About birthdays and bears

G. GEORGE OSTROM / For the Hungry Horse News

It's hackneyed now, but a few years ago the following expression brought a good laugh. Friend Elmer Searle said, "I thought I was wrong one time … but I was mistaken." He also quoted a former supervisor who liked to say, "I could be wrong … but I think so."

You just read my sneaky lead to a painful admission. In last week's column about that initial 1936 trip to The Park, I said Glacier's birthday was May 10. Kindly alert readers realize old George was a day off … and forgive him. I hope!

Several people who read last week's column were curious about the mention of my father having a "bad bear problem" a few years prior to that first Glacier visit. Dad did not enjoy talking about the incident, so I'll have to partly rely on dim recall.

My father was not without work for a long time during the depression because the Anaconda Company kept operating Flathead Mine after the 1929 financial collapse; however there were a couple of extremely lean years. During that time, one of the temporary jobs Dad found was range riding for a large livestock operation which held grazing rights on thousands of state and federal acres in the Thompson River country. Keeping track of the stock required checking herd movements, possible rustlers and wild predators.

Like most folks in Montana during those times, Dad's crew did not consider eating out of season venison a great crime. With lack of refrigeration, fresh beef was not available, especially in the dingweeds, and as I recall, Dad and his "pards' were not supposed to eat any cattle they were guarding. But! With an abundance of deer, the problem wasn't too difficult to solve.

Above their range camp, the men set out a salt block and when it was time to get meat, one of them would ride up in the evening and sit in a makeshift blind. On Dad's last turn he tethered the horse nearby and made himself comfortable to wait for a fat young buck to come along; however, what came along was a large female black bear with two cubs of the year. Maybe Dad dozed off awhile, but somehow he suddenly found himself with bear cubs behind him and the mother in front, at the salt block. She must have gotten a whiff of human because the big bear charged while making "whoofs' that sent cubs up a handy tree.

When he threw up his rifle, Dad discovered the front sight was gone. Apparently knocked off in the scabbard and not checked recently. Telling about it later, he said the bear was close enough he could hit it without the sight and with no options … fired. At the shot she stopped and stood up. Dad saw a white spot on her chest, pointed the rifle and fired again. The bear collapsed a few feet away.

For reasons he would soon regret, Dad decided to catch a little cub as a pet for his kids. He was young and certainly didn't know much about bears. The cubs were high in a yellow pine, which still retained good climbing branches reachable from the bottom. Up he went and when close to the lowest cub, reached out his left hand to grab it by the neck scruff. Not a good plan!

The cub's razor sharp claws went in at the shoulder of Dad's shirt and sliced through flesh to below his elbow, with deepest slashes in the upper arm. Dad came down the tree shedding a lot of blood. Painfully wrapped up the wounds with shreds from his shirt and rode down to camp. Someone there thought the best treatment was to pour iodine in the slashes, bandage the arm and get Dad to a doctor.

I don't know how soon they got him out of the mountains but it was only a couple of days before his arm was violent orange and swollen like an over-inflated inner tube. Perhaps it was a doctor in Plains who said he had "iodine poisoning," should be hospitalized in Missoula and suggested getting him on the next eastbound N P train; however, as I remember, my granddad took him on the long rough trip to Missoula in a Model T. There was whispered talk among adults at my grandparents ranch that my Dad might lose his arm … or worse. The family endured several very somber days before we got good news.

And that is why Logan E. Ostrom would not stop so his kids could feed the bears in Glacier Park.

G. George Ostrom is a Kalispell resident and a national award-winning Hungry Horse News columnist.