I never miss an opportunity to recommend one of my favourite books, The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant.
In January 1997, Grant Hadwin, an expert woodsman and timber surveyor, travelled to Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands). At night, alone and carrying a chain saw, he trekked into the forest and located his quarry: a unique Sitka spruce with golden needles. Hadwin cut into the 200-year-old tree, leaving it so unstable that it fell days later. Hadwin confessed, and was arrested.
The Golden Spruce is as much true crime reportage as it is a history of the region and a biography of Hadwin and the tree itself. Vaillant sets up this mystery not as a who-dunnit, but as a why-dunnit and what-came-next. Why would a man who worked in and respected the forest and the Haida attack a tree that was not only a biological rarity, but also considered sacred and culturally valued? And what happened to Hadwin, who disappeared just before he was due to appear in court, and is still missing?
Vaillant pulls us into this world with rich descriptions of the setting that never feel tacked on to the driving story. And what a magnificent setting it is: intertidal zones, old-growth forests, and mist-enshrouded islands, with savage storms, and soil and water teeming with life.
Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize, and a national bestseller, The Golden Spruce is non-fiction at its very best: investigative, comprehensive, powerful, sensitive, riveting.
If you like The Golden Spruce, check out John Vaillant’s latest book, The Tiger, or Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.