This story, “Terror in the Cassiars,” appeared in the April 1963 issue of Outdoor Life.
John Baumgardner was saying to me, “You know, these grizzlies ain’t much. Back home, lots of people think they’re the top trophy of the whole business. It don’t make sense. I’ll hate to tell everybody I shot mine while it was eating grass like some nearsighted cow in a pasture.”
John had something there, I had to admit. Earlier that day he’d killed his first grizzly. I had killed one in Alaska the previous year; now I’d taken another on the first day of the northern British Columbia hunting season. Nothing much had happened; we shot, and down they went. That second bullet, which our guides urged us to shoot into prostrate carcasses, seemed to me a superfluous precaution.
Now, after finishing supper, we were sitting in the cook shack recounting those small anecdotes so dear to the heart of the hunter. Suddenly, from outside, came such screams and frightful roaring as I hope never to hear again.
Thus began the most terrifying hunting adventure of my life, and — ironically — our first thought was that the whole thing was a big joke.
I had hunted in Alaska the fall of 1961, and had collected, in addition to a very beautiful grizzly pelt, a handsome caribou and a 70-inch moose (see “Bulls Along the Slana,” Outdoor Life, March, 1962). Among the trophies I had wanted was a Dall ram, but I fell one day and damaged the ligaments of my right knee so badly that any further climbing was out of the question. I wound up that expedition in river-bottom hunting where all movements were horizontal.
The notion of bagging a ram, however, came back to haunt me after I returned to Ville Platte, Louisiana, where I publish a weekly newspaper. My knee healed ever so slowly. While I could eventually function fairly well on the level, I began to realize that serious mountain climbing would long be out of the question.
Nevertheless, the yen for a ram persisted. I finally convinced myself that if the mountains were easy, the rams plentiful, and my luck good, I could hang this lovely trophy in my game room. The search for easy ram hunting was pressed relentlessly. Books by famous hunters, magazine articles, correspondence with Outdoor Life‘s Jack O’Connor — all were grist for my mill.
By the process of elimination, the fabled Cassiar Mountains of northern British Columbia emerged as a logical answer. Through this seldom-penetrated land trot the gorgeous Osborn caribou, ponderous moose, Stone rams, goats, and apparently more grizzly bears to the square mile than any other place on earth. There are mountains, also, but they’re not too formidable. A man can ride a good horse to the crest of just about any of them. Cassiar outfitters like to say they never use packboards; horses can be brought right to the fallen game.
I booked a hunt with Frank Stewart whose hunting ground covers an 80-mile-square area southwest of Watson Lake, a small Yukon town just north of the British Columbia border. The choice was a happy one, and I have no regrets. Frank and his wife Anna run a good outfit. They offer wonderful food, excellent guides, reliable and well-broken horses. So far as I could tell, none but Frank’s own parties invade the game fields we hunted.
Within 24 hours of my leaving home, a Canadian Pacific Airline plane was easing me down on the Watson Lake field. Here Stewart had us met by B.C.-Yukon Air Service people, and soon thereafter one of their remarkable single-engine Beavers was transporting four hunters and all our gear to an unnamed lake some 35 minutes to the southwest.
Two of my companions were Dr. Clyde Potter and Dr. C. L. Irvin of North Carolina, who had flown to Watson Lake in Dr. Irvin’s plane. The third was Dr. Bob Speegle of Garland, Texas, whom I had met during the flight from Vancouver. When we landed at Stewart’s base camp on the lake shore, we were introduced to four more hunters: Alex Vigh and Tom Paugh of Akron, Ohio, and John Baumgardner and Buck Deise of Baltimore.
Deise and Baumgardner had driven up in their car, a good plan if you have the time, enabling them to bring great amounts of equipment including two rifles each. This business of two rifles was to play a highly significant role later, but it’s probably just as well that I didn’t know about that in advance.
The plan was for us all to spend the first night at base camp, fanning out in groups of four the following day to hunt from a series of jack camps. All the horses were rounded up that afternoon and herded into a small log corral to guarantee they’d be available next morning.
