Chapter 14
Fogopogo began to look a little better after Granddad Angus unearthed a nine-hundred-year-old moose hide from somewhere in the back of his garage. The moose hide stank like an old wet basement, and looked more than a little like a prehistoric, zombified, petrified, deep-fried mammoth, but when he laid it over the frame it looked pretty realistic.
“Where did you get this moose hide from?” I asked.
“From a moose, of course. He’d outgrown it. You might say he and his hide came to an unexpected parting of ways.”
“Is that the truth?” I asked.
“I’m saying it, aren’t I?”
Which didn’t help much, but that’s all he would tell me as we fastened the moose hide onto the frame. Afterwards, we used a glue gun to stick patches of aluminum foil and plastic wrap onto the moose hide.
“This will catch the light nicely and give it a whole fish-scale sort of look,” Granddad Angus explained.
He found some crow feathers that he had been saving in a dried-out paint tin and stitched them to the outside of the hide.
“How’s that look?” he asked.
“Like a bunch of black feathers stitched to a smelly old moose hide,” Warren said. “Are we fixing on building the world’s first flying moose?”
“The feathers will help to break up the silhouette. Just try and imagine seeing it from a distance on a dark and foggy night,” Granddad Angus said. “In the end it will look like exactly what people expect to see.”
I was more inclined to side with Warren, but I wasn’t going to say anything that might spoil the adventure. Even if it didn’t work, I was having fun putting this sea monster together.
“The moose hide won’t cover the oars,” I said. “People will be able to see them.”
“We aren’t using oars,” Granddad Angus said.
“What are we doing then? Swimming?” Dulsie asked.
“The great inventor has a master plan,” Warren said. “He won’t even tell me about it.”
Two days later, Granddad Angus showed us his secret plan.
“Propellers?” Warren said.
A propeller poked through a hole on each side of the dory. They were attached to a set of bike pedals in the centre of the boat. Granddad Angus sat in the dory with his feet on the pedals, and his hands holding on to a pair of handle grips that looked like they had come from a beat-up old bicycle.
My beat-up old bicycle.
“Is that my bicycle?” I asked.
“Well, it was. Now it’s something else,” Granddad Angus said.
“That was my bike.”
“You were figuring on riding that bike to Ottawa, were you?” Dulsie asked. “Or did you really think your mother would bother to haul your mementos there?”
Mementos?
It is awfully hard to listen to good sense, especially when it is coming to you from the mouth of a fifteen-year-old girl wearing a feather bonnet, with owl eyes painted around her own.
“Life is about letting go of things you no longer need,” Granddad Angus explained. “That’s how the trees make it through the winter—by letting go of the leaves they no longer need.”
Oh sure, I knew the bike was two years too small for me, but I still loved to sit on that purple glitter banana seat in our garage when it rained, reading through my comic book collection.
“They’re not propellers,” Granddad Angus said. “They’re called grinders. You turn the pedal and the grinder turns and moves the boat. They used them on dories that crossed Halifax Harbour back before the ferry boats ever ran.”
“Will they work?” Warren asked.
“Like a charm,” Granddad Angus said. “They’re slow but quiet. They won’t make much backsplash. From a distance it’ll look like the motion a sea monster would make.”
Warren and I nodded doubtfully.
“Besides,” Granddad Angus said, lifting a blanket up from the back of the dory, “I put something else in here from that old bike of yours.”
I leaned over, had a look, and grinned. Sitting in the stern of the dory, bolted to a sturdy board, was my extra-cushy purple glitter banana seat.
“All right,” I said with a grin. “That’s more like it.”
“We better cut some holes in the moose hide so we can see out of it,” Granddad Angus instructed. “And caulk up the seams good and tight. We don’t want to sink our sea serpent in the middle of the harbour, do we?”
In the midst of all this excitement I’d somehow forgotten that we planned on sailing this contraption on the open ocean. Thinking about the prospect of sinking made me want to paint and repaint and goop the dory with every kind of waterproofing imaginable.
Now that I thought about it, adding a few life preservers and a Coast Guard helicopter might be a good idea, too.