With the right equipment and a little luck, stealing a tree from a swath of land as remote and vast as the Olympic National Forest should have been easy enough. In the summer of 2018, Justin Wilke, a Washington man in his late-thirties, found what seemed like the perfect candidate for poaching: a big-leaf maple located about a quarter mile from the Elk Lake trailhead on the forest’s eastern edge. A small number of big-leaf maples, which grow from British Columbia to southern California, have a distinctive grain that makes them particularly valuable. When these trees are milled and…