Peg Tale #1

What happened to it?

I'll tell you what happened to it:  pirates.

Yes, it was pirates, right here on the Concord River.  Bet you never read about anything like that in your Thoreau or your Emerson, now, did you?  Naw, for it's a dark, dread secret. Would be terrible for tourism if it got out.

Up they came in their black kayaks, silent almost as the river current itself.  They may just have been men in bear costumes, but the claws they flashed and the teeth they gnashed as they growled and demanded our picnic pack looked real and sharp enough to me.

Now we had already eaten our picnic, up on the banks, some ways back where the water lily pads hold their shiny, smiling faces up to the sun for kissing, all at once in wide expanses like some kind of mass marriage ceremony.  And it had been a good picnic, a fine picnic full of luscious gourmet tidbits, and we had eaten every bite.

Every bite.

We feared the wrath of the bear pirates when they discovered nothing in the pack but empty Pellegrino bottles and soiled Tupperware, so with just a brief glance into each other's eyes, over the side of the canoe we went, swimming, swimming for all we were worth.

It was then that the mighty, giant snapping turtle, sister goddess of the Musketaquid herself, she who wallows in the muddy bottom far from sunlight and harsh-slicing paddles, saw my legs a-kicking, kicking for freedom and my life.  Starved and exhausted as she was after crossing broad, fast highways to lay her eggs and then crossing back to her cool, dark lair, my flailing limbs looked to her like a tasty lunch, pale pink and full of vigor like the biggest, juiciest worms she'd ever hope to clap her beak upon.  So she fulfilled her name, lunged from the sediment with the last of her strength, and snapped into me with all the gusto of a construction worker with a hero sandwich at noon.

I had to hop home once I reached the beach, and peg it ever after, but it was worth it, for I learned my lesson well:

Leftovers are a good thing.

Comments

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Of course it was pirates. Why wouldn't it be pirates?

[Sara]

Well, it could also have been a gardening incident, something that happened the same week, something to do with giant loppers and a carnivorous rose...

I'm just now trying to remember. ;)