June 20th

15C Cloudy
Gas was down to $ 1.11.9/litre yesterday - better than 1.29.9 of a week ago but still very high.
Lawn bowls this pm but the weather should be good.

I never saw either of them again.

  It didn’t take long to get the lay of the land, John already knew other kids in the area. One, his name was Billy, was his best friend after me. I liked him too, a dog lived at his house but she was quite old and slept almost all the time. She used to grumble a bit when I cleaned up the leftovers in her supper dish but I don’t think she really meant anything and I did understand that I was sort of trespassing.  There were some other kids just a little further than Billy’s house and they all used to play together. One game I liked was called ‘hide n seek’; I was really good at the seeking part and would often help find John. For some reason this annoyed him and sometimes he would take me home and leave me with Mom.

  I quickly found out that I could now go to school when John went, the first couple of times I managed to get right into the school but the lady who was the boss there took exception to my visits. I ended up being tied for a little while in the mornings, but no problem, once I was loose I just went up the hill and hung around outside. I stopped trying to get inside though.

  Maybe because during the day I was a bit lonely I took to doing a bit of exploring and once again I found deer living nearby. Oh what fun I had, I knew I could never catch one, but they were bigger than me and they were obviously afraid. Once I got on the trail of one I just couldn’t quit. I would chase them for hours, if I got too tired, I would have a little snooze and go at it again. Once I kept at it for two days, by then I was hungry and worn out. I had to backtrack myself in order to find my way home.

  Like the other time this came to an abrupt halt when one day this strange man in funny clothes and a hat stopped by our place. He gave my family a lecture about dogs running deer and I remember his words “dire consequences”. I didn’t know what that meant but it sounded pretty bad. That day I was tied up and kept tied up for several days. Now that was dire consequences! John would come and talk to me, a couple of times I thought he was blubbering and he said things about people would shoot me or that they would take me away. Shooting I wasn’t too sure about but I sure didn’t want to be taken away. That must have been in the fall, because shortly after that we had a lot of rain, then it got really cold and this white stuff settled on the ground. It dampened my desire to run through the bush and I found I kind of liked hanging close to the house and that nice warm stove. By spring I kind of forgot about deer and I did rationalize that chasing them was a lot of hard work and if I ever caught one, I wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.

  One of my favorite things was to go on long walks with my family. There were many places to go, we frequently would have what they called a picnic, there was always much fun and often other people would join us. In the summer all the boys in the neighborhood spent half their days swimming. Like I said earlier I never liked to swim, not that I couldn’t (actually I was a very good swimmer) but I just didn’t like it.  Every once in a while John would pack me out into the water and then of course I had to swim back to shore. Strange every time that happened it made me really frisky and in spite of being a bit undignified I would race around in circles, roll in the grass or sand or what ever was handy.

  John had another friend (he was a Billy as well) he and his family lived right out over the beach. They had a dog living with them but I never got to know him too well as he was away most of the time with the Dad on his fish boat. But when he was home we got along ok, although he was kind of possessive about what he considered his territory. That seemed to end right at their gate so it was no problem – all the rest of Irvine’s Landing was mine.