Europe. The leaping, eager flames threw waver- 

 ing lights across the lake on the steeply rising 

 heights beyond. These brought the alarm cry 

 of a coyote, with many an answer and echo, and 

 the mocking laughter of a fox. 



Even these wild voices in the primeval night 

 were neither so strange nor so eloquent as the 

 storm-made and resolute tree-forms that rose, 

 peered, and vanished where my firelight fell 

 and changed. 



At most timber-lines the high winds always 

 blow from one direction. On the eastern slope 

 of the Colorado divide they are westerly, down 

 the mountain. Many of the trees possess a long 

 vertical fringe of limbs to leeward, being limb- 

 less and barkless to storm ward. Each might 

 serve as an impressive symbolic statue of a 

 windstorm. Permanently their limbs stream 

 to leeward together, with fixed bends and dis- 

 tortions as though changed to metal in the height 

 of a storm. 



Whenever a tree dies and remains standing, 

 the sand-blasts speedily erode and carve its un- 

 evenly resistant wood into a totem pole which 



54 



