There was only one giant golden spruce in the world, and, until a man named Grant Hadwin took a chainsaw to it, in 1997, it had stood for more than three hundred years in a steadily shrinking patch of old-growth forest in Port Clements, on the banks of the Yakoun River, in the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Queen Charlottes, a blade-shaped archipelago that lies sixty miles off the northern coast of British Columbia and thirty miles south of the Alaskan coast, are one of a decreasing number of places in the Pacific Northwest where large stands of virgin coastal forest can still be found. Ecotourism is a growth industry here, and the golden spruce was a popular stop on visitors' itineraries. The tree was also sacred to the Haida Indians, two thousand of whom still live on the islands.

The golden spruce was remarkable enough to warrant its own scientific name: _Picea sitchensis '_Aurea.' The tree, a Sitka spruce, lacked eighty per cent of a normal specimen's allotment of chlorophyll, and, as a result, its needles were golden yellow instead of green. Unlike a typical Sitka spruce, which sends its branches off haphazardly, the golden spruce was, for reasons no one can explain, perfectly coniform. It stood out in the deep, green forest like a giant yellow Christmas tree. Several other golden spruces are rumored to exist in the Queen Charlottes, but they reportedly lack their famous counterpart's distinctive shape and are smaller and less uniformly yellow than the Yakoun River specimen, which had been standing long enough to be named K'iid K'iyass (Old Tree) by the Haida people and to be incorporated into their oral history.

On the night of January 20, 1997, Grant Hadwin, then forty-seven, stripped off his clothes and plunged into the Yakoun River, towing a chainsaw behind him. The river was swift and the water was cold, but this was no problem for Hadwin, a self-described "extreme swimmer" who had alarmed local police in Whitehorse, Yukon, earlier that winter by spending a quarter of an hour in the Yukon River when the air temperature was thirty-five degrees below zero. The golden spruce was more than six feet in diameter, and Hadwin's chainsaw had only a twenty-five-inch bar, but Hadwin had worked in the timber industry for years, and he knew how to make falling cuts. Leaving just enough of the core intact so that the tree would stand until the next windstorm, he returned by ferry from the island to the mainland port town of Prince Rupert. Shortly afterward, copies of a letter he had drafted were received by Greenpeace, the Vancouver Sun, members of the Haida Nation, and MacMillan Bloedel, Canada's biggest lumber company, which had a timber lease on the land on which the golden spruce stood. The letter said, in part:

I didn't enjoy butchering, this magnificent old plant, but you apparently need a message and wake-up call, that even a university trained professional, should be able to understand. . . . I mean this action, to be an expression, of my rage and hatred, towards university trained professionals and their extremist supporters, whose ideas, ethics, denials, part truths, attitudes, etc., appear to be responsible, for most of the abominations, towards amateur life on this planet.

The golden spruce fell a couple of days later. Locally, the reaction was extraordinary. "It was like a drive-by shooting in a small town," one resident of the islands told me. "People were crying; they were in shock. They felt enormous guilt for not protecting the tree better." This was in part because, according to Haida legend, the golden spruce represented a person; and, later, a public memorial service for the tree, presided over by several Haida chiefs, was held "to mourn one of our ancestors." But beyond the mourning, some Haida, as well as residents of the mostly white logging community of Port Clements (where the tree had stood), wanted revenge.

Hadwin was located quickly by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and, after being charged and ordered to appear at the courthouse in Masset, which is close to the Queen Charlottes' two remaining Haida communities, he was released on his own recognizance. Hadwin, who was already known to—and suspicious of—the police, was offered no protection and did not request it. "They're making it as nasty as they possibly can," he told a reporter at the time. "They'll want me over there so the natives will have a shot. It would probably be suicide to go over there real quick."

Hadwin could have flown or taken a ferry from the mainland to Masset, but he chose instead to travel to court by kayak, leading people to believe that he was going to attempt a sixty-mile midwinter crossing of the notoriously dangerous Hecate Strait. In fact, Hadwin was last seen paddling north—bound, it seemed, for Alaska.

