Excerpt from The Redwoods

By Richard St. Barbe Baker

(Original spelling, punctuation and grammar retained.)

From Chapter 3

The Balance of Nature

It was dawn. I lay half awake, relaxed, listening to the silence. Suddenly alert, I was aware that something was moving lightly over the blanket that covered me.

It stopped on my knees. I opened my eyes—and looked into two round curious smaller ones.

My visitor was as interested as I. For a second we gazed at each other. In the half light he seemed just eyes. Then I must have moved, for a little sequoia cone that he was carrying dropped and rolled on the floor.

He scampered off my bed and out of the open door of my hut where he paused in a faint streak of light, and I was able to see what he looked like.

He was about half the size of a squirrel, brown in colour with lighter fawn streaks down his back. Very intently he sat up, surprised and interested rather than frightened. Then he danced away and came back in an inviting manner like a dog asking to be taken for a walk.

He didn’t run away when I got up, and while I shaved and dressed he played with his cone. Not three paces away from the door was the foot of a massive tree into the heart of which might have been fitted half a dozen little houses such as the one in which I was. My little friend was only one of the tiny personalities, hundreds of which live in symbiosis with the Big Trees. He was a chipmunk; like the red squirrel in an English wood he lives on the fruits of the trees, makes his winter store in a hole in the earth, more than he needs, the surplus having a chance to germinate, so he does his good turn to the forest.

As I was watching him I began to realize how full of life was the forest around me. High up in the branches lively birds were twittering. A blue jay perched near by. The shot silky light blue of his plumage caught my eye. He too was friendly and later when I was having breakfast he came and helped himself off the table. Cheeky little devil!

Within an hour of sunrise I had thrown the stock-saddle on Ruby, my big mare, and left the tiny chipmunk in charge of the hut under the shade of the great Sequoia.

That day I was going in search of the finest groves, so with a camera slung on my shoulder I rode up the steep trail which wound its way between great boles of the Big Trees, any one of which was about as huge as the one I had left with my chipmunk. But they did not seem so big to me because everything else around was big too. Grove upon grove of trees equally huge in proportion. Ruby snorted—a bear crossed the trail followed by its cubs, stopped a moment to stare and trundled off soon to be lost sight of among the trunks. Here was a tree whose bark had been scarred and torn by their claws. I stopped my mare to look at it. There was a heap of powdered bark.

…The distant scene lured me on, so I returned to the main mountain trail. Once again I entered the forest of the Big Trees, and winding my way, sometimes past fallen giants, I kept on upward and ever upward. Stiff was the climb and luckily my mare was a good climber. After perhaps an hour the ground flattened out, and at last, in the distance, I could see the beginning of a forest glade.

I was coming into a more open park-like land and could see across a grassy meadow. For the first time, the tops of the Big Trees were visible. The ground was soft and damp and where I came to the first opening was a massive tree, lying its length of close on three hundred feet. I wondered if it had been felled by fire or tornado. It was imbedded deep in the earth and I rode along its enormous trunk, with its soft bark still intact after maybe a thousand prostrate years. Then I rode round the glade and took a photograph.

While my mare grazed I ate berries, a sort of blueberry which grew on the fringes of the glade and nibbled pinon nuts, Pinus Sabiniana, which I had in my pocket.

Crescent Meadow

I wondered if I had hit upon Crescent Meadow, John Muir’s favourite place of all others in the Sierra. It was the very heart of a great watershed, the centre of balance. All around this glade the Big Trees enjoyed that particular environment which had proved to be in a peculiar way adapted to their well-being. Here was the forest climax. The underlying reason for the longevity of this forest species is that in that region there has been perfect balance between the Sequoias and surrounding conditions. The requirements of each tree were met, depth and composition of soil, humidity and warmth. Was there any limit to their growth? Why were they not even greater still? Why were trees which might be four thousand years but a little larger and no taller than those of fifteen hundred years? Why did they not luxuriate and become even mightier yet? The answer to this question may be found upon examination of the up-turned roots of a fallen tree. Great as the roots may be, they are moderate by comparison with the tree’s size. If they were not restricted they might rampage over immense areas exhausting the soil too far removed from the mother tree to be replenished by its compensating leaf fall. So here again we may observe the principle of balance. Even the greatest things of the world have their weaknesses, while the humblest creatures have their means of protection.