There were a couple of salt blocks on the ground, and spirited competition developed among the horses for these dainties. Pretty soon the brutes were lashing out with their sledge-hammer hoofs, biting and kicking something fierce. I began to suspect that anybody who climbed aboard one of them would soon have a widow back home. Things got so rough that Frank finally decided to turn most of them out, hobble a few, and later round up any that strayed too far.
Everybody hit the sack early. For a long while, I lay there listening to the jangle of horse bells, the clumping of hobbled animals, and the intermittent thud of hoofs against belly or flank of a trespasser.
I must have been dozing when a shot made all of us jerk upright in our sleeping bags, wondering what in the world could have happened. Presently Frank stuck his head into the tent.
“What you shoot?” somebody asked. “A bear?”
“Naw,” he replied, “a horse. I found one near the corral with a broken leg. Must’ve got kicked bad. Had to shoot him.”
That episode cost Frank about $200. Good horses come high in the northland. Next morning they hitched up one of the other animals and hauled the dead one about 300 yards into the brush. Nobody knew it then, but that dead horse was destined to play a major role in the startling events that lay ahead.
By the time we’d finished a big meal next morning, the pack and saddle horses were ready. It was remarkable how docile they’d become. Some wag speculated they were simply grief stricken over the loss of their late associate.
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Soon mounted up were Ohioans Paugh and Vigh and Carolinians Potter and Irvin. Accompanied by their guides, cooks, and wranglers, they disappeared into the bush, and I never set eyes upon them again.
Now I’m the type who worries about certain things. I’m haunted especially by the idea that my rifle scope might get knocked out of alignment. For this hunt, I took a Browning .270 fitted with a 4X Redfield scope in stoutly anchored Buehler mounts. In addition to encasing the gun in a full-length saddle scabbard, I had built a plywood box that protected it completely. The only trouble was that getting the rifle out of its little coffin was something of an undertaking, because the cover was held on by screws. This box was another important element in the drama that was shaping up.
On a hunt such as this, a great deal of a hunter’s satisfaction depends upon his guide. I have killed fine trophies with guides I didn’t like, and much of the pleasure was lost. On the other hand, I’ve drawn blanks with guides who were congenial, and such hunts linger fondly in memory. I wondered what guide Stewart had arranged for me.
He turned out to be an Indian named Andrew Cigar. As somebody said in Hamlet, “I shall not look upon his like again.”
Completely outfitted, including boots and chaps, Andrew must weigh 120 pounds. He stands about five foot three, a frail-looking wisp of a man. But no Louisiana fox squirrel can race up a walnut tree any easier or faster than Andrew hotfoots it over a mountain. Constantly puffing on homemade cigarettes, he could actually outwalk our horses, and neither sweat nor draw a deep breath. In the field, his vigilance was constant, his efforts to please, tireless. Frank told me that Andrew’s father, in his day, could run down moose or caribou on snowshoes. Poor Andrew; maybe he was born too late. In the old days, he couldn’t have missed being one of the great chiefs.
One thing is sure: my peerless guide never bored anyone with idle talk. In fact, he said very little, and at first I could hardly understand a word. Whenever he tried to tell me something, he seemed to be asking a question. His voice was so low and sibilant that words became blurs.
Andrew is possibly the most forgetful person I ever met. Frank says he loses everything he has, but it never seems to worry him. Once, though, it worried me a little, for what he lost was three of us for several hours.
It happened one day while we were shifting camp. Andrew was in the lead, trailed by three packhorses, and then by Doc Speegle, me, and Frank, in that order. Doc stopped to adjust his saddle. It was a pretty spot, and Frank wanted to get a picture of us on the trail. While Frank took photos, Andrew kept right on moving with the packstring.
Speegle assumed his animal would surely follow the horses towed by Andrew. After a while, though, we realized we were no longer in contact with our pathfinder. Frank began cutting back and forth, trying to pick up the packhorse trail. Pretty soon we were picking up our own trail. Finally, after three hours and Frank’s firing of as many rifle shots, we heard the distant report of Andrew’s old .30/30. We finally came upon him two valleys and two mountains farther along.
