by Steve Vernon
“Slow it down,” Granddad Angus said. “This rig wasn’t built for speed.”
His warning came too late.
Warren leaned into his pedal-propeller and the dory monster tipped sideways. I slid off my bicycle seat and fell against Warren’s shoulder. All at once the water of Muddy Lake slopped into the gut of the dory monster and began pulling us down.
“Bail the boat out,” Warren said, frantically scooping water with the cup of his palm.
“Never mind bailing the boat,” Granddad Angus shouted back. “Bail the water.”
I tried not to panic.
I tried to think calm thoughts.
The lake wasn’t that deep.
We weren’t that far from shore.
But all I could think about was a pack of Cub Scouts and bubbles coming up and for a long, slow, frozen moment in time I thought I could hear the roar of a skidoo and the crackle-snap of hungry breaking ice.
“We’re sinking!” Warren shouted.
The dory monster kept on tipping. I reached up and tried to find something to hang on to, but all I caught hold of was the skin of my purple glitter banana seat. The vinyl was slick with lake water and my grip wouldn’t hold and I tipped sideways and slid out through the side of the sea monster. I hit the lake, opened my mouth to yell, and swallowed a horking lungful of dirty lake water.
The last thing I heard was Dulsie screaming like a scalded banshee. I don’t know why she screamed. She was in the boat, the same as everyone else. I was the one who had fallen in and was most likely about to drown to death.
And then I was under.
Chapter 17
Sea Serpent: Sighted, Shot, and Sinking
Things happen fast when you don’t want them to.
I was in the water, kicking hard. I might have been kicking upwards or I might have been kicking down towards the bottom. It was hard to tell. The lake water was cold and dark. I think I saw a foot flash by my head. It might have belonged to Granddad Angus or Warren or Dulsie. I tried not to swallow but the water kept pushing past my lips. I could taste it. I did my best not to choke. I tried to stay calm. That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it?
Don’t panic, I told myself.
Try and drown calmly.
I sank a little deeper, in spite of my kicking.
Just how deep was this lake, anyway?
From down here in the deep darkness I could see the faces of the ghosts of those missing Cub Scouts staring up at me, looming like soft white jellyfish. The closest ghost reached out a glowing hand and touched my arm. Then he said something to me. Not in words, not the kind that you speak. He said something to me in the same way that a cool breeze will talk to you on a hot August afternoon and whisper of school and snowplows and leaves falling away.
You can stay here with us, is what his feelings said to me.
I’m not ready to stay just yet, is what I felt back—and then a warm, calm kind of glow seeped into my bones. For a moment I was absolutely certain that for some unfathomable reason I had stopped sinking.
I smiled a little and swallowed and started to choke and then something grabbed hold of my neck. I felt myself being dragged upwards. “Whaaaawwhackhwahakchwahak.”
I emerged from the water, hacking and coughing and glad to be able to breathe. Warren held the back of my neck tight enough to cut off my circulation. I’d always imagined if I found myself in a life-or-death situation it would be Granddad Angus who’d save me.
Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined boring old Warren Boudreau would dive into a bottomless lake and save my life. I hacked and coughed a bit more to hide my surprise.
“You can swim, can’t you?” Warren asked.
I nodded, only half hearing him. I kept thinking about those ghostly Cub Scouts I had seen. I kept looking back behind me, but there was nothing but lake water and a whole lot of cold. All I could see were the moonbeams shining fat and white spotlight haloes over the deep, silent waters of Muddy Lake.
“Lean on Fogopogo and keep kicking towards open water,” he told me. “We need to put some distance between us and that shotgun before we try and clamber back under the moose hide and into the dory.”
I nodded weakly and hung on to the side of the dory monster, kicking with the strength of a half-frozen pollywog. Warren was in the water, kicking right along with me. All the while Granddad Angus kept asking me if I was okay and I kept nodding back, like he could hear my head bobbing up and down.
“He’s fine, Angus,” Warren sputtered. “And we’re almost there.”
We kicked out into the lake. The shotgun blasted a few more times, but it sounded as if whoever was shooting was aiming in all the wrong directions. I clambered into the dory like I was three-parts sea monkey and helped Warren back under the cover of moose hide and crow feathers. Granddad Angus hugged me and held me like he was still afraid I was going to drift away.
“That was fun,” Warren said, grinning as if he’d somehow caught Granddad Angus’s knock-knock-joke grin. “Let’s do it again.”
“Dad!” Dulsie exclaimed in disbelief.
“We need more weight in the dory,” Granddad Angus suggested, finally letting me go. “Dories sail best if they’re loaded to the gunnels with a cargo of dead fish.”
I kept thinking about how we had very nearly become a cargo of dead fish only I didn’t say anything because I could tell that Granddad Angus had been pretty scared for me.
Not that I’d needed any help being scared.
“Head for the river,” Granddad Angus went on. “Just in case whoever did all that shooting decides to straighten out his aim.”
