n the boat ride out with Peck on my last day in the Muskwa-Kechika -- five frigid boulder-bumping, jaw-jarring hours of swerving and skimming the flat-bottomed boat down the wide weave of the Tuchodi, through the shunted arteries made by giant cottonwood, some beaver-felled, others toppled by the undercut banks they could no longer preserve -- we encounter two other boating parties and a seismic helicopter.
The two hunting groups each complain that the river is getting too crowded. One of the hunters talks about the impact of roads built for oil and gas development and production, of seismic exploration, mining, and timber. For an elk hunter, there's a simple equation, he says. "Roads equals fucked."
The helicopter offers no such succinct conversation. It comes flying up the Tuchodi just as we're leaving the park boundary. It lands on a gravel bar, then rises deafeningly back into the bright blue sky and peels away, as yellow as a cottonwood leaf. Peck waves to the pilot, the gesture of an uplifted hand, of true good will, though I cannot help but wonder if, in the blur of the boat's speed and the helicopter's speed, the gesture is misinterpreted.
il and wilderness. We need, or are hungry for, so much of the former and possess so precious little of the latter. Boats, helicopters, cars, planes: On the flight back to the ravening States, I find myself sitting next to the man who, as it turns out, shot the Stone sheep that I had dined upon at the Caribou Range a week earlier. We visited about hunting in general, and about his experience of going up into the snow and ice and fog and clouds in pursuit of such a mythic creature, and of his exhaustion, day after day, engaged in such a task: going to bed damp and cold, worn-out but thinking of nothing else but sheep, sheep, sheep, and of awakening again long before daylight and setting out on the journey again. The first sounds he would hear would be that of the guides stirring -- the clink of a coffee pot, the hiss of a stove, the nicker of a horse, and then the breath of the mountain winds, sliding down off the ancient cliffs.
The world of the hunt was almost like a dream, he said, and yet it was also more real than anywhere he had ever been. But now it was over, and he was going back home. Already he sounded a little flat, a little lost, a little tired, and a little sad, as if even now he was not quite sure of all the wonder he had seen. As if the experience somehow had great relevance to, yet was incredibly removed from, his other life.
tories, legends: the fabric of the Muskwa-Kechika's past and -- perhaps -- the foundations of its future. In Vancouver, between meetings, Dave Porter has one more story for me. He acknowledges that First Nations people and the guides and outfitters might be thought of by some as odd bedfellows -- that there can be a bit of a cultural difference between "the meat-versus-trophy thing, the European thing. When you go in our houses, you don't see stuffed animals," he says. But the wildlife is a renewable resource, and he hopes to see more economic development for native corporations, utilizing guide and outfitter permits and First Nations' traditional knowledge of their homeland. Seemingly apropos of the conversation, he tells me a story about a giant, who used to live far up in the mountains and was once a source of great fear and anxiety to the Kaska Dena.
"He was mean," Porter says. Back before the Kaska finally dealt with him, "he used to want to eat everything." No amount of reasoning or compromise would work with him: He just kept devouring, consuming.
"Our people went up into the mountains and cut his tendons, with the help of the Kaska leader Súguyā," Porter says. They brought the giant down to their camp. He was so mean, Porter says, that when they cut into his head to kill him, all the black flies and mosquitoes of the north poured out.
The giant is gone, but the ceaseless devouring continues. Only the mountains remain unchanged and unharmed, if only for a while longer.
