You know Paul could do wonders. Everyone’s
Heard how he thrashed the horses on a load
That wouldn’t budge until they simply stretched
Their rawhide harness from the load to camp.
Paul told the boss the load would be all right,
“The sun will bring your load in”—and it did—
By shrinking the rawhide to natural length.
That’s what is called a stretcher. But I guess
The one about his jumping so’s to land
With both his feet at once against the ceiling,
And then land safely right side up again,
Back on the floor, is fact or pretty near fact.
Well, this is such a yarn. Paul sawed his wife
Out of a white-pine log. Murphy was there,
And, as you might say, saw the lady born.
Paul worked at anything in lumbering.
He’d been hard at it taking boards away
For—I forget—the last ambitious sawyer
To want to find out if he couldn’t pile
The lumber on Paul till Paul begged for mercy.
They’d sliced the first slab off a big butt log,
And the sawyer had slammed the carriage back

To slam end on again against the saw teeth.
To judge them by the way they caught themselves
When they saw what had happened to the log,
They must have had a guilty expectation
Something was going to go with their slambanging.
Something had left a long black streak of grease
On the new wood the whole length of the log
Except, perhaps, a foot at either end.
But when Paul put his finger in the grease,
It wasn’t grease at all, but a long slot.
The log was hollow. They were sawing pine.
“First time I ever saw a hollow pine.
That comes of having Paul around the place.
Take it to hell for me,” the sawyer said.
Everyone had to have a look at it,
And tell Paul what he ought to do about it.
(They treated it as his.) “You take a jack-knife,
And spread the opening, and you’ve got a dug-out
All dug to go a-fishing in.” To Paul
The hollow looked too sound and clean and empty
Ever to have housed birds or beasts or bees.
There was no entrance for them to get in by.
It looked to him like some new kind of hollow
He thought he’d better take his jack-knife to.
So after work that evening he came back
And let enough light into it by cutting
To see if it was empty. He made out in there
A slender length of pith, or was it pith?
It might have been the skin a snake had cast
And left stood up on end inside the tree
The hundred years the tree must have been growing
More cutting and he had this in both hands,