Pennsylvania Game News - March 2011 - 50

water from vulnerable leaves into stem and roots until it’s safe to plump the leaves up again. The rhododendron of Penn’s Woods is such a freeze-savvy example. Common sense says that bushes, flowers, grasses and trees aren’t sentient like us. When we say that someone is “as dumb as a stump,” we’re not only nearly rhyming to make our joking point, we’re also implying what everyone knows, that tree stumps haven’t any brains. But “dumb” has another meaning, the inability to speak. Unless we count their “moaning” in heavy wind, their sharp “cracks” when something breaks, and the “murmur” of the leaves in a light breeze, trees don’t talk. But what if they did? What if the trees could talk? As a hunter and inveterate woods wanderer, I wonder just what they would say. Last fall, trying to find the whereabouts of a flock of turkeys I had been told had been seen in the area, I bumped a different flock — grouse. I had my scope-sighted .22 Hornet, so I just watched as grouse after grouse burst upward from the barberry, grapevine, crabapple and wild rose tangle around me. When they were done, 10 in all had erupted. I’m not much of a shotgunner. I haven’t shot at flying game enough to be good at it, so I just grinned at getting to watch so many grouse going out. I decided I would pass on the information of where I had bounced the grouse to a friend with both a bird dog and the shooting skill to make the most out of such a flush. I took another step and something heavier crashed in the thicket. Whether it was a deer or a bear going out of the heavy cover, I didn’t know. I hustled toward the edge of an opening, but too late to see what had made the noise. I halted short, stopped not only by a denser, thornier blockade, but also by something else. It was the shell of a huge tree. The tree was hollowed but upright, the bottom end of what must have been a soaring specimen. The bark was long gone. The spiral pattern of the under-wood ar50

rested me. I dropped my pack so I could fetch the small digital camera I carry, to take an “artsy” picture. I snapped a couple and then used the close-up feature to record the green of the living lichen on the snag’s surface against the red-brown of the decaying heartwood. An additional feature of the ancient tree struck me. A circlet of iron surrounded its base. The iron band was textured like rebar and it embraced the tree just above the ground, like some sort of embossed medieval collar. I couldn’t tell if it had a ring on the other side for a chain or connecting rod, but it probably did. I suspected it had something to do with the oil history in this valley and dated from the late 1800s to early 1900s. If only that ruined tree could talk! What had it seen here? Tamed for labor, as evidenced by its iron harness, it may have been one of a few trees (maybe the only one) that were allowed to remain standing, when all else was cut down to make way for or build the oil derricks that replaced the living forest in this place so long ago. Was the tree an American chestnut? Maybe, from its resistance to rot and to be standing so long, its blocky size and the copper tones that remained in the interior wood. Did the tree die early when crude oil gushed from the ground or sloshed from barrels at its feet? Or did it have its roots sunk deeply enough to reach untainted earth and green-up every spring, surprising the oilmen? If this tree could talk and spin a tale, it might tell me about how the game and other wildlife of that earlier time gave way before the flood of people to the valley, of the days when its leafy neighbors were felled and the eager-for-oil human crowd replaced them as thickly. I’m sure this tree would say, too, that eventually it awoke out of that nightmare, when oil from the valley had dwindled to a trickle, to find new neighbors of its own kind. Tentative saplings and sprouts grew and matured and now stood all around it, none rememberGAME NEWS

Pennsylvania Game News - March 2011

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