22 Cat Food Ain’t What I Wana Be

One morning shortly before Roy and Marg left, Marg comes over all excited; you could tell she had something important to say, as she could hardly wait to get started.  She was a real talker anyway.   It seems that Roy had taken his bicycle and had gone to the Surge Narrow store for supplies the night before.  The roads on Read Island if you could call them roads were narrow dirt not quite one lane just wide enough in most places for a small car.  At this particular time there were no cars on the Island but you could do all right on a bicycle with what we used to call balloon tires.  Mountain bikes had not yet been invented.

For his return trip home Roy wore a headlamp and carried his supplies in his backpack.  The headlamp gave an adequate beam to see down the lonely, pitch-black trail through the forest.  Traveling along the last stretch before home he thought he heard a rhythmic padding sound like something flapping or a tire’s rhythmic rubbing on something. He dismissed his concern and carried on as it was late and he was anxious to get home.  It was just when his thoughts had settled some, when from out of nowhere something hit him from the back, catching his backpack as it flew by, and knocking him flying.  He landed with quite a thud but was fortunate not to get seriously hurt.  Quickly scrambling to his feet he furtively looked in every direction as his headlamp cast a dim glow into the brush on either side of the trail.  The terror in his heart reached a high note only matched by the disappointed screams of a cougar that had missed its prey.  The fear ran up Roy’s spine as the eyes of the cougar glowed back at him from the light of his lamp. “ This is not good,” Roy is thinking, then, it was gone.  With the fear still raging in his heart he quickly found his bicycle and tore off down the trail with his heart still pounding.  When Roy came rushing into the house as white as a sheet and slamming the door quickly behind him, Marg knew that he had had a close encounter with something and cried out, “Honey what happened to you?”  ”You look like you just saw a ghost.”   Roy exclaimed, “You won’t believe how lucky I was.  I was so close to becoming cat food that I could smell it.  I think I can still smell it?”  Marg says, “But it doesn’t smell like cat food to me.”  So while Roy took a bath to get rid of the smell he told Marg in detail his close encounter with the cougar, and they both had a good laugh to relieve the fear and tension of the moment.

Eventually Roy and Marg moved away because dad could not keep Roy working steady enough.  I think I missed Marg and Roy when they left for Kelsey Bay where he put into practice the skills of the logging trade that my dad had taught him.  It was only years later after I had left Read Island and the memories of Bird Cove that I looked him and Marg up, but that was even now years ago and I often wander how things went with him and Marg through the years.