We Tracked Down a Killer Grizzly — and It Almost Ended in Tragedy

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This story was originally published in the November 1970 issue of Outdoor Life.
Harvey Cardinal had not a moment's fore-warning that it was his last day on earth. He must have realized that there was some risk in tracking a grizzly through pockets of very thick spruce. Guides with whom he had worked said after­ward that although he'd had no previous encounters with grizzlies, he had a deep respect for them.
But Cardinal was carrying a rifle that he considered adequate, an old .303 military Enfield. And if he thought about danger at all that cold January morning, he probably figured that he knew what to expect and could deal with it if it came.
Cardinal was 38, a Beaver Indian from the Moberly Lake Reserve southwest of Fort St. John, a town at Mile 50 on the Alaska Highway above Dawson Creek, in northeastern British Columbia. He had been a trapper, hunter, and guide all his life, working for other guides and outfitters in the area. Chunky of build, weighing close to 200 pounds, and about five feet 10 inches tall, he was a strong, husky woodsman, slow of speech and movement, not much afraid of anything except grizzly bears. Unmarried, he spent more time living off the Reserve than on it.
The evening before, Cardinal had gone to visit friends at the Doig River Indian Reserve, a Beaver community of about 30 families 50 miles north of Fort St. John. He had heard a strange story there.
The natives in that area hold rights to large trapline blocks, within each of which several families are allowed by law to trap. By contrast, whites generally hold trapline rights individually.
One of the Doig River Beavers, running his trapline in 40-below cold that morning, had come across the tracks of a bear.
The date was January 13, 1970. Ten inches of snow was on the ground, and for 10 days the temperature had stayed below zero, falling to minus 30 degrees or lower night after night. At that time of year and under those conditions, the bear should have been in winter quarters. The fact that it was out and prowling was something of a mystery to the Doig River people, and it stirred up more than a little excitement.
The reason will never be known for certain, but I be­lieve that the animal had not hibernated at all during the winter, perhaps because of mild weather. That part of British Columbia had experienced temperatures well above normal all through the fall and early winter, up to the first week in January, when the mercury plum­meted and stayed down for more than two weeks. I think this grizzly had not bothered to den up in the warm weather, and when the cold spell came he just kept on traveling, perhaps goaded by hunger.
The trapper who found the tracks was sure of two things: the bear was big, and it was unquestionably a grizzly. The claw marks in the tracks made by the front feet proved that.
Nobody in the isolated community at Doig River wanted anything to do with the maker of those tracks if he could avoid it. With few exceptions, the Indians of British Columbia prefer to steer clear of grizzlies.
Harvey Cardinal usually shared that feeling, but this was a special case. In midwinter the bear would very likely be carrying a good pelt, prime and unrubbed. Such a pelt, uncured, would be worth around $150 in hard cash. That was money a north-country guide with­out winter employment could use, and Cardinal made up his mind to go after it.
Shortly after daylight the next morning, Cardinal went to the place where the trapper had hit the grizzly tracks. He picked up the trail and followed it into an area of logged-off openings alternating with stands of aspen and thick young spruce. The snow was not deep enough to require snowshoes.
When Cardinal did not return at nightfall his friends at the Reserve began to worry. And when nothing was heard from him the next morning the worry mounted into real fear that the bear had attacked and injured or killed him.
Half a dozen of the Doig River men made up a search party and set out to investigate. They followed the tracks of Cardinal and the bear for two miles, across openings and through timber and finally into a tan­gled thicket. There they found what they feared they were looking for­ —— Harvey Cardinal's body.
It was a grisly scene. The ground around the body was tracked-up and bloodstained. The man's clothing had been torn to shreds. He lay on his back with both arms raised in a hands-up position-frozen in the bitter cold of the night. A fair share of the upper body had been devoured.
Grizzlies are notorious for their sav­age possessiveness and short tempers if anything threatens to rob them of food to which they have laid claim. The Indians knew that in all probabili­ty the man-eater was in thick cover nearby, perhaps only a few yards away —— watching, working up a murderous rage, getting ready to rush the entire party. There was nothing they could do for Harvey Cardinal at that point and no purpose in risking more lives. This was a matter for the police.
The searchers backed off, turned, and hurried for the road. They drove 20 miles south to the store and post office at the little town of Rose Prairie, where the nearest phone was available, and phoned their report to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at the Fort St. John post.
Because a bear was involved, the Mounties contacted the Fort St. John office of the British Columbia Fish and Wildlife Branch, where I am stationed as a conservation officer, and asked for a man to accompany them to the scene.
