My heart is afloat on a sea of white blossoms;
My heart is a-cry with the calls of canaries;
My heart is a-swoon with the odor of clover”
This was the shouting of one logger.
Another’s roar sounded above the many:
“A snow of daisies on the hill,
White drifts all starred with gold.
But, ah, such snow wilt never chill--
It never makes thee cold.”
This logger went on yelling about a rain of buttercups that would not
make you wet, and a soft hail of poppy petals, and a wind of bluebells;
but by and by he seemed to get mixed up and his voice got hoarse. Then
another logger made himself heard above the tumult of bawled rhythms.
He cried:
“From Onion River did I come,
Seeking a sweet opprobrium,
A glorious derogatory
For my rare lust and allegory.
“When I reached this dear venial state,
How my heart did debilitate!
It leered, it fleshed, it energized,
But its emulsion I disguised.
“I doffed among the daisies snide
Till their wan petals mortified.
Egregious as incessant Noah,
I swamped in carnal New Iowa.”
“Poetry!” gasped Paul Bunyan. “Thunderation! Holy mackinaw!”
But the loggers did not hear him, and Shanty Boy, the great bunkhouse
bard, now made himself heard above the din.
“Oho! I am a bully boy,
I come from Thunder Bay
At Pokemouche and Sault au Cochon
I got the right o’ way.”
“That’s more truth than poetry,” murmured Paul Bunyan, somewhat
mollified. He waited to hear more of this piece which sounded like a
bunkhouse ballad; but now Bab Babbitson, who had heretofore been looked
upon as a useless fussbudget around the camp, began to read his poem.
He had the loudest voice of anyone among the common men, and the other
loggers stopped their own reading to listen to him.
He bellowed:
“Here is the land of opportunity.
It is a sun-kissed land.
Flowers bloom on the hills.
The sun shines every day.
The fruit grows thick on the trees and a man
Can pick his breakfast off the trees every morning.
People will want to buy farms here some day.
Let’s organize a company and sell shares.
“Here is the land of opportunity.
It is a sun-kissed land.
Flowers bloom on the hills.
The sun shines every day.
Here are pink meadows along a lavender river.
They would make wonderful townsites.
People will want to buy lots here some day.
Let’s organize a company and sell shares.
“Here is the land of opportunity.
It is a sun-kissed land.
Flowers bloom on the hills.
The sun shines every day.
And I’d bet good money there’s oil in this country.
Anyway, it’s a wonderful place to dig for it.
People will want to get in on the ground floor some day.
Let’s organize a company and sell shares.
“Yes, this is the land of opportunity.
People will come here from all over some day
To buy farms, lots, climate and oil wells.
Let’s organize a company and sell shares.”
The loggers all nearly fell over when they heard this; they were
tremendously surprised, for they had never imagined that Bab Babbitson
could have it in him. They hid their own poems, for they were ashamed
of them now, and someone lifted a shout, “Hurrah for Bab Babbitson, the
boss poet of Paul Bunyan’s camp!” Everyone cheered and begged for more
verses. Bab Babbitson, gloriously puffed up, was about to comply, when
the loggers saw two great shadows advancing upon them. They looked up
and beheld Paul Bunyan and the Big Swede. The great logger’s brows were
drawn in a terrible frown, and his beard was shaking from his rage as
the forest boughs shake when a swift wind blows among them.
“Are these Paul Bunyan’s loggers?” he roared. “I don’t recognize them!”
The poets were all tumbled from their feet by the force of that
wrathful voice, and all but Bab Babbitson lost their poems in the
scramble.
“Where are my old comrades of labor?” their leader went on more gently.
“Where are the happy bunkhouse gangs that told loggers’ tales and sang
loggers’ songs after their honest twelve hours of labor were done? Are
you still loggers, or have you really degenerated into poets?”
They were shamed and they did not answer; but just then Johnny
Inkslinger came out of his office and told Paul Bunyan of the terrible
effect which the climate and scenery of New Iowa had on the soul after
some living in it.
“Then it is no country for loggers,” declared Paul Bunyan.
He ordered the Big Swede to make the camp ready for an immediate move,
and he sent his men to the bunkhouses.
