Trapper Gordy Klassen practises his own ‘brand of activism’ building awareness about Canada’s oldest economic endeavour

This story originally ran March 1, 2014.

Gordy Klassen is on the phone ordering dog urine. Ten gallons each, please, of female and male.

“Not all urine is created the same,” says Klassen, bombing along a northern Alberta highway in his dirty black Ford F350 on a fur-buying trip. His own pee, he jokes, is too contaminated with caffeine and dregs of singlemalt scotch, a dead giveaway for the wary, wild wolves Klassen aims to catch in his snares.

“We’ll keep bottling and scraping up urine (for you),” says the man on the other end of the line, who raises a special hound dog in Williams Lake, B.C., then bottles its urine, scraped frozen from concrete, to trappers and hunters like Klassen.

“Urine to a wolf is like your cellphone to you,” Klassen explains. “There’s hundreds of messages in it.”

Such a morning conversation on the road is the norm for Klassen, whose life as a fur trapper is full of oddities.

Take the skunk pelt he and his wife of 30 years, Ali, hung as a joke in the bathroom of their home near Debolt, 45 kilometres east of Grande Prairie. Or the 11 chest freezers he keeps on the ranch, filled with frozen squirrels, otters, a two-legged beaver and a lone white rabbit his five-year-old grandson and three-year-old granddaughter snared themselves.

Then there’s the trophy room on the second floor of his red barn where Klassen sometimes steals a nap under the 19 white-tailed deer heads mounted on two walls. A stuffed grizzly and black bear keep crowded company with a black wildebeest Klassen shot while consulting in South Africa, a zebra rug, antelopes from Montana and a muskox from the Arctic. Some animals are roadkill; others arrive as gifts from friends.

Trapper Gord Klassen – Gordy to everyone who knows him – has been volunteer president of the Alberta Trappers’ Association going on 11 years, representing 2,000 to 3,000 Alberta trappers. He also trains people on trapping and skinning techniques, travelling across Canada and beyond, but also hosting hundreds of wardens, trappers, researchers and others each year in cabins on his ranch.

Not everyone likes what he has to teach – people in Israel once called him a wolf murderer – but Klassen has carved out his “own little brand of activism” by educating the public on the importance of managing animal populations in urban river valleys, for ranchers, oilfield workers and municipalities.

After all, the fur trade and its inextricable link to the development of Western Canada is first introduced in the province’s Grade 4 curriculum. Alberta’s aboriginal people who trapped and foraged the wilderness long before European explorers arrived and set up the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, with fur-trading posts and Fort Edmonton. The beaver – the biggest rodent whose pelt was coveted by Europeans in the 1700s – “sparked the extensive exploration of North America and provided the impetus for the establishment of the lucrative fur-trade economy that became the basis of the Canadian economy,” reads a teaching guide put out by Calgary’s Glenbow Museum. “The beaver has, as a result, become a Canadian national symbol,” and was featured on Canada’s first official postage stamp in 1851.

Yet too few people know of the role of modern-day trappers, Klassen says, or that they remain busy in Alberta’s bush. Too many, he adds, are quick to condemn.

“All that polarizing and posturing (by opponents), all that does is undermine the chance to have a whole lot of dialogue,” he says. “Trappers aren’t a souvenir of the 19th or the 18th century, but are as valuable today as they were before.”

No longer the unlicensed “Coureurs des bois” or French-Canadian men who arrived in canoes and established trade agreements with aboriginal people, today’s trappers are highly regulated and harvest the landscape from the backs of their snowmobiles with the province’s support.

“Trapping and fur trading are traditions dating back long before Alberta became a province, and they remain important commercial and recreational activities today,” reads an Internet message from Diana McQueen, former minister of environment and sustainable resources development.

“Modern trappers have a deep respect for the land and its wildlife – and are proudly carrying on this long-standing commercial enterprise.”

