Basket Woman: A Book of Indian Tales for Children

by Lester Chadwick

  THE CROOKED FIR

  The pipsissawa, which is sometimes called prince's pine, is half as tallas the woodchuck that lives under the brown boulder; and the seedlingfir in his first season was as tall as the prince's pine, so for thetime they made the most of each other's company. The woodchuck and thepipsissawa were never to be any taller, but the silver fir was to keepon growing as long as he stood in the earth and drew sap. In his secondseason, which happened to be a good growing year, the fir was as tall asthe woodchuck and began to look about him.

  The forest of silver firs grew on a hill-slope up from a water-course asfar as the borders of the long-leaved pines. Where the trees stood closetogether the earth was brown with the litter of a thousand years, andlittle gray hawks hunted in their green, windy glooms. In the openspaces there were thickets of meadowsweet, fireweed, monkshood, andcolumbine, with saplings and seedlings in between. When the fir whichwas as tall as the woodchuck had grown a year or two longer, he made adiscovery. All the firs on the hill-slope were crooked! Their trunksbulged out at the base toward the downward pitch of the hill; and it isthe proper destiny of fir trees to be straight.

  "They should be straight," said the seedling fir. "I feel it in myfibres that a fir tree should be straight." He looked up at the firmother very far above him on her way to the sky, with the sun and thewind in her star-built boughs.

  "I shall be straight," said the seedling fir.

  "Ah, do not be too sure of it," said the fir mother. But for all thatthe seedling fir was very sure, and when the snow tucked him in for thewinter he took a long time to think about it. The snows are wonderfullydeep in the canyon of the silver firs. From where they gather in theupper air the fir mother shakes them lightly down, packing so softlyand 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 hemade another discovery. The fir mother had also a crooked trunk. Thesapling was greatly shocked; he hardly liked to speak of it to the firmother. He remembered his old friend the pipsissawa, but he had sooutgrown her that there was really no comfort in trying to make himselfunderstood, so he spoke to the woodchuck. The woodchuck was no tallerthan he used to be, but when he climbed up on the brown boulder abovehis house he was on a level with the sapling fir, and though he was notmuch 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 suchan old friend; do you see what a crook 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 snowis soft and comfortable and braces one up. I ought to know, for I spendwhole winters in it."

  "_Gru-r-ru-_," said the woodchuck crossly; "well for you that you do, orI should have eaten you off by now."

  After this the little fir kept his thoughts to himself; he was very muchafraid of the woodchuck, and there is nothing a young fir fears so muchas being eaten off before it has a chance to bear cones. But in fact thewoodchuck spent the winter under the snow himself. He went into hishouse and shut the door when the first feel of snow was in the air, anddid 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 thegreen cross, that all firs bear on their topmost bough, above the snowmost 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 thinkhow I came to be afraid of him."

  In those days the sapling saw the deer getting down in the flurry of thefirst snows to the feeding grounds on the lower hills, saw the mountainsheep nodding their great horns serenely in the lee of a tall cliffthrough the wildest storms. In the spring he saw the brown bearsshambling up the trails, ripping the bark off of dead trees to get atthe worms and grubs that harbored there; lastly he saw the woodchuckcome 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 thesnow. When it was wet and heavy and clung to its branches, the littlefir shivered and moaned.

  "Droop your boughs," creaked the fir mother; "droop them as I do, andthe snow will fall."

  So the sapling drooped his fan-spread branches until they lay close tothe trunk; and the snow wreaths slipped away and piled thickly about histrunk. But when the snow lay deep over all the slope, it packed andslid down toward the ravine and pressed strongly against the saplingfir.

  "Oh, I shall be torn from my roots," he cried; "I shall be broken off."

  "Bend," said the fir mother, "bend, and you will not break." So theyoung fir bent before the snow until he was curved like a bow, but whenthe spring came and the sap ran in his veins, he straightened his trunkanew and spread his branches in a star-shaped whorl.

  "After all," said the sapling, "it is not such a great matter to keepstraight; it only requires an effort."

  So he went on drooping and bending to the winter snows, growing strongand straight with the spring, and rejoicing. About this time the firbegan to feel a tingling in his upper branches.

  "Something is going to happen," he said; something agreeable in fact,for the tree was fifty years old, and it was time to grow cones. Forfifty years a silver fir has nothing to do but to grow branches, thrownout in annual circles, every one in the shape of a cross. Then it growscones on the topmost whorl, royal purple and burnished gold, erect onthe ends of the branches like Christmas candles. The sapling fir hadonly three in his first season of bearing, but he was very proud ofthem, for now he was no longer a sapling, but a tree.

  When one has to devote the whole of a long season to growing cones, onehas not much occasion to think of other things. By the time there werefive rows of cone-bearing branches spread out broadly from the silverfir, the woodchuck made a remark to the pipsissawa which is sometimescalled prince's pine. It was not the same pipsissawa, nor the samewoodchuck, but one of his descendants, and his parents had told him thewhole story.

  "It seems to me," said he, "that the fir tree is not going to bestraight after all. He never seems quite to recover from the wintersnow."

  "Ah," said the pipsissawa, "I have always thought it better to haveyour seeds ripe and put away under ground before the snow comes. Thenyou do not mind it at all."

  The woodchuck was right about the fir; his trunk was beginning to curvetoward the downward slope of the hill with the weight of the drifts. Andthat went on until the curve was quite fixed in the ripened wood, andthe fir tree could not have straightened up if he had wished. But totell the truth, the fir tree did not wish. By the end of another fiftyyears, when he wagged his high top above the forest gloom, he grew to bequite proud of it.

  "There is nothing," he said to the sapling firs, "like being able toendure hard times with a good countenance. I have seen a great deal oflife. There are no such snows now as there used to be. You can see bythe curve of my trunk what a weight I have borne."

  But the young firs did not pay any attention to him. They had made uptheir minds to grow up straight.