Poisoned

That's the problem with cutting down a tree. No one tells you how dangerous it might be. Sure they'll warn you about falling branches, and staying out of the way while the job is being done, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how the tree you are about to cut down might be the only thing standing between you and something very bad. Maybe that's the reason trees have been the object of worship throughout history. Could it be because they are extremely good at keeping things out of our world that we don't want in it? Or it could be that it wasn't the tree that was being worshiped, but rather whatever it was that the tree was keeping at bay? Unfortunately for me, the reason our ancestors started worshiping trees in the first place is something that most of us have long forgotten. Until now. I bought the house in the spring of 2009. It was on the Old King's Highway that cuts through Connecticut between New York and Boston. While it no longer qualifies as a highway by today's standards, it is still a fairly busy road. There is a nice historical marker in the front yard of the house claiming that it had been built in 1700. Of course the previous owners (of which there were many!) had made many improvements to the original house over the years so it had an updated kitchen and bathrooms. It also has a lot of old growth oak trees in the yard. I believe they are black oaks, but I've never been one to care that much about this oak or that oak. There was one particular oak tree in the back yard was bigger and more majestic than any of the other trees in the yard. Its trunk must have measured 6 feet around. Occupying the center of the back yard, all the other trees seemed to defer to it. A tree house or a swing would have seemed right at home in this tree, but it had neither. There was a nice spotlight at its base that pointed up and illuminated the tree at night. Day or night, the oak was really nice to look at and best of all it provided excellent shade for the back deck on hot summer days. And then it started to die. I can't really pinpoint exactly when it started to die, but in the spring of 2010, when the leaves began to come out, I noticed that a couple of the top branches stayed bare. I didn't think it was cause for any immediate alarm. If they stayed bare, I'd just have them removed. So when they were still leafless in the middle of June I hired an honest tradesman to come over and take those branches down. He and his team made quick work of it, and I didn't think anything about the fact that they broke one of their buzz saws on the first branch they tried to cut off. I figured it was a tough old tree, and a broken buzz saw was one of the hazards of the job. A couple of weeks later I noticed that on some of the other branches on the top of the tree the leaves had started to wilt and turn brown. As the wilting and dying began to spread to additional branches I became more concerned. By the end of July the bark on the branches where the leaves had first died began to slough off and accumulate at the base of the tree. It was time to seek professional help so I called in an arborist. She examined the tree and quickly came to the conclusion that it was suffering from something called hypoxylon canker. And the really bad news was that there is no known cure for hypoxylon canker once the symptoms have appeared. The disease is internal and kills the sapwood of the tree. The mighty oak was going to die within months. It was shortly after getting this grim diagnosis that I noticed something else. My wired-haired dachshund Baxter had a habit of lying down at the base of the trees in my back yard. In the dog version of 'hope springs eternal', he was convinced that a squirrel would one day be stupid enough to climb down the tree into his waiting paws, and barring that, perhaps fall out of the tree. He spent his days this way under every oak in the back yard at one time or another. Except the one that was dying. At first I imagined that he could sense impending death in the dying oak. But that wasn't it. After some ob