After all, Gold Eagle was operating right next to mining giant Goldcorp Inc. in Ontario's Red Lake camp, and Goldcorp was always seen as its eventual buyer.

On top of that, Goldcorp is the dominant player in Red Lake. By putting $50-million into Gold Eagle, Agnico showed the world that it was willing to take on one of the big boys in its own backyard.

What most people did not know was that Agnico had already claimed much of that backyard for itself.

In a transaction last March that went almost unnoticed, Agnico picked up a whopping 72,220 acres of land for exploration in Red Lake. That makes it the single biggest property holder in the area, with even more land than Goldcorp itself, which holds a little more than 40,000 acres (not including joint-venture land), according to Intierra Resource Intelligence.

The property was optioned to Agnico from mining consultant Michael Dehn, a former Goldcorp employee who had little trouble finding an interested buyer.

"I looked at the project size and said there are only three or four companies that would consider getting into it," he says. "The first guys I took it to, I sold it."

If Goldcorp feels threatened by a major mining company entering its domain, it isn't showing it. The company agreed to buy Gold Eagle on Thursday for $1.5-billion, effectively reclaiming dominance over Red Lake.

But Agnico's move into Goldcorp territory speaks to a bigger issue: It is getting harder and harder for the major companies to keep growing. As a result, they are going to continue to butt heads as they turn over the big gold camps for new discoveries or acquisition targets.

"Because there's less opportunities and less choices in a consolidating industry, people aren't going to sit back," says Ian Telfer, Goldcorp's chairman.

"Everyone's going to pick their targets and do everything they have to do to try and get a deal done. The gentility may be going out of what is a friendly, co-operative industry."

This isn't a new development. Big mining companies wage hostile battles for juniors all the time, and it is not uncommon for them to be working in or around the same camps. Goldcorp moved into Agnico's territory in Quebec a couple of years ago when it bought Virginia Gold Mines Inc.

The difference now is that a shrinking number of opportunities in politically safe countries like Canada means that the majors are certain to clash more often, according to experts.

Catherine Gignac, an analyst at Wellington West Capital Markets, points out that in recent years, many companies realized it was getting tougher to make discoveries in North America. As a result, they headed to other corners of the world but it has often backfired as they faced political risk and other challenges.

"A few years ago, it was easy for companies to go global. They saw that nobody was looking around Romania, Venezuela, Ecuador. And now they've realized, 'Gee, it's not that easy,' " she says.

Agnico and Goldcorp separated themselves from that pack by sticking to politically safe countries and still carving out impressive growth. But by limiting themselves to safer places, it is only natural that many of the same assets would catch their attention.

Ontario-based Red Lake, for example, is right up Agnico's alley. It is one of the world's highest-grade gold districts and requires the same kind of underground mining that the company already conducts next door in Quebec. The only surprise, perhaps, is how long it took Agnico to get into Goldcorp's backyard.

"I don't think there is any turf out there that belongs to any company exclusively," says David Garofalo, Agnico's chief financial officer. "We're all trying to find economic mineralization, and we'll follow our noses in that regard."

That means that the shrinking group of junior companies with good gold deposits in safe jurisdictions will generate more interest than ever from the big producers.

In Canada, consolidation has whittled that group down to a very few names, including Detour Gold Corp., Osisko Mining Corp., San Gold Corp., Lake Shore Gold Corp., Rainy River Resources Ltd., and Comaplex Minerals Corp.

It should thus come as no surprise that Agnico recently bought a 15.6% stake in Comaplex, a small exploration firm working way up in Nunavut.

"As long as they fill out our core criteria, which is low political risk with good development potential, we'll go where the good gold zones are," Mr. Garofalo says.

One of those is Red Lake, where Agnico can look forward to fending off mosquitos as it drills out some of the 70,000-plus acres it has staked in the months and years ahead.

This is untouched land that nobody else wanted. But Mr. Dehn, the Red Lake expert, thinks it could hold vast riches --potentially much more than the Gold Eagle discovery that triggered this week's $1.5-billion bid from Goldcorp.

"I would think there are still at least 20 or 30 million ounces [of gold] to be found on the old properties at Red Lake, and probably that much more [in the land] that the juniors have and that Agnico has at the fringes of the camp," he says.