rescued, and some say she is out there still.
There are quartz crystals that can be found in this area that are grown in the shape of smooth teardrops. Some claim they are the last teardrops that Mary Jane wept.
The Miâkmaq shunned this area because of the cave, and at certain times when the wind is right the folks around Parrsboro claim that you can still hear the ghost of Mary Jane Hawkins weeping over her lonely fate.
13
THE HIDEY
HINDER OF
DAGGER WOODS
ANTIGONISH
Hip-deep in my research for this collection I came across a mention of a demon that was reputed to haunt the Dagger Woods of Antigonish County.
I couldnât find much more than a brief description of the creature, but it sparked a memory of a story that Iâd heard of a Hidey Hinder that followed hikers around in the Cape Breton Woods. I had discovered two perfectly good pieces of two completely different jigsaw puzzles, and I decided they might fit together nicely.
There are an awful lot of stories told about Dagger Woods, just a long forest road about fifteen kilometres east of Antigonish. You can walk through if you like. By daylight it doesnât seem like much, but nightfall brings another story. Residents will tell you of the strange and awful cries that sound throughout the woods. Others talk of a gray-clad demon wearing a bright red cap who will follow you around. They call it the Hidey Hinder, and itâs said that it will sneak up on unwary hikers and follow them on their way.
Youâll hear it, sneaking and creeping up on you, just behind your left ear, but try as you might, you canât see it. Turn as fast as you like, and the Hidey Hinder is that much faster. Itâs worse than trying to catch a mosquito while blindfolded. The Hidey Hinder keeps in your shadow, hiding just behind you, and the only way you can save yourself is to catch a single glimpse of him. Thatâs the hard part. He always moves just that much too fast to be caught.
Some say heâs just a fooler, a minor level trickster who is looking for a giggle on you. Others say that he will chase you until you panic and run, and that the bones of those who died of exposure and lie lost in the woods are usually scarred by the long-fanged hunger marks of the Hidey Hinder.
Young Saundra Girard wasnât thinking of anything but the fat August blueberries she would gather in her bucket. She couldnât wait to hear that juicy plump hollow sound that the blueberries would make as she dropped them into her bucket â plunk, plunk, plunk. That was her favourite sound. She loved to hear the sound soften as the bucket slowly filled until at the very end of it when she would have to place each blueberry very delicately, one by one, for fear of over-spilling her bucket.
Sometimes she would take a fruit basket left over from the groceries and fill it with white foam cups. Then she would fill each cup with blueberries, saving the fattest and the best for the very top. Once the cups were filled she would wait by the road for the bus and sell the berries to the hungry passengers for a dollar a cup. Her mother had done this as a child, selling the berries for twenty-five cents a cup, and before that her grandmother had peddled the blueberries for ten cents a cup.
Todayâs blueberries werenât to be sold, however. Todayâs blue-berries were strictly for baking. Saundra had already decided what she wanted her mother to make with the berries: a great big feed of blueberry muffins. Saundra loved her muffins fresh and hot from the oven, just cooled long enough to handle without a mess. Sheâd slather them up with butter and eat them until her belly pretty nearly burst.
Thatâs why she was out this far in the woods. She needed to find her berries, and the best ones grew thickest out in Dagger Woods. A lot of kids she knew stayed out of these woods, because folks thought they were haunted. Some people said that a man had died in a knife fight in