Ruby in the Redwoods

Filled with such thoughts I dozed while Ruby grazed, and sleeping or waking, my mind traveled through timeless space. All the creatures that had ever passed that way seemed to pass before me—towering over all and greater in bulk than the rest, lollopped along a grotesque shape, a reptile unbelievably huge, perhaps 90 feet long and 30 feet tall, with a long neck and mouth and head ridiculously small in proportion to the massive body. Was it the Diplodocus, one of those gigantic Dinosaurs of the Sauropoda found in the Jurassic rocks of the western States, the largest creature known to have walked this globe? If his eating apparatus had been proportionately large, if instead of being a grass-eating lizard, he had learned to eat meat, then he might have become a menace to the world at large and have wrought havoc over a great area. I mused upon the law of compensation and balance in nature until a gentle nudge in the shoulder by Ruby brought me back to the present.

As I mounted to continue a cloud hung low, the air was sultry and hot in spite of the high elevation. In the distance I heard the rumble of thunder. The sun had gone behind clouds, and with it, my sense of direction. It was my intention to return to the camp by a different route and descend on the other side of the tableland, down through unexplored groves. I started off and rode for an hour along precipitous paths.

I got on to an old track—an unused trail and was soon brought to an abrupt standstill when towering in front and above us was a prostrate veteran, one hundred and fifty feet or more either side of us. It had been scarred by fire and its branches were burnt away. To my left I looked in the direction of where once was its crown, to my right the unearthed roots towered sixty feet high. I rode along under this blackened monster and where the roots had severed themselves from the earth there was a shallow flat-bottomed crater with the subsoil just laid bare of humus. A great rock was held fast between three stump ends of broken support roots. Around the clearing were springing up healthy young Sequoias of all ages. They would contend with each other for the family domain.

I rode on again. A good deal of the way was downhill. I had covered perhaps five miles when I found myself climbing again. I felt there was something wrong.

I had been riding along with the wind in my face. Now it suddenly seemed to be on my left. I pulled up and made a desperate effort to regain my bearings. Was it I or the wind that had changed directions? Ruby was chafing at her bit, should I give her her head and trust her to find the way?

On again and on for about another four miles which brought me back to my own trail. I had made a complete circle. I was lost.

There was just one hope left to me. Would the trees themselves give me a clue? In my experience in other forests there was often a weather side to the trees, or their tops were shaped by a prevailing wind. I examined their trunks closely, but they seemed to be changing in colour every moment as the clouds passed over the tree-tops. My mare was fatigued with the climb and I dismounted and slackened the cinch while I looked still closer for some clue to my direction. After all, it seemed my only chance to return the way I’d come and soon I was in the saddle again.

It was then the brewing storm was let loose. A blinding flash of lightning with an almost simultaneous clap of thunder, but no rain. The mare snorted, and just then I caught the smell of burning wood. A tree had been struck.

From now on the lightning was continuous, the storm was raging immediately above me. I could see the fire; it had burst out high overhead, about two hundred and fifty feet in mid-air, in the very top of a great Sequoia tree. Enormous tongues of fire, sixty to eighty feet long, licked the stunted top, raged and roared around its conical head and soon enveloped it in fire and smoke.

I could do nothing about it myself, just wait and watch until the fire burnt itself out or until a cooling rain came to extinguish it. In the meantime, of course, I might report it if I could find a ranger but no doubt the firemen or guards located at one of the strategic look-outs had already detected it and would send a party to the spot...

I did not wait long—there was a risk of the fire spreading if the rain did not come. I regained my old bearings and hastened down towards my hut. About half-way I met the fire-fighting gang on their way to the fire. I offered to return with them, but they saw how tired my mare was and said they didn’t need me. They’d got it located, and had the latest equipment and portable pumps to prevent it spreading.

I left them to it and rode on back to my hut and chipmunk marvelling how the things most vital to life could become life’s greatest enemies—fire, water, wind.