He had simply never looked back and so never realized we were no longer following. He had heard Frank’s shots but supposed they were by some of the other hunters, since he assumed we were with him. When we finally caught up, Andrew was mighty doleful. He would shake his head and mutter, “Tree guys, all on hoss, can’t follow man with packstring.” There was something hilarious about the situation, but Andrew had us pegged, all right.
On our first day of hunting, the little Indian took me to a high saddle overlooking a densely wooded valley. Somehow he had lost his binoculars, and I had no choice but to lend him my old 6X Wollensaks. After all, if anybody knew what to look for, my guide was certainly the man. Andrew kept fiddling with the eyepieces and making constant adjustments. I began to doubt he could see with them at all. I had brought along, in addition to the binoculars, a 20X Bushnell scope through which I peered unsuccessfully at distant mountains.
Anyone who has hunted the Dall sheep ranges will be disappointed at the relative scarcity of Stones. They just aren’t very plentiful, at least not where I was. And to make things tougher, Stone sheep are hard to see. Their mottled bluish coats blend so well with their rocky homeland that unless the sheep are moving they’re difficult to pick up at any distance. But snow-white Dalls stick out like sore thumbs.
As in most hunting, luck plays a potent role in the quest for Stone sheep. Man and ram must meet, and this meeting is much more easily accomplished if the hunter happens to be on the right mountain.
For example, Doc Speegle hunted from dawn to dusk. He was in great shape and roamed the mountains with the intensity of Captain Ahab looking for Moby Dick. On the other hand, John Baumgardner’s pursuit of his trophy was far more limited and much more laborious. Yet within the first week of hunting, John and his guide, Peter Jack, came face to face with eight full-curl rams at about 30 paces. The beautiful creatures just stood there while John fiddled with his jammed rifle; they seemed unable to believe their eyes.
Finally he got a cartridge into the chamber. Then he missed the first shot at the big, dark leader. The sheep flushed like a bevy of quail, but John finally brought down a beauty at about 100 yards. It was a perfect 40-inch head, a dream ram. Peter Jack said he’d never before seen so many big rams at once, so close, and so unafraid.
Well, as Andrew and I sat overlooking that valley, I felt anything but lucky. In fact, I started wondering if Andrew was goofing off on me when he rather casually remarked, “See grizzly come this way.”
“Where? Where?” I exclaimed, but my guide was silent. After a time he said what sounded like, “Cross creek; go in bush; maybe lose him.” He kept staring through the binoculars toward an area about a quarter mile below.
I had begun to think bruin was lost for sure when Andrew said, “You see, without glasses?” From the expression on his face, I gathered the bear had now come into view.
All at once I made out the unforgettable form of a good grizzly. He was moving into the open on the slope of a small ravine.
“Oh, yes, I see him now,” I said, extending my right hand to indicate the beast’s location. Swiftly Andrew reached out and caught my arm, bringing it back to my side.
“No point finger,” he warned. “Bear not like; go away.” This was news to me, but I believe him. I’ll never point my finger at another grizzly.
“You want take?” he asked. I assured him I did, but that I didn’t like long-range shots at a bear.
“Leg not too sick? Can make it down?” Andrew inquired. And I realized for the first time that he knew I was handicapped in getting around. I told him I felt sure I could manage the slope. It wasn’t too steep.
Warning me not to start any rocks falling, he led me on a circular stalk until we overlooked the ravine. The wind was right, and we sat there awhile watching bruin graze about 60 yards below us.
The grizzly looked big; all bears seem big, especially the unshot ones. His shaggy coat rippled to the movement of his body. Soon the grizzly moved into the wide open. He was broadside now, and I couldn’t possibly expect a better shot.
The 150-grain Nosler, powered by 58 grains of No. 4831 powder, caught him in the near shoulder. He gave that curious catlike flip so typical of bears, and rolled to the bottom of the little draw.
