The Brownness

A pine-sapling starts out green as the scrub it replaces. After ten years the brown begins. Just a fox-tail of dry needles in a lower fork. Then it spreads to the armpits of shaded boughs. The pine tips swagger up into the daylight, a wedge of tall spears all shaking their tips at each other competitive, vaunting and climbing oipinus erectus\ much waving no growth, it seems at first. But month by month it stretches, strangling grasses below in this first tide of the great extermination.