Enos A. Mills

“ With good care, these plants are heavy producers, but, to have from them a premium harvest each year, they need the genial clime, the stimulating shelter, and the constant protection which only forests can supply. Closely allied to changes of temperature is the movement of the air. In the sea every peninsula is a breakwater: on land every grove is a windbreak. The effect of the violence of high winds on fruited orchards and fields of golden grain may be compared to the beatings of innumerable clubs. Hot waves and cold waves come like withering breaths of flame and frost to trees and plants. ”

“ Presently this black stratum was uplifted near the centre and then pierced with a stupendous geyser of yellow flame, which reddened as it fused and tore through the tarry smoke and then gushed astonishingly high above.
A year or two prior to the fire a snow slide from the heights had smashed down into the forest. More than ten thousand trees were mowed, raked, and piled in one mountainous mass of wreckage upon some crags and in a narrow-throated gulch between them. This wood-pile made the geyser flames and a bonfire to startle even the giants. ”

“ The forest-born stream is the useful and beautiful one. It has a steady flow of clear water, and fishermen cheerfully come to its green, mossy banks. The buildings along its course are safe from floods, and are steadily served with the power of its reliable flow; its channel is free from mud and full of water; it allows the busy boats of commerce freely to come and go; in countless ways it serves the activities of man. It never causes damage, and always enriches and gladdens the valley through which it flows on to the sea. ”

“ On this bit of the wild world's stage are theatrical lightning changes of scenes,—changes that on most mountains would require ten thousand years or more. It is a place of strange and fleeting landscapes; the earth is ever changing like the sky. In wreathed clouds a great cliff is born, stands out bold and new in the sunshine and the blue. The Storm King comes, the thunders echo among crags and cañons, the broken clouds clear away, and the beautiful bow bends above a ruined cliff. ”

“ One year the grove cone-crop was a total failure. As a result, Mr. and Mrs. Frémont temporarily abandoned their old home and moved to new quarters on a mountainside about half a mile distant. The day they moved I was by the brook, watching a water-ouzel, when they chanced to cross on a fallen log near-by. In passing, one paused to give a hasty, half-glad, half-frightened, chattery bark of recognition. They hastened across the grassy open beyond as though they felt themselves in danger when out of the woods. ”

“ This bulk of stores together with numerous roots of willow and water plants, which in the water are eaten from the bottom of the pond, would support a numerous beaver population through the days of ice and snow.
On the last tour through the colony everything was ready for the long and cold winter. Dams were in repair and ponds were brimming over with water, the fresh coats of mud on the houses were freezing to defy enemies, and a bountiful harvest was home. Harvest-gathering is full of hope and romance. What a joy it must be to every man or animal who has a hand in it! ”

“ The entire filling of seeds are thus dropped at once and fill the air with flocks of merry, diving, glinting wings. A heavy seed-crop in a coniferous forest gives a touch of poetry to the viewless air. ”

“ Ice has wrought bold sculptures, while fire made the graceful open gardens, forest-framed and flower-filled in the sun. The region was occupied by the Ice King during the last glacial period. Many rounded peaks, U-shaped, polished gorges, enormous morainal embankments, upwards of fifty lakes and tarns—almost the entire present striking landscape—were shaped through the ages by the slow sculpturing of the ice. Forest fires have made marked changes, and many of the wide poetic places—the grassy parks—in the woods are largely due to severe and repeated burnings. ”

“ Advancing was akin to swimming a whirlpool or to wrestling one's way up a slope despite the ceaseless opposition of a vigorous, tireless opponent.
At last I crawled and climbed up to the buzzing cups of the meter. So swiftly were they rotating they formed a blurred circle, like a fast-revolving life-preserver. The meter showed that the wind was passing with a speed of from one hundred and sixty-five to one hundred and seventy miles an hour. The meter blew up—or, rather, flew to pieces—during a swifter spurt. ”

