Białowieża is the last primeval lowland forest of the European plain, straddling the border of Belarus and Poland, a forest of oaks four to six centuries old that has never been cleared, saved as a royal hunting ground of the Polish kings in 1541 and holding the largest herd of European bison, an animal that went extinct in the wild here in 1919 and was bred back from twelve zoo animals. The Belarusian side is the larger, entered at Kamyanyuki near Brest, and its marked trails thread stands where the oaks have held their ground for centuries and the ones that finally fall are simply left, moss-furred and collapsing into the soil, a forest that has never been tidied; boardwalks dip into black-alder swamps where duckweed carpets the still water between the trunks in vivid green, and at dawn the fog rises off the lakes and marshes and catches the low sun while swans drift across. Every European bison on Earth descends from the twelve founders, and the lowland herd in this forest from only seven of them, grazing now in the reserve's enclosures and in the open forest beyond, where they are met on the tracks in winter.
The Soviet hunting lodge in these woods, Viskuli, is where the Soviet Union was signed out of existence in December 1991 by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, far from Moscow's ears, and it is still a state residence. From late September the oaks, hornbeams and maples turn gold and rust while the red deer rut, with the stags bellowing across the clearings at dawn, and in winter the bison gather at the hay racks and stand black against the snow, with wolf and lynx tracks readable between the trees; eight species of woodpecker drum through the old growth. Between Poland's new border wall and the older Belarusian fence lies a strip of forest of some 37 square kilometres where an animal that wanders in finds no way out. Białowieża is the forest Europe had before the axe, and the bison are back in it.