At our current spot, a spindly spruce tree sprouts, like a bonsai, from a giant 1-acre boulder littered with vole and muskrat skulls. We are not the only hunters here. Nor are we the most efficient; I glance down at my collection of empty shotgun hulls. Suddenly, a large duck careens over the decoys, wing tips so close to the water that it leaves behind a trail of concentric rings. It's a whitewing scoter, an outsize sea duck prized by local Aboriginal tribes and a classic component of a boreal forest shore lunch.

Stewart, Reid, and I are on our feet, guns blazing. The bird flies through a storm of steel shot, the water exploding behind it. Stewart hollers - "That's our lunch!" - as the bird pours it on, unscathed. I watch it go, white wing patches flashing, until it disappears into the horizon. Going and gone - gone perhaps to Washington's Skagit marshes, or to Virginia's Chesapeake Bay. I watch it go and think: There are more - millions more - where that duck came from. That's the promise of Canada's boreal forest. For now.