iful pearly-white seeds
about the size of peas, most of which are eaten by chipmunks and the
Clarke's crows. Pines are commonly regarded as sky-loving trees that
must necessarily aspire or die. This species forms a marked exception,
crouching and creeping in compliance with the most rigorous demands of
climate; yet enduring bravely to a more advanced age than many of its
lofty relatives in the sun-lands far below it. Seen from a distance it
would never be taken for a tree of any kind. For example, on Cathedral
Peak there is a scattered growth of this pine, creeping like mosses over
the roof, nowhere giving hint of an ascending axis. While, approached
quite near, it still appears matty and heathy, and one experiences no
difficulty in walking over the top of it, yet it is seldom absolutely
prostrate, usually attaining a height of three or four feet with a main
trunk, and with branches outspread above it, as if in ascending they
had been checked by a ceiling against which they had been compelled to
spread horizontally. The winter snow is a sort of ceiling, lasting half
the year; while the pressed surface is made yet smoother by violent
winds armed with cutting sand-grains that bear down any shoot which
offers to rise much above the general level, and that carve the dead
trunks and branches in beautiful patterns.

During stormy nights I have often camped snugly beneath the interlacing
arches of this little pine. The needles, which have accumulated for
centuries, make fine beds, a fact well known to other mountaineers, such
as deer and wild sheep, who paw out oval hollows and lie beneath the
larger trees in safe and comfortable concealment. This lowly dwarf
reaches a far greater age than would be guessed. A specimen that I
examined, growing at an elevation of 10,700 feet, yet looked as though
it might be plucked up by the roots, for it was only three and a half
inches in diameter and its topmost tassel reached hardly three feet
above the ground. Cutting it half through and counting the annual rings
with the aid of a lens, I found its age to be no less than 255 years.
Another specimen about the same height, with a trunk six inches in
diameter, I found to be 426 years old, forty years ago; and one of its
supple branchlets hardly an eighth of an inch in diameter inside the
bark, was seventy-five years old, and so filled with oily balsam and
seasoned by storms that I tied it in knots like a whip-cord.

The Nut Pine

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