THE UNRAVELING
Conservationist George Smith calls himself a "hopeful cynic," but when I push him he doesn't deny that "unraveling" might accurately describe what's happening to the Muskwa-Kechika agreement under British Columbia's new provincial government, in which the so-called Liberal Party now holds 77 of 79 seats. He complains to me that two-thirds of the advisory board's initial funding has been effectively stripped -- from $3 million to $1 million -- weakening the board's ability to function effectively. One of the law's major provisions -- that all relevant government land agencies, including forestry, parks, oil, and gas, sign off jointly on all management activities in the Conservation Zone -- was rescinded in 2002.

The new provincial government has also mandated that all of the region's "fast track" analyses of the special management zones be completed by spring of 2004, science-be-damned, even though the conservation area design, as well as wildlife studies by the University of Northern British Columbia, aren't yet completed. Will the government include that science? Smith wonders. And if so, how will the information be applied as it becomes available?

When I visit Graeme McLaren, the manager of minerals, oil, and gas in the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management, he reminds me that the advisory board is indeed "advisory" and acknowledges that, in some special management zones already examined, "oil and gas potential was [found to be] very high" -- and therefore likely to be developed more aggressively.

Meanwhile, Smith believes more power must be restored to the advisory board, so that the enduring conservation of the entire ecosystem is "taken seriously," as was the original intent. Though he and others feel that the rug may be pulled not so slowly from beneath the board's feet, Smith is certainly not giving up. From his position as an advisory board member, he's pushing British Columbia's government for more power, for fuller partnership. The Muskwa-Kechika plan empowers the science of conservation on a massive scale, he says, the first such model of this magnitude. "Just for that," Smith says, "the thing is worth fighting for. If we can't make it work in the Muskwa-Kechika, how are we going to protect places where the values aren't as high?"

ave Porter, a Kaska leader from the Tsatonatatane ("people who live among the sharp rocks"), is a voluble, large, and charismatic figure. Because he often dresses entirely in black, he is sometimes called "the Johnny Cash of the north." To me, he looks like a cross between a cheerful Genghis Khan and the one-eyed genius poet Jim Harrison. In his black pants, black long-sleeve shirt, black vest, black coat, and silver bolo tie, and with his long, curling hair and bushy Fu Manchu mustache and beard, he unquestionably commands attention. Visiting with him in Vancouver, I listen, rapt, as he tells me stories of the place called Dechenla, which translates to "the land at the end of the sticks," or trees, at the farthest reach of the boreal forest, where the tundra "teems with gyrfalcons, wolves, and wolverines." He recalls places like Caribou Cry and Raven's Throat, and the autumn-long sight of 10,000 golden eagles funneling through his home, migrating down the spine of the northern Rockies, and grizzlies chasing down caribou. He tells me that the Muskwa-Kechika is still wild enough that some tourists recently came upon three young wolverines huddled around their fresh kill, a ground squirrel; in this place, where humans are still infrequent visitors, the baby wolverines decided to drop the squirrel and charge the tourists, who wisely turned and ran away.

And yet Muskwa-Kechika, for Porter, now represents "a sad state of affairs. I thought we had really done it right for the first time by setting aside this huge chunk of land. We had gained legislative protection. The government worked with us. We reached a letter of agreement between the Kaska Dena and government about how this land should be protected." Now, however, the reneging is proceeding in earnest. He calls the new provincial government "an elected dictatorship. They can peel B.C. raw, and no one can do anything about it," he says.

The betrayals are not new to him. Born out on the trapline, in the far backcountry, he was taken away from his village when he was 6 years old and forced to enroll in the residential schools, as were nearly all of Canada's indigenous people, a brand of cultural genocide that is rarely spoken about. "They herded us up," Porter says. He remembers, too, his father telling him how the U.S. Army punched the Alaska Highway through in nine months in 1942 with an occupying army of 40,000 soldiers, engineers, and civilians. "We were never involved," he says.

This time, they are. The Kaska, under Porter's leadership, have filed several lawsuits against the provincial and federal governments and have recently asked the Round River organization to devise a conservation area design for all of their ancestral lands, which extend into the Yukon and Northwest Territories -- 60 million acres, all told. And though Porter loves the wilderness and gets out into it whenever he can, he, too -- like Peck and numerous others -- has given his life over to working within the system. During the 1980s and 1990s, Porter served in several government posts in Yukon, Northwest Territories, and finally British Columbia, most recently as assistant deputy minister of aboriginal affairs, loving his homeland so deeply that he was willing to walk away from the grizzlies and caribou and put on a suit and tie for them.

That's what makes the stakes so extraordinarily high for many of the participants. Having gambled away years of their lives on the belief that the government would keep its promises, and then to still lose the Muskwa-Kechika's wildness after all, would be bitter twice over.