onths
Paul had him haul them all back again as Mrs. Bunyan, who was cooking at
the camp, wanted to use them to make the hot fires necessary to cook her
famous soft nosed pancakes.

[Illustration]

Mrs. Bunyan, at this time used to call the men to dinner by blowing into
a woodpecker hole in an old hollow stub that stood near the door. In
this stub there was a nest of owls that had one short wing and flew in
circles. When Mr. Shepard made a sketch of Paul, Mrs. Bunyan, with
wifely solicitude for his appearance, parted Paul's hair with a handaxe
and combed it with an old crosscut saw.

From other sources we have fragmentary glimpses of Jean, Paul's youngest
son. When Jean was three weeks old he jumped from his cradle one night
and seizing an axe, chopped the four posts out from under his father's
bed. The incident greatly tickled Paul, who used to brag about it to any
one who would listen to him. "The boy is going to be a great logger some
day," he would declare with fatherly pride.

The last we heard of Jean he was working for a lumber outfit in the
South, lifting logging trains past one another on a single track
railroad.

* * * * *

IT is no picnic to tackle the wilderness and turn the very forest itself
into a commercial commodity delivered at the market. A logger needs
plenty of brains and back bone.

[Illustration]

Paul Bunyan had his setbacks the same as every logger only his were
worse. Being a pioneer he had to invent all his stuff as he went along.
Many a time his plans were upset by the mistakes of some swivel-headed
strawboss or incompetent foreman. The winter of the blue snow, Shot
Gunderson had charge in the Big Tadpole River country. He landed all of
his logs in a lake and in the spring when ready to drive he boomed the
logs three times around the lake before he discovered there was no
outlet to it. High hills surrounded the lake and the drivable stream was
ten miles away. Apparently the logs were a total loss.

Then Paul came on the job himself and got busy. Calling in Sourdough
Sam, the cook who made everything but coffee out of sourdough, he
ordered him to mix enough sourdough to fill the big watertank. Hitching
Babe to the tank, he hauled it over and dumped it into the lake. When it
"riz", as Sam said, a mighty lava-like stream poured forth and carried
the logs over the hills to the river. There is a landlocked lake in
Northern Minnesota that is called "Sourdou