Then he took the felling ax he had devised for the tall timbers, and
through the forests of orange palms he strode, smashing them into
splinters. Kicks from his calked boots tore up the pink meadows and
filled the lavender river with mud. Next, he demolished the hills,
leaving them in scattered piles of barren sand. He regretted that
he could not dissolve the climate also, thus banishing forever the
enervating prettiness of the land. But he felt that he had done a good
night’s work as it was.
“So much for New Iowa,” he said at last, with a sigh of weariness and
content.
In the dark hour before dawn the camp was speeding Northward. But Bab
Babbitson was not in his bunkhouse. Still clutching his poem, he had
slipped out ere the start was made and hid in the forest wreckage. He
was the one man in all that mighty host who was not a born logger. And
now he had found his own country.
THE HE MAN COUNTRY
In Paul Bunyan’s time the He Man country was far from its present tame
and safe condition. It was then a high, smooth valley which lay between
the Cascade Mountains and the Rockies. The highest peaks towered only
a few hundred feet above it. Down the center of the valley Moron River
flowed, and on each side of this amazing stream the sage trees grew,
the wild horses roved, and the long-eared, stub-tailed high-behinds
sat with lifted front feet and savagely sniffed the air for the scent
of their hereditary enemy, the blond wolf. There, too, the tigermunks
lifted their tails and screamed in the moonlight. The professors
maintain that the tigermunks, the blond wolves and the high-behinds got
their great size from eating prune pits which were thrown out from Paul
Bunyan’s cookhouse, and that they were all shot by the settlers who
followed the great logger. This notion is ridiculous. The truth is that
these animals were cowards at heart, and.... But this should be told at
the end of the story.
Paul Bunyan moved to this region after his disastrous experience in
New Iowa, when his loggers all turned poets. He depended on the He Man
country to make plain, honest men of them again. The super-masculine
sage trees, he was sure, would inspire them to anything but poetry;
and the logging off of these hard forests would be a historical
achievement. But the great logger left nothing to chance. He remembered
a species of animal which his boss farmer, John Shears, had originated,
and he ordered a herd of them to be brought West. John Shears had
proved to him that the virility of buffalo milk was incomparable. So
Paul Bunyan planned to stuff his loggers with buffalo milk hot cakes as
an antidote to any poison of poetry that might remain in them.
Thus the great logger’s first move in the He Man country was to
build a great buffalo corral and milking pen. When it was completed
the buffalos were brought from the old home camp, and a gang of
scissor-bills came along to herd and milk them. After their first
breakfast of the new man food the loggers got some of their old swagger
back, and Paul Bunyan was a picture of cheerfulness as he cruised the
sage trees and planned the work of his men.
Moron River offered a chance for the most eventful and picturesque
drive of logging history. From its source above the Border to its
mouth on the Oregon coast it was like a huge child of a river, for it
flowed ridiculously in every mile of its course. Here it ran smoothly
for a short distance, then it would flow jerkily, making spasmodic
waves; again, its surface would form into vast eddies that whirled like
merry-go-rounds, and from these the waters rushed in heaving rolls
of foam; there were quicksands where the river played hide and seek,
nearly disappearing in places, miles where it turned and ran back and
then curved into its course again, making a perfect figure eight.
Moron River flowed everywhere in zigzags and curlicues, cutting all
manner of capers and didos. Any man but Paul Bunyan would have admitted
the impossibility of making a drive on it. But he only smiled when he
saw it and said: “If my rivermen will forget poetry they can drive it
easily.”
The timber in this high, wide valley reached from the Eastern slopes
of the Cascade Hills to the Western slopes of the Rockies. These sage
trees resembled the desert sagebrush of to-day. They were not large;
few of them were over two hundred feet in height, and not one of them
could give a butt log over nine feet in diameter. But they all had
many massive limbs which were crowded with silver gray leaves, each
leaf being the size of a No. 12 shoe. The brown bark of the sage trees
was thick, loose and stringy; it would have to be peeled from the logs
before they were snaked to the landings by the blue ox.
“Splendid work for the swampers and limbers,” said Paul Bunyan, as he
cruised the timber. “What a noble logging land is the He Man country!
Surely my loggers will be re-born here into even better men than they
were before they fell into an illness of poetry and ideas!”
