SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Customers of Yk Paintball must have felt like they had been pelted in the chest with red, bitter-tasting paint when they heard owner Nick Donovan is leaving town later this year.

Nick Donovan, owner and operator of Yk Paintball, will be moving out of town later this year, but doesn't want to leave until his business is safe in the hands of someone who will keep it going. - photo courtesy of Nick Donovan

But fear not, says Donovan: the game will remain in Yellowknife.

Donovan, who created his business Yk Paintball in the summer of 2007, will be leaving Yellowknife in either October or November. His job as resource management sector clerk with the Department of National Defence has summoned him to Ontario.

That news initially worried some of his customers, including Richard Mackenzie-Luxon, who met Donovan through paintball and gradually became a good friend.

"I was pretty upset because at first I thought he was going to be taking it down with him. He assured me that he wasn't," said Mackenzie-Luxon.

Nevertheless, Mackenzie-Luxon remains concerned the game he and approximately 100 other regular customers love will lose its principal organizer and supplier of markers (guns), hoppers (paintball holders) and CO-2 cylinders.

"I'm worried, probably like everyone else, about who's going to take it over," he said. "Is it going to be staying in Yellowknife? Going out of Yellowknife? Is this person going to be looking after it like Nick did? Are they going to be dedicated like Nick?"

Donovan is certainly protective of his business.

"With what I've already established in the last year and a half, I don't want these guys to think, 'He sold us all this stuff and now he's not going to leave anything to support it.'" he said.

In illustration of his point: "I've had one serious offer and I'm hesitant to act upon it," said Donovan. "It's a First Nations band in Wrigley and essentially they're wanting to pick this up and take it up to Wrigley to give the youth something to do and keep them out of trouble.

"I'd like to sell it, but I want to keep it in Yellowknife primarily for the people I started the business for."

Yk Paintball, which stages games in a field near the sand pits, attracts about 20 players every Sunday.

"That's not a small group for a community of our size," said Mackenzie-Luxon. "Before Nick was there, we didn't have a reliable spot to be able to get paint or parts ... It was kind of chaotic."

He added that games usually attracted only 10 people prior to Yk Paintball and that good equipment was hard to come by. He doesn't want to see that happen again.

Nor does Donovan.

"I don't do it for the money," he said. "My wife and I - we make plenty enough working in the military. When we came up, we met some people who wanted to start playing paintball but we could never find a place to get CO-2 filled, never find quality gear, never find paint balls that weren't like rubber balls.

"A lot of people have their fingers crossed that somebody local will pick this up and continue it in much the same manner as I did. There's definitely a market here."