A three-hundred-year-old Sitka spruce on Haida Gwaii with a genetic mutation that made its needles gold — a tree sacred to the Haida, protected in a small reserve, and a tourist attraction. In 1997, a former logging engineer named Grant Hadwin swam the Yakoun River with a chainsaw and cut it down as a protest against industrial forestry, then disappeared on a kayak crossing before his trial. Vaillant builds the whole history of coastal logging around the act — how the trade worked, what it did to the coast, and what happened to a man who spent his life in it and broke. It covers a lot of ground and occasionally gets a little lost in thicker woods, but only occasionally. A crazy story extremely well told—exactly what I’ve come to expect from this gifted Canadian master of long-form narrative nonfiction.