I kept looking behind me back towards the cold swallow of that dark old lake. A part of me wondered what it would have been like to just settle down to the bottom. A bigger part of me was Christmas-morning happy that I hadn’t actually drowned.
The lake wasn’t telling me anything. If there was a story hidden down there it sure wasn’t doing much talking right now.
Except, just for an instant, I thought I saw the face of a boy poking up out of the water, grinning at me. I waved. The boy held his fingers up in the Cub Scout salute and waved back.
“What are you waving at, Roland?” Warren wanted to know.
He looked back when he asked me and I don’t believe he saw what I did. I might have just imagined the whole thing. Nearly drowning could surely bring on hallucinations, but another part of me, hidden deeper inside, told me that maybe what I was looking at was a little more than real.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just waving at nothing.”
“We’d better get this into the shore and pick up some ballast before we try to take it any further,” Granddad Angus said.
We needed to get the oars out to steer the monster towards the river bank. Once we got into shallow enough water, Granddad Angus handed me one of the oars.
“Lean on that and push down hard and forward,” he told me. “Push against the stone of the riverbed and get us in close enough to wade ashore.”
I caught hold of the oar and leaned into it.
Just for a moment I could feel the current of the river and the hard of the stone throbbing through the long grain of the oar. I could feel the ocean’s tug further down the river and the wind blowing through the trees that leaned and nodded and bowed to the river. I could feel the seagulls soaring and I could count the waves that rolled into Deeper Harbour and somehow or other, amongst all the deep, strong feelings that rolled through the veins of my body for that half a second, I could feel Granddad Angus grinning at me.
Dulsie and me and Warren waded ashore and loaded some good river stone into the belly of Fogopogo to keep him weighted safely in the water. Granddad Angus held the monster while we loaded. We pushed off once again.
We tested the dory in the shallow water, rocking and jumping to make sure
we weren’t going to take on any more water. I leaned on Warren and we pedal-paddled as hard as we could. Even with Dulsie leaning in the same direction, the monster safely held its course without tipping.
I looked forward as we moved down the river, aiming our sea beast towards the open mouth of the Drain and out towards the ocean.
Chapter 18
Down the Drain
Riding down the winding stream of the Drain felt a little like cruising down the very large and very wet throat of a sea monster. I wasn’t sure if we were being swallowed or fur-ball-hacked back up. That quiet little river had a stronger current than I had ever imagined. The current pushed and tugged on Fogopogo like the big old dory monster was nothing but a crumple of soggy toilet paper.
It got worse as we left the mouth of the Drain and began moving into the open sea. The waves fought us at first, as if the ocean was trying to slap us uppity dry-landers back to shore. The water didn’t look rough in the growing dawn light, but there were currents moving deep down below the surface that were talking to the dory in a way we couldn’t ignore.
“Work those grinders for me while I row now,” Granddad Angus called out to me. He slid his backup pair of oars into the oarlocks and started rowing, while Warren steered with the rudder. “Keep her hard a’port, Warren.”
“Right, Angus,” Warren replied.
“I thought port was to the left,” I joked.
I told the joke because it was the only way I could unclench my teeth and my jaw was beginning to hurt. I had never been out to sea in a dory before now, and it scared me a little. That was something that had changed in Deeper Harbour since Dad was a boy. Back then children grew up close to the water and learned the ways of the sea at a very early age. Granddad Angus had Dad out in a dory on his tenth birthday.
The waves weren’t that rough, but the dory monster heaved and rolled just the same and my stomach heaved and rolled along with it. I was beginning to have second thoughts about that plate of fried eggs I had eaten before leaving. Dulsie didn’t look too good either. The green in her face wasn’t all face paint, as near as I could tell.
“You’re feeling a little seasick, are you?” Granddad Angus called out.
“I feel like I’m about to heave my toes up through my eye teeth,” I told him. “If this is seasick, I’m seasick with a capital C. We ought to land this dory.”
I wasn’t joking. At this point in the game I was ready to give up and go home and pack my bags for Ottawa. I told Granddad Angus just that.
“The human spirit is like a boat on a wave,” Granddad Angus said. “The wave will toss you up and roll you down and the only thing you can do is ride out the trough and pray for the crest. As bad as you feel now I guarantee you will feel ten times better tomorrow.”
I wasn’t so sure about that.
“This isn’t a dory anymore,” Granddad Angus went on. “It’s a story and a legend just waiting to be born. We’ve built a sea monster and we’re in this just as deep as we can get. There’s no backing out now.”
That’s the part that bothered me. The whole “deep” business. I mean, it wasn’t as if we were going to dog-paddle our way out of the Atlantic Ocean if this sea monster went and sank on us.
I was scared. There was no other word for it.
Pure chicken-cluck scared.
“What if we capsize again?”
“We’re not going to capsize,” Granddad Angus assured me. “That only happened because we panicked.”
I still wasn’t convinced.
This was Granddad Angus, a man who had made a lifetime out of doing stupid things. Who in their right mind would listen to him?
