Beyond the Northern Lights is a story about the attractions of an outdoor life and how they formed the driving force for my youthful ambitions, culminating in a career as a guardian of the forests and its animal inhabitants. It is also a tribute to things that no longer exist except in my memory - the Calgary of my youth and a simpler, more innocent time. I know there are many people who would be delighted to engage in pursuits similar to those I describe - traveling secluded byways far from the stress of urban overcrowding, coping with climate at a primordial level, confronting nature in the raw - but who can only partake of such experiences vicariously through the medium of the printed word. I hope they will find pleasure in these pages. The events related here are based on personal experience. The participants are real people, identified by their actual names when they could be dredged form my memory, although I have twice deliberately neglected to provide surnames to avoid causing anguish or embarrassment to the persons involved or their families.