Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
F ifty-eight-year-old Kim Cyr knows all about island bears, boats and beaches. He's spent a lifetime prowling the rainforests, clearcuts, salmon streams and bays of Vancouver Island. He's a prime example of the quintessential guide of yesteryear, the rugged, taciturn local thoroughly schooled in woodsmanship, do-ityourself experience and years of trial and error. He doesn't know his territory by topo lines and GPS maps, but by boot leather and boat rudder, by wind and currents. Bears, grouse, geese, salmon, halibut, trout, ducks, deer, clams, elk, seals, bass, oysters – he's seen it all and eaten most of it. When Kim suggested we abandon the Vancouver Island Guide and Outfitter's five-star log lodge and its extravagant meals in favor of sleeping under a tarp and eating oysters on a beach, I signed up. The western edge of Vancouver Island is the first stop for wind and waves that sail unimpeded down from Alaska, across from Japan or up from Hawaii. It's no sea for open 14-foot boats, no matter how deeply hulled. V eteran Vancouver Island guide Kim Cyr scans a low, grassy meadow for black bears. Previous pages: Cyr and the author prepare to steam a batch of freshly gathered oysters. The Traveling Spor tsman B lack bears, the most successful ursine in North America, thrive from the fetid swamps of Florida to the oak woodlands of New York, the prickly pear deserts of Arizona, the dry pine forests of South Dakota, the oak savannas of California, the boreal forests of Alaska and the temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. On the largest Pacific island this side of New Zealand, an isolated population of black bears has evolved into a unique subspecies, Ursus americanus vancouveri, the Vancouver Island black bear. Taxonomists report that black bears on the island retain more of their ice-age characteristics than do mainland bears, thanks to some 10,000 years of isolation. Bear skeletons found in caves on the 12,410-square-mile island have been aged to 10,000 years. Those early, postglacial bruins were larger than today's animals. This is in keeping with a phenomenon known as insular dwarfism. Virtually all island species gradually decline in overall body size in relation to limited resources. The smaller the island, the smaller the animals. Before going extinct, the Cyprus dwarf elephant had slimmed down from the 10,000 pounds of its Asian ancestors to a lithe 440 pounds. Vancouver island bears haven't had time to go to such extremes. Despite being smaller than their ice age progenitors, modern Vancouver black bears are hardly diminutive. Thanks to an abundance of vegetation, berries, salmon and seafood, most are larger than their mainland cousins. They still square 61/2 to 7 feet. They are blocky with broad skulls and black pelts, often with white chest stars. More importantly to some hunters, Vancouver Island bears are beachcombers. They can be hunted from the water.