LOUIS BROMFIELD: HIS LIFE AND WORKS

2018 0401 13  Louis Bromfield: His Life and Works

Louis Bromfield [1896-1956]

Louis Bromfield [1896-1956]:  Novelist, short story writer, political writer, playwright, scriptwriter, essayist, journalist, soldier, innovative farmer, nature writer and conservationist: Louis Bromfield was all of these, and more. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1927 (Early Autumn), the O Henry Memorial Short Story Award in 1927 (The Scarlet) and 1928 (The Skeleton at the Feast), and membership in America's National Institute of Arts and Letters (1928), he wrote prolifically. He received the Audubon Medal for leadership in conservation farming in 1952.

Initially educated in agriculture at Cornell University, Bromfield transferred to Columbia University in 1916 in order to study journalism. In 1917, he entered the war with the American Field Service in France and was subsequently decorated for his war contribution. Following the war, he returned to New York City and began working as a journalist. 

His first novel, The Green Bay Tree appeared in 1924 and is the opening of a tetralogy which made his literary reputation. In 1925, he moved to France and continued work on his tetralogy. The four works culminated in A Good Woman in 1927. The third in the series, Early Autumn won him the Pulitizer Prize in 1926. 

Louis Bromfield  [1896-1956]

He returned to America in 1938 when war seemed imminent and acquired a large farm near his Ohio birthplace. He became a strong adherent of organic farming and conservation. 

His works include Possession (1925), The Strange Case of Annie Spragg (1928), A Modern Hero (1932), The Farm (1933), The Rains Came (1937), Night in Bombay(1940), Mrs. Parkington (1943), Pleasant Valley (1945), Malabar Farm (1948), Mr. Smith (1951) and From My Experience (1955).

                                        



YouTub Video: Louis Bromfield: Life and Works: [Click Here]

                                         

JOHN WYNDHAM: WILD FLOWER

2016-46  John Wyndham: Wild Flower from The Seeds of Time

John Wyndam [1903-1969]

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris [1903 –1969] was an English science fiction writer who usually used the pen name John Wyndham. Many of his works were set in post-apocalyptic landscapes.

Post-apocalyptic fiction is a subgenre of science fiction in which the Earth's technological civilization has collapsed. The apocalypse event may be climatic, such as runaway climate change; or man-made, such as nuclear warfare; or medical, such as a plague or virus.

The story may involve attempts to prevent an apocalypse event, deal with the impact and consequences of the event itself, or it may be post-apocalyptic, set after the event, taking place in a non-technological future world. 

What follows is one of his best short stories -- 

"Wild Flower" taken from "The Seeds of Time" [1956] 

...There was plenty of time. Enough to take the field-path way to school, and not to hurry over it. The sun was climbing, a medallion pinned on a deepening blue cloak.The day was fresh, with a touch like a cool, white-fingered hand. Refractile gems still trembled on the leaves and stalks.

A thrush sang in the spinney beyond the hedge. Felicity Fray paused to listen. Unguent, sweet notes. She walked on, becoming aware again of the silk-fringed zephyrs on her cheeks, the sun on her arms, the dew on her feet.

As Felicity opened the door, the hive-murmur beyond sank into silence. The rows of pink-cheeked faces were all turned towards her. The bright eyes were all fixed on her face.

"Good Morning, Miss Fray," they all said, in unison, and silence fell as completely as before. She could feel the suppressed expectation in the air as they watched her. Her glance went round the familiar room till it reached her desk. There it stopped, where a small glass vase held a single flower.

It was something she had never seen before. There was just a suggestion of orchis about it, perhaps, but it was no kind of orchis she had ever seen, alive or pictured. She caught the scent of it. A little sweetness, a little sharpness, a little earthiness, blended with a subtlety to make a perfumer's art vulgar and banal.

She breathed in the scent again, and looked into the flower hypnotized, unable to take her eyes from it, loving it in its brave delicacy with a sweet, longing compassion. She had forgotten the room, the eyes that watched her, everything but the flower itself.

