A section, or a canto, or a chapter, or whatever one may call it, was delivered each night by the old lumberman, who could see toiling demi-gods and sweating heroes in his dark woods, and imagined narratives about them, to which he gave the substance and characters of the traditional Paul Bunyan stories. Len Day had lived in New Brunswick in the forties and had thus heard the stories in their beginnings. The Paul Bunyan stories which form the body of the legend have not had many changes or surviving additions in fifty years. They themselves are not a narrative; they exist, rather, as a group of anecdotes which are told among a group of camp men until the story-teller of the gang is started on a narrative which he makes up as he yarns along, and which may take him an hour, or three evenings, to relate. A Paul Bunyan bunkhouse service is a glory to hear, when it is spontaneous and in a proper setting; preferably around a big heater in the winter, when the wind is howling through crackling boughs outside, and the pungent smell of steaming wool drifts down from the drying lines above the stove. When the vasty spirit of the woods really moves the meeting a noble and expansive ecstasy of the soul is exhibited. Remarks are passed about a similar night in Paul Bunyan’s camp, when the wind blew so hard that Big Ole, the blacksmith, had to bolt iron straps over the logs to keep them from being sucked up the chimneys. The theme grows and bears strange fruits; and finally the camp bard harvests them all in a story based on such a venerable anecdote as that one about Big Ole toting one of Babe’s ox shoes for half a mile and sinking knee-deep into the solid rock at every step. This anecdote is what might be called a “key story,” for it is one of the very old ones. There are at least a hundred of these, all familiar to every man who has worked long in the woods. They all deal with some of the characters whom tradition has placed about Paul Bunyan, with the mighty logger himself as the main hero; their settings are in such regions as the Onion River country, the Bullfrog Lake country, or the Leaning Pine country; and each one is a theme for gorgeous yarns, when a knowing and gifted camp bard is inspired to use it. Nowadays, with a shed garage in every logging camp, a radio in the camp office, graphophones in the bunkhouses, and a jazz shack in the village just “over the hump,” the camp bard has a scant audience. But in happier times each camp enjoyed its chief story-teller; and such a bard could take one of the key stories and elaborate on it for hours, building a complete narrative, picturing awe-inspiring characters, inventing dialogue of astonishing eloquence. (And what stupendous curses, terrifying threats and verbose orations such bards as Happy Olsen and Old Time Sandy could invent!) It is the method of the old bards that I have attempted to follow in writing this book.