Ethnographic studies have established that, until shortly after World War II, Indians in northern Alberta regularly and systematically fired habitats to influence the local distribution and relative abundance of plant and animal resources. In ways similar to what has been reported for hunter-gatherers in other regions, this pyrotechnology contributed to an overall fire mosaic that, in this case, formerly characterized northern boreal forests. Crosscultural comparisons of these practices with those in other parts of North America, as well as in several parts of Australia, illustrate functionally parallel strategies in the ways that hunter- gatherers employed habitat fires, specifically in the maintenance of “fire yards” and “fire corridors” in widely separated and different kinds of biological zones.