"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."