The Grizzly's Rage To Live

Old Two Toes had 18 toes. The two that gave him a name came off in 1898 in Ricks' trap. While the toes still held, leg, trap, chain and anchor tree were dragged by the grizzly for a quarter of a mile through down timber. Then he ate his leg loose. Like all animals, he was absolutely honest with himself.

It might have become harder for him to get at natural foods with an injured foot. It might have been something as simple as revenge. Anyway, Old Two Toes began to work Montana's Swan Valley, the Mission Mountains and the Flathead Range. He would come swinging down into the bottomlands, keeping to the edge of the spruce, moving his nose, moving his ears, now wading pigeon-toed into the tall meadowgrass feed while the fat animals began to call to one another; now rising to stand like a man, so quick and imminent you can't imagine it. He gouged into herd after herd of cattle and sheep, and ran down horses in the brush.

In the spring of 1903 Old Two Toes emerged in the melt and killed 15 calves and three cows before the valley had even greened. One of the cows died alongside her calf after a struggle in which her neck was broken; a brave animal. The rest died alone, feeling terror in their dim way. Those that survived Old Two Toes had sledgehammers crush their skulls just above the thin bones of the nose after a long drive to slaughterhouses in the Midwest. The reward on Old Two Toes went up, bringing in a new man, Kline, to the high country. Kline found the grizzly one day in some timber by the river and shot him. The wounded bear circled and pulled Kline down, tore his leg all to hell before he passed out, then broke the leg and bent the trapper's gun barrel back on itself. Like all animals, he was absolutely forthright in his dealings. Kline lived but did not see Old Two Toes again.

The Fergusons probably came closest to him next. They happened on his tracks while hunting up missing horses near timberline in the Missions. They too had lost stock to Old Two Toes and were eager to shorten up his trail. They were closing, about to follow fresh-laid claw prints through a pass when they spotted other bad company: smugglers bringing Chinese south from Canada along the mountains. Because Chinese were bringing around $1,000 a head in Butte and Anaconda, the Fergusons figured the smugglers would be quick to protect their investment. So they hid in some mountain alder and agreed to turn for home. Lawmen and a rancher posse that included the Fergusons finally caught the smugglers because they were running rustled stock back north after bringing Chinese south, but Old Two Toes took 55 more range animals that year before he slept.

Other men, ranchers mostly, saw the grizzly over the many years he raided. Some got off a shot or two at him, and some, like Hawkey and Moore, claimed a hit after seeing the bear bawl and swipe at himself. But Old Two Toes kept on moving, going toward wherever it was he wanted to go. Belieu was another trapper the ranchers financed for a time. He set out after Old Two Toes with his two prize dogs, and the bear disemboweled the dogs before Belieu ever saw him. The trapper swore certain revenge, but he never got it. The bear went to sleep that fall high up where the little creeks start, and the snows covered him for half a year while Belieu cursed and killed wolves and then disappeared.

Old Two Toes never was old. When he was killed in 1906 in a panic of pitching horses and rolling rocks, he was middle-aged—between 15 and 20, it was figured. Many of his teeth were broken from chewing Ricks' trap and he carried at least four bullet wounds along with his other scars. His life among other bears was unknown: with whom he mated, whether or not he might share berries in a good August, how he felt about things when he died.

The Blackfeet and their brothers the North Piegans and the Bloods believed that a special spirit existed within Real Bear and they left it mostly alone. But the white men came and sheared the West with their slow-moving animals. The bear race was systematically killed and forced toward those lands no one had any other use for—not even Indians—and it was then that a few native Montanans like Old Two Toes, Peg Leg, Slaughterhouse and Old Rough house fought their lonely fights. White men were hoarding all the meat that remained on the range, so competition over flesh was inevitable. But several stock-killing bears seemed rarely to eat the results of their work, making interpretation of their motives more difficult. Peg Leg, like Old Two Toes, stepped early into a trap and lost a paw before he began raiding. Slaughterhouse and Old Roughhouse were named for the distinctive styles with which each swatted bleating woolies around, their true personalities unguessed, their real purpose untranslated. I've lived in some of the places Old Two Toes scourged 70 years back. Certain traditions remain. For about three years I stayed in a cabin near Meadow Creek Gorge at the northern end of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Then I lived in a log shack by the Swan River between the Flatheads and the Missions. Grizzlies tore up the Meadow Creek cabin three times, the Swan River shack twice. The refrigerator door in the Swan cabin was crumpled nearly double like Kline's gun barrel. The grizzlies broke windows and broke preserve jars, tore apart soup cans and chewed holes in kerosene tins. After I put a lodgepole barricade with sharpened spikes over all the doors and windows at the Meadow Creek cabin, a bleeding bear slammed straight through its side. It may not even have been angry. I don't know. I was always gone when the bears came, and when I returned there were squirrels, jays, wood rats and, once, deer inside the cabin eating.

A she-bear lived with her two two-year-old cubs along Bruce Ridge, which leads into Lost Creek. When she came at me her mouth was red and dripped spittle and she was flanked by her big offspring. They all whuffed each time their legs grabbed the ground. I clenched far into myself and screamed "Nooooo, nooooo," realizing as I did that I had seen her running at me before in a dream, with the sun coloring her back just so and her cubs on either side, the wind-bent white pines on the ridgeline, the gentians underfoot, and I had screamed "Nooooo, nooooo," awakening the woman next to me.

The bears—what had they known of this?—turned aside. After two more mock charges by the young alone, again so close I could smell nothing except them, they lumbered away, and I, full of heat and unguessed hormones, was walking after them, yelling threats—invulnerable. Stepping on bright metal, I discovered that I had hurled an antenna, with which I had been trying to locate radio-collared mountain goats, at the she-bear. This had not been in the dream, or premonition, or whatever it had been the first time the bears exploded in my mind. Now I looked up from the metal and the bears had vanished. I understood then that I was, like all animals, absolutely alive, possibly in ways I did not fully understand.

So there is still competition for food and space in what is known as grizzly country: cabin break-ins, garbage strewn about, encounters on the trail. But there has not been much grizzly country and there have been few grizzlies of any note since the turn of the century. Montana bears these days are mere flashes in the pan, one-shot deals. Worse, with only a few hundred Real Bear left in the lower 48 states we've hardly enough to keep heads and humpless rugs snarling from our barroom walls, much less good stories to tell while standing beneath them, much less again the chance to stride through grand spaces. It makes you wonder if there hasn't been a change in the nature of the beast. Are bears still made of the same stuff? While whittling down a race from many thousands to a few hundred it is a fairly routine matter to weed out those traits that make for brawlers, activists or free-thinkers—enemies of the state. There is a more dreary explanation: it is the same critter but there are too many roads, too many pickups with gun racks, too few hole-in-the-wall hideouts for an outlaw to put together a long string of successes.