The Story
Up in the Ottawa Valley, where the winters are long and the pine trees grow so tall they tickle the clouds, they still talk about Big Joe Mufferaw.
Joe was a lumberjack, the finest in all of Canada. He stood seven feet tall in his stocking feet and could swing an axe so fast that the chips flew like snowflakes in a blizzard. He could fell a hundred trees before breakfast, eat a barrel of porridge, and still have energy to carry the logs to the river on his back, forty at a time.
But it was not only his size that people loved. It was his heart.
One spring, the Ottawa River flooded badly, as it sometimes did, and the water poured across old Henri Labelle's farm, washing away his vegetable rows and threatening to swamp his barn. Henri sat on his porch watching his year's work float away, and he looked very sad.
Joe Mufferaw came striding through the trees. He took one look at the situation, rolled up his sleeves, and said, "I'll sort this out."
He walked to the riverbank, braced his boots against two big boulders, and with his bare hands began scooping out a new channel in the earth, shoving tons of soil aside as easily as if he were rearranging a garden. By noon he had carved a new path for the river, three miles to the east, away from the farm. The water grumbled and gurgled and flowed obediently in the new direction.
Henri's field dried out by afternoon. Not a carrot was lost.
Joe refused any payment. He ate an enormous supper, slept for about four minutes under a pine tree — he never needed much sleep — and was back at work in the lumber camp before the stars had faded.
They say that some of the hills around the Ottawa Valley were made from the piles of earth Joe dug out that day, and that if you look at a map, you can still trace the way the river bends, which is not quite the way rivers usually bend, and is all on account of Big Joe Mufferaw doing a favour for a neighbour.
There are statues of Joe now, and songs too. But mostly people remember him because he was the kind of man who used everything he had for other people, and never thought twice about it.