“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.