BVC Announces Treevolution by Paul S. Piper
Treevolution
by Paul S. Piper
Scientists attempting to modify Douglas fir genetics inadvertently hand Nature a means to seek revenge on its most pernicious species: Humans.
When biologist Kara Shackleton investigates a previously unknown grove of old-growth Douglas Fir on the slopes of Mount Baker in northwestern Washington, she unwittingly discovers a genetics experiment that will soon go awry, unleashing a war against humanity unlike anything ever seen before.
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Paul S. Piper is the author of four novels and five books of poetry.
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Read a Sample
1.
Kara Shackleton braked her beat-up Subaru ten feet from the mustard-yellow steel bar-gate blocking the road. She sat for a moment watching dust rise in the rear-view. Ahead, a square metal sign, Washington Timber Company, Private Property, Keep Out, hung stiffly off the yellow bar in the mid-July morning.
Kara had left the Baker Lake turnoff over an hour ago, following the GPS onto a series of circuitous logging roads, each steeper and sketchier than the last. The final mile was touch-and-go, the Forester barely scraping across a fresh rock slide. But she’d made worse, and her car showed it.
She was almost to her target. The road and gate looked sparsely used, but hard rain last night would have obliterated any tracks. Kara said to the empty car, “What now?”
A moment later, having decided, she spun the wheel hard, three-pinning the car, driving back to where a steep spur breached right up over a rocky berm. She pulled the Forester onto the spur and gunned it over the berm, cut the engine, and listened for a moment as the silence of the mountains engulfed her.
Kara lifted a pair of ten-power Vortex binoculars from the seat next to her, slid out, eased the door shut, walked over to the berm’s edge, and looked down at the road. The car was not visible from the road, although the tracks she’d made were obvious.
“C’est la vie,” Kara said, walking back to the car. She slid the license plates out of their brackets and slipped them under the front passenger car mat. Then she locked the car, dropped off the berm, and began hiking back up the road.
Kara was here because of Jakob Grisham.
Jakob was a pilot and photographer specializing in aerial photography, who hired out to the likes of National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Outside Magazine, as well as the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and The Wilderness Society. He had several coffee table books to his name — aerial shots of glaciers, rivers, peaks, and valleys. His most recent, depicting shrinking glaciers of the North Cascades, had flirted with various best-seller lists. Jakob and Kara went way back.
Over a couple of beers three nights ago, Jakob told Kara about a stand of old-growth he’d spotted, giving her the GPS settings scribbled in pencil on a napkin.
“Up on the southwest flank of Baker. Looks like some roads get close. Don’t know what kind of shape they’re in though. The roads.”
Jakob took a swig of local wheat beer, and Kara watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down. As a younger girl, discovering men and their various qualities, she’d been fascinated by Adam’s apples. Still was. And Jakob’s was a thick knot in his compact neck.
“Hadn’t noticed it before, but somehow it escaped the scalping. You see the damnedest things from up there.”
“Huh,” Kara had said.
One of her jobs with North Sound Conservation was to map existing stands of old-growth trees, hoping to protect those that didn’t already have wilderness, park, or protected status. She prided herself on knowing every stand of virgin timber from Whatcom to Twisp. But she’d never heard of this one.
“How large?”
“Not very. A few acres.”
“Huh,” said Kara again, staring off into the space of Borderline Brewery, the pulse and blur of another Monday night before the music amped up.
It took her three days to free herself of other commitments, pin the GPS on a topo map, and figure out which roads, out of a maze of extant and abandoned logging roads, would get her within walking distance to the grove Jakob had described.
And here she was.
But she hadn’t expected a gated road or Washington Timber land. As far as she knew, and as the map had depicted, this was a patchwork of National Forest and Department of Natural Resources, or DNR land. No private parcels up here. Nothing owned by Washington Timber, the largest “forest products” corporation in the Pacific Northwest.
Walking back up the road toward the gate, the morning was bright and full of wren song. Tiny butterflies, silvery blues, or Glaucopsyche lygdamus, flitted around puddles, and the occasional raven drifted across the ravine to her left. Which is what Jakob would be reborn as, she was convinced, a raven.
But it wasn’t long before the flies found her. Tiny black ones called no-see-ums, deer flies, horse flies, common pesky house flies, and the odd mosquito. To the bugs, she knew, she was simply meat and blood.
She cursed, loped back to the car, dug a bottle of picaridin from the glove box, slathered every inch of exposed skin, then jammed a SeaHawks cap onto her head.
“Piss off, bugs.”
