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.

Well, it was a cute idea, and I wished I could think of something good, but couldn’t, so we broke up our campfire circle, with Santa standing and yawning his fat self into a straightened up posture. He looked straight at Tom Till and said, “How about a spin on the lake, with my new outboard motor, Tom?”

I remembered that Santa and Mrs. Santa didn’t have any children of their own, and that last year he had liked Tom so well, and had also been the one who had showed Tom how to become a Christian. I knew that Tom’s pop was an infidel, and was hardly ever kind to him, and Tom was maybe hungry for some grown-up person to like him, so I felt happy inside that Tom was going to get a fast boat ride, although I wanted to go along worse than anything.

“You, too, Bill—and Poetry, if you like,” Santa said—“if you can spare them awhile, Barry. I’ll take the rest of the gang tomorrow. This new motor needs breaking in, you know.”

Well, it was all right with Barry, and it certainly was all right with me, so away we four went toward the sandy shore to where Santa’s big white boat was beached, each one of us taking our life preserver vests, and putting them on before getting into the boat... Boy oh boy, that lake looked wonderful, having as many colors as the sky itself, which meant that a lake got its color from the sky, I thought, and said to Poetry, “Looks like Old Babe, the Ox, must have changed his colors like a chameleon and taken a swim out here, while we were telling stories.”

And Poetry surprised me by yelling, “SWELL, BILL, that’s wonderful! Hey, you guys back there! Bill’s got a good story!”

Well, it made me feel half proud of myself to have Poetry yell that to the gang like that, and I liked Poetry a lot for a minute, that being one of the reasons why I liked him anyway—he was always making a person feel like he was worth something.

It certainly felt fine to sit in the prow of Santa’s big boat, with Tom Till and Poetry in the middle and Santa himself in the stern, and go roaring out across the lake. Boy oh boy, in the afterglow of the sunset, the lake was pretty, and without much wind was as smooth as Mom’s mirror in our front room at home. I was wishing Pop and Mom were there, to see things, but wouldn’t want them to stay on account of I wanted to have some real exciting adventures to tell them about when we got home...

Pretty soon, our boat cut a wide circle around the end of a neck of land, and we went roaring down the other side about fifty or maybe a hundred feet from shore. It was still a little light on the lake, but the pine trees on the shore looked darkish and it was getting dark fast. All the time I was wondering if we could run into any exciting adventures up here in the North when Poetry said, “Look Bill! right there’s where our boat upset last year and tossed us out, and right there’s where I hooked that big Northern Pike.”

I remembered and yelled back to him and said so, and went on thinking—wishing we’d have some kinda scary excitement as well as a lot of fun camping.

I watched the widening waves that spread out behind us like a great V, and felt fine and happy, and for some reason I liked everybody. Also I was remembering the Bible story Barry had told, and how Peter was afraid to have the Lord anywhere near him, because he was a sinner, and I began to feel that God was real close to all of us and I wasn’t a bit scared of Him ’cause I knew that He had washed all my sins away, which our Sugar Creek minister and Little Jim say is what He does to a boy or anybody who will really let Him—washing them away in His own blood.

Just then Poetry yelled to me, “Penny for your thoughts, Bill!” I started, and looked at him and said, “Look at that reddish sky, will you?” and Poetry looked and said, “Kinda pretty, isn’t it?”