On the slopes—or under them, rather—of the Mountain That Stood On Its Head crawled Hels Helsen, and he was urging the loggers to follow him. Not an original method had he devised; he was even insisting that the loggers walk upside down and fell the trees in exactly the same style that they used when standing up. Having been a champion mountain climber in Sweden, he got up the slopes without much difficulty, and he strung cables between the trees. Along these cables the loggers dizzily worked themselves. Tree-felling even under ordinary conditions is hard labor for the strongest men. But when a woodsman attempts to operate a limber crosscut saw and a heavy ax, his head down, his body hanging by a leather belt which is fastened to a swaying cable; when a woodsman looks up to see his feet and to have dirt and sawdust fall down in his eyes; when a woodsman looks down to see rocks and stumps a mile and a half below him—brave and powerful though he may be, a woodsman in such circumstances is bound to feel inconvenienced, harassed and impeded in the performance of his labor. And even the threatening roars and the pleading bellows of a Hels Helsen, the supreme and original Bull of the Woods, cannot make him work efficiently.
“The test of great leadership is originality,” mused Paul Bunyan, as he returned to camp. “At least some inventiveness is needed. Heroic Hels Helsen, the Bull of the Woods—a fair title. The hero inspires, but the thinker leads. I shall now think. One great idea put into action can set the world afire. Surely it will take no more than a common one to master Hels Helsen.”
In such solemn ponderings Paul Bunyan spent the rest of the day. Until midnight he thought, and then the idea came. He at once went to work to make a reality of it.
From an old chest that held the weapons and traps of his pre-logging days he brought forth the most prized weapon of his youth, a gold-butted, diamond-mounted, double-barreled shot gun. He spent the rest of the night in careful cleaning of all its parts. An idea of the size and power of this super-cannon can be gained when it is remembered that he used its two barrels at a later time as smokestacks for his first sawmill. The shells for it were made from the largest cedar logs in the country; they were hollowed out, bound with brass, and capped with sheet iron.
After breakfast, when the loggers had gone wearily to their terrible labor, Paul Bunyan ordered Big Ole, the blacksmith, to cut up thousands of pieces of sheet iron, making each one two feet square. In two days he had the shells loaded, and he was ready to try out his idea. Then he waited for the time when Hels Helsen would have to call on him for help. And this time was sure to come soon, for as the work slowly moved up from the head of the mountain the unimaginative logging methods of the stubborn Bull of the Woods could not but fail completely. And Hels Helsen was not the leader to change these methods himself; he was only a hero.
But Paul Bunyan was not prepared for the monstrous display of effrontery which was given by Hels Helsen when the exhausted loggers could no longer follow him up the mountain side.
One morning the foreman did not call the men out to work; instead, Paul Bunyan heard him giving them orders to pack up.
“Thunderation!” exclaimed the master logger. “What means this, Hels?”
The Bull of the Woods was attaching a cable to the cookhouse skids. He looked up with an insolent grin.
“Aye forgot tal you, Bunyan, but aye goin’ move dar camp,” he said, in tones of marked disrespect. “No use to try har no moore noo, aye tank. Logger can’ stan’ on head mooch lonker har. Aye don’ tank so, Bunyan. We move new yob noo.”