The Winter the Words Froze (Campfire Story)

Of all the cold winters in PAUL BUNYAN's camp, the old loggers agree that one was the worst. They called it the Hard Winter. The WIND blew from the north for four months without stopping to catch its breath, and it was COLD. It was so COLD the thermometer gave up and crawled back into its box. It was so COLD that the cook's coffee froze so fast it was still hot underneath the ice.

But the strangest thing happened on the very first morning. The loggers came out of the bunkhouse, and the first man out the door waved to his friend and said, 'GOOD MORNING!'

And nobody heard a thing.

The words came out of his mouth, all right. You could see them, hanging in the air in front of his face, frozen solid like little icicles. They just couldn't get anywhere. It was too COLD for sound to travel.

Well, that made for a very quiet camp. At breakfast a logger asked, 'PASS THE BEANS!' and the words froze over the table, and the beans stayed right where they were. Out in the woods, the fallers cut down a tree and yelled 'TIMBER!' to warn everybody, and the word froze in the air while the tree came down, so everybody had to watch out for themselves. And in the bunkhouse every night, somebody hopped around on one foot asking, 'WHERE IS MY SOCK?' and nobody ever answered, because nobody ever heard.

The frozen words piled up everywhere. They hung from the rafters of the cook shack. They drifted in the corners of the bunkhouse. They clinked when the WIND blew them together, like a sack of marbles. The loggers had to sweep them off the paths every morning just to get to work. PAUL BUNYAN used his loudest voice, the one that could knock pine cones out of trees three valleys away, and even his words froze, as big as boulders, and rolled down the hill.

So the crew learned to talk with their hands. They pointed. They waved. They made faces. For four whole months, the noisiest logging camp in the north woods was as silent as a library.

Then, one morning in April, the WIND finally changed. It blew warm from the south. The sun came out. Water started dripping off the roofs. And all over camp, the frozen words began to thaw.

They thawed all at once.

Every word anybody had said all winter long came loose at the same moment. Four months of breakfast requests. Four months of tree warnings. Four months of sock complaints. Four months of polite hellos.

(Point at all four groups at once!)

'GOOD MORNING! PASS THE BEANS! TIMBER! WHERE IS MY SOCK?'

The noise was so loud it blew the doors off the bunkhouse. Birds flew south, then turned around and flew north again because they couldn't decide. The racket went on for three days and three nights, and nobody in camp got a wink of sleep.

When it was finally over, PAUL BUNYAN looked around at his crew, all of them with their hands over their ears, and he said the first thing anyone had heard him say since November.

'Well, boys. I guess it's spring.'

And somebody, way in the back, said quietly: 'Does anybody know where my other sock is?'

Storyteller tips: practice the four lines one group at a time, then all together, before you begin. In the story, point at a group when its line comes up. At the thaw, point at everyone and let them go as long and loud as they like before you wave them quiet.

Older Scouts can make up their own frozen lines, such as a patrol yell or the Scoutmaster's favorite saying.