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Soon he was talking and pointing, now to describe the spruce and its short, stubby, upturned needles; the lodgepole pines with their straighter, longer leaves and more brownish, scaly bark; the Englemann spruce; the red fir and limber pine; each had its characteristic, to be pointed out in the simple words of the big Canadian, and to be catalogued by the man at his side.
He used to dream, as he rode down the bridle path, of the day coming when all the vast domain of National Forests would be like that trail; not a stick of underbrush or slash as big as your finger; not a stump above eighteen inches high; all the scaled logs piled neat as card board boxes; open park below the resinous cinnamon-smelling lodge-pole line and englemann spruce, hardly a branch lower on the trees than the height of a man; and such a rain of tempered light from the clicking pine needles and whorled spruces as might have come through the rose window of a cathedral.
Another turn, you were among the lodge-pole pines and englemann spruce pure park, Wayland always thought, the delight of a Forester's heart; warm human open park places where you kept looking for deer though you knew there weren't any.
Certain, it was, the better side would win. Would it be the few like the sugar pine towering over its fellows; or the many like the lodge pole pine and englemann spruce standing in serried ranks of equal valor and power?
And just below it, what a riot of bloom there was! I had learned, oft to my inconvenience, that the higher the altitude the greater the precipitation. Around and just below timberline are many lakes, and miles of marshy, boggy land. On those first winter excursions to the heights I marveled at the deep snowdrifts banked in the heavy Englemann forests just below timberline.
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