ds. Seven of Paul's axehandles were equal to a
little more than forty-two of the ordinary kind.

When cost sheets were figured on Babe, Johnny Inkslinger found that
upkeep and overhead were expensive but the charges for operation and
depreciation were low and the efficiency was very high. How else could
Paul have hauled logs to the landing a whole section (640 acres) at a
time? He also used Babe to pull the kinks out of the crooked logging
roads and it was on a job of this kind that Babe pulled a chain of
three-inch links out into a straight bar.

They could never keep Babe more than one night at a camp for he would
eat in one day all the feed one crew could tote to camp in a year. For a
snack between meals he would eat fifty bales of hay, wire and all and
six men with picaroons were kept busy picking the wire out of his teeth.
Babe was a great pet and very docile as a general thing but he seemed to
have a sense of humor and frequently got into mischief. He would sneak
up behind a drive and drink all the water out of the river, leaving the
logs high and dry. It was impossible to build an ox-sling big enough to
hoist Babe off the ground for shoeing, but after they logged off Dakota
there was room for Babe to lie down for this operation.

Once in a while Babe would run away and be gone all day roaming all over
the Northwestern country. His tracks were so far apart that it was
impossible to follow him and so deep that a man falling into one could
only be hauled out with difficulty and a long rope. Once a settler and
his wife and baby fell into one of these tracks and the son got out when
he was fifty-seven years old and reported the accident. These tracks,
today form the thousands of lakes in the "Land of the Sky-Blue Water."

* * * * *

BECAUSE he was so much younger than Babe and was brought to camp when a
small calf, Benny was always called the Little Blue Ox although he was
quite a chunk of an animal. Benny could not, or rather, would not haul
as much as Babe nor was he as tractable but he could eat more.

Paul got Benny for nothing from a farmer near Bangor, Maine. There was
not enough milk for the little fellow so he had to be weaned when three
days old. The farmer only had forty acres of hay and by the time Benny
was a week old he had to dispose of him for lack of food. The calf was
undernourished and only weighed two tons when Paul got him. Paul drove
from Bangor out to his headq