WILD SANG.(poaching in national parks)(Brief Article)

When it's high summer in eastern Tennessee and the mountain laurel is in full leaf; when three times as many tourists travel here as to Yellowstone, and their boom boxes and bickering echo from hollow to hollow; when the Florida lawyers have settled into their mountain dachas and Dolly Parton is playing to packed crowds in Dollywood, the Great Smoky Mountains can seem to have little left to fire the imagination. But even a landscape so thoroughly picked-over has its secret history and its hidden geography. Not far from the North Carolina border, for instance, there's a spot that campers rarely visit. It has no scenic overlook or waterfall, no trail sign or historical marker. But to a few old-timers and their kin it holds the promise of buried treasure. They call it the Honey Pot.

One Sunday afternoon last August, Larry Hartman, a ranger for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, was patrolling nearby when he spotted a pickup truck at the side of the road. Reaching for his park radio, Hartman called in the make and registration--it was a 1986 Toyota, battered and blue, with North Carolina plates--and waited for the dispatcher to confirm his suspicions. Then he headed into the trees. The wind was rising as he walked, carrying the scent of rhododendron and Cherokee roses, and the sky was threatening rain. Halfway up the draw, he turned and bushwhacked along the ridge, circling back toward the truck. An hour later, another ranger joined him at a predetermined location, and a third took position farther up the slope. Then they crouched in silence and waited.

Seen from that vantage, the road snaking through the trees below marked an old and bitter dividing line in the mountains. On one side was national forest; on the other, national parkland. On one side, trees could be cut, animals hunted, plants gathered and sold. On the other side, every living thing was protected by law. Some seventy-five years earlier, park commissions in North Carolina and Tennessee began to carve the Great Smoky Mountains National Park from half a million acres of private land, consigning thousands of small farms and homesteads back to wilderness. But some locals have yet to accept the change in ownership. The only real difference between the two sides of the road, they say, is that the park side has better hunting. The rangers call these people poachers; the poachers call themselves businessmen.

Poaching has always been both the most local and the most cosmopolitan of pursuits around here: a homely vine that somehow entwines Appalachians with Asians, Native Americans with New Agers. In the nineteen-eighties, Chinese buyers often paid up to two thousand dollars for a black bear's gallbladder--a popular pain reliever and liver tonic in Asia--so local hunters shot as many animals as they could find. But the most valuable target in recent years, the focus of the most determined poaching, and the reason that Hartman was hiding in the bushes, was a plant: Panax quinquefolius, or American ginseng.

Ginseng is an ordinary-looking shrub that has an extraordinary root. For more than five thousand years, the Asian species (Panax ginseng) was used to treat everything from dyspepsia and gout to malaria and leprosy, and American ginseng has been a cure-all for native tribes for perhaps as long. These days, the two roots are the twin pillars of both traditional and modern herbal medicine: the Asian a stimulant, the American a relaxant; the Asian a virility booster, the American a feminine tonic; the Asian an embodiment of yang, the American of yin. But there has never been enough of either of the roots to go around. In the past ten years, the herbal market in the United States has more than tripled, and powdered ginseng is the most popular remedy of first-time users. Wholesale prices for wild ginseng, which is considered more potent than the cultivated variety, have risen to more than a thousand dollars a pound. As a result, close to six million dollars' worth of ginseng has been poached from the Smokies in the past decade alone.

On the evening of the stakeout, daylight was fading and the clouds were curdling overhead when a pair of voices were heard on the slope. The rangers waited until two figures emerged on the road--Billy Joe Hurley and Dewaine Winchester, toting several bulging shopping bags and a freshly soiled digging stick. Then they rose from their cover and converged. "Hurley didn't look too surprised," Hartman recalled. "But Winchester just started running down the road." While one of the other rangers took off in pursuit, Hartman rattled off a description over the radio: "White male, medium build, bluejeans and T-shirt." But before he could finish, the chase was over. "By the time he got to the first curve, he just stopped and turned around," Hartman said. "That's when the skies opened up."

Standing in the downpour, the rangers found four hundred and forty-seven ginseng roots in the suspects' possession. Hurley pointed to the national forest and gave a familiar excuse: "I dug it on that side! I dug it on that side!" Hartman reached into one shopping bag and pulled out a root. In the last of the light, its gnarled branchings and ochre flesh looked like the skin of a jaundiced old man--in Chinese, "ginseng" ...