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November/December 2001 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Intruding on wild lives À la carte Reverberations

Wrap an expandable radio collar around the neck of a moose or bear or wolf or lynx, and you get a privileged peek into its life. Tracking animals electronically allows scientists to know when they are moving, resting or feeding, the extent of their range and, if you have both genders collared in the same area, when they are mating. There is so much to learn, and we know so little about the lives of most species. Are moose doing irreparable damage to the balsam forests of Newfoundland? Are grizzlies sidestepping the wildlife overpasses in Banff?

As the technology for tracking animals advances, and we can pin ever tinier devices on butterflies, insert tags into the stomachs of salmon and snap transmitters onto the legs of eagles, troubling ethical questions arise about whether the work is becoming too invasive. Does wearing a collar have an impact on the health or social interactions of a wolf? And who monitors the behaviour of the researchers?

Writer Michael Clugston, a former senior editor at Canadian Geographic, explores this charged topic in our cover story.

"The ethics of handling wildlife pose an unending conflict of the heart and mind," he told us in a long conversation about the many dedicated and thoughtful people he had interviewed for the story.
"The subject is emotionally unpalatable, period. But we know the only thing standing between many species and eradication is research: we can't protect what we don't understand. The cynical view says, ‘A mouse is an animal which, when killed in sufficient numbers, will produce a Ph.D.' If that quip has any value, it may be as a warning against cavalier uses of animals. The biologists I interviewed felt the same heart-mind conflict and made it very clear that they would not handle animals if they didn't have to."

The Wood Cree who hunted and camped along the Churchill River, which runs from northwestern Saskatchewan, crosses Manitoba and drains into Hudson Bay, were among the first of the western tribes to be drawn into the fur trade. In the late 1600s, they began delivering furs to Hudson's Bay Company posts on the bay and quickly became intermediaries between the Scots and French traders and other First Nations. The earliest stirrings of the Métis arose from relationships — some coercive and some loyal and loving — between the Cree and those same fur traders.

Among the Woodland Cree, the bands in the area of Lac la Ronge, in north-central Saskatchewan, had perhaps more contact than most. Their camps lay at the junction of river systems vital to the trade. In the late 1700s, trading posts sprang up around the lake and the rivers connected to it. There are still fur buyers in La Ronge today. One of the biggest is Robertson Trading, owned by T. Alex and Scott Robertson. "I'm operating a 16th-century business in the 21st century," jokes T. Alex, who has been buying and selling furs for 55 years.

Three years ago, T. Alex's son Scott invited photographer William DeKay to La Ronge to capture on film what may be the last generation of trappers. DeKay travelled with the Cree of Lac la Ronge on hunting and fishing and trapping expeditions, attended community gatherings and slowly "assimilated myself to the North." He now lives in La Ronge. In this issue, we present a gallery of his vivid photos of a people truly at home within the landscape they have occupied since time out of mind.

Our deepest condolences to all our American friends and particularly to those at the National Geographic Society (NGS), which lost two senior staff members on the plane that was crashed into the Pentagon on September 11. Joe Ferguson and Ann Judge were both well known to The Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Joe was the director of the NGS Geographic Education program, and Ann was the director of the NGS travel office. They were en route, with three Washington, D.C., teachers and three students, to join scientists in the field at the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. Bless their souls.

— Rick Boychuk

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