"Thank you. It's a beautiful flower. Who brought it?" A small, golden-headed child in the middle of the second row pinked a little. "I did, Miss Fray." "I thought it was pretty, and I thought you would like it." Felicity looked back to the flower again. "I do like it, Marrielle.  It's lovely. It was very kind of you to think of bringing it for me."

"One day, I'll read you some William Blake -- 'To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower...' But now we must get on. I want you to copy out what I write on the board, in your best handwriting; and she wrote: "Their colours and forms were then to me an appetitie; a feeling and a love.."

"Where was the flower found?" asked Fray. "In the very top corner of the big field where the aeroplane crashed," said the child. 

"Where the aeroplane crashed." That had been almost a year ago--on a summer's evening when all the world was quietening and settling down for the night. Then the aeroplane appeared as a silver-moth up in the sky. She watched it turn; then suddenly, amid the silver there had been a flash of rose-red fire, and the silver moth ceased to exist. Pieces of glittering foil were spreading apart and falling. Then came the crash and the shrieking of metal.

Felicity saw the silver body less than a hundred yards away, and in that moment petals of flame blossomed round it. Something blew up; bits of metal whirred like pheasants over her, and plopped around. The wreck was a cone of flame with black smoke above.

"Oh God," she prayed, "won't You stop them? It isn't their world to do as they like with. It's Your world that they are destroying. Please, God, while there is still time -- You destroyed their presumption at Babel, won't You do it again, before it''s too late?" Felicity remembered the prayer as she sat at her desk, looking at the beautiful flower.

They had put a fence round the place where the aeroplane had crashed, as a mark to indicate the piece of ground that was not to be ploughed. The ground had been left free to grow what it would. And out of the noise, destruction, the fire, the deadly radiations had sprung the lovely flower.

Felicity asked Marielle to come with her on Saturday and show her where the flowers grew. ...Felicity looked up at the ground. There were five or six small clumps of the flowers growing in the weeds. Felicity and Marielle gathered little bunches.  They still looked delicately beautiful and still had their poignant scent.

At the stile Marielle stopped and stood looking sadly at her little bunch. "They're so lovely," she said mournfully, with tears in her eyes. Felicity put her arms round her. "They're very lovely -- and they've gone. But the important thing is they came. That's the wonderful thing. There'll be some more -- some day -- somewhere..."

A jet came shrieking suddenly, close over the hill-top. Marielle put her hands over her ears. Felicity stood watching the machine shrink among the scream and rumble of protesting air. She held up her little posy of flowers to the blast.

"This is your answer," she said. "This. You bullies, with your vast clubs of smoke -- this is greater than all of you." "I hate them -- I hate them," said Marielle, her eyes on the vanishing speck. "I hate them, too," agreed Felicity. "But now I'm not afraid of them any more. I have found a remedy, an elixer:
      
                                      "It is a wine of virtuous powers;
                                       My mother made it of wild flowers."

JOHN COWPER POWYS: CULTURE AND NATURE

2016-45  John Cowper Powys: Culture and Nature

John Cowper Powys [1872-1963]

JohnCowper Powys [1872-1963] was a British novelist, lecturer, philosopher, literary critic, and poet.

Powys's first published works were poetry: Odes and Other Poems (1896), Poems (1899), collections which have "echoes of Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, among contemporaries, and of John Milton and Wordsworth and Keats". 

While he was a famous lecturer and published a variety of both fiction and non-fiction regularly from 1915, it was not until he was in his early fifties, with the publication of Wolf Solent in 1929, that he achieved critical and financial success as a novelist.

He was influenced by many writers, but he has been particularly seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy. Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Maiden Castle are often referred to as his Wessex novels. As with Hardy's novels, the landscape plays a major role in Powys's works, and an elemental philosophy is important in the lives of his characters. 

From CULTURE AND NATURE 
by John Cowper Powys

No refining of one's taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one's powers of insight in matters of science and psychology, can ever take the place of one's sensitiveness to the life of the earth.  This is the beginning and end of a person's true education. The cultivation in one's innermost being of a thrilling sensitiveness to Nature is a slow and very gradual process. 

