Paul ST PIERRE Members of Forest Products Research Society are holding a convention in Vancouver this week. This little-known chapter of the Paul Bunyan story is reprinted here today in the hope that it will make better fly fishermen of them. .- A lot of people don't know that British Columbia is the biggest province in Canada because the maps show it all hunched up but if it ever got spread flat why Winnipeg would be a suburb of Williams Lake and the Fernie mines would be drawing the Cape Breton coal subsidy. Paul Bunyan was an Easterner who had spent his whole life in Alberta, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana and places away back there. But when he heard how big British Columbia was, it fired his imagination. So he saddled up Babe the Blue Ox and came West.:.,. - Now in those days, the province was put together differently from how. it is today. Hawaii and Japan were tucked up right beside the shoreline., There wasn't any Vancouver Island at all. And the Interior: was mostly lake. Paul's crews fixed the lake by scooping out the Fraser Canyon. They didn't have the proper tools for the job, and had to scratch it with peaveys, but they got the water running and the big lake drained. There were ,'' two benefits. When the lake went down it left a lot of bare ground which Paul turned into lawn a great benefit for the cowboys who came in afterward. As for the canyon, it made a first class flume for him and he had all the North Pacific for a booming ground. Paul felt so exnansiv shout the matter that he began to believe more than half the stories he'd been told about British Columbia, . It was just his tough luck that all the Interior forests were infested with Ratchet Owls. Ratchet Owls are pretty much things of the past now, but in those days they were more plentiful than bedbugs. These owls turned their heads to watch things pass, as all owls do, but they had a ratchet gear in their neck and they couldn't turn their heads back again. They had to keep twisting their bodies to follow their beads. So - when a Ratchet Owl would come to sit on the top of a Lodgepole Pine, and a Sidehill Gouger would start to walk round and round the tree beneath him, the Ratchet Owl would, twist the whole darn pine tree as it turned to watch him. This twist-grain lumber was so bad that Paul couldn't even sell it to the customers who didn't plan to pay for' it. He was so discouraged he began to think about turning into a mining promoter. But then one of his crew told him about the big sticks on the Coast which went up to 300 feet before you hit the first branch, This fellow said that the coast was all arranged on vertical sidehills beside the water, ' so every tree had its own booming ground and all that was necessary was to top it, drop it and listen for the splash. Paul naturally - found this pretty hard to believe, but he was ready to try anything. He trapped three Ratchet Owls before be left and sent them to negotiate peace in Vietnam. They're still there. Some of the Sidehill Gougers interbred with Paul's bedbugs but that strain died out the offspring used to wind the blankets around themselves so tight that they choked to death. His main job was Vancouver Island. It isn't 100 per cent true that there was no Vancouver Island when Paul Bunyan came here. There was one, but it had been built standing upended, poking 270 miles into the sky. It was a government project. The settlers couldn't manage this form of Vancouver Island at all. The government noticed that the population wasn't building up and after a while a Royal Commission discovered icaauu nu mat mc settlers kept falling off the side of Vancouver Island. The commission came to the conclusion that none of this would have happened if Vancouver Island had been built on its side and that the trouble originated with a government engineer who read his blue prints up and down instead of side to side. Well anybody can make a mistake. Paul recognized this as clearly as any man. But, being practical, he set out to do something about it. He set his crew to falling Vancouver Island. When they dropped Vancouver Island, it made quite a splash. Japan was washed right up against the mainland of Asia, the Hawaiian Islands were pushed way south and almost sank, and a lot of the Indians got wet. Being British Columbians, they just hated to be any wetter than they already were, and they complained about it. There was talk of forming a Royal Commission to investigate Paul. One of the political parties took the stand that it was a great mistake to have lain Vancouver Island sideways in the water. Paul wasn't a man to talk much, but he was sensitive just the same. He didn't want to stay anywhere unless he felt welcome. So he shut down the British Columbia operation and went East to work on the National Debt. ' ' '