The Book of Yaak (16 page)

Rosalind and I walk down a game trail for perhaps half a mile, looking up at the trees and down at all the different mushrooms. 1 ask questions—"What kind of tree is this? What kind of tree is that? How old do you think that one is?"—and gradually I notice that Rosalind is going slower and slower.

We're in what she calls a "subalpine spruce and fir zone," a place where larch, and shaggy, sharp-needled spruce trees grow strong beside flat-needled fir trees (Douglas firs have one needle-pod growth tip at the end of each twig, while the subalpine fir has three growth tips). I begin to see why Rosalind has stopped here. I'd been looking forward to showing her the even bigger larches further up the trail, but it soon becomes apparent that this is a better place for an examiner.

"The Forest Service doesn't want trees set aside for biological diversity," she says. She's standing in one spot, looking all around, studying. A big fire came through here she guesses about one hundred years ago, sparing only the larch due to their thick bark. The almost as tall but smaller-diameter lodgepoles shot up after that, and together these two species provided shade for the next successional stage, the fir and the spruce.

Hardly moving, Rosalind points out hemlock and cedar—the hemlock's needles green on top but shiny-silver beneath, almost aluminum-looking—a feathery look.

"This is a very diverse forest," she notes, taking three steps to a grand fir. And beyond it, there's juniper; a white pine (five needles to a bunch). She's sure the lodgepole came in after the larch, working its way up between the fire-surviving larches; the lodgepoles have no limbs for a long way up, indicating they had to grow a long way before they could reach the sun.

"Larch trees can get two to three times this size, if you'll let them," Rosalind says: a dizzying prospect. There is one monster larch tree that is definitely an old-timer, and we step over to measure it. She asks me to guess the diameter first, from a distance. I squint and imagine the great tree cut—I pretend I've lucked onto it in a slash pile while out cutting firewood — and make a guess of forty inches. Rosalind nods. "Pretty close," she says.

We stretch the tape measure four feet up to "breast height," then wrap the tape measure around the tree's circumference at that height. We're going to calculate the DBH — diameter-at-breast height—and to get the diameter we divide the circumference by pi and come up with 42.3 inches. A good, big tree. This one, Rosalind says, is some kind of veteran—maybe two or three hundred years old.

Rosalind is a mix of scientist and romantic, an ideal mix of microscope-squinter and world's-wonder wide-eyed gawker. Politician and rebel, she earns her living by numbers, swims through them as a trout through water—and she acknowledges that there are different numerical definitions for old growth (moisture regime, slope aspect, tree species and so on). In a subalpine spruce-fir forest such as the one we're in, she says, a general working definition might be fifteen trees per acre with a diameter greater than twenty inches. But that's the office part of her, the computer grids.

"There's so much," Rosalind says. "You have to look at everything: light patches through the canopy, amount of nutrients on the ground, soil and logs in terms of decay, nesting trees, snags....

"It's close to being old growth," she says, looking around. "Maybe in fifty years."

Larch makes the best nesting cavities for birds because the outside bark is so resistant to rot, and yet the tops of the biggest larches are prone to breaking off—often intercepting lightning bolts, as they rise so high into the sky. These strikes of lightning allow moisture and fungus to enter the heartwood and rot it from the inside; the end result (before the tree falls, returning to earth) is that there is a nice protective shell around a soft home for hole-dwellers.

Rosalind is reentering her scientist-state; leaving the qualitative, which is usually where the poets play, and coming back into the realm of the quantitative. She steps over to a patch of grand fir that is growing in a cluster around a lodgepole pine. Researchers have discovered that the yew tree of this region grows in similar clusters. The yew has been very important in testing for anticancer properties -—an ingredient in the yew called Taxol has shown great success. The yew grows in isolated communities, or families—and one stand's Taxol production, Rosalind says, "can vary as much as tenfold. But they're cutting it all, without measuring," she says. "They can wipe out an important genetic strain."

