WHEN CANADIANS SPEAK of wilderness, they speak most often of the great northern forest -- the vast tracts of trees that stretch in a broad, unbroken belt between the far northern barrens and the settled southern edge.This is the boreal forest -- boreal meaning northern -- which occupies more than a third of Canada. It is the forest of spruce and fir and pine and tamarak, of white birch and shimmering aspen groves, of sphagnum bogs and countless lakes, of quiet streams and thundering falls. It is the ancient home of northern birds and fur-bearing mammals, of Indians and voyageurs, of snowshoes and canoes, of poets and painters and mystery and imagination.It is also the largest biome or ecological community in Canada, shaped over the ages by ice and water, locked half the year in a frozen grip, nurtured in short but clement summers, ravaged regularly by fire butrebounding with renewed vigor.The forest is not a uniform tract, but a patchwork of trees, of old growth and new sprouts of dense strands and open spaces. Spruce may stand sparse and spare or lichen-draped and fringed with fireweed as in this tangled garden in Ontario's Pukaskwa National Park.Its riches have long been exploited, lightly in former times by aboriginals who found it supplied all their needs, more heavily in fur trade days, most heavily now by pulp mills and lumber firms. The boreal forest is a warehouse of trees for an industry that employs thousands of Canadians and makes Canada the world's largest exporter of wood products. Thus this photographic celebration of our northern forest and, tucked into the last page of this issue, "The Boreal Forest" map, a salute to its natural spendours, its great but finite wealth, its place in our history and art and economy.Trees occur in infinite variety in the boreal forest, in loose arrays beside misty lakes like the spindly black spruce near Flin Flon, Man., or in dense groves like the trembling aspen assuming their yellow fall crowns in the Peace River valley in British Columbia. They may form a continuous cover like the mixed forest at Lac la Ronge Provincial Park in central Saskatchewan, or be widely spaced, like the spruce between which caribou race near the Quebec coast of James Bay.The boreal forest reveals its treasury in a myriad of colour and form Cameron Falls in a sedate late-summer pose is near Yellowknife. The pine grosbeak like this rose red male, can be found throughout the northern forest. Moving clockwise the graceful pink spires of fireweed whose seeds initiate nature's renewal in burnt-out areas border a tamarack thicket near Edson Alta. The marten, the forest's curious and efficient little meat-eater is most at home among old-growth conifers.In late spring, yellow lady's slippers bloom in the moist woods of the boreal forest (and beyond). The monarch of the northern forest, the moose, finds sustenance in a twig (as well he might moose in Algonquian loosely translated means twig-eater). Spring rain glistens on the needles and male cones of a jack pine. A wolf crosses a snowy plain at the edge of the forest near Churchill Man. Deep green spruce contrast with autumn-yellow aspen in a patchwork characteristic of the boreal forest.The shiny red berries of the mountain ash -- known commonly as dogberries -- are an important food for wildlife, and a bright spot on the boreal landscape. A flooded grove near North Bay, Ont., is likely the result of a beaver dam. Lichen-coated tamaracks and a carpet of horsetails prosper in a swampy area near Devon, south of Edmonton. Lightning strikes the thickly forested shore of Childs Lake in Duck Mountain Provincial Park, Man. A willow ptarmigan, in its winter whites, dips gracefully to nibble a willow bud near Yellowknife.