The difference between cultured people and uncultured people in regard to their response to Nature is that the former make a lot of a little, whereas the latter make a little of a lot. By this I mean that the less cultured you are the more you require from Nature before you can be aroused to receprocity.

Uncultured people require blazing sunsets, awe-inspiring mountains, astonishining waterfalls, masses of gorgeous flowers, portentous signs in the heavens, exceptional weather on earth, before their sensibility is stirred to a response.

Cultured people are thrilled through and through by the shadow of a few waving grass blades upon a little flat stone, or by a single dock leaf, growing under the railings of some city square. 

To a cultured mind no scenery is ordinary, and such a mind will always prefer solitude in an unassuming landscape to crowds of people at some famous "inspirational" resort.

...The whole essence of this great Nature-cult is to store up and lay by thousands and thousands of impressions. The memory can hold much more than most people give it credit for; and the quickened awareness of our days depends upon our memory.

The feelings that can be roused in us by innumerable little physical impressions, coming and going upon the wind, lost in the air, are feelings that bind our years together in a deep secretive piety.

Who knows? Who can tell? It may well be that Nature herself - or at least our own planetary Earth - depends upon such subtle ecstasies in her offspring for her own indescribable self-realization.

The feelings that move us at many moments when we are alone with Nature, with "thoughts that are too deep for tears," seem to bring their own justification. They associate themselves inevitably with generous human emotions, with indulgence towards all creatures, with pity for all creatures.

A life deliberately given up, in the secret levels of its being, to such a cult as this is not a wasted life; it is a triumphant life. It fulfills some absolute purpose in things that are outside and beyond the troubled fevers of the world.

NOBLE NATURE: "THE BEAVER AND HIS WORKS" BY ENOS A MILLS

2016-28  Noble Nature: "The Beaver and His Works" by Enos A Mills
                            
Enos A Mills [1870-1922] and John Muir [1838-1914] 

John Muir [1838-1914] of the Mountains

Enos A Mills [1870-1922]

Mills met Muir when Mills was a youth and Muir was already an elder statesman. 

Calling himself "the John Muir of the Rockies," Mills said, "I owe everything to Muir. If it hadn't been for him I would have been a mere gypsy." 

He dedicated his book Wild Life on the Rockies [1909] to John Muir where he wrote: "The peculiar charm and fascination that trees exert over many people I had always felt from childhood, but it was John Muir, who first showed me how and where to learn their language." 

In his book, Your National Parks [1917], Mills included a chapter about John Muir, in which he wrote, "He had the poetic appreciation of Nature. He was the greatest genius that ever with words interpreted the outdoors. No one has ever written of Nature's realm with greater enthusiasm or charm.... He has written the great drama of the outdoors. On Nature's scenic stage he gave the wild life local habitation and character and did with the wild folk what Shakespeare did with man. 

His prose poems illuminate the forest, the storm, and all the fields of life. He sings of sun-tipped peaks and gloomy canyons, flowery fields and wooded wilds. He has immortalized the Big Trees. His memory is destined to be ever associated with the silent places, with the bird-songs, with wild flowers, with the great glaciers, with snowy peaks, with dark forests, with sunlight and shadow, with the splendid National Parks, and with every song that Nature sings in the wild gardens of the world.

"The Beaver and his Works" by Enos A Mills

                            [From Chapter 3 of "Wild Life on the Rockies" by Mills] 

Beaver - useful, thrifty, busy, skillful and picturesque

I [Enos A Mills] have never been able to decide which I love best, birds or trees, but as these are really comrades it does not matter, for they can take first place together. But when it comes to second place in my affection for wild things, this, I am sure, is filled by the beaver. The beaver has so many interesting ways, and is altogether so useful, so thrifty, so busy, so skillful, and so picturesque, that I believe his life and his deeds deserve a larger place in literature and a better place in our hearts. 

Beavers' Engineering Works - Governing the Rivers and Fixing the Soil

His [Beaver's] engineering works are of great value to man. They not only help to distribute the waters and beneficially control the flow of the streams, but also catch and save from loss enormous quantities of the earth's best plant-food. In helping to do these two things,—governing the rivers and fixing the soil,—he plays an important part, and if he and the forest had their way with the water-supply, floods would be prevented, streams would never run dry, and a comparatively even flow of water would be maintained in the rivers every day of the year.

A number of beavers establishing a colony made one of the most interesting exhibitions of constructive work that I have ever watched. The work went on for several weeks, and I spent hours and days in observing operations. 

Beaver cutting a tree

While cutting, the beaver sat upright and clasped the willow with fore paws or put his hands against the tree, usually tilting his head to one side. The average diameter of the trees cut was about four inches, and a tree of this size was cut down quickly and without a pause.

When the tree was almost cut off, the cutter usually thumped with his tail, at which signal all other cutters near by scampered away. But this warning signal was not always given, and in one instance an unwarned cutter had a narrow escape from a tree falling perilously close to him.

Once a large tree is on the ground, the limbs are trimmed off and the trunk is cut into sections sufficiently small to be dragged, rolled, or pushed to the water, where transportation is easy.

As workers, young beavers appear at their best and liveliest when taking a limb from the hillside to the house in the pond. A young beaver will catch a limb by one end in his teeth, and, throwing it over his shoulder in the attitude of a puppy racing with a rope or a rag, make off to the pond. Once in the water, he throws up his head and swims to the house or the dam with the limb held trailing out over his back.

Drawing of a typical Beaver House

The typical beaver-house seen in the Rockies at the present time stands in the upper edge of the pond which the beaver-dam has made, near where the brook enters it. Its foundation is about eight feet across, and it stands from five to ten feet in height, a rude cone in form. Most houses are made of sticks and mud, and are apparently put up with little thought for the living-room, which is later dug or gnawed from the interior. 

The entrance to the house is below water-level, and commonly on the bottom of the lake. Late each autumn, the house is plastered on the outside with mud, and I am inclined to believe that this plaster is not so much to increase the warmth of the house as to give it, when the mud is frozen, a strong protective armor, an armor which will prevent the winter enemies of the beaver from breaking into the house.

Each autumn beavers pile up near by the house, a large brush-heap of green trunks and limbs, mostly of aspen, willow, cottonwood, or alder. This is their granary, and during the winter they feed upon the green bark, supplementing this with the roots of water-plants, which they drag from the bottom of the pond.

Along in May five baby beavers appear, and a little later these explore the pond and race, wrestle, and splash water in it as merrily as boys. Occasionally they sun themselves on a fallen log, or play together there, trying to push one another off into the water. Often they play in the canals that lead between ponds or from them, or on the "slides." Toward the close of summer, they have their lessons in cutting and dam-building.

As soon as the beaver's brush dam is completed, it begins to accumulate trash and mud. In a little while, usually, it is covered with a mass of soil, shrubs of willow begin to grow upon it, and after a few years it is a strong, earthy, willow-covered dam. The dams vary in length from a few feet to several hundred feet. I measured one on the South Platte River that was eleven hundred feet long.

Highway for the Folk of the Wild

The influence of a beaver-dam is astounding. As soon as completed, it becomes a highway for the folk of the wild. It is used day and night. Mice and porcupines, bears and rabbits, lions and wolves, make a bridge of it. From it, in the evening, the graceful deer cast their reflections in the quiet pond. Over it dash pursuer and pursued; and on it take place battles and courtships. It is often torn by hoof and claw of animals locked in death-struggles, and often, very often, it is stained with blood. Many a drama, picturesque, fierce, and wild, is staged upon a beaver-dam.

An interesting and valuable book could be written concerning the earth as modified and benefited by beaver action, and I have long thought that the beaver deserved at least a chapter in Marsh's masterly book, "The Earth as modified by Human Action." To "work like a beaver" is an almost universal expression for energetic persistence, but who realizes that the beaver has accomplished anything? Almost unread of and unknown are his monumental works.

