to come to Canada to shoot a bear. Hunters in British Columbia are categorized by residency. Resident hunters (British Columbians) may be awarded a license by lottery to hunt on their own, unguided, in the province. Nonresident hunters (outsiders) have to pay to accompany a guide outfitter, who has his own territory, a kind of hunting jurisdiction. Each territory has an exclusive license, which the outfitter has bought, allowing him to lead nonresident hunters in that area.
When Leonard began, he acquired the license for one guide area in what would later be part of the Great Bear Rainforest. Over the years he started buying the licenses for the adjacent territories from their aging guides for around $150,000, in Canadian dollars, apiece. The nearly guaranteed business meant that he easily got the bank loans he needed to make those added purchases. Leonard also doled out big money to buy and refurbish a number of boats for his hunting navy. Among them was a seventy-five-foot World War II patrol boat turned highliner fishing seine that Leonard named Pacific Grizzly. It would become the flagship of his flotilla—a live-aboard base camp with room to accommodate six hunters at a time.
Soon Leonard was in possession of five hunting territories with adjoining borders—an enormous region. Although many guides competed with him for business across British Columbia, Leonard’s area was special, offering hunters a scenic coast, fjords, freshly caught seafood for dinner, and some of the largest bears found anywhere on the planet.
“We had about ten thousand square miles on the central and north coast—from Cape Caution up past Klemtu,” Leonard recalled nostalgically. “We were allowed to harvest forty-two bears in five years and were getting $15,000 for the hunt and $10,000 for the kill. It was probably the highest-priced hunt in all of North America.”
For much of the 1990s, Leonard lived his dream. He found himself running a full-blown bear- and mountain-goat-hunting business, with several employees, in a northern rain forest paradise through which as many as fifty hunters passed each year. In that time he acquired a reputation as a rugged storybook character. His many exploits and brushes with death fueled the folklore surrounding his person. In one well-known yarn, Leonard was running full tilt through the rain-soaked forest in pursuit of a black bear. When he reached a bend in the game trail, he came across one of the largest boar (male) grizzlies he’d ever seen. Leonard hit the brakes to turn tail, but he slipped, sliding feet first right beneath the grizzly—between its front paws. At that moment, Leonard and the grizzly were face-to-face, just inches apart. For a second, the bear just stared at him, perplexed. And then, according to Leonard, “the bear let out the loudest, most horrible growl straight into my face. It was like a hurricane blast of the rankest fish smell you could imagine. I thought I was a goner for sure. But I guess I got the old man on one of his better days.”
After roaring point-blank at Leonard, the grizzly uninterestedly walked over him and ambled away, out of sight.
Leonard somehow managed to survive the worst that nature, the land, and the elements threw his way. But ultimately the challenge posed by that other force to reckon with on the planet—humans—brought about his downfall as a bear-hunting guide.
Though Leonard sat on a hunting mother lode, his business and livelihood also straddled environmental, cultural, and political fault lines that were on the cusp of shifting irrevocably. Although he couldn’t see it, his timing and location couldn’t have been worse.
“So Leonard’s got the greatest deal going for years,” Ian McAllister said, describing the situation to me earlier. “It’s like the Wild West. Nobody’s up there monitoring. He can do what he wants. It’s a pretty sweet deal. And then we come along.”
By the turn of the millennium, conservationists like McAllister and Captain Brian Falconer, who were fighting to create the Great Bear, opened up another front in their environmental crusade: the grizzly trophy hunt. Their crosshairs came to rest first on Leonard and his business. They brought heavy domestic and international pressure to bear on the hunt. When the lobbying campaign coincided with a sharp decline in the salmon runs on which the bears depended—including the salmon collapse and bear starvation episode at Owikeno Lake—the government stepped in to drastically reduce the bear-hunting quotas in Leonard’s territory.* By 2002, Leonard was able to hunt only a meager two bears per year. The quota, a pittance, was too