In the Yukon everybody is invariably helpful. It is that sort of country, so that in a short space of time I was able to see just what I thought I would need - in particular, a placer gold mine high up on the border of the frozen glacier heights of Kluane National Park. Mike Brine insisted on my wife Dorothy and I being his guest at Dezadeash Lodge and it was he who persuaded Terry Thompson to take us deep into the outback, to the mine he operated high up on the headwaters of a creek named the Squaw, close to the Alaskan border.
Since the title and part of the background of High Stand is timber, I should perhaps explain that my knowledge and interest in trees is a very personal one, for in the last quarter of a century Dorothy and I have planted a great number of Canadian trees in Wales where the silvicultural conditions are as good, if not better, than most of the areas of the Canadian west coast where they grow naturally. In fact, it was those early travels in Western Canada that decided me to use some of the money my books were earning to buy otherwise useless land and develop plantations of Canadian spruce and fir.
As they grow into tall timber, they give me an increasing sense of achievement and satisfaction. Not only have we turned small areas of the Ordnance Survey map from white to green, thus providing the country with additional and much needed plantations of what constitute one of the very few renewable natural resources, but in doing so we have at least done something, however small, to offset the destruction of the world’s forests, a devastation that will affect the climate in which we all live. This has already happened in various parts of the world, notably in North Africa.
I have for a long time wanted to write a novel that, at least in part, was about trees. But always it seemed as though this aspect of my life was to remain quite separate from my writing, my mind apparently unable to conceive a story in which a forest could be part of the main thread. Then, back again in the Canadian West where I had first dreamed of planting my own stand of timber, suddenly it all came together. High Stand is the result.
The end.
High Stand Page 35