“ As I cleared the ridge, there was just time to pull myself together for a forty-odd-foot leap across one arm of the horseshoe-shaped end of the gorge. In all my wild mountainside coasts on skees, never have I sped as swiftly as when I made this mad flight. As I shot through the air, I had a glimpse down into the pointed, snow-laden tops of a few tall fir trees that were firmly rooted among the rocks in the bottom of the gorge. Luckily I cleared the gorge and landed in a good place; but so [Pg 11] narrowly did I miss the corner of a cliff that my shadow collided with it. ”

“ There are six hundred kinds of trees in North America, and each of these equips its seeds in a peculiar way, that they may take advantage of wind, gravity, water, birds, or beasts to transport them on their home-seeking journey.
The whole seed-sowing story is a fascinating one. Blindly, often thick as snow, the seeds go forth to seek their fortune,—to find a rooting-place. All are in danger, many are limited as to time, and the majority are restricted to a single effort. ”

“ The air was full of "water-dust," and, once across the open, I made haste to hug a tree, hoping to find a breath of air that was not saturated to strangulation.
Neither bird nor beast had been seen, nor did I expect to come upon any, unless by chance my movements drove one from its refuge; but while I sat on a sodden log, reveling in elemental moods and sounds, a water-ouzel came flying along. He alighted on a boulder which the on-sweeping stream at my feet seemed determined to drown or dislodge, and, making his usual courtesies, he began to sing. His melody is penetrating ”

“ The log hesitated as it approached the sand-bar, as if cautiously smelling with its big, rooty nose; but at last it swung round broadside, and sleepily allowed the current to put it to bed upon the sand. As a tree, this log had lived on the banks of the Mississippi or one of its tributaries, in Minnesota. While standing it had for a time served as a woodpecker home. In one of the larger excavations made by these birds, I found some white pine cones and other seeds from the north that had been stored by bird or squirrel. ”

“ However, a camp-fire built on a humus-covered forest floor, or by a log, or against a dead tree, is one that is very difficult to extinguish. With the best of intentions one may deluge such a fire with water without destroying its potency. A fire thus secreted appears, like a lie, to have a spark of immortality in it.
A fire should not be built in contact with substances that will burn, for such fuel will prolong the fire's life and may lead it far into the forest. There is but little danger to the forest from a fire that is built upon rock, earth, sand, or gravel. ”

“ Twenty-four hours of alertness and activity in the wilds, swimming and wading a torrent of ice-water at two o'clock in the morning, tumbling out into the wet, snowy wilds miles from food and shelter, a crushed foot and a helpless leg, the penetrating, clinging cold, and no fire, is going back to nature about ten thousand years farther than it is desirable to go. ”

“ During one of its wilder displays the fire rolled forward, an enormous horizontal whirl of flame, and then, with thunder and roar, the molten flames swept upward into a wall of fire; this tore to pieces, collapsed, and fell forward in fiery disappearing clouds. With amazing quickness the splendid hanging garden on the terraced heights was crushed and blackened. By my promontory went this magnificent zigzag surging front of flame, blowing the heavens full of sparks and smoke and flinging enormous fiery rockets. ”

“ The narrow Alpine zone of peaks and snow that forms the crest of the Rocky Mountains has its own individual elemental moods, its characteristic winds, its electrical and other peculiarities, and a climate of its own. Commonly its days are serene and sunny, but from time to time it has hail and snow and showers of wind-blown rain, cold as ice-water. It is subject to violent changes from clear, calm air to blizzard. ”

“ Rarely does a forest fire make so [Pg 146] clean a sweep; generally it burns away the smaller limbs and the foliage, leaving the tree standing all blackened and bristling. This fire, like thousands of others, consumed the litter carpet on the forest floor and the mossy covering of the rocks; it ate the underbrush, devoured the foliage, charred and burned the limbs, and blackened the trunks. Behind was a dead forest in a desolate field, a territory with millions of bristling, mutilated trees, a forest ruin impressively picturesque and pathetic. ”

“ This also facilitates the floating and transportation of the nut in the sea. When the breakers have flung it upon rocks or broken reefs, here its fibrous covering helps it cling until the young roots grow and anchor it securely.
Thus endlessly during all the seasons of the year the trees are sowing their ripened seed and sending them forth, variously equipped, blindly to seek a place in which they may live, perpetuate the species, and extend the forest.
It is well that nature sows seeds like a spendthrift. ”

“ At each roar of the fire they turned hither and thither excitedly to look and listen. A flock of mountain sheep, in a long, narrow, closely pressed rank and led by an alert, aggressive bighorn, presented a fine appearance as it raced into the open. The admirable directness of these wild animals put them out of the category occupied by tame, "silly sheep." Without slackening pace they swept across the grassy valley in a straight line and vanished in the wooded slope beyond. Now and then a coyote appeared from somewhere and stopped for a time in the open among the deer ”

“ With subdued and ever-varying roar the fire steadily advanced. It constantly threw off an upcurling, unbroken cloud of heavy smoke that hid the flames from view. Now and then a whirl of wind brought a shower of sparks together with bits of burning bark out over the open valley.
Just as the flames were reaching the margin [Pg 145] of the forest a great bank of black smoke curled forward and then appeared to fall into the grassy open. I had just a glimpse of a few fleeing animals, then all became hot, fiery, and dark. Red flames darted through swirling black smoke. ”

“ Considering the many influences of the forest that are beneficial to agriculture, it would seem as though ideal forest environments would be the best annual assurance that the crops of the field would not fail and that the soil would most generously respond to the seed-sower.
So well is man served in the distribution of the waters and the management of their movements by the forests, that forests seem almost to think. ”

“ On their commencement day two little atoms of life may be separated by the wind: one finds shelter and fertile earth; the other roots in a barely livable place on the cold, stormbeaten heights of timber-line. ”

“ The purple forests, the embowered, peaceful parks, the drifted snows, the streams that fold and shine through the forests,—all these combine and cover magnificently the billowed and broken distances, while ever floating up from below are the soft, ebbing, and intermittent songs from white water that leaps in glory. ”

“ Happy, hopeful, harvest-home sounds the cones make as they drop and bounce on the dry floor of the autumn woods. Often a pair work together, one reaping the cones with his ivory cutters and the other carrying them home, each being a sheaf of grain of Nature's bundling. ”

“ On the Rocky Mountains are to be found many picturesque yellow pines that have a dozen times triumphed over the greatest enemy of the forest. Once past youth, these trees possess a thick, corky, asbestos-like bark that defies the average fire. Close to this injured old fellow was a rock ledge that formed an influential part of its environment; its sloping surface shed water and fertility upon its feet; cones, twigs, and trash had also slid down this and formed an inflammable pile which, in burning, had bored into its ankle. ”

“ On the steeps, numerous fleshy areas crawled, slipped, and crept. The front of a long one had brought up against a rock ledge while the blind rear of the mass pressed powerfully forward, crumpling, folding, and piling the front part against the ledge. At one place an enormous rocky buttress had tumbled over. Below, the largest piece of this, a wreck in a mass of mud, floated slowly down the slope in a shallow, moderately tilted gulch. This buttress had been something of an impounding, retaining wall against which loosened, down-drifting materials had accumulated into a terrace. ”

“ An occasional one had a temporary ending against the bottom of a kingly cliff, whose short reign was about to end as its igneous throne was disorganized and decomposed. The storm and darkness continued as I climbed the mountain of short-lived scenes,—a mountain so eagerly moving from its place in the sky to a bed in the sea. The saturation had softened and lubricated the surface ”

“ From the table-like summit I watched hundreds of splendid clouds slowly advance, take their places, mass, and form fluffy seas in valley and cañons just [Pg 4] below my level. They submerged the low places in the plateau, and torn, silver-gray masses of mists surrounded crags and headlands. The sunset promised to be wonderful, but suddenly the mists came surging past my feet and threatened to shut out the view. Hurriedly climbing a promontory, I watched from it a many-colored sunset change and fade over mist-wreathed spires, and swelling, peak-torn seas. ”