THE FIGHT AT THE TIMBER-LINE 



18- : 



crowding close to its fellows and forming 

 with them a crinkled mass so dense and 

 flat that one could easily walk on their 

 bowed heads. 



Yet, in spite of its limb-to-limb strug- 

 gles with the gales and the snows, it 

 clings so earnestly to life that when the 

 short springtime finally comes to its aid, 

 it puts on a new uniform of fresh leaves 

 and bedecks itself in the emblems of 

 courage and victory, gay red and purple 

 flowers, which challenge afresh the lash- 

 ing winds and the inhospitable soil. 



Not only does the whitebark pine fight 

 well, but it rights long. Its highest tassel 

 may come only to a man's waist-line. 

 Standing by it and among its fellows, 

 one might well think that of a sudden he 

 had become a tree in stature, and the 

 trees had been transformed into men in 

 height. 



One splendid veteran of scores of hard- 

 fought campaigns was only three feet 

 high. Yet when War Historian Muir 

 interrogated it, the proud reply came that 

 it had been holding its outpost for 426 

 years. Although its trunk was only six 

 inches in diameter and its height that of 

 a yardstick, it had been campaigning 

 eighteen years when Columbus discovered 

 America. 



nature's training camps and rest 



DEPOTS 



As Muir climbed to the battle area he 

 gave detailed accounts of the training 

 camps and rest depots he passed en route : 



"At an elevation of 6,000 feet above 

 the sea, the silver firs are 200 feet high, 

 with branches whorled around the colos- 

 sal shafts in regular order, and every 

 branch beautifully primate like a fern 

 frond. The Douglas spruce, the yellow- 

 and the sugar-pines here reach their finest 

 development of beauty and grandeur. 

 The majestic Sequoia is here, too, the 

 king of conifers, the noblest of all the 

 noble race. These colossal trees are as 

 wonderful in fineness of beauty and pro- 

 portion as in stature — an assemblage of 

 conifers surpassing any other that has 

 ever yet been discovered in the forests 

 of the world." 



Another excellent war correspondent 

 of the timber-line struggle is Clarence 

 King, from whose book, "Mountaineer- 

 ing in the Sierra Nevada," the author has 



Underwood and Underwood 



a grenadier who has intrepidly 



withstood the assaults of the 



elements cannot resist the 



broad- ax of" man 