Trapper Gord drives his snowmobile with one hand, his face upturned in a smile, his left arm thrown up to embrace the wide blue sky above.

This is his paradise: the frozen expanse of Sardine Lake in northern Alberta where his tiny wood cabin, lit up by Christmas lights at night, is nestled on the south bank. From here, he calls to the wolves, watches the fog move north along the trees and carefully tracks the prints in the snow: the lynx’s round toe-heel imprint, the otter’s belly slide down the creek ice, the wolverine’s double-footed jumps.

“I love the wilderness. I love the isolation,” says the 55-year-old, so acclimatized to the cold he can dip his hands into the lake water without flinching, pailing up teeming minnows from an underground spring to later use as lures. “I love the winter. Who needs Mexico?”

Klassen follows in the traditions of his predecessors: an aboriginal family who lived in a cabin on the lake not far from Klassen’s. About 100 years ago, they did the same things he does, drying the wiggly sticklebacks and selling them for dog food in Grande Prairie or farther afield. But that life was cut short as the Spanish flu swept through between 1918 and 1920, killing the mother, father and three children.

Klassen points out the five unmarked graves; mounds of dirt beneath the snow and trees. The family cooking stove still sits in the bush, a bowl and empty tin of Dominion tobacco balanced on top. Klassen dusts off a horse skull. A hub from a wagon awaits another spring thaw. The cabin’s foundation sinks into the ground.

“It’s a bit lonely,” says Klassen, who heard the family’s story from his now-deceased trapping partner, Willy.

Klassen treats this land as sacred, part of Trapline 72 that is about 120 kilometres southeast of his Debolt ranch.

“I’m not a church guy, but I talk to God every day I’m out here,” Klassen says. “The Indians down here look out for me.”

Klassen has been a trapper since he was 10 years old, the first in a family of ranchers and hunters near Grande Prairie. He considered himself an animal-rights activist as a kid and would examine rabbit turds in spring puddles and take feathers home for study. He even attempted to save a muskrat from marauding classmates, and still bears the scar from its bite on his hand.

Yet when he got the hang of shooting a .22, first at the sky, then at squirrels that earned him 15 to 20 cents each from the local Hudson’s Bay fur-buyer – a “pretty flinty guy” who eventually became friends with Klassen – the puny kid got some clout. Back then, the trapping business was competitive and secretive, with few in the industry wanting to share the tricks of the trade. As a teenager, Klassen remembers holding a dead beaver in one hand – himself still wet from swimming in the dam – and using the family’s party line to phone and pry information from local trappers on what to do next.

“I got really goddamn good at it,” says Klassen, his language peppery and straight up. “This isn’t a job that everyone can do. It takes a lot of skills. It takes a certain mindset.”

Young Klassen loved the independence in the bush and spent weekends snowshoeing 27 kilometres in, then back, sometimes hunkering down in only a sleeping bag.

“This is absolutely as important as breathing (to me),” he says. “It’s hard to explain.”

Klassen isn’t often short of words. He chats up a storm about his right-wing politics and jokes he has nightmares about being knocked out and waking up a dreaded Liberal. He’s unapologetic for his colourful language, using politically incorrect terms and hating CBC radio for its liberal-mindedness, even though he continues to listen.

But although he insists he doesn’t like people and prefers solitude in the bush, Klassen shares his down-toearth ways and comfortable smile equally with Wildrose politicians who come courting, Swedish celebrities he takes hunting into the bush and the Mennonite women who sell the best homemade doughnuts at the Crooked Creek General Store. Klassen is an open man. He tears up when he speaks about his 18-year-old nephew dying in a crash on the highway, and has no problem talking about his early divorce followed by his strong marriage to Ali, whom he affectionately calls his “bear.”

She, in jest, calls him “nothing but a square-headed German” when he tries to lay claim to her Cree blood.

He: moniyaw, Cree for white man.

She: nicimos, Cree for sweetheart.

