Rocky mountains

Canada’s greatest asset

If Donald Trump wants to make Canada the 51st state, I suspect it’s for the wrong reasons. I just got back from a family holiday. We started in Vancouver, then drove to Whistler, before flying to Calgary and taking the Trans-Canada Highway – past places with names like Bearspaw and Dead Man’s Flats – into the Canadian Rockies and Banff National Park. I was telling a friend about the trip a few days ago and actually welled up when I was describing the deep azure hue of Lake Louise; the vastness of the forests and the astonishing beauty of the wildlife – from chipmunks to grizzlies – that seems to co-exist peacefully with the comparatively tiny human population. It was nature on a scale that made human beings feel refreshingly incidental.

I tensed my bow as the bull elk stared at me

Some 500 lbs of testosterone and pissed-off muscle and bone busted through the fog and the aspens. I drew my bow. The beast stopped broadside not twenty yards away. Perfect. I moved to settle my sights. There was his head and his rump. But a copse of three aspens covered everything vital. Not perfect. The bull stared at me. And I begged and willed and made unholy promises to God almighty if that bull would just take one fecking step forward. This was the first daybreak on a five-day guided public land archery hunt. Before this moment, I had been on two elk hunts. Each a weeklong. Each do-it-yourself. Each elkless. And neither had taught me a thing about how to hunt elk. A Western elk hunt costs us what we have: time and money. And, I had just about determined it wasn’t worth either.

Bow hunting