Chapter 15
The next day, Granddad Angus got us all up earlier than I liked. The crows were still snoring in the trees and a thick and cloying chowder-fog was brewing in the dark harbour.
“There’s work to be done,” he told me.
I watched as he used a needle that could easily have passed for a whale harpoon to stitch a tangle of yarn onto the dory monster’s neck to give it a thick red mane.
“Sea monsters have red manes?” Warren asked.
“It said so in Roland’s list of ingredients,” Granddad Angus said.
“I think it looks pretty,” Dulsie said, which was saying a lot considering she had painted a sunrise across her face. “It needs eyes, I think.”
“Right you are,” Granddad Angus said, reaching into his magic fishing vest of many pockets and pulling out two glittering chunks of light purple crystal.
“This is amethyst. The Mi’kmaq believed amethyst came to Nova Scotia after young Glooscap scattered his mother’s jewellery box across the beach.”
“Why would Glooscap do a thing like that?” I asked.
“Why?” Granddad Angus replied. “You might as well ask why oceans grow so deep.”
Which didn’t tell me much.
“It was probably because he was fourteen years old at the time,” Warren suggested. “In a recent Statistics Canada survey, it was proven that every single problem in the universe began with a fourteen-year-old boy.”
Dulsie swatted him for that. The swat didn’t stop him from giggling, or repeating what he said, or giggling some more, but I think Dulsie enjoyed swatting her dad all the same. As day-old-tea-bag boring as Warren could be sometimes, he sure made a pretty good father for Dulsie.
Granddad Angus glued the amethysts to the sides of Fogopogo’s head with a tube of something that smelled strong enough to get up and walk on its own.
“That looks great,” Dulsie said. “They glitter, just like a real sea monster’s eyes.”
“Oh yeah?” Warren asked. “So how many sea monsters have you seen, anyway?”
Dulsie stuck her tongue out at Warren.
“One final detail,” Granddad Angus said.
He showed us something that looked like a birch bark dunce’s cap.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
Granddad Angus barked into the narrow end of the cone in reply. It made a sound that reminded me of a mutated Labrador retriever.
“It’s a moose call,” Warren explained. “Hunters use them to call moose.”
“Do you think that sounds like a sea monster?”
“Well, what does a sea monster sound like?” Granddad Angus asked.
I had to admit that I had absolutely no idea.
“People believe what they hear,” Granddad Angus went on. “So we’re going to let them hear a sea monster.”
He made a horrifying haroomphing sound with the moose call. It sounded like a bloated stegosaurus with a bad case of turnip farts.
“It’s just going to take a bit of practise, is all,” Granddad Angus said.
He held the moose call and produced another turnip fart, even stinkier sounding than the last blast.
“Better keep practising,” I told him.
Granddad Angus shook his head.
“We’re all done with practising,” he said. “I think it’s time we took our sea monster out for a spin.”
Everybody suddenly shut up, the same way that a class full of kids goes silent when a teacher walks into the room. It was one thing to build a sea monster. It was quite another thing to actually sail it on the open sea.
“You really want to take this thing out into the harbour?”
“It’s not a thing. It’s got a name now. Everybody calls it Fogopogo,” Granddad Angus said. “And we’re taking Fogopogo out for a dip in Deeper Harbour.”
“And how will we get it into the harbour?” Warren asked.
“Simple,” Granddad Angus said. “We’ll take it out through Muddy Lake.”
I swallowed and took a deep breath, enjoying what I was sure would be one of my last.