Three children, seven grandchildren, seven dogs – and a man who howls like a wolf.

“We have a saying that we think he’s half-wolf,” says Rob Miskosky, a trapper and editor/publisher of Alberta Outdoorsman Magazine. Miskosky says Klassen is the go-to wolf guy in Alberta and will often howl onstage at conferences. Klassen isn’t shy to speak of soaking a tampon in a liquid of rotted fish, female dog pee and skunk essence to entice a wolf in.

And he teaches the importance of chewing gum and wearing clean boots to camouflage human scent while doing wolf reconnaissance, which can take several weeks. Even clean thoughts are vital.

“If you think a bad thought, you’re not going to catch a wolf,” Klassen says. “Wolves communicate on a level that we just got our smartphones for.”

Klassen sees himself more as a coyote, like the one he sketches in the snow with a stick and behind every paper signature.

“Coyotes are survivors and, like the Ian Tyson song … they live in the snow at 40 below,” Klassen says.

Snowmobiling through frigid temperatures, Klassen points out the pussy willows, coaxed into early bloom by unseasonably warm January weather. He believes one mound of snow and rocks is a bear den, with an air vent frosted over with icicles from warm escaping breath. A tree, near the entrance to his three-by-four metre pine cabin, is a rubbing post for a grizzly which left bits of hair stuck to the sap and bark. The cabin’s front arch window is smudged with paw prints, suggesting the peeling duct tape covering a wide chink in the door might need to be reinforced.

For the past dozen years, Klassen has made trapping his focus, once spending 43 days straight on a trapline without a break back to civilization. He melts snow for shaving water. He feeds leftover pancakes to his feathery Canadian Jay neighbours. He sleeps in his bunk as frozen animals hang to thaw in the midnight warmth of the woodfire stove.

It’s an isolated existence that Klassen loves, knowing Ali back home is busy tending the cattle on their 200 hectares, curling, training for marathons and fiddling in a band called Homemade Jam. In the meantime, Klassen spends daylight hours buzzing from one trap to the next on his snowmobile, catching glimpses of a moose and her calf, visiting roadkill he’s left for animals.

“If something were to happen to Ali, I’d come here,” says Klassen, sitting on the porch of his cabin, powered by a generator and stuffed with sleeping bags, lighters, dishes, cashews and Eatmore bars. Curry and turmeric are on hand for cooking, as are tins of Spam, Tang, chicken Oxo, ketchup and Tetley tea.

A book, Mountain Masculinity, sits on a corner shelf in his cabin. A razor and shaving lotion – aerosol shaving cream would freeze – sits on the plain wash basin. In the outhouse, a toilet seat made out of hard pink insulation keeps the cheeks warm.

Most years, the supplies cover basic living for 30 to 45 days spent on three traplines. This year, because of snow dumps and bad weather, Klassen made it into the bush for fewer than 20 days.

After accidentally trapping a cougar in 2001 in a snare meant for a wolf, Ali, 48, rarely heads out with her husband. The cat was huge, and terrified her. Wolves, she knows.

Klassen’s lines are part of 1,632 registered traplines on public parkland and boreal forest in the province. That doesn’t include traplines on private property (1,087 Albertans have such resident licences) or those on aboriginal or Métis reserves.

Few make a full-time living trapping the 18 fur-bearers in Alberta, says Klassen. He’s a multimillionaire himself not from his own fur trade – he estimates he makes between $20,000 to $50,000 annually on the wolverines, martens, beavers, lynxes, otters and other animals he traps in regulated windows between October and May – but from being a consultant for oil and gas and owning a heavy equipment business with his brother since his early 20s.

Klassen has also carved out a lucrative business in his Trapper Gord Trading Post, a store in Debolt that has 13 employees after four years and rang in $1.3 million in business in 2013, with only 25 per cent of sales coming from Alberta. So popular is the store – and its catalogue with photos of community trappers – it is expanding into a brand-new building just up the road from Klassen’s ranch, paid for completely in cash.

