The pipsissawa, which is sometimes called prince's pine, is half as tall
as the woodchuck that lives under the brown boulder; and the seedling
fir in his first season was as tall as the prince's pine, so for the
time they made the most of each other's company. The woodchuck and the
pipsissawa were never to be any taller, but the silver fir was to keep
on growing as long as he stood in the earth and drew sap. In his second
season, which happened to be a good growing year, the fir was as tall as
the woodchuck and began to look about him.
The forest of silver firs grew on a hill-slope up from a water-course as
far as the borders of the long-leaved pines. Where the trees stood close
together the earth was brown with the litter of a thousand years, and
little gray hawks hunted in their green, windy glooms. In the open
spaces there were thickets of meadowsweet, fireweed, monkshood, and
columbine, with saplings and seedlings in between. When the fir which
was as tall as the woodchuck had grown a year or two longer, he made a
discovery. All the firs on the hill-slope were crooked! Their trunks
bulged out at the base toward the downward pitch of the hill; and it is
the proper destiny of fir trees to be straight.
"They should be straight," said the seedling fir. "I feel it in my
fibres that a fir tree should be straight." He looked up at the fir
mother very far above him on her way to the sky, with the sun and the
wind in her star-built boughs.
"I shall be straight," said the seedling fir.
"Ah, do not be too sure of it," said the fir mother. But for all that
the seedling fir was very sure, and when the snow tucked him in for the
winter he took a long time to think about it. The snows are wonderfully
deep in the canyon of the silver firs. From where they gather in the
upper air the fir mother shakes them lightly down, packing so softly
and so warm that the seedlings and the pipsissawas do not mind.
About the time the fir had grown tall enough to be called a sapling he
made another discovery. The fir mother had also a crooked trunk. The
sapling was greatly shocked; he hardly liked to speak of it to the fir
mother. He remembered his old friend the pipsissawa, but he had so
outgrown her that there was really no comfort in trying to make himself
understood, so he spoke to the woodchuck. The woodchuck was no taller
than he used to be, but when he climbed up on the brown boulder above
his house he was on a level with the sapling fir, and though he was not
much of a talker he was a great thinker and had opinions.
"Really," said the fir, "I hardly like to speak of it, but you are such
an old friend; do you see what a crook the fir mother has in her trunk?
We firs you know were intended to be straight."
"That," said the woodchuck, "is on account of the snow."
"But, oh, my friend," said the sapling, "you must be mistaken. The snow
is soft and comfortable and braces one up. I ought to know, for I spend
whole winters in it."
"_Gru-r-ru-_," said the woodchuck crossly; "well for you that you do, or
I should have eaten you off by now."
After this the little fir kept his thoughts to himself; he was very much
afraid of the woodchuck, and there is nothing a young fir fears so much
as being eaten off before it has a chance to bear cones. But in fact the
woodchuck spent the winter under the snow himself. He went into his
house and shut the door when the first feel of snow was in the air, and
did not come out until green things began to grow in the cleared spaces.
Not many winters after that the fir was sufficiently tall to hold the
green cross, that all firs bear on their topmost bough, above the snow
most of the winter through. Now he began to learn a great many things.
The first of these was about the woodchuck.
"Really that fellow is a great braggart," said the fir; "I cannot think
how I came to be afraid of him."
In those days the sapling saw the deer getting down in the flurry of the
first snows to the feeding grounds on the lower hills, saw the mountain
sheep nodding their great horns serenely in the lee of a tall cliff
through the wildest storms. In the spring he saw the brown bears
shambling up the trails, ripping the bark off of dead trees to get at
the worms and grubs that harbored there; lastly he saw the woodchuck
come out of his hole as if nothing had ever happened.
And now as the winters came on, the fir began to feel the weight of the
snow. When it was wet and heavy and clung to its branches, the little
fir shivered and moaned.
"Droop your boughs," creaked the fir mother; "droop them as I do, and
the snow will fall."
So the sapling drooped his fan-spread branches until they lay close to
the trunk; and the snow wreaths slipped away and piled thickly about his
trunk. But when the snow lay deep over all the slope, it packed and
slid down toward the ravine and pressed strongly against the sapling
fir.
"Oh, I shall be torn from my roots," he cried; "I shall be broken off."
"Bend," said the fir mother, "bend, and you will not break." So the
young fir bent before the snow until he was curved like a bow, but when
the spring came and the sap ran in his veins, he straightened his trunk
anew and spread his branches in a star-shaped whorl.
"After all," said the sapling, "it is not such a great matter to keep
straight; it only requires an effort."
So he went on drooping and bending to the winter snows, growing strong
and straight with the spring, and rejoicing. About this time the fir
began to feel a tingling in his upper branches.
"Something is going to happen," he said; something agreeable in fact,
for the tree was fifty years old, and it was time to grow cones. For
fifty years a silver fir has nothing to do but to grow branches, thrown
out in annual circles, every one in the shape of a cross. Then it grows
cones on the topmost whorl, royal purple and burnished gold, erect on
the ends of the branches like Christmas candles. The sapling fir had
only three in his first season of bearing, but he was very proud of
them, for now he was no longer a sapling, but a tree.
When one has to devote the whole of a long season to growing cones, one
has not much occasion to think of other things. By the time there were
five rows of cone-bearing branches spread out broadly from the silver
fir, the woodchuck made a remark to the pipsissawa which is sometimes
called prince's pine. It was not the same pipsissawa, nor the same
woodchuck, but one of his descendants, and his parents had told him the
whole story.
"It seems to me," said he, "that the fir tree is not going to be
straight after all. He never seems quite to recover from the winter
snow."
"Ah," said the pipsissawa, "I have always thought it better to have
your seeds ripe and put away under ground before the snow comes. Then
you do not mind it at all."
The woodchuck was right about the fir; his trunk was beginning to curve
toward the downward slope of the hill with the weight of the drifts. And
that went on until the curve was quite fixed in the ripened wood, and
the fir tree could not have straightened up if he had wished. But to
tell the truth, the fir tree did not wish. By the end of another fifty
years, when he wagged his high top above the forest gloom, he grew to be
quite proud of it.
"There is nothing," he said to the sapling firs, "like being able to
endure hard times with a good countenance. I have seen a great deal of
life. There are no such snows now as there used to be. You can see by
the curve of my trunk what a weight I have borne."
But the young firs did not pay any attention to him. They had made up
their minds to grow up straight.