John Vaillant. The Golden Spruce

Unless a tree is particularly large, or unusually shaped, it will not stand out as an individual, and unless it is isolated from its mates, it will seldom announce itself from a distance. But despite being embedded in a forest of similarly large trees, the tree that came to be known as the golden spruce was an exception on both counts. From the ground, its startling colour stopped people dead in their tracks; from the air, it stood out like a beacon and was visible from miles away. Like much of the surrounding landscape, the tree was incorporated into the Haida's vast repertoire of stories, but as far as anyone knows, it is the only tree, in what was then an infinity of trees, ever to be given a name by the Haida people. They called it K'iid K'iyaas: Elder Spruce Tree. According to legend, it was a human being who had been transformed.

Although it was well known to those who lived around the Yakoun Valley [in the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of British Columbia], the golden spruce wasn't discovered by scientists until well into the twentieth century. By then it was more than two hundred years old and all but impossible to miss. When the Scottish timber surveyor and baronet Sir Windam Anstruther stumbled across the tree in 1924, he was dumbfounded. "I didn't even make an axe mark on it," he told one reporter before he died, "being, I suppose, a bit overcome by its strangeness in a forest of green." For years afterward, no one knew quite what to make of Sir Windam's arboreal unicorn. Some suggested it might be a new species, native to the archipelago; others supposed the tree had been hit by lightning or was simply in the process of dying. As it turned out, the tree was alive and well; it was just fantastically rare. So rare, in fact, that it warranted its own scientific name: Picea sitchensis 'Aurea.' Picea stichensis is the Latin name for the Sitka spruce, and Aurea is Latin for "golden" or "gleaming like gold," but it can also mean "beautiful" or "splendid." Sixteen storeys tall and more than six metres around, the golden spruce was unique in the botanical world. (John Vaillant. The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed. Alfred Knopf [Canada], 2005, pp. 18-19.)

Nowhere else [than in the boreal jungle of the Primorye, in Russia's Outer Manchuria] can a wolverine, brown bear, or moose drink from the same river as a leopard, in a watershed that also hosts cork trees, bamboo, and solitary yews that predate the Orthodox Church. In the midst of this, Himalayan black bears build haphazard platforms in wild cherry trees that seem too fragile for the task, opium poppies nod in the sun, and ginseng keeps its secret in dappled shade.... Primorye's bizarre assemblage of flora and fauna leaves one with the impression that Noah's ark had only recently made landfall, and that, rather than dispersing to their proper places around the globe, many of its passengers had simply decided to stay, including some we never knew existed. Within this waterbound envelope live unclassifiable species like the raccoon dog, as well as a bizarre tropical canid called a dhole that hunts in packs, and has been reputed to attack humans and tigers, along with more traditional prey. Here, too, can be found red-legged ibis, paradise fly-catchers, and parrotlike reed sutoras, along with five species of eagle, nine species of bat, and more than forty kinds of fern. In the spring, improbable moths and butterflies like the Artemis Emperor, the Exclusive Underwing, and the as-yet unstudied Pseudopsychic hatch out to spangle and iridesce by the roadsides. In the dead of winter, giant ladybugs with reverse color schemes cruise the walls of village kitchens like animated wallpaper. This Boreal Jungle (for lack of a better term) is unique on earth, and it nurtures the greatest biodiversity of any place in Russia, the largest country in the world. It is over this surreal menagerie that the Amur tiger reigns supreme. (John Vaillant. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, pp. 24-25)

(My grateful thanks to my colleague Kevin Neuhouser, in sociology, who handed me a worn paperback copy of The Golden Spruce last year. "You'll really like this," he said. I'll admit to being skeptical at first -- partly because I thought I had better things to do than read about a tree, and partly because, at least at first glance, the environmental issues that Vaillant raises seemed shopworn and predictable. But, as it turns out, I really did like it, and there's nothing predictable about it. For a start, although the tale of the golden spruce is little more than a strand among many, the warp and weft of this narrative provide a fascinating and extraordinary tapestry of the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia -- the biodiversity of its sodden, old-growth forests; the lives of the Haida Indians, who wove tales of the golden spruce into their legends; the collision of European and Haida cultures in the early days of exploration; and then of their collusion as well, exterminating otter and old growth alike. What's more, Vaillant writes like a dream -- "arboreal unicorn" is perfect pitch -- and take a second look at how much gets packed into sentences as rich, jam-packed, solid, and surprising as the biodiversity of the Primorye itself. Better yet, the punch-line of The Golden Spruce is utterly baffling and disturbing. Why would a timber scout turned environmentalist named Grant Hadwin swim naked across a river in the Haida Gwaii in the middle of the night, towing a chainsaw behind him? Why did he cut down the legendary Golden Spruce?

Hooked, I picked up Vallaint's next book, The Tiger, which is ostensibly about a man-eating Siberian Tiger that hunted down Vladimir Markov, a poacher, in Russia's Far East. (I'll concede to being foolishly attracted to the subject matter; but then, as Vaillant points out, who would read a book about a man-eating pig?) Like the former book, the tale of Yuri Trush tracking down the tiger is merely an excuse for a range of explorations -- of the native tribes who lived alongside the tiger for generations, of the arrival of Russian settlers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, of the savage effects of perestroika, which turned ravaged and impoverished villagers into poachers. And then there's the story of the two Germans who lived for 2 1/2 years in the Namibian desert during WWII (The Sheltering Desert). And then there's a chapter on the critical distinction that Jakob von Uexkull, one of the fathers of ethology, drew between Umbegung (the objective environment) and Umwelt (an animal's, or person's, inevitably self-centered take on the world). And then this curious sentence, just one of a wealth of riches hidden in plain view: "The brandname Viagra is derived from vyaaghra, the Sanskrit word for tiger" (p. 211). And then, in the end, there's the heart-stopping, "soul-rending" roar of the tiger as it leaps from the edge of a forest clearing for the the throat of Yuri Trush.

In passing, for the past 50 years or more, Alfred A. Knopf has been consistently publishing the best writing in the United States. If I were rich, I'd buy myself a first edition, first printing, of everything to come out of Knopf, and then I'd think I'd died and gone to heaven.)