Night of the Grizzlies, by Jack Olsen

This proved a surprisingly apt book to read during a pandemic. Here, the dangers of leaving the house are made vivid in present in the form of grizzly bears that will maul and eat you. And, less facetiously, this is a book about the way an impending crisis is spectacularly mismanaged to the point of brutal disaster affecting total innocents.

Night of the Grizzlies is a nonfiction account of August 13, 1967, when two nineteen-year-old women were attacked and killed by two separate grizzly bears in Glacier National Park--after decades of absolutely no fatalities and very, very few attacks period. While that night seems from the outside like a total aberration, Olsen notes that it kicked off an overall escalation in grizzly attacks, and that it didn't come out of nowhere at all. The tragedy was essentially manmade, a clusterfuck of a Park Service that refused to pay any real attention to dozens of reports about an unusually aggressive bear, somehow thought it was a good idea to set up a campground in the middle of a grizzly bear feeding ground, tacitly allowed/encouraged employees to regularly feed the grizzlies, and permitted park overcrowding that steadily reduced the bears' habitat and frayed at their nerves. The end result was the horrible, fatal mauling of two girls, a shitstorm of media attention that partly blamed them for their own demise, and a lot of dead bears--all of which could have been avoided if people had not decided, as people usually do, that they should have unfettered access to everything all the time. When you insist on owning nature, nature will eat you. Or, more accurately, eat the people who naively believed that the situation was under control.

Olsen is a journalist--the book began as a series of articles for Sports Illustrated--and a true crime writer, and Night of the Grizzlies feels, in essence, a bit like a true crime book: a careful assemblage of the facts and statements surrounding a tragedy, with particular attention paid to who is to blame for all this. It's very earnest--empathetic towards both animals and people, though justly angry at and impatient with some parts of the Park Service--and I found that appealing. The writing is extremely readable but also often clumsy, with way too many epithets and comparisons like "silence pressed down on the place like a giant bowl of mushroom soup." (The epithets are basically at their worst when we're constantly referring to someone as "the Indian." Usually they're just awkward or inadvertently funny.)

Olsen's nature writing is clearly done with a lot of love, and he really evokes the beauty of the park and shows a great affection for (and knowledge of) bears--there's a lot of great, endearing info about their habits and characteristics. He juggles his large cast aptly, and in addition to parceling out blame and indicting complacency, he also make sure to record instances of heroism and people rising to the occasion. Parts of this are enraging--it probably won't surprise anyone to learn that women, in particular, tended to get ignored or dismissed when they pointed out the increased bear aggression, nor that some people blamed the dead girls for having possibly incited the bears by wearing cosmetics (my wife, on hearing this: "So even when a woman gets eaten by a bear, it's because of what she was wearing?")--but it's not reported in an enraging way. He basically just relays the events and opinions of the people involved, with his own judgments mostly reserved for the summing up the book does at the end.

Here's a sample of irritating park rangers:

A few days later, a ranger executive arrived in Kelly's Camp on a routine visit, and Joan Berry, who had been away from the camp on the bear's most recent intrusion, took him to one side and said, "We've got a sick bear, a crazy-acting bear around, and I wish you'd do something about it."

The official asked for a description of the animal, and Mrs. Berry told him that it was a dark grizzly with a big, emaciated frame and a thin, elongated head. "I'm sure that he's dangerous and somebody's going to get hurt," the schoolteacher said.

The ranger executive chuckled at the remark. "Oh, Joan," he said casually, "is it really that bad?"

Mrs. Berry was annoyed and repeated emphatically that the bear was acting abnormally and must be considered a menace.

The ranger official said, "Well, when his illness makes him go berserk, we'll do something about him, and made it plain that the matter was closed. His attitude made Mrs. Berry seethe inside. In all the decades since her family had homesteaded on the north shore of Lake McDonald, they had almost never reported a troublesome bear; they preferred taking their chances on coexistence. Kellys and grizzlies had been living together amicably since the 1800s, and Mrs. Berry felt that the ranger official ought to know that and ought to have taken her complaint more seriously.

and

[He] wound up telling his story to a ranger who seemed almost bored by the news. "That bear's been chasing people all summer," the ranger said, "and a little last summer."

"What are you gonna do when it catches somebody?" Price asked.

"Well, I don't know," the ranger said bemusedly. "He hasn't caught anybody yet."

It's a sad and infuriating story, but it's told well. Even when his writing is weak, Olsen is mostly a strong storyteller, and it doesn't surprise me that Wikipedia noted this as surprisingly influential for a lot of action-fueled horror fiction. If you don't mind your nature writing mixed with some real life horror, or if you're interested in how mismanagement creates tragedies, or if you just like seeing how people respond to problems and crises, and the stylistic flaws are forgivable to you, I'd definitely recommend this.

Warnings: gore, medical procedures, various instances of sexism and mild racism, dead people, dead bears, a badly injured bear cub. A puppy is endangered but lives.