5
I WAS sitting there on a small log, looking at the extra beautiful sky, looking at it over the top of our camp fire, thinking about how the rays of the sun shooting up looked like a lady’s many colored unfolded fan or the tail of a fantailed pigeon, when Barry said, “One of the Sporting Clubs up here is offering a prize for the best original Paul Bunyan story... Here’s a chance for you boys to stretch your imaginations a little...”
Pretty soon we were all racking our brains to see if we could think of something about Paul Bunyan that nobody had ever thought of before, which Barry might decide was good enough to write about and send in to the contest... Different ones of us made up different things, such as: One time Paul Bunyan gave a wintertime party in a terribly big recreational center in Bemidji, and so many people answered his invitation and came that there wasn’t any place to hang their fur coats and other heavy coats, so Paul went out and blew on his horn and hundreds of great big huge antlered deer came running in from all directions, and Paul stood them up all around the outer wall of the building, each one of them facing the center, and the fancy ladies hung their fur coats and other kinds of different colored coats on the antlers, using them for what is called “costumers.” Those deer stood there patiently, without moving, with their kind eyes watching the skaters.
Everything was going fine, until somebody opened all the doors all around to let in some fresh air, and then all of a sudden, Old Babe, the blue ox came in and started lumbering around looking for Paul, and stamped his hoofs and snorted like a mad bull, and the people got scared and excited and the women started to screaming, and that scared the hundreds of deer, and they bolted for the doors in a terribly mad and wild scramble, and, there being doors all around that were open, they took all the coats with them...
That was Big Jim’s story, and when he told it, I remembered that he always got very good grades in English in the Sugar Creek School.
Dragonfly told his story, and it was that Paul Bunyan got hay fever so bad and sneezed so hard and so many times in succession that it blew a whole forest over; Poetry said Paul Bunyan ate so many blackberry pies and got so fat that when he went in swimming in Leech Lake and splashed around a lot, so much water splashed out of the lake for hundreds of miles around that it made a thousand new lakes so that the ten thousand lakes that Minnesota had at first were changed to eleven thousand; Circus said the day Paul ate Poetry’s blackberry pies he had to have toothpicks to pick the seeds out from between his teeth, so he cut down some Norway pines with his jack-knife which was seven feet long, and used them for toothpicks; Dragonfly looked at me and my red hair, with a mischievous grin in his dragonfly-like eyes, and told another story real quick which was: Paul’s long hair was so red that when he was asleep one windy day, the Indians saw it blowing in the wind and thought it was a forest fire. They threw water all over him, and ever since then, all red-haired people have been all wet.
Well, that was supposed to be funny, and most everybody around the camp fire thought it was and laughed hard, but it wasn’t funny, maybe. For a minute I was almost mad, but decided it would be a waste of good temper to spoil what the others thought funny; besides my pop says any boy who wants to get along with people can’t afford to always be taking offense. I couldn’t think of anything about Paul Bunyan that would help me get even with Dragonfly, so I let Little Jim tell his story, and we didn’t have time for mine, on account of it was time to go to bed.
I watched Little Jim’s small friendly face in the firelight and in the light of the afterglow of the sun which had already gone to bed, and he looked so innocent, that you couldn’t tell whether he was thinking or not, but it was fun to listen to him, ’cause his mouse-like voice squeaked out the strangest story, which really sounded good, and it was: “Well, when Paul and I were up here in this pretty country of many lakes, we got awful lonesome and wished there were some people living here. We stayed down where Brainerd is now, and Paul would carry me around in his vest pocket and tell me stories, and complain about how lonesome he was...”
Well, it sounded like Little Jim was going to have a real good story, so I listened and sure enough it was. That little innocent-faced guy said that Paul Bunyan got so lonesome finally that he took his big long brown flashlight and some different colored cellophane and stood the flashlight, which was two hundred feet long, up on the ground, and built a wooden platform around it right at the place where the switch was, and every night Little Jim sat on that platform of the two-hundred-foot-tall flashlight and turned that light on and off and on and off; and Paul would stand beside the flashlight and slide different colored pieces of cellophane paper across the top of the flashlight, and the whole sky was all lit up in many different colors every night, changing just like the beautiful northern lights do—(and I thought that maybe the sky above the lake had made little Jim think about the different colors)—and pretty soon in a week or so, people from Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and all the southern states, began to come up North to see what they thought were beautiful northern lights, and they liked the country so well they decided to stay and build their homes, which they did, and so the town of Brainerd was founded, and then Paul left his flashlight standing and the people took the big batteries out and used it for a water tower, where it still stands in downtown Brainerd.