Island Black Bears

Spot-and-Stalk Hunting at its Best.

- John Haviland

Pacific Ocean rain storms drench Vancouver Island off the southern coast of British Columbia, Canada. With mild Pacific weather, the island’s rain forest grows in a dense thicket. Moss envelops giant cedars; blackberry brush slithers over logs and rocks, and the brushwood of birch, fir and alder lean over to hem in everything. Black bears roam that bush from sea level up into the snow-covered mountains, and every darkness and black stump briefly looks like a bear. The deepest shadows begin to stare back after a few days of hunting.

I hunted bears on Vancouver Island last April with Vancouver Island Guide Outfitters. The standard hunting methods are to stop at every overlook along roads to glass for bears grazing on the green grass of spring in logging clear-cuts or cruise the ocean inlets and bays in a boat to search beaches and estuaries for bears feeding on grass and digging up oysters and crabs.

The first evening out I rode along with guide Robert Lindores, a local Port Alberni boy, university student and hockey forward. Lindores drove for what seemed hours out of the valley up roads leading one onto another. We finally stopped and began walking up an abandoned road that turned into a trail tunneling through the encroaching forest. Grass had been cropped off, and piles of bear scat lay scattered along the trail, showing bears were there, somewhere in the dark.

We peeked around each bend in the trail. Ceaseless water tumbling down from rain and snow melt had worn a fissure into the bedrock deep enough to see into the earth. Lindores said he wanted to check the openings of a couple of logging cuts on up the mountain, and in a step he disappeared into the alders. The creek bottom was sort of spooky with the feel of night coming on under the setting sun and the roar of water limiting my hearing. Lindores returned with a shake of his head, and we walked back down the trail and then the road.