Some say that Paul Bunyan lived a long, long time ago, but some say that he is still alive. Well, both are right in their own way. Yes, you yourself will agree with this when you hear what they say about him. Let's start from the very beginning, from afar. .
Paul was born about a hundred and fifty years ago. True, no one can name his exact birthday. They didn’t write metrics back then. But one thing is absolutely certain: the very next day after his birth, Paul demanded crumpets and blush.
At that time, his parents did not speak English yet. They knew, it seems, French, or maybe Russian, or maybe even Swedish, we can’t say for sure. But not English. So judge for yourself how capable Paul was, if even as a little boy he immediately spoke a foreign language.
Then Paul asked for a toy. Lying in the bullock cart that served as his cradle, he declared that he wanted an axe. However, his father and mother did not give him an ax. It is quite possible that they believed that he was still too young for such fun. Paul waited and waited, and finally he got tired of it, he jumped out of the cradle and began to search himself until he found a sharpened ax.
When he lost teeth, he scratched his gums with an axe. Since then, he has never parted with the ax. And with age he worked more and more dexterously with it.
And he grew quickly, and the farther, the faster.
There is no point in arguing how tall Paul was. Some say he was taller than the tallest tree. Others claim that when Paul wanted to ride on the railway, the roof had to be removed from the carriage, otherwise it would not fit. One way or another, you see for yourself, he was not a baby.
When Paul went alone into the forest for the first time, his mother packed him breakfast for the trip. She wrapped up several rolls, half a dozen onions, and a quarter of beef carcass to boot. But Paul became engrossed in the frolicking moose and, forgetting about everything in the world, accidentally sat down on a bundle of food. Well, of course, the beef was flattened. And when it was time for lunch, Paul put flat beef with onions into the buns. So Paul Bunyan, willy-nilly, invented steak and onions.
Even in his adolescence - he was then thirteen or fourteen years old - Paul fell in love with hunting. Well, he was quick on the hunt! Listen to the story they tell in the forests of the North about how fast he ran. One day Paul noticed a deer about five miles away. He took aim and fired. And he was a sharp shooter, so he probably knew that he had not missed, and he quickly ran after the prey. However, he hadn’t even run halfway, and he suddenly felt itching down his back. Well, do you think it was? It turns out that he overtook his shot, and a large shot from his gun hit not the elk, but himself.
Since then, after the shot, he always waited before running after the killed prey.
Paul came to the lumber camp when he was just a boy. True, at that time he was already taller than the tallest of the lumberjacks and coped with the work no worse than them. And he blew the horn, calling the lumberjacks to dinner, louder than anyone else. He once blew his horn so loudly that he blew a man off the moon. And the poor fellow had to wait until the next night, when the moon rose again, to return home.
Paul's voice was like your thunder. And he tried to speak only in a whisper. But even his whisper made the dishes in the kitchen dance.
In the lumber camp, Paul befriended seven lumberjacks. They always called him with them when they went into the forest to cut down trees. Although Paul was still just a boy, he worked with an ax no worse than any of the Glorious Seven. One-two, one-two - and a pine tree three feet thick was already lying on the ground. As soon as Paul shouted “Look out!”, when the pine tree began to fall, at least two or three more trees fell to the ground, overturned by his thunderous voice.
Paul and his friends had one problem - with their ax handles. Paul and the Glorious Seven worked so quickly and briskly with their axes that their axes shattered into splinters. Even if they were made of strong oak. And so Paul and his friends came up with the idea of weaving axes from flexible rawhide, like a braid. Now Paul and his fellow lumberjacks were cutting down several trees at once with one blow. This saved them a lot of time, and time was an important thing for them, because a lot of work lay ahead of them.
In those distant times, almost the entire North of the country - from Maine to California - was covered with forest. The townspeople needed the forest to build houses. For shipbuilders - for high masts of high-speed sailing fleets. Farmers - for barns and fences. And soon railroads appeared, so timber was needed for sleepers. The strongest logs were used for fastenings for coal mines.
