Word: firs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...blanket of fog and smoke still hugged the ground. Fenton chose to go around. What was the weather at nearby Seattle-Tacoma Airport? Visibility ten miles, ceiling unlimited. That was the last the tower heard from Fenton. The big plane roared over the field, slashed into a stand of fir trees, and fell, flaming, in an open lot outside the city...
Mookie, out of sight, worked efficiently. Suddenly, a rabbit bounded out of a nearby hole and fled across the heather in a series of bobtailed bounces, heading straight for a patch of scrub fir trees. Diana spotted the quarry almost instantly. When the rabbit was about 75 yards away, Falconer Wolfgang Stehle suddenly called "Habicht frei" (Hawk free) and released the thong which bound straining Diana to his. wrist. Wings pounding for quick altitude, Diana flashed after the rabbit. Closing fast, she wheeled into a vertical bank between two fir trees and plummeted downward for the strike...
Then the Jagermeister solemnly cut a fir twig, placed it in the crease of his green hat, bowed to Stehle and pronounced "Falconer, Heil." Stehle, in turn, bowed, accepted the twig and placed it under the band of his own hat. In two days of competition, with 18 stylish kills, the deadly hunting trio of Stehle, Diana and Mookie successfully defended the title in the international competition sponsored by the Order of German Falconers...
Technically this discovery was still a rumor until 1944 when a forester brought back to Professors H. H. Hu and W. C. Cheng specimens of leaves and cones from three trees that local inhabitants called, "shui-sa" (water fir). Since the material was fragmentary, Hu and Cheng were unable to classify the tree, and so Cheng sent an expedition in 1946. Harvard-trained Hu received part of the material from this trip and forwarded speciments to the Arboretum...
Inside the big, greenish concrete plant, the visitors saw a sight unique in Canadian papermaking. The wood supply clanking up the jackladder to be milled into paper was not the customary heavy, costly pine, fir and spruce; it was scraps of branches and tree tops and scrubby hemlock, waste wood that loggers call "slash" or "hog." Pounded by the mill's crushing stones, the scrap was being processed into newsprint as marketable as any produced from the most expensive pulpwood...