or they clung along the trunk of the tree
and grew there when it was about an inch and a quarter in diameter.
The section upon which these cones grew was between fifteen and
twenty-five feet from the ground.

The seeds of most conifers need vegetable mould, litter, or vegetation
cover of some kind in which to germinate, and then shade for a time in
which to grow. These requirements so needed by other conifer seeds and
seedlings are detrimental to the lodge-pole. If its seeds fall on
areas lightly covered with low huckleberry vines, but few of them will
germinate. A lodge-pole seed that germinates in the shade is doomed.
It must have sunlight or die. In the ashes of a forest fire, in the
full glare of the sun, the seeds of the lodge-pole germinate, grow,
and flourish.

Wind is the chief agency which enables the seeds to migrate. The seeds
are light, and I know of one instance where an isolated tree on a
plateau managed to scatter its seeds by the aid of the wind over a
circular area fifty acres in extent, though a few acres is all that
is reached by the average tree. Sometimes the wind scatters the seeds
unevenly. If most of the seeds are released in one day, and the wind
this day prevails from the same quarter, the seeds will take but one
course from the tree; while changing winds may scatter them quite
evenly all around the tree.

A camping party built a fire against a lone lodge-pole. The tree was
killed and suffered a loss of its needles from the fire. Four years
later, a long green pennant, tattered at the end and formed of
lodge-pole seedlings, showed on the mountain-side. This pennant began
at the tree and streamed out more than seven hundred feet. Its width
varied from ten to fifty feet.

The action of a fire in a lodge-pole forest is varied. If the forest
be an old one, even with much rubbish on the ground the heat is not
so intense as in a young growth. Where trees are scattered the flames
crawl from tree to tree, the needles of which ignite like flash-powder
and make beautiful rose-purple flames. At night fires of this kind
furnish rare fireworks. Each tree makes a fountain of flame, after
which, for a moment, every needle shines like incandescent silver,
while exquisite light columns of ashen green smoke float above. The
hottest fire I ever experienced was made by the burning of a
thirty-eight-year lodge-pole forest. In this forest the poles stood
more than thirty feet high, and were about fifteen thousa