But most of all the forest was consumed by toothpicks, because the Americans' favorite food was steak made from the tough meat of the long-horned Texas.
In addition to the famous Seven, Paul had three more bosom friends among the heroes in the lumber camp. One was nicknamed Johnny Ink Soul. He was an accountant. To keep a record of his work, he made a handle from the trunk of a large tree. Johnny was a master at adding and subtracting. And even multiply. It was he who came up with the multiplication table!
Paul's second friend was Pyshka-Khudyshka. He was a cook for lumberjacks, and he was best at making ruddy donuts.
At their first meeting, Paul Bunyan and Pyshka-Khudyshka entered into a heated argument. Paul argued that good cooking was needed to make the lumberjacks' work more fun. And Pyshka-Khudyshka stood his ground: they say, no, in order to do this, he needs to work more cheerfully in order to eat everything that he cooks up. They never came to an agreement. But they agreed to work hand in hand.
When Pyshka-Khudyshka had just arrived at the lumberjack camp, all sorts of troubles began to arise. Firstly, with stoves. To bake crumpets for Paul and his Seven, as well as for another three hundred strong lumberjacks and for the Little Blue Bull (you will hear about him later), ovens of unprecedented size were needed.
The skinny one baked crumpets, as was customary, in frying pans. But the lumber camp grew and grew, and there was no longer enough room for new frying pans. Then Skinny tried to bake crumpets, placing them on a barrel. Of course, this saved space, but the problem was that the lumberjacks didn’t like the crumpets that were flattened on the sides. Donuts are supposed to be round. Therefore, a gigantic frying pan was required.
Skinny Puffy drew what the frying pan should look like, and Johnny Ink Soul helped draw it out to full size. When the drawing was ready, Khudyshka asked Paul Bunyan's third friend, whose name was Olle Bolshoy - he was a blacksmith - to forge such a frying pan. It took a lot of iron; we had to get ore from three mines at once. Olle Bolshoi did a great job with the order. He not only made a frying pan, but made holes in all the crumpets that were baked in the lumber camp. Now can you guess who invented donuts?
One thing was inconvenient: the frying pan turned out to be so large that Pyshka-Skinny could not grease it with oil himself without outside help. He tried to adapt a long tree with a thick panicle of branches at the end, but it was too slow. Then he hired a team of seventeen boys. They tied chunks of lard to their soles and rolled around the frying pan as if on ice skates, rubbing it until it shined. True, the lumberjacks now had to eat crumpets with caution. Before putting them in their mouths, they held each one up to the light to see if one of the young skaters had stuck to the dough.
The skinny one put crumpets on the table straight from the oven. But the table at which the lumberjacks sat was a quarter of a mile long, no less, and therefore it was not easy to deliver the crumpets hot. So he came up with an idea: he gave the boys rollers and told them to quickly drive through the middle of the table and throw a hot donut to each lumberjack. Everything would be fine, but the rollers would get stuck in the sweet maple molasses. In addition, it was easy for the boys to fall right into someone’s fork or, what’s even worse, under the knife of a lumberjack, who was just at that time reaching, for example, for butter. Pyshka-Khudyshka decided to launch a train across the table, but the lumberjacks protested: you see, the smoke was eating into their eyes.
In the end, Pyshka-Khudyshka decided to learn from the miners. He made a suspended road with dump cars - overturning trolleys. He put crumpets into the trolleys and set them in motion; the trolleys flew whistling over the table and tipped over each plate in turn.
Needless to say, Paul Bunyan was a great lumberjack, and yet he would never have been able to clear the forest from the entire North of the country, from east to west - the states of Michigan, Oregon and others, if he had not had his faithful assistant Blue Bull, nicknamed Baby.
