I turn away from the window. My brain is drifting back to a particular dawn on Great Slave Lake, to the idea of another generation. After leaving Trout Rock Lodge, I hunted one morning with Bruce MacDonald, a federal biologist, along with a DU staffer out of Yellowknife. We motored up a winding creek that emptied into a massive bay ringed with horsetail marsh. No fancy lodge, no $500 floatplane, just a Grumman canoe, a temperamental outboard, and one guy whose world had been rocked by two indomitable forces: the industrialization of the boreal forest, and the recent birth of a first child.

MacDonald and I hunkered down on a rocky point as snowflakes fell. Mallards were soon storming our simple set of two dozen decoys.

"One day I want to bring my daughter out to the bush and show her what an amazing place this is," MacDonald said. He was clean-shaven and boyish but for the look in his eyes. "But when I think of how quickly my world is changing, I can't tell you what will be left by the time she"s old enough to sit in a canoe."

He looked out across the marsh; my gaze followed. Just the day before I'd watched a double rainbow arcing across Great Slave Lake, its multicolored prism falling from the sky, down through breaking clouds, disappearing somewhere miles into the distance, into the yawning green-black maw of North America's greatest chance for meaningful wilderness: the boreal.

It seemed, to me, a kind of promise. I wished he could have seen it.