“Oh, I really couldn’t say, sir,” she says in a serious tone. “These trees are fully protected by Holtcorp’s strict preservation—”
“Just toss out a number,” he persists.
As a Forest Guide, Jake is routinely advised against making prolonged eye contact with Pilgrims, to avoid interfering with their epiphanies—but she now boldly peers into the greenish depths of the man’s expensive sunglasses. “It depends,” she says.
“On what?”
“On who’s buying. Now are there any other questions?”
“You want a photo?” the celebrity asks her just before they start back. He says it like he’s offering an object of great value. She nods and he stands abreast with her directly in front of God’s Middle Finger, aiming his phone with a hooked wrist, kinking his neck into the frame. He doesn’t know that appearing in photos and selfies are indignities that Forest Guides are contractually obligated to suffer—they’re certainly Jake’s least favourite part of the job. To think of all the photos she’s haunted in her nine years here, a sedately smiling extra, briefly appearing in the brilliant, globe-trotting lives of others.
“What’s your name?” the celebrity says, thumbing the screen afterwards. “I’ll tag it.”
Only because she’s required to, she tells him.
His eyebrows crest from beneath the rim of his sunglasses. “Any relation?” he says, doing a little finger twirl, meaning: to all this?
Jake shakes her head. “My family are gone,” she says. “And even when they were alive, they weren’t the island-owning type.”
“Sorry,” he says, wincing.
“It’s fine,” she says, forcing a smile. “But we ought to be getting back.”
Just as the group rejoins the path, Jake notices that some patches of needles high up on the east-facing side of the old-growth firs have browned. Odd, especially at this time of year. She calls a premature water break and picks her way back through the waxy salal underbrush while scanning the canopy. The Pilgrims wait at the trail, tapping the toes of their Leafskin hiking boots, eager for the private luxuries of their solar-powered Villas, which are in fact secretly grid-connected, because the primeval canopy allows only enough actual sunlight to power a two-slice toaster or to charge their phones, not both.
Upon closer examination, Jake discovers two firs, both directly adjacent to God’s Middle Finger, whose needles have rusted to a stricken, cinnamon tinge. And down near the soil, she notes that a few sections of their thick, cement-grey bark have gone soggy. A tree’s bark performs the same function our skin does: it keeps intruders out and nutrients in—so any weakening of the bark does not bode well for the tree’s long-term survival. With her heart banging behind her ribs, Jake scrutinizes the soggy tissue as though she’s peering out a car window at a roadside accident—with curiosity and horror, compassion and revulsion—but the bark seems to be intact, and there’s no sign of hostile insects or fungal intrusion. Somewhat satisfied, she takes one last look before hurrying back to the impatient Pilgrims.
To afford her some time to think during the hike back to the Villas, Jake omits her usual speech about the important riparian area that hydrates the forest. It was only two, she reassures herself. There were no bugs or funguses, and the surrounding soil looked damp and well aerated, so perhaps the two trees are an anomaly. If they are in fact diseased, it’s something she’s never observed on the island before.
As a dendrologist—a botanist specializing in trees—Jake knows that many tree species suffered catastrophic die-offs long before the Great Withering struck: the American chestnut in the 1900s, the Dutch elm in the 1960s, and the European ash in the 2000s. Insects, funguses, cankers, blights, and rusts: the enemies of trees are many, and include supervillains such as the emerald ash borer, the Asian long-horned beetle, the dreaded fungus Chalara. But no single organism is responsible for the Withering, and most scientists (including Jake) attribute it to the climate zones changing faster than the trees could adapt, which weakened their ability to defend themselves against invaders. Though formal research has surely been done, somewhere, scientists are no longer freely sharing their findings since the rise of environmental nationalism and the end of the free internet. Jake’s personal hypothesis is that Greenwood Island’s local microclimate somehow manages to regulate itself, which allows it to remain hospitable to its trees.
But could it be that whatever has protected the Cathedral for so long has now shifted, leaving its trees newly vulnerable to pathogens and intruders? But why would the Great