The first day of logging in the He Man country seemed to justify
the great logger’s best hopes. The men came out from breakfast with
a swinging, swaggering tramp, loudly smacking their lips over the
lingering flavors of buffalo milk hot cakes. This potent food made them
vigorously he in every action. Each man chewed at least three cans
of Copenhagen and a quarter-pound of fire cut during his first twelve
hours in the woods. “P-tt-tooey! P-tt-tooey! P-tt-tooey!” sounded
everywhere among shouted oaths and coarse bellowing. Every ax stroke
buried the bit deeply in the tough sage wood, and brown dust spurted
and gushed constantly from every singing saw. Crash! Crash! Crash! The
thunder of falling trees sounded like a heavy cannonade. On all the
loggers’ backs gray sweat stains spread from under their suspenders,
and their hair hung in dripping strings over their red, wet faces. They
had got up steam for the first time since leaving the Hickory Hill
country, and they were rejoicing in it. Even after the eleventh hour
had passed their eyes were bright, though red-rimmed from stinging
sweat, though wrinkles of weariness had formed around them. The men
were tired indeed; the fallers and swampers were now panting through
open mouths, and they were chewing nervously on their tongues, as is
the habit of men when they are wearied out; but they never missed a
lick, and when Paul Bunyan called them home they could still walk
springily.
When they were back in camp they did not even complain of the smeared,
sticky feeling which always follows great sweats. No one spoke
delicately of bathing; the loggers all washed and combed carelessly;
and soon they made a trampling, growling host around the cookhouse door.
The rafters and beams of the great cookhouse shook at this supper, so
savagely did the loggers tackle the platters of bear meat. Even the
bones were crushed, ground, and devoured; and Hot Biscuit Slim and his
helpers were delighted when all the dishes were left slick and clean.
That night no poems were recited in the bunkhouses, but the loggers
roared out “The Jam on Garry’s Rock” and other plain old songs. The
loggers all crawled into their blankets at an early hour, and every one
of them emitted gruff snores as soon as he went to sleep.
Paul Bunyan listened to them, and he praised the saints for the He Man
country. Had it not been for this region there was no telling what
continuous plagues of poetry would have afflicted his simple men. Now
they were back to normalcy.
The loggers continued to improve as summer passed and the short autumn
of the He Man country ran its course. The first snow of the cold season
fell on a redeemed camp. That snow flew in on a thundering wind; its
flakes quickly made masses of dry snow around the bunkhouse doors;
and these were swept into huge drifts that were window-high in places
when the breakfast gong rang. The loggers roared and cheered when they
rushed out for their buffalo milk hot cakes. Paul Bunyan listened to
their basso growls of hunger, their rumbling jovial cursing, their
bellows of laughter, and he chuckled so heartily that the snow which
had gathered on his beard was shaken over a crowd of loggers, burying
them. They dug themselves out, whooping their appreciation of the
humorous happening, and they jestfully shook their fists at their
chuckling leader. Then, without stopping to dig the snow from their
shirt collars, they galloped on for the steaming cookhouse.
The stamping and banging, the clatter and crash, the smoking, sucking
and grinding of meal time had never sounded with more vigor and power
than on this wild winter morning. Breakfast done, the loggers came
forth wiping their mouths with flourishing swipes of their fists, and
with much snorting thumb-blowing of noses. When they were back in the
bunkhouses, they laced up their boots, arguing loudly the while as to
whether true savages, real tough bullies, would wear mackinaws when it
was only forty below zero.
“Mackinaws?” yelled the majority. “Where’s your red bully blood, you
Hunyoks? Mackinaws! Hell, no, burlies; we won’t even button the collars
of our shirts!”
And then Ford Fordsen, camp tinker, bunkhouse handyman, and prophet,
got an idea which swiftly ran through all the bunkhouses.
“Real rough, red-blooded, burly, bully, savage, dirt-stomping,
ear-chewing, tobacco-loving, whisker-growing, hell-roaring He Men are
not going to wear their boots and pants like we’ve been doing,” said
he. “Look you now: here’s a ten-inch boot top, here are two inches of
wool sock above it; and there’s a pants’ leg all tucked down nice and
pretty inside of it. Mates, it looks too delicate. It is no way for a
fire-eating logger to wear his duds. Here now; watch me and do as I do,
and be a real band of honest-to-God bullies. This way--look!”