We do not advise you to take on faith different rumors about where the Kid came from. Paul didn’t tell anyone how it happened, so he alone knows the whole truth. One way or another, when spring came after the Winter of Blue Snow, Paul brought the Kid to the camp. Some say he was born blue, and some say he turned blue after spending the night in the yard when it snowed blue. However, both agree on one thing; The baby and Paul were simply made for each other.
Well, this little guy has grown up big! In those days, lumberjacks were accustomed to measuring everything by the length of the axe. So, Hans Hansen said that he himself measured the distance between the horns of the Kid. It turned out to be seventeen axes with a hook!
Paul had gotten into the habit of cutting down twenty to thirty trees before breakfast. And while he was having breakfast, the Kid was dragging these trees to the sawmill.
There were no good straight roads in the North at that time, only curved ones, and therefore it was convenient for the Blue Bull to carry trees with crooked trunks. But Paul did not like such extravagance: after all, straight trunks were considered the best even in those days. How was it possible to get them along crooked roads? Paul thought for a long time and finally came up with it, so simply that he himself laughed. And why didn’t it occur to him earlier? He harnessed the Kid to the road, and the Kid straightened it out. This is where straight roads come from in America.
But that's not all. Paul believed that something else could be invented. He thought and thought and finally, after three days and five nights, he invented it. Listen to what he did with the other lumberjacks.
Tied the Kid to a square mile of forested land, and the Kid dragged it straight to the sawmill. So the lumberjacks could only grab the trees by the roots, shake off the earth from them, chop off the branches with axes and send the finished trunks to where the saws were whirring. Having thus cleared one square mile of forest, they returned the land to its place and took on the next mile.
But one Saturday evening they forgot to put the square mile back in place. During the night she was caught in the cold, and when Monday morning came, it was impossible to just pick her up and send her to her place. This is how the famous Square Mountain grew up in those places. Since then, people have never ceased to marvel at her, and at Square Lake too. It arose in the place where this square mile was dug out.
At one time, Paul and Pyshka-Khudyshka were very worried about the egg problem. Having learned to read and write, Khudyshka read in one book that everyone who works must eat eggs. He figured that each lumberjack needed damned hefty eggs for his appointment—thirteen of them, therefore. Well, they built a chicken coop and put several roosters and many, many laying hens in it.
The hens rushed tirelessly, but the cockerels, in Paul's opinion, were idle. “Well, what use do lumberjacks have from cockerels?” - Paul racked his brains. Now it has become a habit for him to spend his leisure time in the chicken coop in the evenings. Lying on his side and resting his head on his hand, Paul watched and thought. It just drove him crazy, why should he work, but the cockerel doesn’t?
This went on all spring. And suddenly the laying hens began to disappear. The seven lumberjacks have already gotten used to the fact that they always have fresh eggs for breakfast. They even had to retrain Paul's hound to make her a night watchman. They spent a lot of time on training. Paul himself also helped them. The guard dog turned out to be a hound, but he never managed to catch the thief. The chickens continued to disappear.
Paul was very worried. The day came when there were even more roosters than chickens. Paul was simply in despair. I couldn’t even work and lay down at home to rest and think. There was a pleasant heat coming from the stove, and Paul’s eyes began to close. He didn't even notice how he fell asleep.
When the Seven Lumberjacks returned home, they gasped: little yellow chickens were swarming on the floor, and anxious hens were peeking out of Paul’s beard! Everything was clear: while Paul was studying the rooster problem in the chicken coop, the laying hens nestled in his beard to hatch the chicks.
Accountant Johnny Ink Soul counted them all and was very pleased: every single one of the laying hens was in place.
One day, Paul and his Seven Lumberjacks made a short trip to Canada. One thing particularly struck him about the Canadian lumberjacks. Every time the English king came to their camp, they had to say in English “Your Majesty!” But I must tell you that Canadian lumberjacks were mainly French. And in France, even before they came to Canada, they worked hard to completely cover up the entire “royal shop”, and for this they organized the Great French Revolution. Moreover, speaking only French, they could not learn to pronounce “Your Majesty!” in purely English. And this made them very angry. They rebelled and asked Paul to help them. Well, at least some advice.
