Free Haunted Harbours by Steve Vernon Page B

jumped and whirled, trying to catch a glance at the elusive beast but all she caught was a really bad case of the dizzies. She nearly tripped and fell.
    â€œYou’d like that,” she thought. “You’d like that a whole lot, wouldn’t you, Mr. Hidey Hinder? You’d like it if I tripped and fell and hurt myself. You’d laugh at me while I lay there and rotted down into something soft enough for your rotten old teeth.”
    She forced herself to be still. She waited for the world to stop spinning before her eyes. She forced her breath to slow down, and then that thing behind her stuck its slimy tongue against her ear.
    Saundra took off running like a sprinter at the sound of the starter’s pistol. She crashed straight ahead, twisting and turning and trying to look back over her shoulder to catch a look at the Hidey Hinder.
    It was no good. No matter how hard she tried, she caught no more than a fleeting glimpse of its shadow. The shadow looked large, larger than a shadow ought to be. It looked hungry.
    She kept running, and in the midst of her panic she heard her father’s voice, telling her to run for the stream. She knew it was over one more hill. She could hear the Hidey Hinder close on her heels.
    â€œI just have to stay ahead of it,” she thought. “It’s not trying to catch me. It’s just trying to scare me.” It was working. She was scared stiff. Her breath was burning her lungs, and her legs felt like they’d been poured full of sand. “Just a little further,” she thought. “Just up over the hill.”
    There it was: the stream, bubbling and laughing around the rocks, the most beautiful sight she’d ever seen. She ran for it and fell to her knees, scraping one against a stone. She looked down into the water and saw the reflection of the Hidey Hinder, and that was all it took. There was a puff of foul-smelling smoke and that was the end of the Hidey Hinder. She was safe.
    Saundra hurried home as fast as she could. She hugged her brother hard, her mother harder, and her father hardest of all.
    â€œSo what’d it look like?” they asked, after she’d told them what had happened. “What did the Hidey Hinder look like?”
    She wouldn’t say, or perhaps she couldn’t.
    It was a long time before she found the nerve to ever go back into the woods, and when she did, she always carried a pocket mirror, just in case that old Hidey Hinder came sneaking up behind her.

14

THE BLACK DOG
OF ANTIGONISH
HARBOUR

ANTIGONISH HARBOUR

    Legends of eerie black dogs, with names such as Barguest, Shuck, Grim, Black Shag, Trash, Skriker, Padfoot, Ku Sidhee, are scattered throughout Celtic history. These dogs are frequently thought to be forerunners of death. They are seldom found very far from the sea, and some folklorists believe them kin to the man-eating water horse or the selkie seal people.
    Originally told in the British Isles, these stories migrated with the British and Scottish settlers, following them all the way to Nova Scotia.
    This is one I heard around a campfire. I’ve added a little to it.
    To say that Willis Dougall was a drunkard was a little like calling an ocean deep. Willis used to tell his friends that he’d been born in a drought year with a thirst that ran bone deep. He was, as folks would say, clearly under the care of the bottle, and he’d lost track of the cork a long time ago.
    One fine Nova Scotia morning, Willis Dougall set out for the town of Antigonish, accompanied by his brother, Dane. They decided to ride along the sunny reaches of the harbour. They rode up and over and down the steep rugged North River hill through the level stretches around the landing where the ships came in. They paused once by a traveller’s cairn to lay a stone for luck. This was an old custom, still practised in other parts of the world. Folks passing by would lay a rock on the cairn, and as you passed by, you would