Stewart — Watt—Legends of Paul Bunyan. 643 
down the timber on a tract of sixty acres, and when he spoke, 
the limbs sometimes fell from the trees. To keep his pipe 
filled required the entire time of a swamper with a scoop- 
shovel. In the gentle art of writing Bunyan had, however, 
no skill. He kept his men’s time by cutting notches in a 
stick of wood, and he ordered supplies for camp by drawing 
pictures of what he wanted. On one occasion only did his 
ingenuity fail; he ordered grindstones and got cheeses. 
“Oh,” says Paul, “I forgot to put the holes in my grind¬ 
stones.” 
Bunyan was assisted in his lumbering exploits by a won¬ 
derful blue ox, a creature that had the strength of nine 
horses and that weighed, according to some accounts, five 
thousand pounds, and according to others, twice that. The 
ox measured from tip to tip of his horns just seven feet, 
exactly his master’s height. Other accounts declare that 
the ox was seven feet—or seven ax-handles—between his 
eyes, and fourteen feet between his horns. Originally he 
was pure white, but one winter in the woods it snowed blue 
snow for seven days (that was the winter of the snow- 
snakes) and Bunyan’s ox from lying out in the" snow all 
winter became and remained a brilliant blue. Many-of the 
Bunyan legends are connected with the feats performed by 
the ox. Bunyan’s method of peeling a log was as follows: 
He would hitch the ox to one end of the log, grasp the bark 
at the other end with his powerful arms, give a sharp com¬ 
mand to the animal, and, presto , out would come the log 
as clean as a whistle. On one occasion Paul dragged a 
whole house up a hill with the help of his ox, and then, re¬ 
turning, he dragged the cellar up after the house. Occa¬ 
sionally, as might have been expected from so huge a crea¬ 
ture, the ox got into mischief about camp. One night, for 
example, he broke loose and ate up two hundred feet of 
tow-line. 
One favorite tale connected with the blue ox is that of the 
buckskin harness. One day old Forty Jones of Bunyan’s 
crew killed two hundred deer by the simple process of 
tripping a key-log which supported a pile of logs on a hill¬ 
side above the place where the animals came to drink. The 
skins were made into a harness for the blue ox. Some days 
later while the cook was hauling a log in for fire-wood, it 