In the air at the old location, the distinctive smell of skunk hovers in the air, one of many gag-inducing, putrid lures trappers use to draw into traps curious wolves, lynx and other furry critters. Store shelves are full of metal killing traps, cable snares, old-fashioned snow shoes, beaded moccasins, wolf urine and pelts from skunks, fox and coyote.

Klassen says he won’t take a dime from the new store. He plans to spend his profits on promoting the trapping industry and sharing his love of the bush.

One lynx lies on its side, frozen solid, its fur and feline face dusted with snow. Another lies directly on the snowmobile trail that weaves through Klassen’s trapline, its paw gently resting on the taut cable that cinched its neck. Their last moments in life are written in their snowy prints padding down the machine track, their noses sniffing a frozen chunk of Canada goose in the air, their curiosity raised by the smelly catmint-laced lure smeared on a branch in the lynx pen. Goose feathers dangle in the breeze for a toy.

But once the lynx’s heads slip through the cable noose at the entrance, the snare is immediately set, pulling tight to block the cats’ carotid arteries, fatally locking, tightening and cutting off circulation. Klassen estimates it takes less than five minutes for the lynx to die, but no one knows exactly what happens in the last moments of struggle out here in the cold.

Animal rights groups say larger animals can suffer for days in snares. The Born Free USA website quotes a 1981 report by Canada’s Federal Provincial Committee on Humane Trapping that concluded snares “do not have the potential to consistently produce a quick death.” It also posts warnings against steel-jaw leghold traps, which have been banned in Canada and many states for decades.

Klassen says technology has vastly improved. He yanks one snare around his forearm to test its strength. He sometimes leaves green bruises when he conducts training sessions for trappers. “If it does this to my magnificent pipe,” Klassen jokes, “what will it to do a skinny wolf’s neck.”

“Snares aren’t designed to choke off the air supply like many suppose. They are designed to close off the carotid arteries,” Klassen says. Canadian traps and snares are tested in a Vegreville facility operated under contract by Alberta Innovates and Technologies, in part, Klassen says, from pressure from trappers to know the traps work well, quickly.

“Lynx have highly exposed carotid arteries and fight a snare hard,” Klassen says. “This only hastens their death.”

But the system isn’t perfect.

The carotid arteries of coyotes and wolves aren’t as exposed, Klassen concedes, although he says modern-day snares will still take the larger animals down in minutes.

Trappers are required to check foothold traps on public land every 48 hours so that animals caught live are shot – “dispatched,” Klassen says – as soon as possible. But on this trip, Klassen has left some unchecked for more than three days. All remain empty so Klassen springs them. He has never had his licence checked by a warden.

Klassen also finds a Northern Goshawk killed accidentally in a lynx snare. He picks up the bird, distressed and puzzled why the beautiful raptor was flying over his trapline in early February. He’ll turn it in to the Fish and Wildlife office, which has the discretion to allow each trapper one incidental catch per trapline each year. Klassen does his best to prevent such occurrences, changing heights and pressures of traps to match species’ gaits.

“I don’t know a single trapper who enjoys killing,” Klassen says, then quotes Thomas Coon of the Cree Trappers’ Association in Quebec. “If you can’t take an animal with honour, dignity and respect, then you don’t deserve that animal.”

On this trip, he nabs seven marten before pulling all the metal traps from wood boxes nailed into tree trunks, tucked under red willow bushes or balanced on fallen logs. January 31 is the end of the sable season.

The sharp teeth of one marten are still clamped onto a mesh screen in front of the bait. Another’s fangs are bared in one final hiss. They died fast, Klassen says, in killing traps similar but more complex than mouse traps that snap shut across the animals necks and soft abdomens. These traps must render martens unconscious immediately and dead in two minutes, according to the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards signed by Canada, Russia and the European Union in 1997.