I was in the field that morning. Senior Conservation Officer Jack Mac­kill, a 20-year veteran with the Branch, took the call and agreed to go along.
Mackill and several police officers drove at once to the place where Cardi­nal had left the road to go into the woods. They were able to get a panel truck to within a half-mile of the scene of the killing, and they followed the tracks from there. Since they were dealing with a grizzly that had report­edly killed a man, Mackill was carrying a 12 gauge shotgun with slug loads.
The death scene was fully as hor­rifying as the Indians had described it. Cardinal's body lay in a thicket, torn and mutilated, and it was obvious that the bear had fed heavily on its victim.
Mackill and the police pieced togeth­er the story of the attack as best they could from the evidence in the snow.
Cardinal had been surprised and killed in a lightning-like attack that came from behind without warning. He had not had time to release the safety of his Enfield, and the leather mittens he'd been wearing were still on his hands. The bear had killed him with a single blow of a forepaw to the side of the head, a blow so savage that it shat­tered the entire skull.
Although the area was badly tracked up, the men could easily imagine what had happened. Apparently the grizzly had lain quietly in ambush, in thick stuff no more than a few feet away, perhaps hidden behind a log or a wind­fall as bears often do. He must have let Cardinal walk by. Then, once the man was past him, he had exploded in murderous fury, pouncing on his vic­tim in no more than two or three leaps.
I doubt that Cardinal felt the blow that killed him, and if he saw or was aware of the bear at all it was for only a fleeting instant.
Newspaper accounts, basing their conclusions on the fact that the bear had attacked from the rear, said the animal had deliberately stalked the man through the brush to kill him for food. But those of us who investigated the affair disagree with that version. Fred Harper, a regional wildlife biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Branch who went with me to hunt the grizzly down, summed up our collective opinions.
'The attack probably was uninten­tionally provoked by the victim,' Harp­er said. 'He got too close to the bear without knowing it was there, and it jumped him without warning. Though the animal was old and battle-scarred, I do not believe that any of its physical peculiarities were sufficient to have stimulated the attack.'
Fresh tracks around the body, ap­parently made 24 hours after the at­tack, indicated that the grizzly had been on the kill again that morning. Jack Mackill and the police made their investigation very cautiously, with guns in hand, knowing that the bear was probably lurking nearby and might de­cide to attack at any instant.
When they had put together as much of the story as possible, they covered Harvey Cardinal's body with a blanket and carried it out to their truck, keep­ing a sharp watch all around through­out the half-mile hike.
Fred Harper and I returned to the office in Fort St. John late that after­noon. Jack Mackill told us the story.
Nothing quite like it had ever hap­pened before in our part of British Columbia, and we all agreed that the bear had to be destroyed. What­ever the grizzly's reasons for attack­ing Cardinal, now that it had killed and fed on a human the odds were great that it would repeat the perfor­mance. We could not leave so danger­ous an animal in the woods.
Though this was the first instance of a grizzly turning man-eater that ever came to our attention, it was not the first time one of the big bears had attacked a man in our area. Luckily, the earlier affairs had turned out better.
Two such attacks had occurred be­fore my time at Fort St. John. In both cases the victims were big-game guides. In one incident the guide was on foot and escaped the bear by jumping over a 20-foot cliff. The other attack was more unusual, though the grizzly had good reason for what it did.
The bear had been wounded by a hunter and had gotten away. The party followed it, and it rushed out of thick bush and attacked the guide while he was on horseback. The man was cut up badly but he remained conscious and walked out for help. The bear disappeared and was never seen again.
A third attack happened in late Oc­tober 1968. The victim that time was an experienced hunter, Mike Marku­sich of Port Alberni on Vancouver Is­land.
Markusich was hunting moose east of Mile 135 on the Alaska Highway. In four inches of snow he came across grizzly tracks going into dense spruce. He had no bear license but decided to see where the animal was headed.
The bear had a moose kill about 300 yards ahead in the bush and had been feeding there. With its belly full, it had walked 50 feet away and lain down to keep watch, in typical grizzly fashion.
As in the case of Harvey Cardinal, the bear let Markusich walk by be­fore it moved. Then it struck.
Markusich neither saw nor heard the animal. His first warning of the attack came when the bear's jaws clamped down on his head and face from be­hind. Before it let him go, he suffered two jaw fractures and severe lacera­tions on the face, neck, and back. He eventually lost the sight in one eye. (I interviewed him in the hospital not long after the incident, and he could not speak. He had to nod or shake his head in answer to my questions.)
