NATURALIST MEETS PROSPECTOR iii 



promptly left them and wandered away into the 

 woods. Again, without my knowledge, they fol- 

 lowed. 



After travelling about a mile I came to a glacial 

 meadow surrounded by an Engelmann spruce 

 growth. In the margin between spruce and mea- 

 dow I found a splendid grove of lodgepole pines 

 and stopped to examine them. They, too, were 

 nearly two hundred years of age. They stood 

 close together, and the crowding had prevented 

 their being much more than towering poles about 

 one hundred feet high. 



The lodgepole pine lives one of the most interest- 

 ing stories in all the forest world. It is a pioneer 

 tree, one of the first and most successful to take 

 possession of burned-over areas. It is most easily 

 killed by fire, yet every forest fire that sweeps its 

 territory proves an advantage to it. Throughout 

 the West in the last fifty years the numerous forest 

 fires have enabled the lodgepole greatly to extend 

 its holdings. A complete cessation of forest fires 

 would almost exterminate it. It may be said to 

 cooperate with fires, so closely is its life interrelated 

 with them. 



It begins to bear seeds at an early age. Often 

 it hoards all its seeds, keeping them in the cones, 

 and the cones on the tree, year after year, some- 

 times for twenty years or longer. But if a fire 

 sweep its territory, the wax is melted from the 

 cones that survive; they at once open and the seeds 