Paul remembered how their glorious general George Washington kicked the English king out of his camp, that is, out of American soil. And this was, as you know, two hundred years ago, in 1776, during the War of Independence. America was still a colony of England and fought with the troops of the English king for its freedom. Only after the victory did it become an independent state - the United States of America. So Paul thought: why don’t the Canadian lumberjacks throw the English king out of their country? And he decided to help them, but one fine day, when Paul was doing just that, he lost his balance and fell head over heels into Niagara Falls. This was Paul Bunyan's first cold shower. He liked it so much that he didn’t want to get out. But Paul still caught a cold, and what a cold! Strong, like Paul Bunyan himself, she would have been too much for anyone else.
Paul understood that there was not enough mustard in all of Canada to make him a good mustard plaster. And so he returned to Michigan to his lumberjacks. The cook took three full cartloads of dry mustard, mixed it with water, and, giving Paul an evil mustard plaster, sent him to bed. After this, it took Paul a while to get back on his feet, but he always remembered with pleasure the cold shower under Niagara Falls.
That year there was a particularly frosty winter. It was so cold that Pyshka-Khudyshka did not have time to remove the coffee from the hot stove before it immediately turned into ice. Laying hens laid snowballs instead of eggs. And then it got even colder, so the smoke in the chimney froze and clogged the chimney. Skinny had to ask the lumberjacks to break out the ice piece by piece in order to clear the pipe and light the stove.
Naturally, Skinny’s lunch turned out worse and worse. Seven lumberjacks and the rest complained to Paul, and like it or not he had to intervene. He told Skinny what others thought of him.
Word after word, both became so excited, despite the bitter cold outside, that their screams made the walls of the house tremble. But honestly, what could Skinny do?
On the day when crumpets were served on the table, burnt on the bottom and frozen on top, the lumberjacks’ patience ran out. If it hadn't gotten warmer the next day, all work would have stopped. But the frost softened a little, and Pyshka-Khudyshka gave the lumberjacks a feast. Everyone laughed and joked, stuffing crispy crumpets and seven other types of different pies into their mouths. The strong coffee was steaming. Suddenly everyone stopped eating and fell silent in amazement when they heard Paul’s angry squabble with Thin. Paul shouted:
- What kind of food for lumberjacks! And Skinny responds:
-Where have you seen baking crumpets on ice bricks?! I already had to thaw the fire in our stove with a blowtorch!
And then more. Finally someone realized what happened. It turns out that the words that Paul and Skinny shouted to each other on the coldest day froze in the air and only now began to gradually thaw, and everyone heard them.
And now about Olle Bolshoi, who, as you know, was a blacksmith in Paul’s camp, although he seemed smaller in stature than Paul. It was his duty to see if Little Blue Ox was well-savvy. Olle was a strong man and could easily carry one of Baby’s horseshoes on his shoulder. But to make a new harness for the Kid when the old one was worn out, there wasn’t enough leather even in three states. And then Olle brought a herd of long-horned cows from Texas and made a new harness from Texas leather. It was as strong as iron when it dried, but when wet it stretched like toffee.
The harness fit the Kid, and he did not part with it until the famous Winter of Warm Snow. On the day the blizzard broke, Little Blue Ox had to carry thirty-seven logs, each four feet across. Warm, wet snow began to fall, and gradually the harness began to stretch. The kid continued to walk forward, but the logs remained in place. And when the Kid reached the sawmill, the logs were three and a quarter miles behind.
It was then that Olle Bolshoi realized what kind of harness he had made. He unharnessed the Kid and tied the harness to the logs. And when the sun froze and rose, the leather harness gradually began to dry out. It dried out and shrank, becoming shorter and shorter. This always happens with rawhide. She shrank, shrank, and pulled all thirty-seven logs out of the forest with her. With a crash, noise and roar, the logs rolled straight to the sawmill, which, in fact, was what was needed.
