Post 00135
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This patriarch had stood three hundred feet high, was sound to the core, and had lived through two thousand one hundred and seventy-one years. Its existence began in the year 271 B.C. After more than five centuries of life, in A.D. 245 it was in the pathway of a forest fire from which it received a bad burn on the lower trunk. It was one hundred and five years before this burn was fully covered with tissue and bark.
Following this fire came the peaceful procession of twelve centuries. Eleven hundred and ninety-six times the golden poppies came to glorify the green hills of spring, while the songs of mating birds filled woods and meadows. More than a thousand times the aspens ripened and scattered their golden leaves, while this serene evergreen grew and towered more and more noble through the centuries.
Elsewhere the forests were dim with smoke, and on the Sierra during these centuries the heroic “big trees” received many a scar from fire. But not until 1441 did fire again try this veteran. Soon after this burn was healed there came a third fire. This was less injurious than the preceding ones, for the wound that it inflicted healed in half a century.