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November/December 2007 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Top wildlife stories Feature: Legion halls Feature: Northern food Feature: Ice road The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

Canadians who travel abroad are often taken aback by how little others know about this country. We’re a small player on the world stage. Africans, Asians and South Americans who have at least a vague mental picture of Canada tend to imagine it as vast tracts of forest, tundra and snow-capped mountains populated by bears and other coldweather beasts. Nothing confirms that view as much as caribou, their numbers alone substantiating what others believe about Canada’s rich ecological heritage.

An estimated 1.2 million caribou, spread among various herds, range across the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Another million inhabit northern Quebec and Labrador. Photos of these massive herds recall descriptions of the rivers of bison that once flowed across the grasslands of North America.

Like all creatures, though, caribou cycle through population expansions and contractions. Twenty years ago, the Bathurst caribou herd, whose range straddles the Northwest Territories and Nunavut boundary and criss-crosses the Arctic Circle, was estimated at a staggering 472,000 animals. Today, it is believed to be about 128,000. The George River herd in northern Quebec and Labrador numbered upward of 700,000 animals in 1993. The last count shows it at fewer than 385,000.

Writer Laurie Sarkadi, who lives in the caribou’s range near Yellowknife, explores the decline of the herds and the obstacles that may impede their eventual expansion. Her feature is part of our annual selection of Wildlife Stories of the Year.

The story featured on our cover assembles evidence that suggests the cougar is once again prowling the woods and fields of southern Ontario. The expansion of the big cat’s range is a sign of ecosystem health. It also means hikers and campers need to be alert to the possibility of encountering a predator with an appetite for flesh.

Imagine your lettuce and bananas delivered by Canada Post. That’s how most northerners receive "fresh” — often wilted and barely edible — fruit and vegetables. Residents of many northern communities live by the hunt as much as they can, and bulk staples, such as flour, rice and peanut butter, arrive by sea once a year. Shipments of fresh foods, however, are flown in by Canada Post, the exorbitant cost of delivery covered, in part, by the federal government’s Food Mail Program.

We asked writer Alex Roslin to follow the trail of blackened bananas from Canada Post shipment depots to northern homes. It isn’t an appetizing story, but given the exploding rates of obesity and diabetes in many northern communities, access to affordable and wholesome fresh food has never been more important for the people of Canada’s North.

Also in this issue, photographer Loïc Seron rides the the world’s longest ice highway north from Yellowknife; for our Remembrance Day feature, Tobi Asmoucha captures the life and daily activities at four legion halls; Mark Anthony Jarman dodges hot-dogging snowboarders on the ski hills of Banff; and in our back-page "In habitat” column, novelist Lynn Coady hunts for a new apartment in Toronto and discovers that since her last foray into the rental market, she has cycled into a phase of her life where she is now a WDT, or Wildly Desirable Tenant.

— Rick Boychuk

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