The dogs and their canoe ride

Our boys were boys at that teen age. So one day it was spring and most of the snow had melted and it was a nice warm afternoon so why not take the canoe down to the local crick. Off they set, two of them and I think a friend, and our two dogs for sure who would never miss this fun. Now usually in summer this crick was a little dry and would have been a tricky paddle down to the lake, but it being early spring they said it had lots of water and looked like a good ride with a bit of a current they wouldn't have to paddle much.

So in they got and the two dogs too, and they said everything was going real well, and they were moving along at a pretty good clip. Now there was this railway track between us and the lake and it had no other choice than to cross this crick and what the builders had done in the early nineteen hundreds was used this huge culvert about twenty feet across to let the water through.

Who saw it first I don't really know, the dogs or the boys, but it was definitely approaching fast and it was this little space about two feet high between the top of the water and the top of the culvert. It gets a little confusing here, the story, but I gather the boys jumped for their lives and the dogs with no fear steered that canoe right through the centre of that culvert not quite understanding what had happened to their passengers.

When the boys all had dragged themselves out of the current and the bush and made it over the railway track there on the distant shores the dogs had neatly parked the canoe with not a little water in it, and were busy shaking themselves off while awaiting their passengers to show up. Never did figure out if they paddled to the lake for a leisurely afternoon of girl watching or what, but the canoe it needed a little more than loving care, and the one dog, he never took to the water much after that day much less setting foot in any floating contraption his humans could contrive of.