E. Russell Smith writes in Ottawa when he isn't paddling or skiing into some Canadian wilderness. His poetry, stories, feature articles and reviews have appeared in periodicals across Canada, the USA, and the UK. His published books include Trippers' Tales: Stories and Legends from the Ottawa Valley (GSPH 1991), The Felicity Papers: Forgotten Voices of a Valley Town (GSPH 1995) and Why We Stand Facing South (poetry; Moonstone Press, 1998). A second poetry collection and a historical-juvenile novel are forthcoming. Find his work at www.ncf.ca/~ab297/

Monday's Poem The Birds of Haggart's Ditch A threnody by E. Russell Smith © A pair of orioles sing around their hanging bower; an osprey whistles to his consort on her tower. Songs heard by teams of wondering Irishmen who dug too shallow for the draft of steamboats. Yet for all their pains they died. The early Tay canal, a tag on Colonel By's original, brought timbers briefly from the mills at Perth, and then it failed as well. Today a lazy paddle brings us through this legendary mire from lower locks to duelling-fields and luncheon at a coffee house not there in eighteen thirty-four. Water snakes and painted turtles sun on mossy logs, and spy us passing, alone at first with nature and the past, where muskrats vee the glassy water by shores of reeds and speckled alder. Circling turkey vultures also watch. Flycatchers sweep malarial mosquitoes from the autumn air. Herons stalk and stab for minnows in the shallows. Bottle gentian, bittersweet, and grape, hyssop, alien thorn, and loosestrife dress the banks where we have found, above the rough-cut masonry, abandoned shards of old clay pipes. Men in blinds are watching decoys. One old gander crosses overhead; the hunters fail to call it in. In dying light beneath a formidable sky the bird drops down into a cove where boys with shotguns passing in an outboard, stop to shoot the sitting fowl. It rises for a short last flight, falters and collapses in the reeds. They have no dog to fetch it, and they give up trying to retrieve the wounded creature, left to die and lie, like those abandoned Irish navvies in an unmarked resting place. Swallows nest beneath a bridge; redwings cry; a pied-billed grebe forages near the upstream end. Kingfishers rattle on of happier days.

The Tay Canal, known as "Haggart's Ditch" after John G. Haggart, local MP, Minister of Railways and Canals who spent much money upgrading it, is part of the Rideau System. The present locks were built in 1883-1887, replacing earlier wooden locks of 1834. About 500 Irish labourers died building the Rideau Canal.