On Sequoia Time | Page 4

than most of the other trees, too.
By the time the tree had reached thirty-five feet the United States was fighting a "police action" in Brazil to preserve what was left of the rain forests. Without euphamisms it was a war, and a losing one. Too many people had a vested interest in the slash-and-burn beef-growing economy that was consuming the rain forests, starting with the desperately poor South American Indians who had no other way to survive, and working step by step up the economic ladder to McDonald's corporation stockholders.
While the rain forests died, life in the canyon flourished. The rabbit population, without my grandfather's .22 rifle to keep it in check, exploded. My grandmother's cats--tough farm cats, pushing twenty pounds--did well even without Grandma to take care of them. Shortly there were eight cats, and then eleven, and the cat population leveled off at around twenty. There would have been more except that the coyotes wanted the same food, the desert mice and squirrels and rabbits, and were tougher about going after it. The coyotes rarely hunted the cats; it happened at times, but it was always a fierce fight. For five years one tom, a big orange glandular monster who weighed thirty-three pounds, made it a riskier proposition than usual; he killed and ate two young coyotes before a rattler finally got him one night.
The rattlesnakes my grandfather had spent nearly four decades warring against outlasted him; they killed more of the cats than the coyotes ever did.
About the time the sequoia was nearing forty-eight feet, a couple of owls nested in its lower branches. The owls fed off the snakes, including the rattlers; baby owls were born the next summer.
The sequoia broke fifty feet the year the last of the rain forests went up in flames.
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LIFE IN THE canyon continued quietly. Water came up from the ground. The sun warmed the canyon during the day, and during the night the mammals retreated to their burrows, the owls tucked their wings beneath their heads, and the snakes and lizards and insects grew still. Tree sap turned sluggish; it would stay liquid, and keep the trees alive, well below the freezing point of water.
The sequoia's bark grew thicker as the tree grew taller. It was still very young, for a sequoia. Giant sequoias can live a very long time; nobody really knows how long. Humans had found giant sequoias as much as thirty-five hundred years old, and there was no reason to believe that they might not live longer.
The sequoia in my grandfather's canyon might have been expected to live a long time, even by sequoia standards. Though it had competition for soil and water, it grew fast, and got up into the sunlight, putting most of the other trees into its shade. By the time it was tall enough to take the brunt of the canyon's wind itself, there was no danger that the wind would kill it.
The giant sequoia was not the only thing that thrived in that canyon. So did the pines surrounding it, and the animals that lived among them, the owls and the snakes and the lizards, the coyotes and the rabbits and bees. There was water and there was sunlight and there was food enough for everything; and the wild creatures flourished.
Some days, when the sun came slanting down into the canyon just right, it was so beautiful that seeing it would have made you glad to be alive.
Fortunately the human race had forgotten about the place, and as a result no one came to admire the beauty, and incidentally to destroy it.
The cats, living in the wild where size was important, got bigger and bigger with the passage of the years, until most of them approached the size of the glandular monster who had once been such a freak. These were not mutants; the genes for size had been floating around in the cat population, but they had not been selected for. Now they were selected for and the cats got big, quickly, and gave the coyotes and owls some real competition for the rabbits and desert mice, snakes and lizards.
Quickly is a relative word: the sequoia continued to grow, too, at its own pace. It was young and beautiful, with dark brown branches laden with dusky green leaves, the branches radiating outward from its trunk in a conical pattern, all the way from the ground to the top of the tree. In later life the branches near the ground would wither away, leaving the tree with a smooth trunk reaching up as much as two hundred feet; but for now the tree was young, and its growth was everywhere. The tree drank the water, and dug down into the soil, and reached for the sun.
As adults, giant sequoias can reach heights