“This is stupid, stupid, stupid,” I said for about the four thousandth time.
“Of course it’s stupid,” Warren said. “It’s supposed to be stupid. Anyone who has never done anything stupid in their life has never tried anything new.”
All three of us looked at Warren in total surprise. We had come to expect words of caution and common sense from Warren and here he was sounding almost like some sort of a daredevil.
“Albert Einstein said it before I did,” Warren explained, with a sheepish shrug. “I have a stamp with him on it.”
“My dad used to say something like that to me,” Granddad Angus said. “‘If you’ve never been lost, you’ve never really rowed far enough away from the shore.’”
Which made even less sense to me.
“This is stupid with a capital stupid, squared to an unlimited infinity of stupid,” I said. “I want to go home.”
“Do you mean Deeper Harbour or Ottawa?” Granddad Angus asked.
I thought about that.
He had a point.
“We’re almost there, aren’t we?” I said.
“The harbour is just ahead,” Granddad Angus said. “Just around that big stony point.”
When we rounded the point I could see the harbour, but from a perspective I’d never had before. Not this early in the morning. Not all new and all fresh like it was. It was almost as if I had somehow grown myself a whole new set of eyes.
I’d grown up here and I’d learned to skip a stone and throw a ball and ride a bike all within a stone’s throw of this sleepy little coastal town. But looking at it this morning, from the belly of a homemade sea monster, everything looked strangely different. The harbour was peaceful and welcoming and I could see all the wonderful details that a tourist might notice.
Sure, there was no McDonald’s.
Sure, there was no movie theatre.
Sure, there weren’t any tourist attractions.
The fog curled and clotted about buildings that leaned like old, tired men. The paint was peeling and the only signs of life were a few early fishermen who looked up and probably blinked a few times while trying to decide if a sea monster was worth catching or throwing back. Even the seagulls looked more than a little bored with the way the tide of time seemed to stand so still around this sleepy little harbour town.
But there was something quiet and precious and forever in the way that our little town clung there like a barnacle upon a wave-worn rock. There was something that caught in my throat like a swallow of surprise birthday party.
Then one of the fishermen stood up and pointed.
Granddad Angus woofed through his birchbark moose call.
A fishing boat blew its sounding horn, long and low and clear.
Maybe that fishing boat was saying hello. Maybe that fishing boat was warning us to stay away from its fishing grounds. Maybe that old boat was just clearing something from its throat.
But it was the figure standing alone on the wharf that caught my attention.
A figure that stood there as if whoever it was had been standing there all morning just waiting for us to pedal-paddle into the harbour.
I couldn’t see him clearly enough to be certain, but I could feel him deep in my heart. I was sure it was my dad, standing there watching me sail in the belly of a moose-hide and crow-feather sea monster.
He was holding something in his hand, high above his head.
“That person’s got a cell phone,” Dulsie said with more than a little certainty. “I’m pretty sure whoever that is, they’re making a Fogopogo video.”
“Everybody say cheese,” Granddad Angus said.
And underneath the moose hide and the chicken wire and the crow feathers, we all smiled.
Whoever it was, standing on the wharf, waved before turning away.
By the end of the day we had our own YouTube video.
It was a blurry, out-of-focus, shaky-handed video that showed something that might have been a sea monster or might have been a giant floating whale booger. It showed just enough to give the impression that the video was showing something very out of the ordinary.
We had actual video coverage.
Th
e word was getting out.
Chapter 19
Hot Pursuit
We had to wait three more days for another foggy morning.
By now nearly everyone in the town had seen the video of Fogopogo. Nora hooked up a wall-sized television in her diner so that everyone could watch it. Opinions were divided about just whether the blurry image on the video was a sea monster or not.
While we waited for the fog to roll in, we hid Fogopogo in the belly of a tidal cove that was sheltered by a thicket of pine trees. It was a perfect hiding spot that allowed us to work at keeping the sea monster patched up and running without being discovered by any curious townsfolk.
We set off on our next excursion before the sun rose, sliding out carefully into the ocean water and aiming ourselves towards that big old cape of a rock that hooked out around the harbour like a fat man’s arm around a plate full of beans. I was still afraid of tipping over, but the ballast we had set in the belly of the dory monster seemed to keep it at an even keel.
So far, so good.
The fishermen were out again. This time they didn’t even seem to notice us. They were far too busy tending to their lines and cleaning their boats and making certain that everything was ready for the day. That was just how fishermen were, no matter what time of day it was. Everything revolved around the boat that they staked their lives on and the prospect of their next catch. A little thing like a sea monster wasn’t going to upset their daily routine.
This time I could see the purple minivan parked just beside Warren’s boat shed.
That minivan was more important than the fishermen. The monster-hunters were bound to help spread the word even further.
I could see a few more people out there as well. It looked as if every customer in Nora’s Diner had cleared out from the early breakfast special and lined up in front of the restaurant, gawking out into the harbour.