Paul had a lot of trouble in the camp. Soon after the harness story, he had to solve a mosquito problem. By that time, the mosquitoes, feeding on the blood of the lumberjacks, had grown nowhere else, so it was easy for them to drill their proboscis into the log wall of a forest hut and bite into anyone, not even bothering to politely knock on the door first to receive an invitation to enter.
This is the plan Paul came up with then. He heard that the most evil bees live in Alaska, and he thought: why don’t they eat mosquitoes? He offered to quickly send someone to Alaska for them. The bees were taken to the lumber camp, but Paul put his hopes on them in vain. Instead of eating the mosquitoes, they fell madly in love with them, and they all got married. Soon striped monsters flew through the forest in clouds - a cross between mosquitoes and bees, which now had stingers at both ends. Which means they buzzed, and squeaked, and stung twice as painfully.
One fine day, when Pyshka-Khudyshka was washing his large cauldron in the yard, he saw that a whole army of these robbers was approaching the camp. What was to be done? He pulled the cauldron over himself and hid under it. The bee mosquitoes swooped straight onto the boiler and, one after another, began to drill holes in the cast-iron walls of the boiler with their proboscis.
But Pyshka-Khudyshka was not at a loss: as soon as his proboscis passed through the cast-iron
the wall, he hits him! - and bent it with a heavy sledgehammer. And the mosquito bee was captured. Of course, Skinny had to sweat before bending all his proboscis. Before he had time to finish, the bee-mosquitoes calmly flew into the air along with the cauldron.
Seeing such a miracle, Paul also came up with something. He ran to the kitchen for the second cauldron and invited Skinny to repeat the clever trick. Before the last mosquito bee had time to drill through the cast-iron wall of the cauldron, and Thin Man had time to bend his last proboscis, the whole flock, together with the cauldron, soared up and also disappeared. Now Paul was calm - all the bee-mosquitoes would die of starvation, since cast iron was not at all useful to them.
But early on he rejoiced: having solved the bee-mosquito problem, he created another. What will the lumberjacks eat now if Pyshka-Khudyshka has lost the cast-iron cauldrons in which he cooked pea soup for them?
For three days and six nights Paul thought about this problem. During these days, the woodcutters were so weak from hunger that they did not even have the strength to lift an ax. Donuts and donuts - is this food for lumberjacks? Give them pea soup and that's it!
Then a new idea dawned on Paul. He loaded a huge barge, three hundred feet long, with dry peas. Then he entered the lake himself, pushing the barge in front of him. In the middle of the lake, the water already reached his knees. He pulled Baby’s old iron horseshoe out of his pocket, and not just one, but several, threw them all onto the barge, and the barge sank. Not much time had passed before the lake turned into a wonderful pea soup.
Yes, but he was cold. Then Paul lit a fire on the shore around the lake, and the soup warmed up in no time. Now do you see where the name of the lake came from - Pea Soup?
However, after the pea soup story, Paul began to have troubles with forest fires. Actually, fires are an eternal problem for lumberjacks. That day, when Paul lit a fire around Pea Soup, the fire spread to the trees, and Paul had to put out the fire, and this is a serious matter. But Paul realized everything at once: he took off his shoes and, scooping up the pea soup with them, quickly put out the fire.
Another time, Little Blue Ox helped him put out a fire. Paul asked the Kid to drink the whole river to the bottom. And then he tickled him in the pit of the stomach, and the Blue Bull burst out laughing, so that water began to flow out of him like a fountain and flooded the fire.
One day, Pyshka-Khudyshka shared with Paul his doubts about the fact that lumberjacks did not get enough vitamins. If only they had more vegetables! To which Paul immediately suggested:
-Plant all the land that we cleared from the forest with vegetables and the problem will be solved!
