THE PINES 229 



mantle that lies on the treeless mountain-side just above 

 the timber line. 



From a tvvelve-thousand-foot elevation on the Rocky 

 Mountains, in British Columbia and south to the Yellow- 

 stone, the tree clambers down to the five-thousand-foot 

 line, where it sometimes attains forty feet in height; its 

 dark green, rigid leaves persist from ^ve to eight years, 

 always five in a bundle, and never more than two and a 

 half inches long. The cones, horny-tipped, dark purple, 

 one to three inches long, are ripe in August; the large sweet 

 seeds are gathered and eaten by Indians. In California the 

 tree's ransje extends into the San Bernardino Mountains. 



THE TWO "FOXTAIL" PINES 



Two Western pines are distinguished by the common 

 name "foxtail pine," because the leaves are crowded on 

 the ends of bare branchlets. P. Balfouriana, M. Murr., 

 has stiff, stout dark green leaves with pale linings. The 

 tree is wonderfully picturesque when old, with an open 

 irregular pyramid, on the higher foothills of the California 

 mountains, or crouching as an aged straggling shrub at 

 the timber-line. Its cones are elongated, the scales thick- 

 ened and minutely spiny at tip. 



The second five-leaved foxtail pine is P. aristatay En- 

 gelm., also called the "prickle-cone pine," from the curving 

 spines that arm the scales of the purplish brown fruits. 

 This is a bushy tree, with sprawling lower branches and 

 upper ones that stand erect and are usually much longer, 

 giving the tree a strange irregularity of form. The leaves 

 are short and crowded in terminal brushes. From a stocky 

 tree forty feet high, to a shrub at the timber line, this tree 



