Moose County Legends

—JMQ

쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀

You’ve got me wrong, Qwill. I was born and brought up near the lake. I relocated in Lockmaster when I married. Believe me, it’s good to be back here. I have a passion for fishing and boating. You probably never heard this, but my family was in commercial fishing for three generations before my grandfather sold out to the Scottens. He was always telling me about the herring business in the twenties and thirties. They used wooden boats and cotton nets—

and no echo sounders or radio phones. You wouldn’t believe what fishermen went through in those days.”

“Try me,” I said, always curious about someone else’s business.

“Well, the Bushland Fisheries regularly shipped hundred-pound kegs of dried salted herring Down Below, salt being the preservative in those days, before refrigeration. And here’s the interesting part: The kegs went to Pennsylvania, 쑽쑽쑽

105

Lilian Jackson Braun West Virginia, and other coal-producing states, and the miners practically lived on herring. They could buy it for four cents a pound. The fishermen got a penny a pound and worked their tails off to get it. They were up before dawn, out on the lake in open boats in all kinds of weather, hauling heavy nets till their backs nearly broke, filling the boats to the gunnels with fish, and racing back to shore to dress it. Sometimes they worked half the night—salting it, pack-ing it, and loading it on a freight car before the locomotive backed up and hauled the car away.”

I said, “I hope they didn’t use gill nets.”

“No way! They used coarse-mesh ‘pond’ nets. That’s spelled p-o-u-n-d. I never found out why it was pronounced the way it was. In the spring, after the ice broke up, they drove stakes in the lake bottom—tree trunks as long as fifty feet—and they drove ’em with manpower before the gasoline derrick came into use. After that, they set out their nets and visited them every day to scoop out the catch.

When cold weather came, they pulled up the stakes before the ice could crush ’em. Then they spent the winter mend-ing nets and repairing boats.”

“I can see why your grandfather wanted to get out of the business.”

“That wasn’t the reason. He wasn’t afraid of hard work.

It’s a sad story. He lost his father and two older brothers in a freak incident on the lake. They went out in a thirty-five-foot boat, the Jenny Lee, to lift nets. The weather was fair.

Lots of boats were in the fishing grounds, all within sight of 쑽쑽쑽

106

Short & Tall Tales each other. Suddenly the Jenny Lee

vanished. One minute she was seen by other fishermen; the next minute she was gone. The authorities searched for a week and never found the bodies—never even found the boat underwater. The whole village of Fishport was in mourning. It’s remained an unsolved mystery.”

I stared at Bushy sternly. “Is this an actual fact?”

“It’s the God’s truth! There’s a memorial plaque in the churchyard. Someone wrote a folk song about it.”

“Were there any speculations as to what happened?”

“All kinds, but there was only one conclusion, and you won’t like it. It had to have something to do with the Visitors—like, they could make a thirty-five-foot boat vaporize.

There was lots of talk about the Visitors way back then, you know: Blobs of green light in the night sky . . . Sometimes shining things in daylight. That was before I was born, and they’re still coming back—some years more than others.”

I wanted to believe my friend, but found it difficult. I said, “You once told me about some kind of incident when you were out fishing.”

“Yeah, it was my old boat. I was on the lake all by myself, fishing for bass. All at once I had a strange feeling I wasn’t alone. I looked up, and there was a silver disk with portholes! I had my camera case with me, but before I could get out my camera, the thing disappeared in a flash. Their speed, you know, has been clocked at seventeen hundred miles per hour.”

I listened with my usual skepticism, although I tried 쑽쑽쑽

107

Lilian Jackson Braun not to show it. I thought, Here I am in the middle of the lake with a crazy guy! Watch it!

Soberly, I asked, “Do they accelerate from zero to seventeen hundred in the blink of an eye? Or do you think they have a technology that makes them invisible at will?”

“That’s the mystery,” Bushy said.

“And there’s another mystery. There’s a rash of sight-ings every seven years—documented in diaries and county records as far back as 1850. Does it take them seven years for a round-trip between their planet and our planet? Or is there a time differential? Is our year equivalent to their month?”

I said, “Bushy, we’d better get back to shore. I have to feed the cats.”

쑽쑽쑽

108

쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀

쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀쒀

쒀

20.

A Scary Experience

on a Covered Bridge

It Was Dark and

Emma Wimsey Was Alone