Throughout his turbulent and peripatetic life, Grant Hadwin demonstrated a level of woodsmanship and an imperviousness to the elements worthy of a character from the pages of Robert Service or Jack London. His wife, Margaret, from whom he has been separated for a decade, described him as "indestructible," an opinion shared by many who have known him. "Basically, you're dealing with a person who, with very few resources, could be dropped anywhere on earth and come up smelling like a rose," Cory Delves, one of Hadwin's former bosses, told me.

Hadwin always felt most at home in the forest. During his late teens and twenties, he worked as a lumberjack and gold miner and lived in the mining town of Gold Bridge, British Columbia, a five-hour drive north from Vancouver. It is a tough, marginal place that is now inhabited by fewer than a hundred people and is accessible only by rough logging roads lined with fatal drop-offs. When Hadwin first showed up there, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, the surrounding valleys were thick with virgin, high-altitude timber. Today, as in much of British Columbia, vast clear-cuts push outward in every direction, giving the mountains the appearance of enormous animals unevenly shorn of their coats. The Northwest coast is, for all practical purposes, a rain forest, and the tall timber it nurtures can live for a thousand years and grow to heights that rival California's redwoods. (A Sitka spruce taken from the same forest where the golden spruce stood left a stump seventeen feet in diameter.) It was Hadwin, in his most successful incarnation, as a forest technician, who laid out many of the roads that gave loggers access to the remote forest around Gold Bridge. In the end, he helped to raze the site of many of his happiest memories.

Hadwin was well known for outdoing his co-workers. Paul Bernier, a longtime colleague and close friend of his, told me, "He was in the best condition of any man I've ever seen." Bernier was with Hadwin when he outwitted a pair of charging grizzly bears by dodging across a stream and feinting upwind, where they couldn't smell him. In addition to consuming prodigious quantities of chewing tobacco, Hadwin was known for buying vodka by the case and going on spectacular binges that, even in freezing weather, would leave him unconscious in the back of his vintage Studebaker pickup or passed out in a snow-filled ditch, dressed only in slacks and shirtsleeves. There was a local joke: "Look, that snowbank is moving. Must be Grant."

Early photographs of Hadwin show a fine-boned, handsome man, slightly less than six feet tall and built like a distance runner. People who knew him during his Gold Bridge days likened his lean, sharp-eyed appearance and remote manner to Clint Eastwood's. Quiet and courteous though Hadwin usually was, he possessed an almost tangible intensity, a piercing, in-your-face conviction that some found alarming. "He always had to be the best, had to be first," his Aunt Barbara recalled. "It always had to be Grant's way. There was never any room for compromise."

The golden spruce wasn't discovered by scientists until it was almost three hundred years old. When the Scottish timber surveyor and baronet Sir Windham Anstruther stumbled upon it, in 1924, he was dumbfounded. "I didn't even make an axe mark on it, being, I suppose, a bit overcome by its strangeness in a forest of green," he told a reporter before he died. For years afterward, no one knew quite what to make of Sir Windham's arboreal unicorn. Some suggested that it might be a new species, unique to the archipelago; others thought the tree had been hit by lightning, or was simply dying. In fact, the golden spruce was alive and well; it was just fantastically rare. Only a chance mutation would ever produce another.

A tree with this mutation is called a "chlorotic," and although it is not uncommon to see a chlorotic branch or two on an otherwise healthy evergreen, it is in theory almost impossible for an entire tree to be chlorotic and survive. Because this condition causes a fatal intolerance to bright sunshine, no one knows why the golden spruce was able to compete so well against healthy trees for centuries, or why it was able to grow to more than a hundred and sixty feet tall. Some contemporary scientists believe the tree's success may have been due to the unique lighting conditions afforded by its location. The Charlottes are sometimes called the Misty Isles; they share southeast Alaska's weather (as much as twelve feet of rain per year), and direct sunshine is a rare occurrence. It is conceivable that the island's climate provided just enough light to facilitate photosynthesis and turn the needles yellow, while diffusing the light sufficiently to keep the needles from burning out and dropping off. D'Arcy Davis-Case, a forestry expert who lived in the Queen Charlottes for years before becoming a consultant to the United Nations on forestry issues, said that when she lived there botanists and dendrologists were always trying to explain the tree's golden color. When I asked what they had concluded, she smiled and rolled her eyes. "Magic!" she said.

To those who were lucky enough to have seen the tree in bright sunshine, Davis-Case's explanation sounds plausible enough. Many who saw the golden spruce spoke of its peculiar radiance, as if it were actually generating light from deep within its branches. Marilyn Baldwin, the owner of a sporting-goods store in Prince Rupert, saw the tree on a gray, foggy day in the early nineties. "A few minutes after we got there, the sun burned the fog off, and suddenly there it was in its golden brilliance," she recalled. "We called it the ooh-aah tree, because that's what it made us all say." Ruth Jones, a Vancouver-based artist, visited the golden spruce late one sunny afternoon in 1994. "It looked as if it were made of glowing gold," she said. "It was like a fairy tale. How can this be?"

The Queen Charlottes have always had a somewhat mystical reputation; even loggers and land-use planners employ the adjective "magic" to describe them. The hundred-and-eighty-mile-long chain comprises the most remote of all the West Coast islands, and, in many ways, they are a world apart, hosting species and subspecies that occur nowhere else. The Haida language, too, is an "isolate," unrelated to that of any other West Coast tribe, and the largest collection of historic totem poles in North America that still survive in their original, beachfront locations are situated here.

Haida warriors, who ranged widely throughout the North Pacific, became legendary for a ferocity and maritime daring comparable to that of the Vikings. One of their seagoing canoes—sixty-three feet long and hewed from a single log—is on permanent display at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. During the nineteenth century, the Haida's numbers were reduced from as many as twenty thousand to fewer than six hundred by warfare and a biological holocaust of smallpox and venereal disease which accompanied British and American fur traders, settlers, and missionaries. Many of the survivors converted to Christianity and were absorbed into the nascent fishing and logging industries. Since then, these core industries have been practiced in a rapacious and indiscriminate fashion, and today the numbers of fish and old-growth trees have been reduced almost as dramatically as those of the Haida.

In the mid-sixties, MacMillan Bloedel had reluctantly set aside the few acres of old-growth forest remaining around the golden spruce. In 1988, after a long battle that pitted logging interests and the British Columbia government against a coalition of environmental groups and the Haida, the southern half of the chain was designated a national park reserve that includes a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The land is currently owned by the Canadian government ("the Crown"), which leases it to MacMillan Bloedel, which is now owned by Weyerhaeuser. Before long, tour buses began lining up to see the tree, and in 1996 the local tourist trade got an additional boost when an albino raven showed up, one of only two known to exist in the entire country. Between it and the golden spruce, Port Clements had cornered the freak-of-nature market in western Canada.

Despite his mountain-man pretensions, Thomas Grant Hadwin could never wholly conceal his middle-class origins. He was born into an educated family from West Vancouver. His father graduated at the top of his class from the University of British Columbia's electrical-engineering program and became a senior engineer with BC Hydro, the province's biggest power company. Grant was the younger of two sons, who were brought up to be like their father—competitive and stubborn. Nothing, however, went as planned: Grant's older brother was given a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, and Grant quit school and left home at seventeen.

Grant headed north, first working for a maternal uncle who owned a logging company that was engaged in clear-cutting the valleys above Vancouver. He was ideally suited to the work, and the isolated life style captured his imagination, not least because it flew in the face of his father's professional ambitions. But, even as Hadwin relished the bush life, he was horrified by what he saw. His paternal aunt, Barbara Johnson, recalls that Grant, who visited her as a teen-ager, described logging techniques that stripped the mountainsides down to bare rock. "Nothing's going to grow there again," he told her.

Meanwhile, his brother had become increasingly ill, and in 1971 he killed himself in a leap from the Lions Gate Bridge, in Vancouver. By this time, Grant had migrated to Gold Bridge, where he, too, with his excessive drinking, appeared to be well on his way to an early death. By the mid-nineteen-seventies, though, he seemed to right himself. He earned a forest technician's degree and, in 1978, he swore off alcohol and got married; Grant and Margaret, who was a nurse from Lillooet, about sixty miles away, had three children. In order to house his family, Grant built what would be the most imposing residence in Gold Bridge, two and a half stories tall and made entirely of hand-hewn logs. The capstone on the oversized chimney was a mattress-size slab of granite that weighed more than four tons.