Bugs at bay, a rush of joy surged through her. Walking this high up a mountain road, the July sun soaking her, arms swinging, legs pistoning her even higher, it was times like this that the world seemed a beautiful gift. When being alive wasn’t an abstraction. And out here in nature, the piles of work, the meetings, and the emails all evaporated.
In her younger years, Kara had been a long-distance runner, varsity in high school and college. She’d been good enough to train for several Olympic events, but never quite made the cut. These days she participated in as many Iron Man and similar events as time would allow. Several weeks ago, she’d run the REVEL Mount Hood race in Oregon with her friend Monique. Tall, lithe, and athletic, Kara possessed wild hair the color of Raven, and her cheekbones were the gift of her Quinault grandfather.
Stepping over the bar-gate, instantly cognizant she was trespassing, Kara slipped off the road into the forest, a second-growth mixture of spruce, Douglas fir, hemlock, and alder. The bright sun of the road was immediately eclipsed, reduced to slivers and slashes of light on the thick duff. She hesitated. There was no sound except the buzzing of insects, the occasional fluted pitch of a varied thrush. No engines, no sound of humans or their machines. She began paralleling the road, keeping ten to fifteen feet in. She calculated the stand of old growth was a half to three-quarters mile ahead.
Stopping to wipe sweat from her forehead, she glanced at her phone, and saw forty minutes had passed since she’d stepped over the gate. Given her steady pace, Kara figured she’d bushwhacked nearly a mile. She should be close. She kept moving efficiently and quietly.
Suddenly, a new-cut road flared ahead of her, fresh clay churned to the surface by a D-9 cat.
She stopped short, her senses torqued. Moving cautiously, she stepped out of the forest to the road’s edge and glanced both ways. Her father had drilled that into her. Always look both ways before you cross a street. Nothing moving, any tracks washed clean by the rain. But something caught her eye. She brought the glasses to her eyes, and there it was. A video camera mounted high on a Doug fir, aligned to capture anyone driving or walking in.
And then she heard a whine and immediately spotted the drone flying fast down the road toward her. She snapped back into the woods and crouched, tracking the drone. She watched it zip past and disappear around the bend. Aware now she’d been holding her breath, she let it out with a long sigh. “Damn.” It hadn’t seen her.
Kara moved back into the forest, settled onto a log, and intoned softly, “What the fuck?”
She pulled an energy bar out of her shorts and ate it in slow bites, thinking this was very, very strange. A surveillance camera and a drone in a remote forest, two thousand feet and twelve tortuous miles above Baker Lake, where a few boats trolled slowly for sockeye salmon. There had to be something here that Washington Timber didn’t want anyone to see, that they were guarding. She crumpled the wrapper and stuck it back into her pocket. Then she waited.
A half-hour went by and she heard nothing else.
She began following this new road, hugging the forest but keeping the road in view. Fallen trees and devil’s club made her passage slow and circuitous.
And then, despite her years of experience as a field ecologist, she stopped and gasped. In front of her across the new road stood some of the largest Douglas fir she’d ever seen. As large as those in the Hoh Valley, the groves on the Olympic Peninsula she visited every summer to pay homage. The new thin road skirted them, curving away and disappearing to the right. Kara made a quick decision and bolted across the road.
She was in them now, feeling as minuscule as an ant in the presence of gods. Some of the trunks were the size of small houses, fifteen feet in diameter. She’d never seen anything like it. Douglas fir the size of redwoods. Pseudotsuga menziesii. The primary timber crop tree in the Pacific Northwest. The guidebooks would tell you trees of this species and size were impossible. Yet here she was. And here they were.
As Kara walked, she became aware of energy in the grove, a thrumming, as if the very ground was alive and moving, as if hundreds of animals burrowed and twisted under her feet. And then, staring expectantly at the ground, expecting it to heave and shift, she noticed that the soil was virtually bare. Scraped off was the six inches of detritus that would normally blanket an old-growth forest floor. This ground was raked clay.
“Huh,” she said.
Catching movement, she froze, and when she focused on it Kara was stunned. The branches of these giant trees were visibly growing.
She slid her phone out of her shorts, opened the camera, and shot a two-minute video, then realized she needed a scale. She took the case off her camera, a rubber six-by-four rectangle, and held it next to the branch while she focused the camera, then shot another two minutes, bracing the camera to hold it still.
When she clicked the camera off, Kara hung between amazement and disbelief. The branch now spanned half the length of the camera case, at least three inches. In two minutes. What the hell was going on here?
She walked on, noticing other things about the plot. Every so often a tree was contorted, bent into itself or a neighbor, corkscrewed. These trees looked as if they were in pain. Kara knew she was anthropomorphizing but didn’t care. There was pain here. It was in the ground and in the air.