Only a few beavers remain, and though much of their work will endure to serve mankind, in many places their old work is gone or is going to ruin for the want of attention. We are paying dearly for the thoughtless and almost complete destruction of this animal. A live beaver is far more valuable to us than a dead one. Soil is eroding away, river-channels are filling, and most of the streams in the United States fluctuate between flood and low water. 

We need to cooperate with the Beaver

A beaver colony at the source of every stream would moderate these extremes and add to the picturesqueness and beauty of many scenes that are now growing ugly with erosion. We need to coöperate with the beaver. He would assist the work of reclamation, and be of great service in maintaining the deep-waterways. I trust he will be assisted in colonizing our National Forests, and allowed to cut timber there without a permit.

The beaver is the Abou-ben-Adhem of the wild. May his tribe increase.

For the full text of  "The Beaver and His Works", please refer to Chapter 3 of the "Wild Life on the Rockies" by Enos A Mills p.51: [Click Here]

For a Biographical Portrait of Enos A Mills: [Click Here]

Enos A. Mills [1870-1922]

NOBLE NATURE: "THE STORY OF A 1000-YEAR PINE" BY ENOS A MILLS

2016-27  Noble Nature: "The Story of a 1000-year Pine" by Enos A Mills

Enos Abijah Mills [1870-1922] was an American naturalist and homesteader. He was

Enos A Mills [1870-1922]

the main figure behind the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park. Mills was born in Pleasanton, Kansas, but moved to Colorado at the age of 14. He built his homestead near Longs Peak, Colorado at the age of 15. At 15, he made his first ascent of the 14,255-foot Longs Peak. Over the course of his life, he made more than 300 trips by himself and as a guide.       In 1889, Mills met the famed naturalist John Muir and from then on, dedicated his life to conservation activism, lecturing, and writing. He trained many nature guides at his homestead, who in turn, guided many more up Longs Peak neighborhood. Mills also led the fight successfully to preserve the area around Longs Peak as a national park. Congress established Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915 and Mills was called the "Father of the Rocky Mountain National Park".

Mills: "Father of Rocky Mountain National Park"[1915]

The Story of aThousand-Year Pine by Enos A Mills

Book: "The Story of A Thousand-Year Pine" [1914]

The peculiar charm and fascination that trees exert over many people I had always felt from childhood, but it was that great nature-lover, John Muir, who first showed me how and where to learn their language. 

Few trees, however, ever held for me such an attraction as did a gigantic and venerable yellow pine which I discovered one autumn day several years ago while exploring the southern Rockies...

Sunset in Old Pine land

As I came upon it one evening just as the sun was setting over that mysterious tableland, its character and heroic proportions made an impression upon me that I shall never forget, and which familiar acquaintance only served to deepen while it yet lived... 

Many a time I returned to build my camp-fire by it and have a day or a night in its solitary and noble company. I learned afterwards that it had been given the name "Old Pine," and it certainly had an impressiveness quite compatible with the age and dignity which go with a thousand years of life.

When, one day, the sawmill-man at Mancos wrote, "Come, we are about to log your old pine," I started at once, regretting that a thing which seemed to me so human, as well as so noble, must be killed.

A grand and impressive tree he was. Never have I seen so much individuality, so much character, in a tree. Although lightning had given him a bald crown, he was still a healthy giant, and was waving evergreen banners more than one hundred and fifteen feet above the earth. His massive trunk, eight feet in diameter on a level with my breast, was covered with a thick, rough, golden-brown bark which was broken into irregular plates. Several of his arms were bent and broken. Altogether, he presented a timeworn but heroic appearance.

Baby Tree - Tiny Shadow

It is almost a marvel that trees should live to become the oldest of living things. Fastened in one place, their struggle is incessant and severe. From the moment a baby tree is born—from the instant it casts its tiny shadow upon the ground—until death, it is in danger from insects and animals. It cannot move to avoid danger. It cannot run away to escape enemies. Fixed in one spot, almost helpless, it must endure flood and drought, fire and storm, insects and earthquakes, or die.

