Unexplored!. Chaffee Allen

never start out without it, whether we told him to or not. But I’m awfully afraid we’ll use more tea than coffee. It’s bulky, and worse, it loses flavor.”

      “Oh,” said Ted, “I know the answer to that. Powdered coffee isn’t one quarter so bulky, and put up in little separate tins, we keep opening them fresh, don’t you see?”

      “I’ve never yet seen a powdered coffee that could compare with the real thing,” Ace complained.

      “Why couldn’t Les buy the real thing and then get it powdered and sealed into little separate tins for us?”

      “He could,” agreed Norris, “I suppose, – if we’re going to be as fussy as all that.” (Ace flushed.) “But with our woods’ appetites–”

      “Oh, and citric acid tablets,” the Senator’s son hastened to change the subject. “For lemonade, you know.”

      The discussion was cut short by Pedro’s discovery that a bear had invaded the lean-to.

      The American black bear, and his California cousin whose coat has generally lightened to the cinnamon brown of the soil, is all but tame in the National Parks, where for years he has been unmolested. A friendly fellow even in the wild state, – for the most part, – he roams the Giant Forest as much a prized part of the landscape as the Big Trees themselves. He has learned to visit the garbage dump regularly every night, and it causes no sensation whatever to meet one on the trail. It was much the same about the lumber camp.

      But to have him visit uninvited, and serve his own refreshments from their selected stores, was a less attractive trick. Nor did he show the slightest inclination to take alarm and vacate when the boys returned. On the contrary, he snarled and showed his teeth when they would have driven him from the maple sugar can, and even Ace felt at the moment that discretion was in order. It was not till Old Shaggy-Sides had pretty well demolished everything in sight, and then carried the ham off under his arm, that he took a reluctant departure.

      This would never do. That night the unprotected edibles were hoisted just too high for a possible visitor to reach, on a rope slung over the limb of a tree. The boys still slept under the stars, for they knew enough about bears, (all but Pedro), not to be afraid. Pedro, however, got little sleep that night, though he would not have confessed to the fact for anything on earth.

      “There was one bear in Sequoia Park,” remembered Ace, “who got too fresh, that way, and raided some one’s tent, and they had to send for help to get him out. When it happened half a dozen times, he was ordered shot. But he was the only one I’ve ever heard of acting that way. Now I’ll bet, if we’d inquire, we’d find this bear had been half tamed, and altogether spoiled by these lumbermen.

      “We were driving through Yellowstone last summer when one of those half tame bears came out to beg. We stopped the machine and I fed him some candy. Then we parked, and went up to the hotel for dinner. When we came back, we found he had mighty near clawed the back seat to pieces, – and why do you suppose? – To get at a side of bacon we had stowed away in there.”

      “Did he find it?”

      “We never did.”

      “That reminds me of something I heard,” laughed Norris. “Some friends of mine in Sequoia left their lunch boxes in the machine while they went to climb Moro Rock. When they came back they found a cub calmly sitting up there behind the wheel, eating one lunch after another.”

      Pedro was in for moving their headquarters to a great hollow Big Tree, the cavity in which was as large as a good sized room, with a Gothic sort of opening they could have made a door for. But the very next morning the old prospector arrived with the train of pack-burros, and they were off.

      “How do you explain the Sequoias, Mr. Norris? Will we find more of them?” asked Pedro, with a last wistful backward glance.

      “The Big Trees are by no means confined to Sequoia National Park and other well known groves,” said the Survey man. “The Sequoia gigantea is to be found in scattered groves for a distance of 250 miles or more, up and down the West slope of the Sierras, at altitudes just lower than that of the belt of silver firs, – that is, anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level. And in fact, south of Kings’ River, the Sequoias stretch in an almost unbroken forest for seventy miles. Nor are they all of the proportions so often cited, where a man standing at their base looks like a fly on the wall by comparison with these prehistoric giants. Nor did they all get their start in life 4,000 years ago. There are young trees in plenty, saplings and seedlings, who will doubtless reach the patriarchal stage some 4,000 years hence. On what kind of earth will they look then? On what stage in the evolution of civilization? Will another ice age have re-carved these mountains? And how will man have learned to protect himself from the added severity of those winters?”

      “It certainly gives one something to think about,” mused Pedro. “It is only in these younger specimens that you can see what a graceful tree it is!” He glanced from a feathery Big Tree youngster of perhaps 500 summers, with its slender branches drooping in blue-green plumes toward the base, with purple-barked limbs out-thrust on the horizontal half way up, and at the top reaching ardently heavenward. Near it stood a parent tree of perhaps middle age, born around the time of Christ, whose crown was still firmly rounded with the densely massed foliage, now yellow-brown, and the bark red-brown.

      The millions of two inch cones, surprisingly tiny for such a tree, hang heavy with seeds, – they counted 300 in a single green cone.

      “With such millions of seeds,” puzzled Pedro, “I should think the trees would grow so thick that there would be no walking between them.”

      “No,” said Norris. “In the first place, remember that not one seed in a million escapes these busy Douglas squirrels and the big woodcocks that you hear drumming everywhere. Then even the millionth seed has to risk forest fires and snow-slides, lumbermen and lightning. But I’ll tell you something funny about them. You’d naturally think, from the number of streams in these forests, that they required a lot of moisture. Well, they don’t. Further South they grow and flourish on perfectly dry ground. But their roots retain so much rain and snow water that their tendency is to make streams. The dense crown helps too, by preventing evaporation. You’ll find Sequoias flourishing in a mere rift in a granite precipice. But wherever you find a dense growth, as you do here, there you will find their roots giving out the seepage that feeds a million streamlets, and these in turn feed the great rivers.

      “You see these trees must be able to survive drouth or they could not have survived the changes of so many thousand years. Why, these Sequoias might have formed one continuous forest from the American River on South, if it had not been for the glaciers that swept down the great basins of the San Joaquin and Kings’ River, the Tuolumne and the Stanislaus.”

      “But why didn’t the glaciers clean them off the basins of the Kaweah and the Tule Rivers, too?”

      “Ah! There the giant rock spurs of the canyons of the King and the Kern protected the Tule and the Kaweah, by shunting the ice off to right and left.”

      “There’s one thing more I’d like to know,” said Pedro. “Where will we find the nut pines that have the pine nuts? Aren’t they delicious?”

      “There are several kinds,” said Norris. “There is a queer little one with cones growing like burrs on the trunk as well as on the limbs, but that is only found on burnt ground. Another, that forms a dietary staple with the Indians of Nevada, is to be found only on the East slope of the Sierra, and the little nut pine that our California Indians harvest is away down in the foot-hills among the white oaks and manzanitas, so I’m afraid whatever else we come across on this trip, we won’t want to count on pine nuts.”

      “What interests me more,” said Ted, “is whether we are going to come across any gold or not.”

      “Now you’re talking!” the old prospector suddenly spoke up.

      Ted’s eyes shone.

      Ace had an experience about this time that flavored his nightmares for some time to come. Following a lumber chute, one of these three board affairs, up the side of a particularly