“Shoot again,” Andrew said. I did, but it didn’t seem necessary.
In life, the beast had looked big to me, and he actually proved larger than most bears killed on this hunt. But in death, a grizzly seems to shrink. You can hardly believe that the animal at your feet is the vast, fluffy creature you shot at. The mountain grizzly that looks big even when he’s dead is truly a big bear; I was soon to face such a beast.
We’d been hunting over a week, covering beautiful sheep country and seeing lots of sign, when my luck ran out. I was leading my horse down a steep incline when that darned knee went out from under me, and down I went. I knew in a flash that for me the hunt was over. Next morning my knee looked like a football, and I got Andrew to take me back to base camp.
One of the first things I did after getting there was to carefully clean up my .270 and pack it back into that plywood coffin. Don’t ask me why. I have hunted a lifetime and certainly know the rule: keep your weapon handy as long as you’re in hunting territory. Let’s just say I was disgusted. I had nothing to do but hobble from tent to cook shack, sweating out the plane to take me home.
A couple of days later, Deise and Baumgardner rode in with their guides Stanley Stewart (Frank’s 17-year-old son) and Peter Jack, a most engaging Indian. Both had rams, and that morning they had shot grizzlies. They figured on heading out next day to moose and caribou country.
Their arrival brought the total camp population to seven. Mrs. Stewart and her 13-year-old boy, Larry, Stanley’s brother, stayed there all the time. With me out of action, Andrew had gone to help Frank find a ram for Doc Speegle.
I’d exhausted the camp’s supply of magazines and novels, and it was a genuine pleasure to have hunters around and hear them tell how each head of game was bagged. We were sitting around the cook shack chewing the fat after supper, and Baumgardner — as I related back at the beginning — was giving me his unenthusiastic views on grizzly hunting. Mrs. Stewart was also in the cook shack at the time, and so was Buck Deise. Larry Stewart, delighted to have a playmate, had engaged his brother Stanley in a water fight. They were playing “Indians,” sneaking around the building and dousing each other with cans of water. Peter Jack stood just outside the cook-shack refereeing the proceedings.
The shack and the entire camp area occupy a rise about 20 feet above the level of the lake on which the planes landed. Right at the cook shack the terrain drops off into the thick brush along the lake shore. Down in this bottom, about 30 yards from the kitchen, was the garbage pit.
Suddenly we heard that unearthly screaming.
“Bear! Bear!” somebody was shouting, and we could hear Peter Jack yelling, “Get a gun! Get the gun!” Combined with all this racket was an ominous, indescribable growling.
My first thought was that this was part of the game the boys were playing. Baumgardner told me later that he had the same thought, but all of us rushed to the doorway.
It just didn’t seem possible. Straining up that slope for all he was worth was Stanley. His eyes looked big as saucers, and he was the color of old wax candles. The muscles of his face were distorted almost beyond recognition.
Right on his heels was the reason — a grizzly. The beast’s long snout was extended like a mad hog, and he was roaring and coughing with rage. Twice we saw him swat at the laboring youth with a mighty paw, blows that would have felled a horse. They missed his back by inches and gave him precious split seconds.
There is no doubt that what Peter Jack did in the next few seconds saved Stanley’s life.
Grasping the situation at once, like a football line-backer diagnosing a play, Peter jumped into the doorway. Grasping the top of the door with his right hand, he swept the rest of us back into the shack with his left arm.
“In here, Stanley. In here!” he ordered. Then as the plucky lad plunged through the opening, Peter slammed the door in the grizzly’s face.
We were all huddled right at the door, expecting to have it smashed open at any second with the enraged beast slapping us around like rats in a trap. And, indeed, he could easily have done that. The only weapon in the shack was a small ax.
Luckily for us, doors must have been beyond his comprehension. It must have seemed to him that Stanley disappeared into a rock or hillside. We squeezed around the doorway for a little time, peering through the cracks for a glimpse of our enemy. Slowly Peter Jack swung the door open just a mite, and we all tried to peep out. The great bear, most unlike a cow in a pasture, cleared the rise and lumbered right at us, roaring mightily. Again Peter slammed the door almost on his snout.
We didn’t feel too secure. Not only did the cook shack have a thin door, but it also had the upper part of its end walls and all of its low roof made of thin, transparent plastic. Nevertheless, the grizzly made no effort to force the flimsy barrier.
We didn’t open up again for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and this time there was no sign of the grizzly. His tracks were plain enough right at the cook-shack door, and so was his dung where he had charged Stanley up the slope. The maddened brute had voided his bowels as he slashed at the back of the terrified youth.
Stanley, pale and shaken, told us what had happened. He was hiding from Larry down in the brush, planning to catch his younger brother unaware and splash him with water. Unknown to Stanley, Larry had tired of the game and had returned to the cook shack.
When Stanley heard something move in the brush nearby, he thought it was his brother. Next thing he knew, a bear was facing him at about 12 paces. The young man ran, and the grizzly came for him. None but a strong and powerful man in top physical condition could evade the rush of a mad bear. As it was, Stanley barely reached sanctuary; a few more bounds, and the race would have ended differently.
With the coast clear, we hurried for our rifles. As I mentioned earlier, mine was carefully packed away in its box with the lid screwed down. So John Baumgardner lent me one of his rifles. John had a Winchester Model 70 in .300 H.&H. and the same rifle in .264 caliber. He handed me the .264 and a handful of cartridges; those big cases looked like elephant stoppers.
We lined up on a ridge overlooking the garbage pit and strained our eyes for some sign of bruin below. Then we tossed down sticks of stove wood and all the loose rocks we could find, but nothing happened. Darkness was closing in now, but sleep would not come easily while a dangerous animal prowled the area. Larry and Mrs. Stewart brought their bedrolls from their tent to the cook shack and barricaded themselves as best they could. Peter and Stanley took turns at guard duty atop the cache platform throughout the long night.
John, Buck, and I slept in the same tent, our rifles loaded and cocked beside our sleeping bags. It gave me a weird feeling to see the beam of Peter’s flashlight sweep the tent as he stood the first watch. Darkness never really is complete at that latitude in mid-August; I wondered what we would have done if that vast, shaggy head had come through the tent flap. Finally I dropped into an uneasy sleep.
Next morning things seemed better. There’d been no sign of bear. We began discussing how big he was. About half of us, including me, thought he was of only average size — a seven-footer, maybe.
“Heck no,” maintained Peter Jack. “That’s the biggest bear I ever saw. He stood high as Stanley’s elbows.”
With everything apparently back to normal, the guides rounded up some horses and shortly after breakfast pulled out for the caribou flats with John and Buck.
Around noon, Frank Stewart rode in from the hills to pick up food and supplies for Andrew and Doc Speegle. When he heard the bear story, he could hardly believe it. Nothing like this had ever happened to his hunters, or to anyone else around there so far as he knew.
Before heading back to the pack camp, he rode down the little valley to check on the remaining horses. I was standing at the door of my tent when he reappeared; he was plainly upset.
“That grizzly’s feeding on the dead horse,” he called to me. “When I rode by there, he came at me. Had no gun or anything. He chased me away, and he’s gonna kill somebody.”
“Let’s go get him then,” I replied. He nodded.
Rather than take time to dig out my .270, I picked up John’s .264 and stuffed a bunch of cartridges into my pocket. Funny, the things a fellow will do. I’d read the labels on the boxes of John’s factory-loaded cartridges: “Designed for thin-skinned game.” I had practiced many hours and shot hundreds of rounds through my .270, but had never shot John’s or any other .264.
As I say, though, those big, bright cases looked fierce, and he’d a big Balvar 8 mounted up top. I kept recalling that comforting theory: “All you got to do is hit ’em right; the bullet size don’t matter.”
Mrs. Stewart and Larry were alerted to our plans and watched me hobble off with Frank. He was carrying Doc Speegle’s .300 Weatherby loaded with 180-grain Noslers. Doc was out trying to prove up a wildcat he had made — a .270 necked down to 6.5 mm.
