Julie Helgeson’s long night, Michelle Koons was dragged from her tent and killed by a different grizzly bear; and as a result, this night would never die, would always burn in the popular imagination.
It was speculated afterward by some that the bears had been attracted to the women’s menstruation, as if grizzly bears were land-sharks, magnetically pulled to a single drop of blood; and while it is true that bears and other predators can smell blood from great distances, it was highly unlikely that this is what led those bears to kill that night. The story expanded, first in news reports of the attacks and then through a sensational and popular book by noted true-crime author Jack Olsen published two years after, titled Night of the Grizzlies, and later in subsequent documentaries and films that borrowed the title (or variations of it) and certain details of the events that night.
Most recently a 2010 documentary, titled Glacier Park’s Night of the Grizzlies, revisited the attacks and interviewed survivors and park rangers who’d been there, making connections between the events of that night and the fate of the grizzly bear in the American imagination. In a sense, everything changed that night. Perceptions changed and policies changed. The story inflated into a myth that persisted for decades, floating in the margins of other attack stories, lingering also perhaps as a reminder that sexism perpetuates everything, even animal attack narratives.
Hegelson and Koons were, in essence, “blamed” for their attacks. Or at least that seemed to be what the stories were saying; and I wondered, as I prepared to play Stephen Haas, if anyone would ask me a question about Janey, about whether she was menstruating and if I thought that might have attracted the bear.
Part of me wanted to bait them a little, make obscure references to Night of the Grizzly, and see if the cub reporters would bite. Part of me wanted to know who’d done their research and who hadn’t. If they had, they’d know about Night of the Grizzlies. They’d know that these were the first fatal attacks since the park had opened in 1910. And they’d know that since those attacks, Glacier National Park has been the site of other attacks, some of them fairly recent. They’d know that, statistically, your chances of encountering a grizzly bear in Glacier were perhaps greater than they were in any other National Park. They’d know you don’t go to Glacier without knowing the bears are out there.
Q: Mr. Haas, if you knew there were bears in Glacier Park and knew the history of attacks, why would you choose to go there?
Have you seen the beauty of Glacier? It’s a spiritual place, man. You should go. I mean, there are dangers everywhere.
Sure, but aren’t you increasing the probability that you might be attacked by a grizzly bear when you hike or backpack in Glacier National Park?
I suppose so. But you’re also increasing the probability that you will experience something amazing, something so far from what you know in everyday life. It can reorder the way you think. It changes you. I guess that’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Again?
Sure. I mean, not like anytime soon. . . . Do you know, have they found the bear?
BEAR ORIGINS
To name something is to own it, to shape its identity through language and to control it. The grizzly bear’s scientific name is Ursus arctos horribilis, or the “horrible bear.” Even its origin is monstrous and mysterious, the beast’s very existence associated with terror.
When we describe a particularly gory accident or scene of violence, perhaps the death of someone who jumped into a tiger’s or polar bear’s cage, or even the scene of Janey Craighead’s death, we might describe the scene as “grisly,” a homophone that, at least for me, always conjures up an image of a “grizzly” bear. The word “grizzly” may descend from both “grizzled,” meaning “gray,” or old, as well as from the Old English, grislic, meaning
. . . “horrible, dreadful” from root of grisan “to shudder, fear,” with cognates in Old Frisian grislik “horrible,” Middle Dutch grisen “to shudder,” Dutch griezelen, German grausen “to shudder, fear,” Old High German grisenlik “horrible,” of unknown origin; Watkins connects it with the PIE root *ghrei- “to rub,” on notion of “to grate on the mind.”
I try it in a sentence: Stephen Haas shuddered with fear before the horrible, dreadful bear and the grisly scene that awaited him the next morning.
I BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND the way language might shape this moment, and perhaps how it continues to shape the second-day stories of this incident and others like it. But it is this last root meaning, this connection from Calvert Watkins, editor of The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, that has planted itself deep within me: this idea that the animal and its name, the sign and signifier, each mean to grate, to grind, and worry the mind. A scene, an image, a story is grisly and grizzly because it lingers, because it takes over your thoughts at times, lurking with others in the recesses of your consciousness. It is grisly because it never leaves, because it haunts you, attacking the quiet moments.
I REMEMBER AS A kid hearing about the attacks in Glacier National Park and, though I couldn’t find it in my research, I know I’ve seen a clip from some horror-movie adaptation wherein a monstrous rampaging grizzly attacks a woman in a mummy-style sleeping bag. He picks her up as if she is light as a leaf and throws her against a nearby tree. I can still remember the images, the scene playing out in my mind. And though this was something of a special-effects exaggeration designed to make the bear seem even more monstrous, it wasn’t much of an exaggeration.
After finally charging the camp in the early morning light, the bear dragged Julie Helgeson in her sleeping bag out into the brush, where she was quickly mauled and killed as her campmates listened.
The grizzly bear was that dark malevolent force—unseen, unpredictable, and unstoppable; and one of the last great predators in North America, one of the few species that we hadn’t yet hunted to extinction. Though bears and mountain lions have now made a comeback in many parts of the country, most of that hadn’t begun yet when I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s.
The Glacier Park bear’s behavior troubled park rangers and scientists because they hadn’t ever heard an account wherein the bear clearly seemed to be stalking and hunting humans. Bears weren’t supposed to act this way. They didn’t hunt people. Or at least they weren’t supposed to hunt people, not according to previous research. But both bears that night exhibited unusually aggressive behavior that was difficult to reconcile with what humans thought they knew about grizzlies in the park, proving ultimately how little we actually knew about the predators around us.
Native American cultures have long acknowledged the powerful symbolism of the bear, recognizing its wisdom, courage, power, and strength, as well as its unpredictability. Some cultures also see the bear as a healing maternal spirit with powerful medicine, a peaceful solitary mother figure who is, nevertheless, capable of great savagery and aggression when provoked or threatened. The bear is never just a bear. It is always something greater and more wild, more sublime and powerful than humans can perhaps ever fully understand.
Q: Mr. Haas, can you describe what you remember of the attack?
I don’t sleep very well most nights. I slip in and out. I hear things, you know. I always thought I’ d hear a bear coming, that it wouldn’t be like a shark attack that you don’t see or hear, that it would be like a tornado and sound like a freight train coming . . . but I didn’t hear anything until the bear was on top
