From The Scrap Book
September 1993
By Dr. Bill Randall
Smokey The Cat
My Smokey is a beautiful solid black cat born March 4, 1993. She has gorgeous yellow eyes and is for us the personification of what a beautiful native cat should be. Of course, I really wanted to know her genealogy! O.K.? She came to us from the Henry’s in Magundy. Her parents were from Donnelly Settlement, Lake George her grandparents were from Rosborough Settlement on the upper Pokiok Road and their ancestors came from Lower Southampton – before it was called Nackawic. Jocelean Hall will surely ask “what is the verification of your sources” – and Jo, honest, would you trust what a tomcat told you? Well here’s my verification. George Frederick Clark wrote a book “Six Salmon Rivers and Another” in his book he relates a story told to him by Joe Perry.
Joe, in 1934 was teaching in the little country school house at Lower Southampton. He says that after a couple of weeks in the village three young men told him they were going to dig for treasure on the Indian Lookout and they asked him to accompany them. Now the Indian Lookout was a prominent low flat land projection created by the St. John River as it made its sharp oxbow turn just above the Nackawic Stream it was known as the Munroe Flats.
Well they told him it had to be after midnight on a full moon and the utmost secrecy was intended in Joe’s words “it was just after midnight when we reached the Look Out. We had shovels and a grub-axe to work with, and a lantern which at first we didn’t light because the moon made everything as bright as day. It was a weird sort of night_ Between the bowies of the small growth of the trees on the Look Out we could see a low bank of mist, as white as milk, over the St. John. In the hollow on our left, the Nackawic rippled and gurgled over its rocky bed. Occasionally the plop of a salmon in the pool at its mouth reached our ears; far back of us, the wolfish howl of a dog which Jerry O’Neil whispered to us boded ill for some poor body. Now and then we heard the baa of a sheep from the hillside pasture, while the faint tinkle of a cow bell rose at fell on the night air that was as still as death itself. At long intervals, from across the river, came the hum of a motor car and we saw the headlights sweeping the highway with a concentrated path of gold.
There were a few rock and roots where we dug, but for the most part it was easy work, and in a very short time we had a hole as big as a molasses puncheon. As it got deeper we took turns getting into it, throwing up the earth to those above, who removed it to one side.
My companions seldom spoke, and then only in a low voice. I gathered that they were quite nervous, so I began joking them: told them we might dig through to China and find no treasure. As for being disturbed by spirits, or anything else, that was all poppy-cock. They begged me to be quiet but I joshed them the more.
Well, it was about half past two when Jerry – who is taking his turn in the hole, shoveling out – whispered that he’d struck rocks and asked for the grub-axe to loosen them. It was passed down to him so he began picking away, pausing every minute or so to throw up the rocks. Finally, we heard a dull, splintering sound then Jerry’s excited voice: “I’ve gone through something that’s hollow. This is it, boys!”
The rest of use clustered about the mouth of the hole dropped to our knees and peered down at Jerry. I admit we were all as excited as he was. “Light the lantern” Jerry said “So’s I can see what I’m doing.”
Archie Hailes, who was beside me, said “alright Jerry” reached for the lantern, which was behind him, pushed up the little lever that controlled the glass globe, then struck a match. No sooner had he done so than there was the darndest caterwauling I ever heard, and the hole was alive with tomcats – black tomcats – hundreds of them and they came in droves up the sides of the Look Out. Jerry gave a yell you could’ve heard a mile. Then “give me a hand up.” Archie flung the lantern at a dozen big black tomcats it smashed against a tree then went out we both of us grabbed the hand of Jerry then we all ran down the slope of the Look Out and across the field towards the highway and every step we took we stepped on a howling cat. They spang at our legs clawing us one reached my shoulder. I grabbed the fiend by the back tore its claws loose and flung it from me. It struck Jerry and he cried out to St. Peter, St. Paul and St. Anne to persevere him. All of us save Archie Hailes had thrown away our shovels, and half way across the field he laid about him like a veritable Sampson, mowing down the cats in swaths of fifty at a time. The din was terrific. I could see the fiends; they were all black, and their eyes glowed like fireballs. We were almost to the fence that separates the field from the highway when we got another scare that almost turned us inside out. It seems that after the hay cutting Mr. Munroe had turned his cattle out to graze on the after grass. They had been lying down near the fence, and now, hearing us coming, and the yowling of the cats, they jumped to their feet and stampeded in all directions. An ugly old white bull that was the terror of the countryside, threw up its tail in horror and with a succession of bellows tried to escape the cats. They landed on his back as thick as flies on a dead carcass and that bull in a frienzy jumped into the river it swam up to the Pokiok Falls jumped up over the Pokiok Falls and staying in as deep water as it could find headed for the highlands. Running up over the Rosborough Ridge daylight began to creep into the sky and finally the nearly exhausted old bull felt the black cats fall off him and he lay down exhausted.”
They may be parts of this story which cannot be easily proven, but I’m sure that’s where my Smokey came from.
Source: Rev. Bill Randall’s “From The Scrapbook Vol. One.”