Trees, like people, struggle for existence, and an aged tree, like an aged person, has not only a striking appearance, but an interesting biography. I have read the autobiographies of many century-old trees, and have found their life-stories strange and impressive. The yearly growth, or annual ring of wood with which trees envelop themselves, is embossed with so many of their experiences that this annual ring of growth literally forms an autobiographic diary of the tree's life. I wanted to read Old Pine's autobiography. 

A veteran pine that had stood on the southern Rockies and struggled and

 Veteran Pine

triumphed through the changing seasons of hundreds of years must contain a rare life-story. From his stand between the Mesa and the pine-plumed mountain, he had seen the panorama of the seasons and many a strange pageant; he had beheld what scenes of animal and human strife, what storms and convulsions of nature! Many a wondrous secret he had locked within his tree soul. 

Nature matures a million conifer seeds for each one she chooses for growth, so we can only speculate as to the selection of the seed from which sprung this storied pine. It may be that the cone in which it matured was crushed into the earth by the hoof of a passing deer. It may have been hidden by a jay; or, as is more likely, it may have grown from one of the uneaten cones which a Douglas squirrel had buried for winter food. 

Douglas Squirrel 

Douglas squirrels are the principal nurserymen for all the Western pineries. Each autumn they harvest a heavy percentage of the cone crop and bury it for winter. The seeds in the uneaten cones germinate, and each year countless thousands of conifers grow from the seeds planted by these squirrels. 

It may be that the seed from which Old Pine burst had been planted by an ancient ancestor of the protesting Douglas who was in possession, or this seed may have been in a cone which simply bounded or blew into a hole, where the seed found sufficient mould and moisture to give it a start in life.

Death-blows to Old Pine

...Two loggers swung their axes. At the first blow a Douglas squirrel came out of a hole at the base of a dead limb near the top of the tree and made an aggressive claim of ownership, setting up a vociferous protest against the cutting. As his voice was unheeded, he came scolding down the tree, jumped off one of the lower limbs, and took refuge in a young pine that stood near by. From time to time he came out on the top of the limb nearest to us, and, with a wry face, fierce whiskers, and violent gestures, directed a torrent of abuse at the axemen who were delivering death-blows to Old Pine.

I carefully examined the base of his stump, and in it I found 1047 rings of growth! He had lived through a thousand and forty-seven memorable years. As he was cut down in 1903, his birth probably occurred in 856.

Annual Rings of Growth of a Tree

In looking over the rings of growth, I found that a few of them were much thicker than the others; and these thick rings, or coats of wood, tell of favorable seasons. There were also a few extremely thin rings of growth. In places two and even three of these were together. These were the result of unfavorable seasons,—of drought or cold. The rings of trees also show healed wounds, and tell of burns, bites, and bruises, of torn bark and broken arms. 

Old Pine not only received injuries in his early years, but from time to time throughout his life. The somewhat kinked condition of several of the rings of growth, beginning with the twentieth, shows that at the age of twenty he sustained an injury which resulted in a severe curvature of the spine, and that for some years he was somewhat stooped. However, after a few years he straightened up with youthful vitality and seemed to outgrow and forget the experience.

A century of tranquil life followed, and during these years the rapid growth tells of good seasons as well as good soil. This rapid growth also shows that there could not have been any crowding neighbors to share the sun and the soil. The tree had grown evenly in all quarters, and the pith of the tree was in the centre. But had one tree grown close, on that quarter the old pine would have grown slower than the others and would have been thinner, and the pith would thus have been away from the tree's centre.

When the old pine was just completing his one hundred and thirty-fifth ring of growth, he met with an accident which I can account for only by assuming that a large tree that grew several yards away blew over, and in falling, stabbed him in the side with two dead limbs. His bark was broken and torn, but this healed in due time. 

A year or two later some ants and borers began excavating their deadly winding ways in the old pine. They probably started to work in one of the places injured by the falling tree. They must have had some advantage, or else something must have happened to the nuthatches and chickadees that year, for, despite the vigilance of these birds, both the borers and the ants succeeded in establishing colonies that threatened injury and possibly death.

