It is often a surprise to me to see how far a seed will fly with but one wing. The air currents set it spinning the moment it leaves its parent tree making of it at once a tiny gyroscope with a single blade of a propeller. Its gyroscopic quality steadies it and the whirl of its propeller tends always to lift its weight. Hence with a downward current it falls with a less velocity than the wind which whirls it, in a level breeze it often holds its own, while in the upward slanting streams of air which flow so often along and away from the earth's surface it rises easily. The stronger the wind the more the whirl of that tiny propeller tends to keep it in air and with a good September gale thrashing seed out of its cones a pine tree may be planting its kind for miles to leeward. The seed that brushed my cheek this morning made no such offing. Caught in a back eddy it whirled round a sunny glade for a moment, then in a sudden lull spun directly downward to the grass. There again its shape favored it. The first grass spear stopped its spinning and it dived plummet-like out of sight, the thin propeller becoming a tail that kept it head downward while it slipped most cannily to the very mould. There I found it, still in such a position that every movement, every pressure, would carry it dawn out of sight of all seed eating creatures where it might rest and ripen till spring when it would be ready to germinate.
Searching the pine grove and the scrubby country that outlies it, I found all stages of pine growth, from the gnarled patriarch four feet in diameter at the butt to the germinating seedling. The patriarch is nearly a hundred feet tall, and though I know many pines of his height, I have found none of quite his diameter, and I am very sure none of his age, hereabouts. His age I can but guess, yet I know that fifty years ago he was as large as he is now. Indeed, he had more wood in him, for his lower limbs that then were green and flourishing and six to eight inches in diameter have since decayed and fallen away. Recently a pine was felled in Pennsylvania which was 155 feet tall and 42 inches through at 4 feet 6 inches from the ground. This tree was 351 years old. I have reason to believe my patriarch is as old as that one. His height is not so great, but he has three trunks instead of one, springing from that gnarled butt at a number of feet above the ground: There are occasional trees like this one still standing in eastern Massachusetts. They have seen their children and grandchildren grow to marketable size and fall before the woodchopper's axe. They have seen one or two generations of hardwood grow between these cuttings, yet they still are allowed to remain. In cutting off wood it used to be the custom of our forefathers to leave here and there a particularly gnarled and difficult pine that the seed might furnish a growth for succeeding generations. Hence these occasional trees. I may be wrong, but I have an idea that my patriarch was growing right where he stands, a young and vigorous sapling, when quaint old Josselyn wrote about those two voyages to New England in the early years of the seventeenth century.
Josselyn gives us to understand that the wood of the white pine is that mentioned in the Scriptures as gopher wood out of which Noah built the ark. Certainly if the white pine of Josselyn's day was abundant in the neighborhood of Ararat in Noah's time he could have done no better. The wood is light, soft, close and straight grained. You may search the world for one more easily worked or more generally satisfactory. Indeed the last half-century has seen the good white pine of the world pretty nearly used up, certainly all the best of it, for woodworking purposes. Fifty years ago it was the cheapest New England wood, today it is the highest-priced, and the old-time clear pine, free from knots and sapwood is almost impossible to obtain at any price. For all the forestry we can bring into play it will take more than three centuries to grow for us such trees as were common in Maine and New Hampshire a century ago. In 1832 white pines were not rare in Maine six feet in diameter and 240 feet high. In 1736 near the Merrimac River above Dunstable in New Hampshire a pine was cut, straight and sound and having a diameter at the butt of 7 feet 8 inches. Half a thousand years were none too many in which to grow such a pine as that. Could a man have a few of these on his farm anywhere in New England today they would be worth more than any other crop the centuries could have raised for him.
