l yards away blew over,
and in falling, stabbed him in the side with two dead limbs. His bark
was broken and torn, but this healed in due time. Short sections of
the dead limbs broke off, however, and were embedded in the old pine.
Twelve years' growth covered them, and they remained hidden from view
until my splitting revealed them. The other wounds started promptly to
heal and, with one exception, did so.

A year or two later some ants and borers began excavating their deadly
winding ways in the old pine. They probably started to work in one
of the places injured by the falling tree. They must have had some
advantage, or else something must have happened to the nuthatches and
chickadees that year, for, despite the vigilance of these birds, both
the borers and the ants succeeded in establishing colonies that
threatened injury and possibly death.

Fortunately relief came. One day the chief surgeon of all the
Southwestern pineries came along. This surgeon was the Texas
woodpecker. He probably did not long explore the ridges and little
furrows of the bark before he discovered the wound or heard these
hidden insects working. After a brief examination, holding his ear to
the bark for a moment to get the location of the tree's deadly foe
beneath, he was ready to act. He made two successful operations.
These not only required him to cut deeply into the old pine and take
out the borers, but he may also have had to come back from time to
time to dress the wounds by devouring the ant-colonies which may have
persisted in taking possession of them. The wounds finally healed, and
only the splitting of the affected parts revealed these records, all
filled with pitch and preserved for nearly nine hundred years.

Following this, an even tenor marked his life for nearly three
centuries. This quiet existence came to an end in the summer of 1301,
when a stroke of lightning tore a limb out of his round top and badly
shattered a shoulder. He had barely recovered from this injury when a
violent wind tore off several of his arms. During the summer of 1348
he lost two of his largest arms. These were large and sound, and were
more than a foot in diameter at the points of breakage. As these were
broken by a down-pressing weight or force, we may attribute these
breaks to accumulations of snow.

The oldest, largest portion of a tree is the short section
immediately above the ground, and, as this lower section is the most
exposed to accidents