Chief Surgeon of Pineries - Texas Woodpecker

Fortunately relief came. One day the chief surgeon of all the Southwestern pineries came along. This surgeon was the Texas woodpecker. He probably did not long explore the ridges and little furrows of the bark before he discovered the wound or heard these hidden insects working. After a brief examination, holding his ear to the bark for a moment to get the location of the tree's deadly foe beneath, he was ready to act. He made two successful operations. 

These not only required him to cut deeply into the old pine and take out the borers, but he may also have had to come back from time to time to dress the wounds by devouring the ant-colonies which may have persisted in taking possession of them. The wounds finally healed, and only the splitting of the affected parts revealed these records, all filled with pitch and preserved for nearly nine hundred years.

The oldest, largest portion of a tree is the short section immediately above the ground, and, as this lower section is the most exposed to accidents or to injuries from enemies, it generally bears evidence of having suffered the most. Within its scroll are usually found the most extensive and interesting autobiographical impressions.

It is doubtful if there is any portion of the earth upon which there are so many deadly struggles as upon the earth around the trunk of a tree. Upon this small arena there are battles fierce and wild; here nature is "red in tooth and claw." When a tree is small and tender, countless insects come to feed upon it. Birds come to it to devour these insects. Around the tree are daily almost merciless fights for existence. 

Mice Rats and Rabbits

These death-struggles occur not only in the daytime, but in the night. Mice, rats, and rabbits destroy millions of young trees. These bold animals often flay baby trees in the daylight, and while at their deadly feast many a time have they been surprised by hawks, and then they are at a banquet where they themselves are eaten. The owl, the faithful nightwatchman of trees, often swoops down at night, and as a result some little tree is splashed with the blood of the very animal that came to feed upon it.

The lower section of Old Pine's trunk contained records which I found interesting. One of these in particular aroused my imagination. I was sawing off a section of this lower portion when the saw, with a buzz-z-z-z, suddenly jumped. The object struck was harder than the saw. I wondered what it could be, and, cutting the wood carefully away, laid bare a flint arrowhead. Close to this one I found another, and then with care I counted the rings of growth to find out the year that these had wounded Old Pine. The outer ring which these arrowheads had pierced was the six hundred and thirtieth, so that the year of this occurrence was 1486.

The year that Columbus discovered America, Old Pine was a handsome giant with a round head held more than one hundred feet above the earth. He was six hundred and thirty-six years old, and with the coming of the Spanish adventurers his lower trunk was given new events to record. The year 1540 was a particularly memorable one for him. This year brought the first horses and bearded men into the drama which was played around him. This year, for the first time, he felt the edge of steel and the tortures of fire. 

From time to time in the old pine's record, I came across what seemed to be indications of an earthquake shock. During 1859 some one made an axe-mark on the old pine that may have been intended for a trail-blaze, and during the same year another fire badly burned and scarred his ankle. I wonder if some prospectors came this way in 1859 and made camp by him.

Another record of man's visits to the tree was made in the summer of 1881, when I think a hunting or outing party may have camped near here and amused themselves by shooting at a mark on Old Pine's ankle. Several modern rifle-bullets were found embedded in the wood around or just beneath a blaze which was made on the tree the same year in which the bullets had entered it. As both these marks were made during the year 1881, it is at least possible that this year the old pine was used as the background for a target during a shooting contest.

Douglas Squirrel with a Pine Cone

While I was working over the old pine, a Douglas squirrel who lived near by used every day to stop in his busy harvesting of pine-cones to look on and scold me. As I watched him placing his cones in a hole in the ground under the pine-needles, I often wondered if one of his buried cones would remain there uneaten to germinate and expand ever green into the air, and become a noble giant to live as long and as useful as "Old Pine". 

 Wild Life on the Rockies: Enos A Mills: [Click Here]

"The Story of a 1000-year Pine" forms the Second Chapter of the book "Wild Life on the Rockies"

YouTubeAudio: The Story of a Thousand-year Pine - Enos A Mills: [Click Here]