The attack lasted only seconds. Then the bear dropped Markusich and ran off. As far as is known it never came back to the moose kill.
Markusich was able to walk and drag himself two miles out to the road, where he collapsed and was later picked up by a passing motorist.
Jack Mackill and I investigated that case thoroughly. As far as we could determine, the bear had not been wounded earlier. It was protecting its kill and had attacked in blind anger when the man came too close.
At daylight the morning after Cardi­nal was found, Mackill, Harper, and I climbed into a big chopper rented from Okanagan Helicopters, a first-class fly­ing service operating over most of British Columbia.
Our pilot was Maynard Bergh, the service's 51-year-old base manager at Fort St. John, who has been flying copters since 1940, has logged over 7,000 hours at their controls, and is rated one of the best in the business.
In the seven years I have been sta­tioned at my present post, Maynard has flown me on many game counts and predator-control missions. Count­less times he has put me down close enough to a particular animal to enable me to classify it as adult or juvenile and even to determine its sex. If any­body could locate this grizzly from the air, hidden as it would be in dense cover, Bergh was the man.
We went armed for what we intend­ed to do. This was no hunt for sport, and we wanted weapons that would kill no matter what the circumstances might be. Harper was carrying a .375 Magnum Browning in Safari grade; Mackill and I had 12 gauge shotguns. Jack's was a Model 12 Winchester with the plug removed, giving him five shots without reloading. Mine was a Brown­ing over-and-under. We carried both buckshot and slug loads.
We flew directly to the scene of the killing, and a few minutes of circling revealed a line of bear tracks headed north. The grizzly had cleared out sometime during the night —— we guessed right after dark. He no longer had any reason to hang around in that neigh­borhood, and the presence of the In­dian search party and later the police had almost certainly disturbed him. He was traveling steadily.
Tracking the bear from the air, which was the only way we could hope to overtake him, proved very difficult. The terrain was level, as is most of that part of British Columbia except for creek draws and river breaks. The tree cover is aspen with very dense scattered stands of spruce. There are a few clearings devoted to grain crops and the grazing of horses (it's not cat­tle country), but the bear had avoided the clearings.
To follow the tracks we had to fly just above the treetops. The snow on the ground was light and fluffy, and at our height the main rotor of the heli­copter blew it into the tracks and filled them instantly.
The four of us strained our eyes to the limit. Try as we would, however, we could not follow the track for more than a few hundred yards at a time. Repeatedly it disappeared into thick spruce stands where we could see noth­ing, leaving us the frustrating chore of circling until we picked it up again.
About five years before, oil-explora­tion crews had cut seismic lines through, the area at one-mile intervals. If it hadn't been for those lines, 35 feet wide and straight as a fire break, I doubt I that we could have stayed on the track. We could spot the trail where the bear had crossed one of the lines, fly on to the next in the general direc­tion he was traveling, and pick up the track again.
It took four hours of this aerial tracking to cover eight miles. Probably the bear had made better time than we did. Finally his tracks went into a very thick isolated stand of spruce about a half-mile long and half that wide. We circled the 80-acre tangle twice, but no tracks came out.
We were sure we had the grizzly cornered at last.
We had decided at the outset that we would kill the bear from the air if we could. Mackill, Harper, and I strong­ly deplore the aerial hunting of any I game, but this was no time for ethics, or sportsmanship. We had come to I destroy a killer, a man-eater, an ani­mal that was a potential menace to any human he encountered. We meant to do it quickly and humanely.
Finally his tracks went into a very thick isolated stand of spruce about a half-mile long and half that wide. We circled the 80-acre tangle twice, but no tracks came out.
We searched the 80 acres of bush for 20 minutes without seeing a sign of the bear. Then, in a little opening below us, something big and brown moved out of one thicket and into another.
We had no chance for a shot, but at least we knew where the bear was and we had him on the move.
It took us 10 or 15 minutes to find him again. Twice during that time Bergh made a quick circle around the perimeter of the spruce to make sure the grizzly had not slipped out. Finally the bear moved into an open place, and we got our first good look at him.
To me, one of the most surprising things about that bear hunt was the way the grizzly reacted to the chopper. All the while we were tracking him I had visualized him running at top speed to get away, or turning on us, ­reared up on his hind feet, cuffing the air in a rage, daring us to come down.
