Haunted Harbours by Steve Vernon Page B

arms like the baby that she and James would never have, she leaped into the deep end of the pond.
    At the last she thought better of it and kicked for the surface but the rock was far too heavy and bound too tightly. It carried her straight to the bottom. She tried to scream and swallowed dirty pond water and her face turned a colour that nearly matched her forget-me-not eyes.
    Not more than five minutes later young Jamie came by the pond.
    â€œDonnalee!” he shouted, but there was nothing but the laughter of an unseen moonlight whippoorwill that answered his call. Jamie circled the pond seven more times until he nearly fell over Donnalee’s luggage. Fearing the worst, he knelt and peered down into the water, searching until he saw her staring up at him, her face a pale blue moon of sorrow.
    He knelt there and wept until his tears had cried themselves dry. Then he stood up as straight as a trooper on dress parade. He straightened his uniform and scuffed the loose dirt off with his hands.
    He scattered the forget-me-nots he’d picked upon the waters of the pond. Then he blew on those bagpipes, a long last haunting pibroch — a lament for the dead. He marched around the pond, playing his last pibroch until the coyotes howled and the hoot owls called back at him. And then he marched straight into the pond, playing the bagpipes right up until the very end.
    The forget-me-nots still grow around the Piper’s Pond, scattered like a thousand pale blue tears. The legend says that if you run around the pond thirteen times in a counter-clockwise direction, six times for her and seven for him, or once for every full moon in a year, the piper will rise up out of Piper’s Pond and begin to play the bagpipes.
    Is it true? As Sam Slick was wont to say, “Facts can be stranger than fiction.”

11

THE MOOSE
ISLAND DEVIL

FIVE ISLANDS

    I first heard this tale told over a pitcher of good draught beer at the Lord Nelson Beverage Room in Halifax, a lowly tavern made famous by the fact that it was only the second pub in Halifax to allow women inside its doors. More recently, the pub has served as the first stopping point for many a college student working their way down Spring Garden Road towards the livelier downtown bars. It was fine fishing grounds for a wandering storyteller; the talk was cheap and the beer even cheaper.
    The man who told this tale to me gave me nothing more than the barest of bones to work with. Such is a storyteller’s lot. A few days worth of digging at the Archives enriched the facts, and I’ve painted in what details history saw fit to leave out.
    Moose Island is the largest of a fistful of islands that jut into the Bay of Fundy at the base of the broad and low Economy Mountain, near Five Islands, Nova Scotia. There’s fine hiking here, and in the autumn the turning leaves will tell you stories I could never dream of.
    The Mi’kmaq tell us that Glooscap created these islands while throwing stones at the beaver across the bay from the top of Cape Blomidon. The legend goes that the beaver had built a dam between Advocate and Blomidon, causing water to flow into Glooscap’s Blomidon home and drown out his medicine garden. Glooscap set a trap to catch the beaver, but the wily animal escaped his device. In a fit of rage Glooscap then threw five great boulders at the beaver, who escaped, but not without a flattened tail.
    More practical sources will tell you that the five islands have been christened geometrically for their shape — Diamond, Long, Egg, Pinnacle, and Moose. Moose Island is so named because it looks just like the hump of a big old bull moose rising up from out of the gray waters of the Atlantic.
    Upon the granite coastal wall of Moose Island is crudely carved the face of an angry bearded man. Locals call this cliffside Ruff’s Ghost after a long dead Irish settler who went by the name of John Ruff.
    Back in the mid-1800s Moose Island was the only