Rosalind frowns, and then tells of a friend hired by the Forest Service to do "stand exams"—inventorying the diversity and quantity of various species, as required by law. It's a pleasant enough job under normal circumstances—I think of how good it felt to enumerate, record,
preserve,
even if briefly, that one larch—42.3
inches
—but the trouble Rosalind's friend has with the job is that they often do not send him in to do stand exams until
after
they'd already decided to cut, making his measurements meaningless.

"It's pretty disgusting," Rosalind says.

"Strangely enough, the Forest Service has destroyed the records," she adds. "We try to examine the historical timberstand exam database—but after about six years, the Forest Service dumps their files. It's a little like George Orwell, or Lenin—destroying the past, and rewriting the future. They're saying to us,
What old growth? What old growth was here? Prove to me there was old growth here.
"

Later in the day we're still along the Canadian border, up by the Yaak cemetery, looking at more larch. The trees in the immediate area are almost-for-sure-safe: not from any written legislation, but from the simple and unspoken decency that it's not nice to run amok with chain saws in a cemetery; not nice to fell trees on the headstones.

The afternoon wind lifts and stirs the highest branches far above us. "I like that," Rosalind says, smiling, looking down at the little cemetery. "People fertilizing the trees, when they're through living."

These are
big
trees; we see several all around us that would measure at least forty inches DBH. She mentions that she's asked the Forest Service to include categories in their old-growth surveys for how many trees per acre (and what kind) measure more than thirty-inch DBH, but they're not interested in measuring forty-inch trees. "They say, 'Oh we hardly ever find trees like that anyway,'" she adds sadly. "All they want to do is confirm whether or not the tree meets the seventeen-to-twenty-one-inch minimum."

Rosalind pokes around the base of a larch tree. Big larches typically accumulate great mounds of detritus at their base—detritus that is home for all kinds of mycorrhizae and bacteria, the kind of stuff that only the rest of nature (and scientists like Rosalind) can understand and appreciate.

I notice she's going slower and slower again. It's so unlike our nature, I think, to move that slow; when I get into open woods my tendency is to hurry along....

She begins pointing out old-growth components once again. "Conchs," she says—"tree ears." Just above us, in one of the lower branches, there's some
Alectoria
—the lime-green caribou lichen that woodland caribou would utilize were there any caribou left to feed on it. (Rosalind found caribou hair over near Glacier National Park in 1985; she suspected that's what it was, sent it in to the state lab, and sure enough, one had been through there.)

There's a big larch tree not too far ahead of us, down in a shady ravine, and I head toward it eagerly, like some kind of hunter, anxious to measure it: as if to lay claim to it. But Rosalind's entering micro-creep, and thinking about it now, I wonder what it must be like for her, in the woods, to be able to see so much—to see almost everything?

I would like to learn more, but understand that I'm going to have to move slower.

"Come back here and look at these lichens," she says.

I turn and go back to where she's crouched, looking at the underside of a fallen tree that leans down the hill. "It looks at first like there's just one lichen growing here, but you can see that there's two," she says.

I feel like nodding and saying Yes, Yes, now let's go measure that rascal over there (before he gets away?), but Rosalind's definitely in micro-creep—she's touching the two lichens, which are similarly colored and textured—only their patterns are different—one ornate, even baroque, and the other more clustered symmetrically—and so I, too, touch the lichens.

Now we're ready to go, I think. I touched the damn lichens.

I want to see
old growth.

She gazes down the length of the tree.

"Even the way a tree dies adds to the diversity of the forest," she says. "If it breaks off high"—if it snaps, so that it sags to the ground like a lean-to—as opposed to 'pit-and-mound', where the root system comes up with the tree, creating more soil perturbation—"or if it breaks off too low." Something like that affects, I realize, all that will follow, forever after.

How the tree dies matters too in that if it falls pointing downslope, it'll be elevated only a little bit off the ground, providing for quicker nutrient fixing back into the soil. But if it falls across-slope, it will provide access for animals to walk across, above the deep winter snows.

