But though so consummately beautiful, the big
tree always seems unfamiliar, with peculiar physiognomy, awfully solemn
and earnest; yet with all its strangeness it impresses us as being more
at home than any of its neighbors, holding the best right to the ground
as the oldest strongest inhabitant. One soon becomes acquainted with new
species of pine and fir and spruce as with friendly people, shaking
their outstretched branches like shaking hands and fondling their little
ones, while the venerable aboriginal sequoia, ancient of other days,
keeps you at a distance, looking as strange in aspect and behavior among
its neighbor trees as would the mastodon among the homely bears and
deers. Only the Sierra juniper is at all like it, standing rigid and
unconquerable on glacier pavements for thousands of years, grim and
silent, with an air of antiquity about as pronounced as that of the
sequoia.
The bark of the largest trees is from one to two feet thick, rich
cinnamon brown, purplish on young trees, forming magnificent masses
of color with the underbrush. Toward the end of winter the trees are
in bloom, while the snow is still eight or ten feet deep. The female
flowers are about three-eighths of an inch long, pale green, and grow
in countless thousands on the ends of sprays.
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