the small bear would usually run back down the draw at the same high speed, but now and then it would simply move off a few feet, lie in the snow, and watch till the two big bears had eaten their fill. Then it would rush into the dump, grab a few scraps, and disappear down the draw toward the Granite Park campground.
    For a