"It makes a difference if it falls parallel to or opposite the slope," Rosalind says, her gaze still focused on the slender dead tree, "because it will cast different shadows on the ground, which then creates different growth patterns....

"It bothers me," she says, turning toward me as though I would have the answer. "How can we do better than nature?"

We take one step away from the fallen tree, one of a dozen fallen trees around us. She stoops to examine a dark, pretty, waxy-leafed plant,
Pipsissewa
—prince's pine. "They need the larches' mycorrhizal fungus too," Rosalind says. Suddenly, I see, there's
Pipsissewa
all around us.

The woods are very quiet, as if agreeing.

We take another step toward the enormous tree I've had my eye on. "Orchids," Rosalind says, pointing, and then, "Queen's Cup—the one with the blue berry. It's an indicator plant of an old-growth forest, too."

1 all but dash the last twenty yards to the tree, stopping, though, en route to look briefly at black bear scat. When I pick it up to ask what she thinks it is, Rosalind is horrified, not realizing I meant, Did she know whether it was black bear or grizzly scat. She seems to think that I consider it an old-growth
delicacy.
I know scat and muscle, she knows orchids and slippery clean meiosis....

The tree I've all this time wanted to look at has a fifty-four-inch diameter at breast height. We spend a long time circling it, examining the thick great scales and ridges of bark. Forty or more feet above us, the trunk branches into three trunks, like a god.

"There's a little bird called the brown creeper," she says quietly, "that nests in the bark of giant larch trees like this one"—laying its eggs where one of the fist-sized scales of bark has half-exfoliated, a peeled-back place that allows the bird to wedge itself between the trunk and the flakey bark.

"It makes a hammock for the bird," Rosalind says, pointing to one such piece of bark where a small bird could lay one or two small eggs. "They live there and feed only by going
up
the tree with their curved bill, feeding all the way up, probing the bark for insects."

She looks around and I have the thought that, for the second, she's looking at the forest not through the eyes of a research scientist, or woods-walker, or anything like that, but through the eyes of a brown creeper: a bird.

"We need to save the best of what's left," she says. "You have to look at the landscape. If there's nothing else out there but lodgepole—then this, a diverse forest, becomes of immense value." She's talking about not just diversity of age, but of species. Even a
young
forest is rare these days, if it has diverse species within it. She blinks, pauses as if switching languages, and tries to explain it more clearly.

"Rather than being black-and-white about it, I've tried to encourage the Forest Service to come up with some sort of relative ranking system for what's left"—a system, says Rosalind, "based not just on
numbers,
but on what we have
left;
on what's
rare.
"

At our third stop, at dusk, up in the Spread Creek drainage—the great divide that has provided not only for the vast majority of Montana's historic (and present-day) caribou sightings, but which has been of historic importance as a grizzly corridor—we stand below a dark cedar jungle watching a red sunset over the northwest peaks. For just how long will this view remain? And Spread Creek?

"How
can
we do better than nature?" Rosalind had asked.

Down below an owl begins to hoot. The woods are still except for the peace that seems to be sliding off the ridges as evening cools.

"Nobody listens to the importance of dead trees," she says.

When the owl hoots again, Rosalind smiles and says, "Maybe a barred owl—one of the dark-eyed owls." She smiles wider, listening to what is left of the forest.

Y
OU CAN SEE THE GUYS
from the city getting a bit funny-eyed, when Tim and I walk down to the put-in carrying a chain saw. It's raining hard, pouring off the brims of our caps, and they think it's a practical joke—the four-weight fly rod in one hand and the Stihl 034 Super (with extended bar) chain saw in the other. They're so polite, these guys from the East—famous writers, famous fishermen and world travelers—that they don't know whether they're being had or not, but they don't want to risk hurting our feelings, so they just huddle in the rain and puff cheerily on their cigars and stare through the drizzle at the damp woods pressing in from that riverside wall of green. Mist is rising from the river. Even the name itself sounds somehow terrible and sharp,
Yaak,
like the sound a hatchet might make, cleaving flesh and then bone, and perhaps they think, well, why not a chain saw?