It didn’t take long to reach the place. The dead horse was at the edge of a fringe of timber. About 30 yards behind the carcass rose the side of the mountain. Between us and the dead horse was pretty much open space grown up in waist-high willows. We eased to within 75 yards of the carcass but couldn’t make out the bear. I looked through the scope and thought I could make out a brownish area about 10 feet to the left of the horse.
Presently there was no doubt about where the grizzly was. From his bed in the willows, he rose to his full height, dark and malevolent under the spruces. Off a ways to my right Stewart said, “For God’s sake make this one good.”
I could see the bear plainly in the scope. I don’t think he made us out; he hadn’t seen us coming, and the wind was wrong for him. Only his ears had warned that something was amiss. A solitary spruce about eight feet tall was directly in front of me. I caught its trunk in my left hand, settled that .264 carefully across my arm, centered the crosshairs between his big paws, and touched her off.
There was an awful blast, and the bear dropped, vanishing into the timber. He didn’t act hit.
“Frank,” I yelled, “this isn’t my rifle, and he doesn’t look hit to me. If he shows anyplace, bust him.”
“What rifle you got?” he called back.
“It’s that .264 of Baumgardner’s, and I never shot it before.”
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed.
There was nothing we could do. We stood there gazing into the thickets. Presently Mrs. Stewart and Larry came out to meet us. Frank sent Larry up the tallest spruce he could find, but the boy couldn’t spot anything that looked like a grizzly. All at once Anna said, “Look Frank; there he is, just at the bottom of the mountain.”
Sure enough, he was in plain view, moving ever so slowly through the light timber. We hadn’t seen him, because we kept watching the flat, thinking he might circle and come at us from the rear.
At the crack of the Weatherby, the old rogue flipped over and came down the mountain. Again, all we could do was wait. Frank’s notion was to let him stiffen up before going after him in the brush.
As we stood there, John Boring came up to us on horseback. Boring, an old hand in the game fields, is Frank’s top packer. We told him what the trouble was, and he immediately spurred his horse forward, his .30/30 ready in his hands. He rode straight across to where the bear had rolled, and soon we heard him call out.
“You fellows with those big guns, come here. I’ve picked up his blood trail.”
“This is my job,” Frank told me. “You don’t have to come.”
Make no mistake. I was scared stiff, but I said, “I want to.”
When we got to Boring, he pointed to the bright-red blood on the trees and foliage. We hadn’t moved far when Frank spotted a piece of flesh. He and the packer decided it was a chunk of kidney. That meant the bear was as good as dead, but still might be a terrible engine of destruction.
Slowly, slowly, we advanced a step at a time, following the wet, red patches. I, for one, expected at any moment to hear that savage roar and the blasting of all guns at close quarters.
We had traveled perhaps 100 yards in the timber when we reached a little opening. There lay our grizzly, stretched full length on his belly. He had been the proud king of the Cassiars, and he’d feared no man, but his time had run out.
We discovered that Frank’s shot tore a hole big enough to shove a baseball bat through the grizzly’s lower back. And to my great satisfaction, John’s .264 didn’t miss him after all. The 140-grain Power-Point caught him in the rib cage; it probably penetrated about six inches before blowing up in his right lung. We found pieces of metal almost on the surface of the hide.
This wound, though inevitably fatal, was momentarily insufficient. Why didn’t he charge? He certainly wasn’t afraid, and he’d have been tough to stop in those willows. Also hard to understand is why he left the timber, where he was invisible, for the open mountainside.
Frank estimated the bear’s weight at 750 pounds or better. The hide, laid out on the ground, measured 112 inches across the forepaws and 101 inches from snout to tail — a veritable monster as mountain grizzlies go.
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My friend Roy Ostermiller of Cheyenne’s Frontier Taxidermists is doing a half mount of this trophy for me. And in the years to come, when I gaze upon that ferocious figure leaping from my wall, the magic of memory will recall anew those thrill-filled hours and friendships made in the distant Cassiars.
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