Fort Smith (July 24/06) - For Earl Evans, hunting is much more than just a pastime - it is a way of life.

Evans says he is the most active hunter in Fort Smith and one of the most active in the NWT.

Earl Evans stands next to a bear skin, one of the many hunting souvenirs that adorn his Fort Smith home. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

"I think I've shot just about every kind of animal around here," he says, noting he has hunted in most parts of the NWT, except the High Arctic.

The game has included bear, bison, wolf, wolverine, Dall's sheep, muskox, and grizzly bear. Evans jokes Greenpeace and animal lovers would "roll over and croak" if they knew how many animals he has harvested.

A massive head on a wall in his home is from the biggest bison ever recorded in North America - a specimen of over 2,000 pounds he shot in 1997.

"I've been hunting since I was eight or nine years old," Evans says, adding he has no plans to stop anytime soon. "I'm going to be hunting until I can't walk."

Evans says one of the reasons he hunts is to keep Metis culture alive.

However, he adds there are far fewer hunters in the NWT now than when he was growing up.

"There's almost no one in the bush anymore," he says, noting there are only a few hunters he knows of in Fort Smith, though there is plenty of game around.

"Everybody is playing bingo or watching TV," he says, describing television as a "culture killer. I bet you 15 years from now you'll see very, very few people out hunting," he predicts.

Even though he works full-time as a highways maintenance supervisor with the Department of Transportation, Evans says he finds time to hunt on weekends.

Evans was introduced to hunting by his late father, John Evans, who would take his son along when he hunted rabbits.After that, Evans and his friend Ken Hudson, now president of the Fort Smith Metis Council, began hunting birds with slingshots and bird wires. The two-foot-long crooked wires would be thrown into flocks of birds and sometimes knock down 10 at a time.

When they were still about 10 years old, the two friends graduated to .22-calibre rifles, Evans recalls, noting they hunted small game like prairie chickens, ducks and rabbits.

They moved on to hunting bears when they were 13 or 14.

Evans says he learned many of his hunting skills from elders, such as Pi Kennedy.

When he was about 11 years old, he was with Kennedy in a boat on a river, when they saw a bear on a bank. Kennedy told Evans to shoot at the bear with a .306 - a rifle that he had never used before - and he took four or five shots, but missed every time.

"Pi was just killing himself laughing," Evans recalls, adding he got "bear fever" and really wanted to hunt after the experience.

However, sometimes the hunter becomes the hunted.

Evans was nearly killed by a bear in the spring, while hunting moose along the Slave River. A bear charged as he was cleaning a moose carcass.

Evans shot the bear in the face when it was about 25 feet away, but it kept charging and he managed to shoot again. "The bear fell right at my feet."