Churchill Wildlife Management Area, Manitoba, Canada

There are places where one world ends cleanly and another begins. Churchill is not one of them. This remote frontier outpost sits at the edge of Hudson Bay, where people and polar bears, settlement and wilderness, taiga and tundra all overlap. Ecologists call a transition zone where two distinct biological communities meet an ecotone—and I have experienced few places where that word feels more fitting.

I captured this image in an area where the great boreal forest begins to surrender to the Arctic tundra. The trees become fewer, smaller and increasingly shaped by the relentless northern winds until, eventually, they disappear altogether. Many of these final scattered spruces are known as “flag trees,” their branches swept predominantly to one side—a living record of the prevailing wind. On this particular evening, one transition seemed to mirror another: the taiga was fading into tundra just as daylight was fading into twilight. For a few fleeting moments, I found myself capturing two ecosystems, two kinds of light and, in many ways, two worlds.