The youngest pine seedlings hide so securely in the pasture grass and under the low bushes that rarely does one notice them during the first summer's growth. By the end of that time they are singularly, to my mind, like fairy palm trees, planted in the gardens where the little folk stroll on midsummer nights. Their single stem and the spreading whorl of leaves at the summit of it are in about the same proportion as those of a palmetto whose great leaves have been tossed and shredded by the trade winds. That so tiny a twig could become, in the passage of centuries even, a 200-foot tree seems difficult to believe. It looks no more likely than that the "ground-pine" which is taller than the seedling and fully as sturdy should some day be 200 feet tall. Yet the ground-pine may grow from its creeping rootstock for a thousand years in the shade of one grove and never be over a foot tall. Thus easily may we be deceived by small beginnings. No palm ever rivalled a full-grown pine in height and girth, yet a palm comes out of the ground as great in diameter of trunk and with as abundant a leafage as it will ever have.
Watching seedling pines grow year by year it is difficult to see how the great, clean trunked, old-time pines that towered over two hundred feet tall and were from four to six feet in diameter came about. The free growing pasture pine makes a round headed shrub, for the first ten years or so of its life, with abundant long limbs, and is clad in profuse foliage from top to bottom. Even as decades pass its limbs still remain numerous and though there is abundant wood in the half century old pasture pine it is of little use for lumber, for the limbs, young and old, have filled its trunk with knots. Where our present day trees have seeded in thickly and uniformly over considerable space it is different. Then as the trees grow old they grow taller, each struggling to outdo its neighbors and get more light and air. Lower limbs decay in time and in the progress of forty or fifty years we get a "second growth" pine which is fairly limbless for a height of forty or fifty feet. Give the trees another half century if you will. I know many groves that have had that and still their trunks, though fairly bare, show the knots where the limbs have been and produce anything but clear lumber. It may be that by giving these century-old groves another century or two we should have something like the old perfect boles that our great grandfathers got out of the Maine woods, but I am not sure about it. I see no promise of it in the conditions under which pines grow today. Even my patriarch, though he has, I am very sure, sufficient years to his credit would cut up into only a medium quality of box boards; there is no clear lumber in him.
To produce the wonder trees of the early half of the nineteenth century the tiny seeds must have rooted plentifully in rich soil, the trees must have grown so close together as to steadily and persistently crowd out the weaker and shorter, and in the passing of two, three or four centuries we had remaining the magnificent specimens, towering two hundred or more feet in the air, their trunks without limb or knot for more than half that distance. Such conditions may account for these enormous trees, yet I am inclined to think that they do not. I am inclined to the belief that in these giant pines we had a variety of Pinus strobus which was very closely allied to our smaller trees, but which was not the same, just as the Sequoia gigantea of the higher Sierras is a gigantic variety of redwood, closely allied to but not the same as the Sequoia sempervirens, which flourishes nearer the coast and in the lower levels. That would easily explain why our pines, which we call "second growth," show little tendency to become such majestic or so long lived trees as the giants of a century and more in age. It is doubtful if any of the old time mighty ones remain in any remotest corner of our forests. It is a pity, too, for it is probable that in destroying the last one we destroyed a variety of pine that was far nobler than any left.
CHAPTER XX
THE PASTURE IN NOVEMBER
In late autumn the pasture is a place of ghosts, yet ghosts so friendly withal that one walks among them unafraid. November is the month of transition when many of the pasture folk pass on to another, perhaps a better life. The blue-jays stop their harsh teasing screams now and then to toll a clear, musical passing bell for these, and the nuthatches are goblin gabriels blowing eerie trumps of resurrection to which the spirits of the bee people drone a second as they wing their way onward. The great white town of the white-faced hornets is conspicuous on the blueberry bush down in the far corner and within it are the husks of a few of its once roaringly busy inhabitants. But it is very quiet and only a few of the husks remain. The others are scattered the pasture over and on them the shrubs drop red fruit and wreathed beauty or autumn leaves, in memoriam. The bumblebees, the yellow-jackets and many another variety of scintillant, fairy-winged wild bee are with them. Their summer, like ours, is gone, and they with it, though a few of the young queen mothers are safely tucked away in warm crevices, to sleep secure until May wakes them for the peopling of the place once more.