But he did nothing of the kind. He showed neither anger nor concern. He just walked away, and even after we started shooting he did not hurry. I got the idea that he was too old to care.
The bear was on my side of the copter, and I quickly emptied both bar­rels of the Browning into him. When we autopsied him later we learned that although my buckshot had not hit a vital organ, some of them had pene­trated the body cavity to the stom­ach and would have killed the bear eventually. Yet he didn't react in any way to those two shots.
The grizzly walked out of sight into thick spruce again, but Bergh was di­rectly over him now, just above the trees, and in a minute the bear came into the open once more, on Harper's side 60 feet below us.
Fred's 300-grain soft-point from the .375 Magnum smashed into the grizzly's right shoulder and blew up in the lungs and heart. He fell, pushed himself ahead a few feet to the edge of a thick­et, and was dead in seconds.
Maynard set the helicopter down at the border of the thick stuff, and the four of us climbed out for a closer look at the killer animal we had destroyed. What happened next almost piled trage­dy upon tragedy.
Jack stepped down from the bubble and walked back along the side of the copter, checking the loads in his Win­chester in case the grizzly was not dead. We were taking no chances. We knew that more than one 'dead' bear had come suddenly to life.
Jack's mind was intent on his gun and the bear, and he didn't notice the still-spinning tail rotor of the helicop­ter. He walked into it and was knocked down as if he had been sledged.
Jack escaped instant death narrow­ly indeed. The spinning rotor struck him on the side of the head, in front of and above the right ear, knocking away a fragment of skull a half-inch wide and half again that long. His doctors said afterward that he came within a hair of being killed outright.
Jack was unconscious, and for a min­ute we thought he was dead. When we saw that he was still alive we gave up all thought of checking out the bear and loaded Jack back into the chopper for the half-hour flight to Fort St. John. Fortunately, the fragile rotor that had felled Jack wasn't seriously damaged and the chopper could still fly.
Mackill was treated at the Fort St. John Hospital and at 6 o'clock that evening he was put aboard a Canadian Pacific jet flight for Vancouver as a stretcher patient. Eight hours after the accident, surgeons in Vancouver General Hospital removed bone frag­ments from his skull.
Prompt help and medical skill saved Jack's life. He has recovered complete­ly and has since been transferred to Williams Lake, leaving me the Senior Conservation Officer at Fort St. John.
On Saturday, three days after the grizzly killed Cardinal, Harper and I went back to bring in the bear's carcass, for examination, to see whether we could learn the answers to the riddles in the case. We were assisted by half a dozen members of a Fort St. John snowmobile club headed by Grant Slat­ter. We drove to within two miles of the place in a light truck and went the rest of the way on three snowmobiles.
The weather was still bitterly cold, and the grizzly was frozen hard. We rolled the carcass onto one of the snow machines, took it out to the truck, load­ed it, and brought it back to Fort St. John to thaw overnight in a Forest Service warehouse there.
Grizzlies are notorious for their stench, which is hardly surprising, con­sidering that they feed on carrion much of their lives. By morning this one smelled so bad that we moved it out­side for an autopsy. Even there, the job was very unpleasant.
Harper and I did the autopsy in 25-below cold. We learned less than we had hoped, but we did prove that we had destroyed the right bear. Its stomach contained human hair, a piece of denim cloth from Harvey Cardinal's shirt, and not much else.
The grizzly was a very old male, weighing about 500 pounds and severely battle-scarred. The pelt was poor; its hair was only two or three inches long and was iced up on the back from exposure to snow and cold. The face was scarred, probably as a result of a fight with another bear, but the injuries were old and had healed. Part of the pad on the right-front foot had been torn off.
The teeth were badly worn, the two upper canines broken across and split in half. But apparently the bad teeth had not bothered the bear much, for we found two or three inches of fat under his pelt and he showed no evi­dence of having gone short of food. Hunger may have contributed to his attack on Cardinal, but it was not hunger of long duration. He had come through the winter in good condition.
Tests were made to determine wheth­er the bear was rabid, but they proved negative.
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About the only conclusion Harper and I could reach was that the grizzly had jumped Cardinal simply because the man got too close, and had fed on his kill afterward as he would have fed on a moose.
One question will never be fully an­swered: why was the bear out of winter quarters in such frigid January weath­er? But for that odd bit of behavior, the whole strange affair would never have happened.
Unusual as this case was, there is a lesson to be learned from it: grizzly bears are unpredictable, dangerous ani­mals, and humans who deal with them in any way had better keep that fact in mind.