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It was a nice kind of day, sunny and warm, no
wind. I paddled around for about an hour, I guess. Good exercise,
right? A relaxing paddle, right?
Not in this canoe, and not on Miller Pond.
Because when I first launched the canoe, it
became the Golden Hind, sailing into San Francisco Bay for the first
time, allowing me to claim California for the British. Then, as I
neared the point, out came the Iroquois in their war canoes, and I
had to paddle like crazy and duck the arrows as I tried to keep them
from taking my beaver pelts and my life.
But I made it.
Then, in the middle of a calm, warm afternoon,
Miller Pond became the stormy Atlantic as my square-rigged ship
tossed in the grip of the hurricane. I stayed glued to the helm and
kept her bow facing the blast. We rode each mountainous wave to the
top and then hurtled down the other side into a trough filled with
dread and death. And just when the men had given up, my skillful
paddling sent us safely climbing yet another monstrous sea into the
sunlight of victory and life.
When the storm subsided, I spied an enemy
warship, laden to the gunwales with high explosives. So heavily
laden was it, actually, that all you could see was its eyes and nose
and the slight rudderly switch of his tail as it camouflaged itself
as a muskrat.
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column in this article]
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But there in my submarine, the crew was alert
to these ruses. Swiftly and silently I turned the submarine until
its forward torpedo tubes faced the enemy warship. As I watched
through the periscope for any sign that their deck crew had spotted
us, I gave the orders.
"Fire one! Fire two!"
"Torpedoes running hot, straight and normal,
sir," said my second-in-command, who resembles a coonhound in
civilian life.
Blam! Blam! Dead-center hits on the warship,
which strangely kept going until it rounded a point in the ocean,
preferring to sink privately, out of sight of its conquerors.
Then the armada was sighted, closing in on the
north of Ireland. It looked a lot like Herb Collins in his new dory.
As the armada swung around to face our guns, I took note of the
dory's clean lines, the upswept bow and stern. It reminded me a lot
of a World War II battleship.
I gotta get me one of those.
[Slim Randles]
Brought to you by "Raven's Prey." Check it out
at
www.slimrandles.com.
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