1998 short list:
Dippers
by Barbara Nichol
illustrated by Barry Moser
published by Tundra Books
Published with permission from the author. This excerpt is copyright protected.
There was a little song the girls had for skipping. It went:
Dipper dipper
Come to stay
Dipper dipper
Fly Away!
You'd jump into the skipping rope at the first part, and then when it went "Dipper dipper fly away," you'd jump out. Then it would be someone else's turn. Someone else would jump in.
We had that song even before the dippers came up from the river. Mother used to say to us, "Now, you girls don't go down to that river." The Don River was right there. Mother always thought something bad was going to happen. But you could go swimming down at the river and the boys could go fishing.
Louise and I could go there when we liked because Mother went to work. She cleaned house for people called the Cables up on Jarvis Street.
We lived on Mark Street, which was just off River Street. So we were right there. We were poor and that's where the dippers came around. They came up from the Don River.
Anyone who lived in that part of Toronto in those days knows about dippers. You don't see them now, but in those days they were nothing special. Aunt Benedict said they used to get them down in Windsor. She called them "water dogs." Across the river in Detroit they called them "paddies" or "water paddies."
It was when you got the hot weather that you got the dippers. We called it dipper weather. They'd come up out of the water down at the river. But the summer I'm talking about, they didn't just stay down at the river.
The summer the dippers came up was the same summer Louise got ill. That's how I remember it.
It was a very hot summer. There was a heat wave.
I was about seven or eight because I'd been to school already the year before. That made Louise five.
It was Louise and Mother and me. We didn't have any father. We lived in the back of the house. Upstairs, there were people called the O'Donnells.
The reason they were called dippers is because they'd fly back and forth just over the water and if you made a loud noise, they would dip down. If you clapped your hands, they'd dip down into the water.
They were frightened of the noise. We'd go down there and clap our hands to make them dip.
When you'd done it a few times, they'd dip down just a little in the air and come right back up. After a while they'd be on to you. They got used to the noise.
Sometimes the boys would throw rocks at them.
The dippers were maybe a foot long, or two feet. A big one would be bigger. They had the wings on their back. The wings were stubby and they weren't fur. They were like skin.
That's where the noise came from. It came from the wings. They made a noise when they were flying like clickety, clickety, clickety. They'd come out of the water and then they'd go back and forth, but not very high.
When they came up out of the water, the water would be running off them.