He jerked open his horn-handled old knife, and he slashed off the
legs of his tin breeches, his mackinaw pants and his overalls, just
below his knees. He bit off a jaw-full of fire cut and then stood up,
his fists on his hips, an unshaven cheek bulging with pepper-flavored
tobacco, shapeless hat down over one eye, collar unbuttoned, suspenders
stretching over his expanded chest, and--high mark of all high marks,
distinction of distinctions--his pants ending in ragged edges below
his knees. An inch of red drawers’ legs showed below them, there
followed bands of green wool socks, then black boot tops. Stagged
pants! The finishing touch! Poetry was crushed to earth, never to rise
triumphantly again in Paul Bunyan’s camp. The inventive and prophetic
Ford Fordsen had about killed it.
The great leader was delighted beyond words when he saw the loggers
in their new costumes. He smiled indulgently when he heard some of
the more modest among them saying that the brush would not bother
them greatly now, and that Ford Fordsen’s invention was a mighty good
useful one. This is the reason loggers of to-day give for stagging
their pants. But Paul Bunyan knew that his men had all taken up with
the invention because it suited their natures, which had come back
to them. Most of them indeed, admitted it. The loggers of our time
should also be frank and admit that stagged pants spring from the
he-bulliness of their souls. As Paul Bunyan said, “Etiquette, dainty
speech, sweet scents, poetry and delicate clothes belong properly in
the drawing-room, the study and the sanctum. They are hothouse growths.
Loggers should take pride in hard labor and rough living. Anything
that helps their Hesomeness makes them better men. All glory to you,
Ford Fordsen, for the invention of stagged pants.”
He offered the bunkhouse genius his little finger. Ford Fordsen got his
arms a fourth of the way around it, and the two inventors shook hands.
The months went on and the loggers’ rugged virtues continued to gain
strength from the virile buffalo milk hot cakes. They did noble work
among the sage trees and felled so many of them that the Big Swede and
the blue ox had to go in a gallop during their working hours to snake
all the logs to the landings.
Now, this was the year which is mentioned in history as the Year of the
Hard Winter. But the bitterest cold could not now chill the blood of
Paul Bunyan’s He-Men. They had never been so jolly as they were this
Christmas, and they jigged and chortled when Paul Bunyan gave each of
them a knife devised especially for pants-stagging. The great leader
had cut out thousands of these excellent presents from two of Babe’s
old ox shoes. This was the merriest holiday season the camp had ever
known, and even the incredible cold of New Year’s Day did not lessen
the noisy bunkhouse gayety.
On the last night of the old year the mercury in the great thermometer
which hung on the camp office had dropped to four hundred degrees below
zero. Then the tube burst, and no one could tell the temperature, but
it got appreciably colder. The next morning the boiling coffee froze on
the stove, despite the desperate stoking of the kitchen firemen, and
the loggers had to drink hot brown ice for their morning’s breakfast.
But they tramped cheerfully to work, nevertheless, cracking their
mittened hands together and stamping the ground as they went along.
They worked so hard to keep warm on this day that they talked and swore
but little. This was fortunate. For on this incomparable New Year’s Day
every spoken word froze solidly in the air as soon as it was uttered.
The next day the temperature rose, but the words remained frozen, and
many a logger bumped his mouth by walking into the HELLOS and DAMNS
which were solid in the air. But the hardy victims only laughed through
their split lips at such accidents. These words all thawed out at once
on a warmer day; they melted in one long-drawn-out, mournful echoing
shout so unhumanly humorous in sound that the loggers rolled with
laughter to hear it.
Cold as the winter was, Paul Bunyan and his men were reluctant to
see it go, for every day had brought some tickling incident. But at
last the gray frost crystals began to glitter occasionally from rays
of sunshine which filtered through the white winter mists. Then Paul
Bunyan began to plan for the hazardous historical drive down Moron
River. Spring was at hand, and the great logger remembered his old
whimsical query:
“If Springtime comes can Drives be far behind?”
