The Alaskan., 1927-12-16

1ASS d4S tue Sdu5 NdI16Ly dS LuOSS consumed. They lift up as did oth- er trees. There is nothing new in the process; there is no difference Ill the order, but it will take 300 to 1000 years to replace the forest.
 We humans measure time by clocks. To Nature, an hour when the earth was soft, an hour now or an hour 50 millions of years hencs. is all the same. Time, as we stand ardlze the deeting minutes, is noth- ing to Nature.
 Undoubtedly, Nature can afford to pull these stunts, but it is hard on the things that Nature has put the breath of life into.
 There is a peaceful community with long reaches of garden sur rounding it. A volcano belches hell. Living things are choked, roasted and buried in rivers of molten dirt. Between a sunrise and set the re- zion is rearward to the very stage when the world was young. Agony, death, ruins, and Nature grins and commences on the slow process of reconstruction. It is like the grouch who was always busy knocking down today what he had fashioned the day before.
 Last November Nature ran off on an early tangent and smeared the country around here with snow. Un- less something far out of the ordil- ary turns up the human element will wiggle through, but how about the other living things? Why does Ma ture seek to destroy life by slow tor ture? Starving, freezing and expos ure? Really, it is hard to under stand. There has been labor, pain and struggle in the creation of this life and in scarce a breath of time it is gone and it's going prolonged in agony.
 One early May we witnessed the ice break in the Tanana River. We stood on the uper deck of a river steamer, pulled in over the overflow of the day before to a bunch of cot tonwoods, and snug on the lee side of a bend of the stream. The first big crash came at three in the morn ing, but it was plain daylight and the sky clear. In just a short time the river had turned from peaceful, ice overflow to a mad, tumbling 5eething roar of muddy water. ter rible boilups and breaker-like back lashes. And in this churning mael- strom was the rampaging ice, break ing, cutting, slashing, snapping like cannon reports, piling up, falling down and death rode astride every rolling piece of ice exultingly. There was a timber covered point across the river from us. An acre square of ice seven feet thick, gouged the bank with a whirling cut. Trees pig small and indifferent were down ike grain before a sickle. Trees hat were anywhere from 600 years old, down to the spring before.
 Just below us the ice jambed and he river immediately backed up md gave us a dozen feet of muddy Water where it had been dry before. l Then the oncoming ice tore the bar fer down and away and the current l vas that much swifter. Before the afternoon waned the point had been ut off far below the frothy sur. ace. Forty acres there had been n that point and every living thing 'n it perished.
 This was going on in every riv- 1T. A few days later Nature tossed l he dead things She didn't bury | long strange shores from the in erior to Siberia and She flteder he silt of the land between Her fingers into Behring Sea.
 Here and there along the Yukon. Iaturn pi1ad nm ic1opdc opd hove oe |