Emerging from a stand of trees in the Northwest Territories of Canada comes a wood bison, the larger of the two subspecies of the American bison. (The plains bison is the other type). The wood bison once numbered in the tens of thousands, roaming the chilly boreal forests and open meadows in northwestern Canada and parts of Alaska. But by the early 1900s, these majestic animals, as with their cousins to the south, were driven almost to extinction by hunting, disease, and habitat loss.