Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
Everywhere in the mountains, I had found burned-over forests; ancient trees that had stood for centuries, had endured drought, flood, storm and pestilence, only to be burned at last by a fiendish flash and left, charred skeletons of their former green beauty. I hurried down from the heights as the fire spread upward along both sides of the gorge.
The ridge of rock cutting across the burned-over area could not properly be called rimrock. It was a different formation. Set at an angle it climbed steadily upward to the very top of the mountain. In places weatherworn to a slippery smoothness; in others jagged, fragment-strewn; where the rain had washed an earth-covering upon the rock the cheerful kinnikinick spread its mantle of shining green.
Almost he lost his bearings, and finally would have ridden toward his enemies had not good fortune favored him in the matter of an open burned-over stretch of ground. Here he saw both groups of pursuers, one on each side and almost within gun-shot. Their sharp yells, as much as his cruel spurs, drove his horse into that pace which now meant life or death for him.
Very few people would think of the porcupine as an animal destructive to forest trees, yet one of the Tahoe Forest rangers reports that in the spring of 1913 fifty young trees, averaging thirty feet high, were killed or ruined by porcupines stripping them of their bark. Sometimes as many as ninety per cent. of the young trees growing on a burned-over area are thus destroyed.
Between nine and ten o'clock the fires had all burned down to coals. A circle of burned-over grass and rubbish surrounded each fire. There seemed no possibility that the flames could spread to the mat of dry leaves on the side hill. So they went home, a lantern guiding their feet over the rough path through the timber, stopping at the spring for a long, thirst-quenching draught.
Could it be possible that people had lived in them? She imagined men had but hardly women and children. Somewhere she had forgotten an idea that women and children were extremely scarce in the West. Straggling bits of forest yellow pines, the driver called the trees began to encroach upon the burned-over and arid barren land.
At length he reached the top of the mountain, to find a wide, open space, with heavy forest in front, and a bare, ghastly, burned-over district to his right. Fox growled, and appeared about to dash forward. Then, in an opening through the forest, Wade espied a large bull elk, standing at gaze, evidently watching him. He was a gray old bull, with broken antlers.
He followed the tracks to the edge of the creek. After that he resumed his wandering, and also his hunt for food. For two hours he did not find a crayfish. Then he came out of the green timber into the edge of a burned-over country. Here everything was black. The stumps of the trees stood up like huge charred canes.
Here they passed out of the burned-over area of underbrush and stubs and scuffed through brushless groves of fir and spruce where no grass grew and not a ray of sunshine struck the ground and the wind soughed always mournfully. But here and there were comparatively open spaces, grassy, drenched with sunshine, and sparsely sprinkled with lovely mountain maples and solitary yellow pines.
There had been a forest fire four years before, and everyone knows what happens after that. In but one place, where a ridge of rock reared through the soil, was it possible to cross the stretch of burned-over ground. Naturally Racey had picked this one spot. Whether the posse had not known of this rock ridge, or whether they had simply miscalculated its position it is impossible to say.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking