The pipsissawa, which is sometimes called prince's pine, is half as tall as the woodchuck that lives under the brown boulder1; and the seedling2 fir in his first season was as tall as the prince's pine, so for the time they made the most of each other's company. The woodchuck and the pipsissawa were never to be any taller, but the silver fir was to keep on growing as long as he stood in the earth and drew sap. In his second season, which happened to be a good growing year, the fir was as tall as the woodchuck and began to look about him.
The forest of silver firs grew on a hill-slope up from a water-course as far as the borders of the long-leaved pines. Where the trees stood close together the earth was brown with the litter of a thousand years, and little gray hawks3 hunted in their green, windy glooms. In the open spaces there were thickets4 of meadowsweet, fireweed, monkshood, and columbine, with saplings and seedlings5 in between. When the fir which was as tall as the woodchuck had grown a year or two longer, he made a discovery. All the firs on the hill-slope were crooked6! Their trunks bulged8 out at the base toward the downward pitch of the hill; and it is the proper destiny of fir trees to be straight.
"They should be straight," said the seedling fir. "I feel it in my fibres that a fir tree should be straight." He looked up at the fir mother very far above him on her way to the sky, with the sun and the wind in her star-built boughs9.
"I shall be straight," said the seedling fir.
"Ah, do not be too sure of it," said the fir mother. But for all that the seedling fir was very sure, and when the snow tucked him in for the winter he took a long time to think about it. The snows are wonderfully deep in the cañon of the silver firs. From where they gather in the upper air the fir mother shakes them lightly down, packing so softly and so warm that the seedlings and the pipsissawas do not mind.
About the time the fir had grown tall enough to be called a sapling he made another discovery. The fir mother had also a crooked trunk. The sapling was greatly shocked; he hardly liked to speak of it to the fir mother. He remembered his old friend the pipsissawa, but he had so outgrown11 her that there was really no comfort in trying to make himself understood, so he spoke12 to the woodchuck. The woodchuck was no taller than he used to be, but when he climbed up on the brown boulder above his house he was on a level with the sapling fir, and though he was not much of a talker he was a great thinker and had opinions.
"Really," said the fir, "I hardly like to speak of it, but you are such an old friend; do you see what a crook7 the fir mother has in her trunk? We firs you know were intended to be straight."
"That," said the woodchuck, "is on account of the snow."
"But, oh, my friend," said the sapling, "you must be mistaken. The snow is soft and comfortable and braces13 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 cones14. 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 sufficiently15 tall to hold the green cross, that all firs bear on their topmost bough10, above the snow most of the winter through. Now he began to learn a great many things. The first of t............