Robertson Trading Co. in the town of La Ronge, Sask., might be the only grocery store in Canada where a good portion of the inventory is not for sale.

Sure, residents and visitors passing through on their way to hunt and fish the province’s boreal wilderness can stop in to pick up dry goods, camping supplies and some of in-house butcher Guthrie Winn’s sausage (former prime minister Stephen Harper is a fan), and trappers can still sell raw furs or trade for groceries.

But it’s the stuff mounted on the walls and hanging from the ceiling — taxidermied wildlife, buckskin jackets, wood and bone carvings, airbrushed drums, birchbark canoes — that makes Robertson truly special, a sort of living museum to a way of life that is at risk of disappearing.

“A lot of the things you see are not for sale, they’re part of his collection, or we really love them and don’t want to part with them,” says Diane Robertson. She’s referring to her late father-in-law, Alex, who left a decades-long career as a fur buyer with Hudson’s Bay Company to purchase the La Ronge Grocery Store in 1967. In the 1970s, global demand for high-quality furs fuelled a Canadian export industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and, in spite of competition from HBC, within seven years the Robertsons were able to build a bigger store beside the original building, at which point they changed the name to Robertson Trading Co. They would renovate twice more over the years to expand the business, which today is run by Alex’s son Scott.