she can get them into her temperature-controlled vaults in Colorado.
Well over a century ago, an Englishman smuggled rubber tree pips out of the country, to Brazil’s devastation. Now almost all the world’s natural rubber grows in South Asia, on land cleared of other trees that no one ever fully cataloged. It puts the Brazilians on their guard about her—another Anglo collector, here to steal their seeds. But on the afternoon when her team discovers mahogany and ipe elders hacked to pieces, they come around. They’ve never seen anyone who wasn’t them, crying over trees.
Her men are armed, if only with their great-grandfathers’ nineteenth- century rifles. Pistoleiros prowl the stream and roadbeds at night. Poachers kill anyone who comes between them and their harvest. You don’t have to be a hundredth of the hero that Mendes was, to die for wood. One of her best guides, Elizeu, tells her a story, through Rogerio, the interpreter, over a night’s campfire. “Friend of mine, tapping since childhood—baff! Head taken clean off with a piece of trip wire. Just for protecting his little grove.”
Elvis Antônio nods, staring into the fire. “We found another, three months ago. His body was stuffed into an animal den in the base of a big tree.”
“It’s the Americans,” Elizeu tells her.
“Americans? Here?” Stupid, stupid. She gets it, as soon as the words slip through her mouth.
“Americans make the market. You buy the contraband. You’ll pay anything! And our police are jokes. They get their cut. They want the trees to die. It’s amazing we’re not all smugglers. Compared to tapping rubber? Laughable.”
“Then why don’t you give up and poach?”
Elizeu smiles, forgiving the question. “You can tap a rubber tree for generations. But you can only poach a tree once.”
She falls asleep under her netting, thinking of Dennis. She wishes he could see this place, so much like a boy’s book of lost worlds. He’s waiting, back at the seed bank in Colorado. He’ll never get used to that state. It’s way too cheery, cold, and dry—the harshest kind of Oz. He finds it unnatural, all the aspens and sun. Not a tree out here taller than an adolescent hemlock back home.
He’s happy working on the facility’s maintenance, ensuring that the vaults never vary in temperature or humidity. But mostly he spends his fragmented year waiting for the seed hunter to return with her vials full of species that soon will exist nowhere else but in their climate-controlled tombs. He never objects, yet the project doesn’t quite convince him. How long do you think they’ll keep in there, babe?
She has told him about the Judean date palm seed, two thousand years old, found in Herod the Great’s palace on Masada—a date pit from a tree that Jesus himself might have sampled, the kind of tree Muhammad said was made of the same stuff as Adam. It germinated, a few years ago. She tells him about the campion seeds, buried yards under the Siberian permafrost. Growing, after thirty thousand years. He just whistles and shakes his head. But he never asks what he wants to ask, what she knows he should. Who’s going to do the replanting?
SHE WAKES AT DAWN to impenetrable green. Light filters through layers of vine-encased rot, like a picture on the bulletin of a church reverting to paganism. Dennis’s unasked question plays in her head. The glut of life outside her tent makes her wonder what good it does to save a species without all the epiphytes, fungi, pollinators, and other symbionts that, in the trenches of the day, give a species its real home. But what’s the alternative? She lies in her bag a moment, picturing the campsite as pasture—120 new square miles of cropland a day. And the shrinking forest only speeds the warming world, making it harder to feed.
Back on the trail after breakfast, they come upon a stack of fresh-cut logs. The scouts fan out. In minutes, rifles pop, followed by a motorcycle grunting through the undergrowth. Elvis Antônio returns through the bush, waving his arms in an all-clear. Patricia follows him onto a rough approximation of a road running up into a pistoleiro shanty camp evacuated in haste. There’s little left but a stack of oily clothes, a bag of moldy manioc flour, soap flakes, and one Portuguese girlie magazine that has made the rounds too many times. They set the camp on fire. The blaze feels good—a tiny orange reversal of progress.
They hike along a streambed to a plain that the