Eric Collier's autobiographical sketch of pioneering the wilds of the Chilcotin in British Columbia in the 1940s and 50s was quite a read. This man, skilled in the poetry of language in descriptions of the various manifestations of raw nature in his book Three Against the Wilderness, left a valuable legacy for all Canadians interested in learning what they can of Canada's westernmost province at that period.

He writes of the unflappable courage and homemaking skills of his wife Liliane, of their son Veasy's homespun education in the vast forests surrounding their modest one-room cabin that despite its isolation taught the boy survival skills without neglecting his introduction to advanced science and mathematics. At age six Veasy Eric Collier was already a skilled trapper like his father Eric, with his own trapline to maintain.

What the Colliers had set out to do was to re-invigorate a wilderness area that had been degraded by the fur trade, at a time when trappers, both indigenous and foreign, had extracted from the Chilcotin in the Cariboo Mountain Range all the beaver they could trap, leaving none to maintain the critical water system with their dams so that natural water runways simply dried up, with the consequence that wildlife ceased flourishing and abandoned the area.

A proposal to the B.C. Ministry of Natural Resources succeeded in having two pairs of beavers delivered to their care. With these four young beavers, placed in old abandoned beaver colonies, the population soon exploded as the original four adapted and industriously began the mammoth work of natural restoration. Their swift success in restoring the waterways and lakes of the region was of monumental usefulness to area ranchers, providing for their cattle, for as the water was restored enabling the cattle to find and make use of sources of reliable water so were vital grasses requiring irrigation to feed the cattle.

Browsing mammals returned to the area, along with otters, mink, fishers, deer, moose, bear and smaller creatures that find their home in natural woodlands of the boreal forests. Eric Collier wrote of the winter of 1948 when British Columbia experienced one of its coldest winters ever. So cold that the mighty Fraser, into which the waterways of Chilcotin pour, froze almost in its entirety. The amount of snow that fell that winter was astronomical, the cold and the snow-depth killing birds, juvenile animals and people alike. Unable to find their normal food supply due to the snow coverage, mature animals starved and froze to death.

Normally temperate British Columbia is now once again experiencing unusual cold and snow. Although not to the extent that it did back then. And so, coincidentally, is Ottawa, the second coldest, snowiest capital in the world. We've been locked into a prolonged cold snap and have received far more snow than would seem normal for this early part of winter; in fact even before the arrival of the Winter Solstice. Now, when we enter our local forested ravine, we tend to flounder through the snow, and without bundling up in layers for warmth the experience of a woodland jaunt would be far less pleasurable than it is.