Light at the Edge of the World

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Wade Davis. Light at the Edge of the World

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Praise

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In the Canadian north, by contrast, in a world where animals dominate and the dialogue is between predator and prey, the central metaphor is the hunt. Unless one is able to follow caribou over the tundra, track moose through the forest, one can never fully embrace the rhythm of the culture. To record the myths of Athabaskan elders, one has to become a hunter, for the myths are an expression of the covenant that exists between men, women and the wild, a way for the Indian people to rationalize the terrible fact that in order to live, they must kill the creatures they love most, the animals upon which they depend. Like so many lessons of anthropology, this was something that I learned through experience, living amongst a people, frequently making mistakes but always paying attention to the consequences.

In northwestern British Columbia, a year or so after graduating from college, I was hired as ranger in the Spatsizi wilderness, a roadless track of some two million acres (800 000 ha) in the remote reaches of the Cassiar Mountains. The job description was deliciously vague: wilderness assessment and public relations. In two long seasons, our ranger team, myself and one other, Al Poulsen, a six-foot four (193-cm) vegetarian who grazed through meals and could conjure golden eagles out of the wild, encountered perhaps a dozen visitors. Wilderness assessment was a licence to explore the park at will, tracking game and mapping the horse trails of outfitters, describing routes up mountains and down rivers, recording what we could of the movements of large populations of caribou and sheep, mountain goats, grizzly bears and wolves.

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