The loggers, too, sensed the approach of the driving season, and every
night the bunkhouses rang with sounds of filing, as the rivermen
sharpened calks, pike poles and peavies. They bellowed the old driving
songs as never before, and the floors shook as they leaped and pranced
to show the marvelous springiness of their legs. They got so comradely
in their merriment and exuberance that the last poet among them
ventured a poem which began:
“It’s all very well to be profane,
When life is as dark as night;
But the man worth a fuss is the man who can cuss
When everything ’round him is bright.”
He got no further, for in an instant one bully had him down, chewing
savagely on his ear, while others raked his ribs with their calks. It
was the last sigh of poetry in the camp. Paul Bunyan heard about it and
had one of the happiest hours of his life as he rejoiced over the good
news.
“But every silver cloud has its shadows,” he said sensibly, when
his exaltation had passed. “I still expect great troubles and
difficulties.” He was wise indeed in this thought, for he got a
troublous problem at once.
Sure as the great logger had been that the powerful buffalo milk hot
cakes could only do good for his loggers, sure as he was they could
not give his men too much red blood or make them too hellishly He,
Paul Bunyan had yet failed to reckon on the dire effects that the
virile food might have on weaker men. He had given no thought to the
scissor-bills who herded and milked the buffalos. Throughout the fall
these men had shown nothing but their usual tameness and amiability;
during the Hard Winter they had shivered silently by their camp fires;
but now they began to show that the powerful food was having a terrific
effect on them. Many of the buffalos had died during the cold spell,
and the scissor-bills had made pants from the shaggy hides. Some of
the high-behinds had frozen also, and the scissor-bills had taken
their skins and made tall, flapping hats of them. Colds had afflicted
them during the winter, and for convenience they had tied their
handkerchiefs around their necks. They took a fancy to this fashion
and let the handkerchiefs remain after their colds were gone. Their
next outbreak of virility was to unravel one of Babe’s halter ropes and
arrange a long little rope with a noose-end from each thread of it.
They practiced throwing nooses over the posts of the buffalo corral
fence until they became quite expert in casting them. The scissor-bills
then caught wild horses with their ropes and broke them for riding.
They got to be a crazy, noisy gang after this, and Paul Bunyan began to
notice them as they rode through the sage trees, yipping shrilly. And
then one morning they came to the hero-leader and requested that they
be called “scissor-bills” no longer, but “buffalo boys” instead. Paul
Bunyan admired their shaggy pants, their necker-chiefs and their tall
hats, and he thoughtlessly consented to their wishes. He did not feel
that the scissor-bills had it in them to become real He Men, but he was
not a man to discourage worthy ambitions.
But Paul Bunyan soon had reason to remember one of his old sayings,
that the road from the palace of generosity leads through a forest of
perils. His one kindly gesture towards the lowly scissor-bills made
them a powerful faction in the He Man country, and a fierce rivalry
between them and the loggers soon developed. For they insisted on being
called “buffalo boys,” and Paul Bunyan’s best men saw an intolerable
dignity in the title. The buffalo boys painted large B. B’s. on their
hats, they painted the letters on the buffalos and on their horses
also. At calving time they devised some irons in the shape of double
B’s., and they branded the buffalo calves with them. The buffalo boys
grew even bolder; they began to ride among the bunkhouses in the
evenings, yipping and yelling at the men who were earnestly preparing
for the greatest drive of history.
Such impudence was not long tolerated, of course, and it got so that
every morning found buffalo boys mourning for lost ears and doctoring
the wounds made by sharp calks. But buffalo milk was running hot in
their veins, and their new courage carried them to still greater
extremes. One morning when the loggers came to work they found that
every sage tree had B. B. burned into its bark. That day the drive was
not talked about, for the loggers plotted vengeance as they toiled.
This night they turned the buffalos out of the corral, and the buffalo
boys were out until morning rounding up the herd. The following night
they, in turn, galloped past the bunkhouses and roped every stovepipe
that stuck above a roof. They dragged them into the timber and hid
them, and the loggers had to dress by cold stoves the next morning.
That evening, during milking time, the loggers slipped into the buffalo
boys’ tents and poured water into their blankets; the next morning the
loggers found their boots all filled with ice, for the buffalo boys had
played such an evil trick on them during the night. The astonishing
audacity of these lowly creatures was not to be longer endured.