“It’s all right to feel bad for the little guy,” Klassen says, back in his cabin warmed by a wood fireplace. He skins one of the little creatures, thawed overnight.

“It will live on.”

Klassen pulls into the parking lot of the inn at Red Earth Creek, about 170 kilometres north of Slave Lake, and jumps out to meet Hermas Houle, a 62-year-old trapper from nearby Loon Lake who wants to sell his furs.

It’s at least -27 C and after a quick morning coffee inside, Klassen and Houle are doing a deal out of the backs of their idling trucks. Klassen quickly pulls a camouflage-coloured snowsuit over his blue wrangler jeans, his feet still in thin leather beaded moccasins and rubber oversoles. On his head is his signature black cowboy hat from Texas, made from pressed beaver felt.

A good cowboy hat, Klassen advises, will put you back between $500 and $1,000.

Klassen’s hands are bare as he shakes out lynx pelts, listening for the sound of dry newspaper to make sure the furs have been dried and stretched properly. Next, he lays them flat on his tailgate, holding both ends and rippling them to fluff up the fur for inspection. Lynx with light bellies speckled with dark spots are keenly sought for soft trims. Dark brown marten are coveted by those wanting rich chocolate sable fur coats. Klassen likes the pumpkin-coloured ones, their fur bleached orange from the sun.

He has a licence to buy fur from local trappers like Houle, then tries to make a small profit after he ships it to one of two fur auctions in Canada where buyers from China, Italy and Ukraine go shopping.

Furriers predicted a boom in 2014 as young people and top designers embraced fur trims on boots, fur scarves dyed purple and pink, and snappy little fur coats. International demand from China has exploded in recent years, boosting Canada’s fur exports to $706 million in 2012, up 34 per cent from 2011’s $525 million. Alberta, the province with the most trappers behind Quebec and Ontario, earned $5 million in fur.

But there’s already a glitch. Two of China’s billionaire fur importers were caught ducking the system and evading paying duty, Klassen says. They’re now in jail, but fur prices have tumbled 25 per cent.

Klassen remains optimistic, determined to give fair prices as opposed to other fur buyers he’s heard of who travel into trapping cabins, hand over some whisky and little else.

Klassen becomes alarmed after jumping into the cab of Houle’s pickup to count out cash, then realizes the man was willing to accept $1,195 rather than $2,195, having misheard Klassen’s original offer.

During his three years buying fur, Klassen has met trappers in their 90s,

who sign fur registration forms with crosses rather than signatures. Some speak only Cree and take interpreters.

Yet Klassen is no pushover and follows several trapping rules:

1. Wear silk neck bandanas to keep you warm.

2. Find yourself a fat (the kind the melts between your fingers) to devour for warmth’s sake. His fat of choice? Butter. On pancakes. Melted with oil for fried potatoes.

3. Don’t go on to a Métis or First Nation reserve to buy fur in the dark, even in a Super Duty Ford F350 with gun muscle inside.

“Most fur buyers won’t go on reserves at night,” Klassen says, although he made one exception the night before his stop at Red Earth Creek, visiting Rondy Gauchier’s fur shed on the Peavine Métis Settlement, 60 kilometres north of High Prairie. “It’s just too damn dangerous because of the drugs and because of the booze.”

Klassen was conned once, he says, when someone ran to his truck window and said his brother wanted to sell some fur. When Klassen walked through the door, he found a crack house, lost his temper and got out of Dodge.

After all, for this twoday trip, he has $22,000 in crisp $100, $50 and $20 bills tucked away in his briefcase. These are cash deals so local trappers don’t have to wait and take their chances on the international market by selling to the auction houses themselves.

Back in Gauchier’s fur shed, Klassen murmurs to himself, “That’s a pretty little cat, eh?” He offers an average of $161 for Gauchier’s lynx pelts. The martens, caught late in the season, have “mediocre” fur damaged by a harsh winter running through branches and cattails and go for just under $100 each.

Gauchier, 65, pockets $6,280 for 13 lynx, 12 fishers and 37 martens. “Fur buyers, they take their chances,” Gauchier says. “They could lose their shirts.”

He’d rather be on his trapline on the Métis settlement, even though this year was one of the worst on record, with snow up to the earlobes and a fierce January wind that bent and snapped willow trees onto snowmobile lines.

“When you start thinking it’s work, it’s time to do something else,” says Gauchier, who has a day job building leases for the oil industry. Being busy is good when the loneliness hits. He wipes tears from behind his glasses, speaking of his wife of 44 years who died suddenly from an unknown illness two years ago. He keeps her picture proudly in the kitchen.

“It’s nice to be out there, especially now, physically and mentally,” Gauchier says.

The next day farther down the road, Wade Houle, 9, sits with his dad in the community centre in Trout Lake as Klassen buys their fur. Maybe Wade will buy something from the GameStop video store with his trapping money, if dad Darrell Houle lets him.

“It’s a family thing,” Darrell, 32, says of his trapping tradition with his wife and two children outside Peerless Lake First Nation, 300 kilometres northeast of Grande Prairie down a dead-end gravel highway.

“I get to spend time with my dad,” Wade says.

Trapping is no longer a draw for 62-year-old Leo Alook. It took him out of school at age 15, says the councillor for the Municipal District of Opportunity, when he and his father would take dog sleds out into the cold bush and had to ice-fish to feed the dogs. Back then, people could take their furs to the store and get credit for groceries. No longer.

These days, Leo’s wife Lillian Alook is the family trapper. She carries her haul including 220 squirrel pelts to Klassen in a Cheetos box. Bundled into groups of 20 and bound with blue elastics, each inside-out squirrel has its forearms looped neatly together, ready to be turned into felt or fishing lures. The catch and Alook’s immaculate skinning methods net her $1.50 for each squirrel, even though the average price runs between 80 cents and $1.

It takes a professional about two minutes to skin a squirrel, so the money isn’t half bad, coming in at roughly $45 an hour. Skinning beavers can take beginners two hours or longer, so the $30 or $50 return on one pelt is often not worth the effort.

It’s clear Lillian doesn’t do this the money. Her work years have been spent babysitting, being a medical driver, community outreach worker, head cook for a lunch program and more.

But the outdoor life of a trapper pulls her.

“It’s really important to me,” Lillian says. “It’s still in me. I can’t stop.”

“Their eyes might as well be yellow just like a wolf,” says Klassen, respect in his voice for the 12 to 20 per cent of Alberta trappers who are women. “Just deadly, deadly.”

But during this two-day fur-buying excursion, Klassen also sees evidence of animal suffering as he inspects furs from about 10 to 15 trappers: a bloody paw potentially from panicked biting, fur worked off around a marten’s shoulders from a struggle with an old trap.

“It wasn’t the most humane thing he could have done,” Klassen says of one trapper he’ll speak with later in private, advising him that buying new $25 marten traps will not only be more humane, but will net him at least $20 more for each pelt.

Klassen will also have to throw some bloody coyote furs into the washing machine with dish soap when he gets home, spinning them dry before restretching them on boards. An animal, oily smell rises from some of the fur bags.

Klassen knows some people will never support the fur-trapping industry and will continue to launch international campaigns against fur fashion and practices they consider cruel and disgusting. But Klassen argues trapping is essential to manage swaths of land that can support only a certain number of animals. Cities need help with beaver and coyote populations, ranchers need to make a living raising cattle, and the oil and gas industry come into conflict with wildlife in Alberta’s north.

Klassen once targeted beavers flooding an area where a company had built wells into the muskeg. The area was drained and the company could work again.

Every year, the City of Edmonton contracts a trapper to take out beavers, such as the one that dammed up a creek near 111th Avenue and 82nd Street and flooded a schoolyard, says James Wilke, director of the city’s animal care and pest management branch. In the 1990s, eight beaver dams had to be removed from the Kinnaird Ravine, and the beavers killed because of drowning liability.

“We take out a number every year,” Wilke says, adding his own staff deal with problem muskrats. Coyotes are most often taken out with quiet crossbows, since traps would be dangerous for dogs and people. “It becomes more of a ‘have to’ than a ‘want to.’ “

Moving beavers or other animals isn’t a good option, says Dave Kay, commercial wildlife and priority species specialist at Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resources Development. Beavers, for instance, then have to compete for territory and often end up killing each other. Leaving the rodents to their own devices also doesn’t work, Kay says. When beaver populations become too big – the rodents reproduce many kits, he says – natural forces such as the disease tularemia move in, killing them off in unhealthy masses.

“If you manage it properly, you don’t have to get to that stage,” Kay says. “If you harvest a surplus, you’re not allowing the population to get to the point where it’s eating themselves out of house and home. … With many populations, hunting and trapping – harvesting, let’s just call it that – is a good thing when done in a controlled manner. It actually leads to increased populations or health in populations.”

Klassen is motivated by managing the ecosystem – yes, even manipulating it – to use its renewable animal resources while balancing its health with the health of people and industries around it.

“It has to be done sustainably,” he says, explaining that if someone traps too many marten or beaver one year, there won’t be any left for the next. “I can’t think of a trapper where sustainability is not in the best interest. … You get as much as you can without hurting things.”

And when things get hurt, you respond.

Klassen knows of one rancher in southern Alberta who was losing eight cows a day to a wolf pack. That could quickly eat upwards of $50,000 when 50 cows are downed.

“They’re getting beat up pretty bad,” Klassen says, who gets multiple calls every day from panicked farmers.

“I don’t know a single rancher that would get upset that they would lose a cow or calf with a wolf,” Klassen says. “It’s where their own livelihood is threatened where they are powerless.”

And he doesn’t counsel slaughter in every case.

“Not every pack of wolves out there are cow killers,” he said. “They traditionally want to hunt wild food.”

Yet Klassen plans to take out the wolf pack on his trapline – three greys and a black – so that more moose calves can grow into adulthood.

He and the province, Kay says, “would like to get trapping a little bit out of the shadows.”

“The fur trade and traditions date long back before Alberta became a province and they really are what defined Canada in its day,” Kay says. “When you hang around trappers enough, you really get a sense for how much they actually do care about wildlife and wildlife habitat. It’s a passion. It really is. They do care deeply for them.”

Klassen drives onto his ranch yard, pulling up to his red barn as his dogs named Skunk, Nellie, Deuce and Cowboy bark and wag with excitement. Ali greets him and soon they’re drinking fresh coffee and catching up on their days apart.

Not that Klassen will be staying put. He will soon be heading to a nearby farm to help neighbours with coyotes and wolves so brash they’re within three metres of farm machinery.

One sleep in his bed with Ali, and then it’s back to “working like a dog and eating like a coyote” along the trap line for one more day. He’ll check his snares for lynx before pulling out to exchange his black cowboy hat for a straw one for a holiday in Mexico.

He isn’t looking forward to the warmth.

“I love the winter. I love Alberta. There is no place like home.”

jsinnema@edmontonjournal.com

twitter.com/jodiesinnema

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ALBERTA’S FUR-BEARING ANIMALS

Badger

Bear

Beaver

Bobcat

Coyote

Fisher

Fox

Lynx

Marten

Mink

Muskrat

Otter

Raccoon

Skunk

Squirrel

Weasel

Wolf

Wolverine

A fur-bearer is an animal with long protecting guard hairs and thick, insulating under fur.

Black bears can be hunted by Alberta trappers, but not trapped or snared. As part of Alberta’s overall black bear management plan, trapper Gordy Klassen says registered trappers are allowed six bears per season.