Khudyshka turned out to be no worse a farmer than a cook. He managed to grow such huge pumpkins that the lumberjacks slowly stole them all for their tools, instead of work boxes. And his radish grew so big and red, well, like fire. I was even afraid that the kitchen would burst into flames. And the wheat rose so quickly and high that the Seven Lumberjacks did not have time to reap it.
Now Skinny had more than enough food. We even had to invite more lumberjacks to the camp so that there would be someone to deal with the food. New lumberjacks immediately began to cut down the forest, and Skinny had even more land on which he could grow vegetables. Soon all of Kansas was cleared of forest, and Skinny sowed this land. But the more Khudyshka planted, the more people he had to hire so that there would be someone to feed.
In the end, Paul and other loggers destroyed the entire forest in a huge area that is now called the Great Plain - Great Valley. Besides, Paul is already bored with helping Thin Man find a balance between people and vegetables. And he asked the accountant Johnny Ink Soul to take on this problem, and he decided to rest.
And yet, more than anything else, Paul loved to work. When the forest was finished, he began drilling oil wells in Oklahoma. Yes, yes, it was Paul Bunyan who discovered the first oil springs in this state! Here's how it happened.
Oklahoma farmers needed water. And it didn’t cost Paul anything to dig a deep hole for a well. If he used a drill and hit it with a hammer, the hole would become even deeper and there would be even more water in it. And then one day, by complete accident, he drove the drill so deep that oil came out instead of water. Since then, oil production has begun in Oklahoma.
However, the day came when Paul launched a drill deeper into the ground than a mile, and nothing came up - neither water nor oil. Paul was indignant. He racked his brains trying to figure out how to use the well, and finally came up with an idea. He took it out of the ground, sawed it into pieces and sold it to farmers for holes for posts that held up fences. Well, it turned out to be a good deal!
Some claim that Paul Bunyan died shortly after this. What evidence? They themselves were at the funeral, and therefore there were no people at the funeral. But it is reliably known that everything turned out differently. Eagle Eagleson himself spoke about this, who was on the spot when Paul Bunyan’s funeral did not take place. And here's why.
That day Paul took the day off to go to Arizona and dig the Grand Canyon there. For the occasion he even put on new shoes. Having finished the work, he was not very pleased with it. The slopes of the canyon turned out to be completely vertical and seemed disgustingly smooth and bare. Paul said to himself:
- Anyone can dig an ordinary ditch! And I decided to come back the next day and see what else could be done here. Getting ready to go home, Paul had already stepped over the edge of the canyon, but he did not take one thing into account. The rubber soles of his new shoes were thicker than he was used to wearing, and he tripped. He tripped and fell down into a deep canyon.
As a rule, Paul stood firmly on his feet, and if he fell, he landed again on his feet. But here everything happened differently. Having reached the bottom, he jumped. And all because of the rubber sole: it springs too well. And every time he touched the bottom, he jumped higher and higher.
“There’s no point in wasting time!” thought Paul. “You can’t just jump, you need to come up with some sensible activity.”
He took crayons from his pocket—Paul always carried crayons with him to mark downed logs and keep track of them when the bookkeeper, Johnny Ink Soul, was not around. And so, at a gallop, Paul painted all the walls of the Grand Canyon. It turned out amazingly beautiful!
Meanwhile, Eagle Eagleson visited his oil plot in Oklahoma and was very surprised and worried that Paul had been away from home for so long. Fortunately, he guessed to go to the state of Arizona and there he found Paul galloping. He called out to him loudly. But Paul jumped up so fast that Eagleson's scream did not have time to reach his ears. Paul flew higher and higher, right up to the sky.
The last time Eagle Eagleson saw Paul, he was flying towards Mars.
Since then, astronomers have been trying in vain to solve one problem: where do the green spots on Mars go that they are accustomed to observing in their telescopes?
However, any lumberjack who was lucky enough to work hand in hand with Paul could easily explain everything to them. It was Paul Bunyan who began cutting down forests on Mars.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru