The story begins when a pinecone raises its knuckles and abandons its nuts, losing them to the birds and the chipmunks and the wind, only one of them taking hold in the earth. This is in spring, after the powdery snow has turned to a hard rain that makes the rabbitbrush go yellow and the cheatgrass green and sends floods of brackish water surging through canyons.
This particular nut, buried and dampened by the rain, opens softly and releases a green-tipped stem that, like a finger pointing the way, uncurls and stiffens and presses its way upward until it breaks the soil and takes in the warm air and the warm sun, so thrilled by them both that it grows three inches that day and three more the next. Its roots mine the soil, burrowing downward, extending like capillaries, drinking up precious moisture and gobbling up nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, knocking aside worms and grubs, feeding, feeding, feeding off everything, so that several other nuts can find no sustenance and wither and eventually break down into particles the tree consumes as well.
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