The Last Trapper

On an incredible Canadian "White Odyssey" crossing 8,600 kilometers by dog-driven sled from Alaska to Quebec, filmmaker Nicolas Vanier met Norman, a modern-day Jeremiah Johnson—a Davy Crockett for a world that has forgotten its past.

Norman, 50, lives in the Yukon woods with a Nahanni Indian woman named Nebraska. A long-time trapper, he doesn’t need society's luxuries. He has his dogs and he eats what he hunts or fishes. He handmade his sled, his rackets, his hut and his canoe with the wood he gets from the forest. Leather is tanned by Nebraska for him in the old way, as the ancient Sekani Indians did.

Hunting lynxes, beavers, martens, wolves and wolverines provides the rest. Each spring, he goes to Whitehorse or Dawson to sell furs and buy sundries: cigarette tobacco, ammunition, traps, flour, matches, candles and batteries for his radio. He travels with his dogs. They are silent and allow him to gaze undisturbed at the majestic landscapes he crosses. That is what makes Norman trap. The Great North is in him, and Nebraska carries it with her, in her blood, because the boreal forest is her people's mother.

The audience gets a day-to-day portrait of a pure spirit, existing in accord with his environment, and living respectfully off the lives of fellow creatures.