May 28th

10C Cloudy.
Today it is the "Battle of the Sexes" at bowls, followed by pizza or lunch.
Well I did manage to knock off another short story. It will be in two parts. I have started another one that is an attempt to sequalize a story based on fact with a fiction addition as to 'what may have happened'.
You will have to wait for that.
Now here is the first of two very short stories connected by ----------------------------------------

 COW-INCIDENCE

I had written the following story quite a few years back, but I believe it is lost due to technological changes that have occurred to computer programs, in this case a word processing package that no longer exists.

This is actually two stories connected by coincidental themes or as the title indicates they are cow-incidental.

The first part occurred when I was about six years old. We lived in the very small coastal town of Lund. My Dad was away most of each week on his Forestry boat the Arbutus. When he was home on weekends he strived hard to do those fatherly things that us fathers want to do.

This particular time he decided that he and I would go fishing and then camp overnight.

We had to walk from where we lived in an apartment in the Lund Hotel. To my short little legs it seemed like we went quite a distance but in reality it was just a mile or so out of town. Our destination was a fairly large meadow that had a small stream passing through it. There was a wire fence across one end of the meadow and just on the one side there was a small dam that provided a reservoir for the town’s water supply. The grass on this side was tall, lush and untouched.

On the other side of the fence the grass was cropped short by the small herd of dairy cows that the local farmer owned. We could see them at the far end of the meadow, quite some distance away.

There was a small pool below the dam and of course a bigger one above it. My Dad chose to set up the tent he had lugged along against the fence on the cropped side. This gave us access to both pools and the small trout that lived there.

I no longer remember all the details, I know we caught some fish but don’t remember if I caught any of them.

Before dark my dad got a fire going, we dragged chunks of wood and branches from the bush a few hundred feet away. I also helped him gather up some of the dried out cow paddies that were quite plentiful, we stacked these beside our fire.

We probably turned in pretty early.

In the middle of the night I was awakened to the sound of my Dad shouting then our tent shaking followed by the end closest to the fire collapsing. I was scared!

What had happened is Dad had stoked up the fire with cow paddies to keep mosquitoes and black flies at bay and the cows apparently used to smudge pots when the biting insects were bad had crowded around the fire and stumbled into our tent ropes. Looking back in later years the humour of it all was very real and I am fortunate in having the kind of memory that retains things from my childhood.