A pleasing scent, a heady odor familiar to waterfowlers the globe over, tugged at the land near Brighton, Colorado, where the great Rocky Mountains with their snowy peaks serve as the overseer.

There is another richness in Colorado not widely known: Geese! Canadas beyond imagination in a place a waterfowl hunter would not likely seek, especially in January when the wind comes tearing down from the mountain tops. But they are here: the Giant and the Greater Canadas along with the Lessers, Richardson's, Hutchinson's, Aleutians and the Tavernier's. From Alaska, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Montana, North and South Dakota, they come with their numbers swelling to over 300,000 at the height of the migration. This is in addition to the 30,000 resident nesters.

Things are good for Canada geese in Colorado, a small miracle considering how dismal it was for them in the 1950s in this the state of the blue spruce.

But back then they did not have someone to speak up for them. Until, through the influence of a single waterfowl hunter (his name now lost in the annals of waterfowling), who appealed to the Colorado Wildlife Department to close an area known as the North Central Zone, north of Denver, to the Wyoming border, west of what is now Interstate 25, to the Continental Divide. There were, at the time, a small number of Greater Canadas in various locations within this zone.

The Colorado Wildlife Department agreed and the season was closed for five years. This created a healthy flock and migratory Canada geese found a safe house for the duration of the closure. Soon numbers of Canada geese began to grow. The foundation had been laid.

When the hunting ban on the "no zone" was lifted, hunters were allowed to take only one bird. When Mark Beam, a happy sort of fellow with a cheek-to-cheek smile, showed up in 1980, the limit had climbed to two birds. Now the limit is three.

Mark came to Colorado from Illinois not as a waterfowl hunter but as a cabinet maker. When he left the Midwest he thought he had left waterfowl hunting, especially goose hunting, forever. Instead, he fell into a goose well--a seemingly bottomless hole, at that.

"There were some private clubs but there were also vast acres no one hunted," Mark recalled. "All you had to do was ask a farmer for permission to hunt. And usually you got it."

Continuing to work at the cabinet shop, Mark began to learn about front-range Canadas and he would soon take out his first guide party from Denver for a Saturday hunt, his day off. The hunters got nine Greater Canadas, and Stillwater Outfitters was born. The year was 1989. Mark was to become Colorado's first licensed waterfowl guide.

It was Christmas week in 1995 when I first met Mark for a hunt. The moon was fat and yellow like the fat on a corn-fed mallard's breast, and it rose each night to light a path for late-feeding geese. The nighttime temperature was in the 20s and climbed into the 60s by noon each day.