The loggers had turned their bunkhouses upside down, because the rain had come up through the floors. They had then set their bunks on the rafters, and they were now snug and dry, for the rain could not pour up through the tight roofs. The loggers left their cozy quarters reluctantly when they heard Paul Bunyan call, “Roll out or roll Up!” They could imagine nothing more disagreeable than its raining up their pants’ legs, rough He Men though they were. But when they saw the river rising in rushing waves they did not need Paul Bunyan’s orders to make them run for the cookhouse. Johnny Inkslinger was wiring the camp office and Babe’s stable to the mammoth building, and the Big Swede was making his fastest moves since the Dakota days as he hitched up the blue ox. Paul Bunyan roared, “Yay, Babe!” just as the river waters thundered into camp. The blue ox plunged towards the Cascade Hills. He dragged the three greatest buildings of the camp and all the loggers to safety. But the bunkhouses were rolling over and over in the flood.
Paul Bunyan and his two aides saved two of the buffalo boys, two buffalos, two high-behinds, two tigermunks, two blond wolves, and two wild horses, from the raging waters, but all other life perished.
For forty days and forty nights it rained up from China, and then the flood receded. Paul Bunyan and his men looked down from the Cascades and saw that all of the old He Man country had been washed away. It was now a low valley. There was sage in it still, but this sage was only brush. Ridges and buttes of gray rock were all of the old land that remained. There was no longer any logging in the greater part of it. But here on the new slopes of the Cascades was a more cheering sight. For the old land over these slopes had covered a magnificent forest of white pine which was even finer than that around the old home camp. The loggers shouted when they saw it. And was it a tear, that gleam of moisture in Paul Bunyan’s beard? If so, it was from his new happiness.
“It’s an ill rain,” he chuckled, “that brings no logger wood.”
The two buffalo boys, like the loggers, still heroic from their virile winter’s diet, had come through their ordeal in good shape and the buffalos had slept all the forty days and nights. But the other poor animals! The wild horses were wild no longer; they had become tame and would now eat sugar out of any man’s hand. The buffalo boys nick-named them bronchos. The high-behinds, the blond wolves and the tigermunks were all cowards at heart, and they had been scared out of twenty years’ growth. Not one of them was knee-high to a logger now. The Big Swede made his first and only joke about the tigermunks, who had been scared into the size of chips.
“Tigermunks!” he grinned. “Aye tank these har ban chipmunks!”
And chipmunks they have been called ever since. Paul Bunyan’s history does not tell how the high-behinds came to be named jack rabbits, or how the blond wolves came to be named coyotes. No doubt they were also named humorously, for the loggers were gay when the rain no longer came up from China. Anyhow, the old names are no longer used in the He Man country.
EVIL INVENTIONS
Paul Bunyan knew nothing about women, but he had heard of them with little liking for the stories he heard. History, industry, invention and oratory were, to his mind, the four grand elements of human life. And women, as they were revealed in the loggers’ stories, cared little about these elements. Women seemed to lack inventiveness especially, and this was man’s greatest quality. Women, the great logger had heard, were often marvelous cooks; but men had invented both can-openers and doughnuts. Women were excellent makers of garments; but men had invented calked boots, mackinaws and stagged pants. Women were assiduous readers of poetry; but men had invented most of the poetry that these creatures cared about. Even in the writing of history, where inventiveness is not allowed (or was not, rather; for nowadays, such is progress, many historians are good inventors also), women had apparently done nothing. Paul Bunyan, in the early days of his camp, often marveled when he heard his loggers hurrahing and stamping as they talked about the people called pretty women. He himself could not see their use in the grand parts of life. But when he knew his men better he decided that women were creations of the loggers’ fancies, that they were incredible and fabulous.
For Paul Bunyan’s loggers only cared to feel effects; they had no wish to think about causes. They would make a reality out of any fancy that delighted them; they never inquired beyond their pleasures. When they were told that they were making history they heard the statement with a thrill, but they did not pretend to know what it was all about. As for inventions, they used them joyfully, but they thought that Paul Bunyan’s new devices just happened. “We always sharpened our axes by rollin’ rocks down-hill,” the loggers would say. “We’d run alongside, holdin’ the ax blades on the stones as they rolled. But in the Big Dust country they was no rocks an’ no hills, so ol’ Paul made grindstones.” That was their story of the invention of the grindstone, an invention to which Paul Bunyan had given weeks of intense thought. And as for industry, why, a man just went out and did what old Paul told him to do. Oratory was great stuff; it made a man feel powerful good to listen to it; but, holy mackinaw! how was a man to remember all the things that old Paul said? But they did like oratory; yes, they liked it right well.