Unexplored!. Chaffee Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ at altitudes just lower than that of the belt of silver firs, – that is, anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level. And in fact, south of Kings’ River, the Sequoias stretch in an almost unbroken forest for seventy miles. Nor are they all of the proportions so often cited, where a man standing at their base looks like a fly on the wall by comparison with these prehistoric giants. Nor did they all get their start in life 4,000 years ago. There are young trees in plenty, saplings and seedlings, who will doubtless reach the patriarchal stage some 4,000 years hence. On what kind of earth will they look then? On what stage in the evolution of civilization? Will another ice age have re-carved these mountains? And how will man have learned to protect himself from the added severity of those winters?”

      “It certainly gives one something to think about,” mused Pedro. “It is only in these younger specimens that you can see what a graceful tree it is!” He glanced from a feathery Big Tree youngster of perhaps 500 summers, with its slender branches drooping in blue-green plumes toward the base, with purple-barked limbs out-thrust on the horizontal half way up, and at the top reaching ardently heavenward. Near it stood a parent tree of perhaps middle age, born around the time of Christ, whose crown was still firmly rounded with the densely massed foliage, now yellow-brown, and the bark red-brown.

      The millions of two inch cones, surprisingly tiny for such a tree, hang heavy with seeds, – they counted 300 in a single green cone.

      “With such millions of seeds,” puzzled Pedro, “I should think the trees would grow so thick that there would be no walking between them.”

      “No,” said Norris. “In the first place, remember that not one seed in a million escapes these busy Douglas squirrels and the big woodcocks that you hear drumming everywhere. Then even the millionth seed has to risk forest fires and snow-slides, lumbermen and lightning. But I’ll tell you something funny about them. You’d naturally think, from the number of streams in these forests, that they required a lot of moisture. Well, they don’t. Further South they grow and flourish on perfectly dry ground. But their roots retain so much rain and snow water that their tendency is to make streams. The dense crown helps too, by preventing evaporation. You’ll find Sequoias flourishing in a mere rift in a granite precipice. But wherever you find a dense growth, as you do here, there you will find their roots giving out the seepage that feeds a million streamlets, and these in turn feed the great rivers.

      “You see these trees must be able to survive drouth or they could not have survived the changes of so many thousand years. Why, these Sequoias might have formed one continuous forest from the American River on South, if it had not been for the glaciers that swept down the great basins of the San Joaquin and Kings’ River, the Tuolumne and the Stanislaus.”

      “But why didn’t the glaciers clean them off the basins of the Kaweah and the Tule Rivers, too?”

      “Ah! There the giant rock spurs of the canyons of the King and the Kern protected the Tule and the Kaweah, by shunting the ice off to right and left.”

      “There’s one thing more I’d like to know,” said Pedro. “Where will we find the nut pines that have the pine nuts? Aren’t they delicious?”

      “There are several kinds,” said Norris. “There is a queer little one with cones growing like burrs on the trunk as well as on the limbs, but that is only found on burnt ground. Another, that forms a dietary staple with the Indians of Nevada, is to be found only on the East slope of the Sierra, and the little nut pine that our California Indians harvest is away down in the foot-hills among the white oaks and manzanitas, so I’m afraid whatever else we come across on this trip, we won’t want to count on pine nuts.”

      “What interests me more,” said Ted, “is whether we are going to come across any gold or not.”

      “Now you’re talking!” the old prospector suddenly spoke up.

      Ted’s eyes shone.

      Ace had an experience about this time that flavored his nightmares for some time to come. Following a lumber chute, one of these three board affairs, up the side of a particularly steep slope one day, where at the time of the spring floods the yellow pine logs had been sent down to the river, he thought to try a little target shooting with Long Lester’s rifle. But at the first shot a bunch of range cattle, – of whose presence he had not known, – began crowding curiously near. He fired again, and a cow with a calf took alarm and started to charge him, but was driven back with a few clods and a flourished stick.

      He fired again. This time, quite by accident, his bullet hit an old bull squarely on the horn. The shock at first stunned the animal, and he fell forward on his knees. Recovering in an instant, however, the enraged animal made for Ace.

      The Senator’s son had that day worn his heavy leather chaps. He had found them burdensome enough on his slow climb upward. They now impeded him till he could not have outrun the animal had he tried, nor was there any tree handy between him and it.

      Then a wild thought struck him. The log slide! – It was mighty risky, but then, so was the bull. Leaping aboard a log that still lay at the head of the slide, he pulled the lever and sent it shooting to the stream below, and the fallen pine needles flew out in a cloud before him, as the log hurled down the grade. His heavy leather chaps really helped him balance now, and his hob-nails helped him cling.

      The log came to a stand-still before it reached the river, – but Ace did not. And the bull was hopelessly out-distanced.

      CHAPTER III

      LIVING OFF THE WILDERNESS

      On every side stretched a sea of peaks. They might have been in mid-ocean, stranded on a desert island, had they not been on a mountain-top instead.

      For one glorious fortnight they had camped beside white cascading rivers, and along the singing streams that fed them, following their windings through flower perfumed forests and on up into the granite country where glacier lakes lay cupped between the peaks to unfathomable cobalt depths. They had seen deer by the dozen feeding in the brush of the lower country, – graceful, big-eyed creatures who allowed them to approach to within a stone’s throw before they went bounding to cover. They had thrown crumbs to the grouse and quail that came hesitatingly to inspect their camp site, protected at this season by the game laws and so unaccustomed to human kind that they were all but tame. They had crossed and recrossed rivers not too deep to ford, and rivers not too swift to swim. They had scaled cliffs where nothing on hooves save a burro – or a Rocky Mountain goat – could have followed after.

      But always the shaggy gray donkeys had kept at their heels like dogs, – save when they got temperamental or went on strike, – waggling their long ears in a steady rhythm, exactly as if these appendages had been on ball bearings. The burros, five in number, had each his individuality. There was Pepper, the old prospector’s own comrade of many a mountain trail, who, knowing his superior knowledge of the ways of slide rock and precipices, insisted always on being in the lead. This preference on his part he enforced with a pair of the swiftest heels the boys had ever seen. There was old Lazybones, as Pedro had named the one who, presenting the greatest girth, had to carry the largest pack. There was Trilby, of the dainty hooves, who never made a misstep. He – for the cognomen had been somewhat misplaced – was entrusted with the things they valued most, their personal kit and the trout rods. The Bird was the one who did the most singing, – though they all joined in on the chorus when they thought it was time for the table scraps to be apportioned. And finally there was Mephistopheles, whose disposition may have been soured under some previous ownership, – since the blame must be placed somewhere. Ace had added him to Long Lester’s four when a lumberman had offered him for fifteen dollars. The name came afterwards. But though he sometimes held up operations on the trail, he was big enough to carry 150 pounds of “grub,” and that meant СКАЧАТЬ