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[bibliothecula]

Llanfair's back! Thank you, llanfair. My week is not going as swimmingly as I planned and I am hiding out.

<passes around kittens, soft blankets, scones, tea, and Scotch. Fluffs up everyone's pillows.>

[llanfair]

<scoops up kitten for lap>

     By noon the amiable horse had dragged The Coot across the two-mile flats to open water once again.  Aaron allowed the horse to wade a little way out from shore in order to float The Coot.  He was about to halt the beast in order to untie the towrope when my father’s genius renewed itself.  “Why stop him now?” Father asked.
     Aaron looked at his mate with growing affection, and passed the bottle.  “By God, Angus,” he said, “for a librarian you’ve got quite a brain.”
     So The Coot proceeded on her way under one horse-power and, since the river seldom was more than three feet deep, the horse experienced but little difficulty in his strange role.  When, as occasionally happened, he struck a deep hole, he simply swam until he could touch bottom once again.  And when the water shoaled into a new sand bar, The Coot’s passengers jumped ashore and helped him haul.
     The use of a river horse was a brilliant piece of improvisation, and it might well have sufficed to carry the voyagers to Lake Winnipeg - where they would assuredly have drowned - had it not been for the flood.
     When the rain began on Saturday afternoon, Father and Aaron took The Coot to shore, hauled her a little way up on the flats, covered her with a big tarpaulin, and crawled under the canvas to wait out the downpour.  The horse was turned loose to scale the high banks and forage for himself, while the two men and the dog relaxed cosily in their shelter over tins of dog food and dollops of red rum.
     The rain grew heavier, for it was the beginning of one of those frightening prairie phenomena - a real cloudburst.  In less than three hours, three inches of water fell on the sun-hardened plains about Saskatoon and that was more than the total rainfall during the previous three months.  The ground could not absorb it and the steep-sided gulches leading into the valley of the Saskatchewan began to roar angrily in spate.  The river rose rapidly, growing yellow and furious as the flow increased. 
     The first crest of the flood reached The Coot at about five o’clock in the afternoon, and before her crew could emerge from their shelter, they were in mid-stream, and racing down the river at an appalling clip.  Rudderless, and with only one remaining oar - for Aaron had used the other to support a tea pail over an open fire a few days earlier, and then had gone off to sit and think and had forgotten about oar, tea, and fire - there was nothing useful that The Coot’s crew could do to help themselves.  The rain still beat down upon them, and after a brief, stunned look at the fury of the river, they sensibly withdrew under their canvas hood, and passed the bottle.

<pats kitten, sips tea>

[tinyzombie]

Can we name the kitten The Coot?

<settles down with an amiable cat, listens>

[llanfair]

     By seven o’clock the rain had moderated to a steady drizzle, but the flood waters were still rising.  In Saskatoon we who waited impatiently for news of The Coot were at last rewarded.  The arrangements made by the newspaper began to bear fruit.  Reports began arriving from ferrymen all down the river, and these succeeded one another so swiftly that at times they were almost continuous.  The telephone exchange at the newpaper office was swamped with messages like this one:

   Special to the Star:
   Sailing vessel, Coot, outbound in ballast from Saskatoon, sighted at Indian
   Crossing at 7:43 pm on course for Halifax, that is if she don’t go busting into
   the Big Island Bar afore she gits past Coyote Creek.

     The Coot got by Big Island and Coyote Creek all right, for at 7:50 pm the watcher at Barners Ford reported that she had just passed him, accompanied by two drowned cows, also presumed to be en route for Halifax.  At 8:02 she went by Indian Crossing ... at 8:16 she sideswiped the Sinkhole Ferry ... at 8:22 she was reported from St. Louis (Saskatchewan, not Missouri) ... and so it went.  The ferrymen tried to “speak” the speeding ship, but she gave them no reply and would not even deign to make her number.  So swiftly did she pass that a hard-riding stockman who spotted her near Duck Lake could not even draw alongside.
     In the city room at the newspaper, reporters marked each new position on a large-scale map of the river, and someone with a slide rule calculated that if The Coot could maintain her rate of speed, she would complete her passage to Halifax in six more days.
     By nine o’clock that evening the darkness of an overcast and moonless night had so obscured the river that no further reports were to be expected from the watching ferrymen.  However, we presumed that on Sunday morning the observers would again pick up the trail.  A number of people even drove out at dawn from Prince Albert to see The Coot go past the junction of the two branches of the river.  They made that trip in vain.  The flood passed and the river shrank back to its normal, indolent self, but no Coot appeared.  She had vanished utterly during the black hours of the night.
     All through that tense and weary Sunday we waited for news, and there was none.  At last Aaron’s son-in-law called on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for help, and the famous force ordered one of its patrol aircraft up to make a search.  The plane found nothing before darkness intervened on Sunday evening, but it was off again with the following dawn.
     At 11 am on Monday the following radio message was received in Saskatoon:

   Coot located five miles northwest Fenton and two miles from riverbank.
   Aground in centre large pasture and entirely surrounded by Holstein cows.
   Crew appears all well.  One man playing banjo, one sun-bathing, and dog
   chasing cattle.

     It was an admirable report, and indicative of the high standards of accuracy, combined with brevity, for which the force is justly famed.  However, as my father later pointed out, it did not tell the entire story.

[llanfair]

Time to finish this chapter before I start marking my latest batch of assignments.

     Mutt, Aaron, and Father had spent the whole of Saturday night under cover of their tarpaulin.  Even after the rain stopped they did not emerge.  Father said that this was because he wished to die bravely, and he could do so only by ignoring the terror and turmoil of that swollen river.  Aaron said it was because they had found the second bottle of rum.  Mutt, as usual, kept his peace.
     When the light grew strong on Sunday morning, Father began to hope that they might yet survive and, pulling aside the canvas, thrust his head out for a look.  He was stupefied by what he saw.  The Coot had evidently managed to cover the entire distance to Lake Winnipeg in less than ten hours.  His bemused mind could find no other explanation for the apparently limitless expanse of brown water that stretched away on every side.
     It was not until late afternoon, when the flood waters began to subside and the tops of poplar trees began appearing alongside The Coot, that the illusion was partially dispelled.  It had vanished totally by Monday morning when the voyages awoke to find their vessel resting on a broad green meadow, surrounded by a herd of curious cattle.
     The crew of The Coot now proceeded to enjoy the happiest hours of their journey.  There was no water in the boat, or under her.  There was no sand or mud.  The sun was warm.  Aaron had found the third of the missing bottles, and Father had procured a side of home-cured bacon and five loaves of homemade bread from a nearby Dukhobor settler.  Mutt was having a time with the cows.  It was a fair and lovely place for storm-tossed mariners to drop their hook.
     The idyll was disturbed by the appearance of the search aircraft; and shattered a few hours later by the arrival of Aaron’s son-in-law as a passenger in a big red truck.  A conference was called and the cruise was declared to be at an end, despite Aaron’s blasphemous dissent.  The Coot went ignominiously back to Saskatoon aboard the truck.
     When he was safely back within his own house, Father frankly admitted to us that he was delighted to be there, and that he had never really had much hope of seeing home again.  For the rest of that summer he was content with Concepcion, and we spent many a happy week end on Lotus Lake, sailing her back and forth between the Anglican Church beach and Milford’s Beer Parlour.
     But there is a curious postscript to the story of The Coot.  One day in the autumn of the following year my father received a letter from Halifax.  It contained nothing save a snapshot which showed a funny little craft (unmistakably The Coot) tied up alongside that famous Lunenburger Bluenose.  On the back of the snapshot was a cryptic message, scrawled large in purple ink.  “Quitter!” it said.
     Father would have felt badly about that, had not his friend Don Chisholm (who was assistant superintendent for one of the railroads at Saskatoon) shown him a waybill sometime earlier.  It was an interesting document.  It dealt with the dispatch of one flatcar, “with cargo, out of Saskatoon, bound for Halifax.”  And the name bestowed on that flatcar for the journey by some railway humourist was write large on the bottom of the bill.
     It was The Cootie Carrier.

[bibliothecula]

I'm all for naming the kitten The Coot. It's cat-carrier can thus be The Cootie Carrier.

I'm hiding from tedious work and cleaning the bathrooms.

[llanfair]

I'm hiding from the rest of the assignments I have to mark.  Fortunately, there are only five ... but somehow, by accident, they're amongst the worst of the lot.  Sigh ...

[seventhyear]

Don't tell them I'm here. They probably won't look for me until we run out of milk again.

[alto_stratus]

<gives The Coot ear scritches and heads to a cozy chair for a nap>

[llanfair]

Hiding from the lecture I'm supposed to be writing.  Getting soooo siiiiiick of course prep!

[tinyzombie]

My first choice grad school said no, and I'm quietly crying at work. I'm also afraid that my ex, who I dearly love, will shoot me down when I put on the big girl pants and tell him how I feel.

I want to stay in hiding for a long, long time.

[bioteacher]

I'm so sorry to hear that, TinyZombie. But ultimately, that school is the one who is losing out. And you'll be better off in a place that appreciates what you have to offer.

I am sorry things are not going well with the ex. I'm not familiar with the backstory, so I will simply offer hot chocolate and a pile of puppies and kittens in need of cuddles.

[tinyzombie]

I'm so sorry to hear that, TinyZombie. But ultimately, that school is the one who is losing out. And you'll be better off in a place that appreciates what you have to offer.

I am sorry things are not going well with the ex. I'm not familiar with the backstory, so I will simply offer hot chocolate and a pile of puppies and kittens in need of cuddles.

Bioteach, a pile of puppies and kittens is just what I need! (ZombiCat will be very comforting once she decides to lie down.)

I am trying to breathe deeply and appreciate what I have (academically) and hope for the best (love life).

[bibliothecula]

Tinyzombie, I'm sorry.

<hands out Ghiradelli brownies, curls up with soft blanket and pillow>

[prof_smartypants]

Tinyzombie, I'm sorry.

<hands out Ghiradelli brownies, curls up with soft blanket and pillow>

Tinyzombie, I didn't get into my first choice grad school either, and it turned out great! In retrospect, it would have been a disaster had I gone to #1 choice. Instead, I got to work with great people at #3 and have a job and everything.

As for the ex - nothing ventured, nothing gained. My husband was my ex at least twice before we finally grew up and sorted our sh!t out.