Otherworldly Maine by Noreen Doyle Page B

mystery:
CAVE PEOPLE IN STRANGE VIGIL
    People have begun to gather on a hillside outside Brattleboro, Saskatchewan, and each morning there seems to be more of them, speaking in a growing variety of tongues.
    All day these people do little more than sit and stare at an object partially imbedded in the earth, which blocks off the mouth of a natural cave—one of a series in the area. The stainless-steel capsule, apparently catching the gleam of the sun, seems to glow as if from its own internal light.
    Toward evening, the cave people can be heard chanting. Once the sun is down, they build campfires, and the chanting stops. Lately they have been entering the catacombs of surrounding caves to shelter themselves for the night and, it is said, to pray.
    Brattleboro police told the Gazette that the cave people are orderly and are breaking no laws. “That hill is part of a huge national forest preserve, open to all Canadians,” said Chief Judd Nooson. “There’s nothing much we can do about them, legally.”
    A professor of philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan, Stanley Nihlin, offered a possible explanation: “In these times of rapid change, when religious belief is at such a low level, people try on cults like new shoes. And discard them just as quickly.”
    A curious postscript to that newspaper item and, indeed, to this entire investigation, is that the editorial assistant who first heard about the Hermit Genius of Marshville, and the reporter who covered the story for EQMM , have resigned. Reportedly she left her husband and children and he left his fianceé and friends behind to join the cave people. But this has not been confirmed.
Footnote
    â€  At their request, the identities of the assistant and the reporter are being withheld.

BASS FISHING WITH THE ENEMY
    Daniel Hatch
    S ome people said we were heroes and some said we were traitors, but we were just a few old Mainers, with scruffy white beards and tussled white hair, in the right place at the right time—or maybe the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on your point of view.
    Either way, the place we were at was a little seafood and ice cream shack called The Cabana at the southeast end of a little lake outside of Auburn. My brother, Ben, and I had been out fishing since the sun came up.
    I love the lake first thing in the morning, when great clouds of steam rise up into the sky and a dazzling glare sparkles across the water. I was trying out a new bass lure—yellow and red with little flukes on the side. We didn’t have much to show for the effort, but it was a wicked good way to keep a couple of old men out of their wives’ way for a few hours.
    It wasn’t much of a lake—only a couple miles long and less than a mile across and pretty rectangular down at our end. Nothing like its bigger neighbors, Sebago and Thompson, but sufficient it was to the purpose of the day.
    Our cottage was at one corner of the lake—now a duplex with my wife and I on one side and Ben and his wife on the other. The Cabana was over at the other corner, set just far enough back to be out of view from our porch.
    It was one of those aging gems you find around Maine, with red-and-white-striped awnings outside and dark wood paneling inside. A juke box sat in the corner with little units at each booth where you could drop your quarter and pick your song. There was an old Coca-Cola sign on one wall and a Moxie sign on the other—the real thing from the factory in Lisbon Falls, not one of those phony Americana factory fakes. The place had the smell of moss and old grease and pine oil. It was a monument to the heyday of Maine’s Golden Age, a century ago, before the rest of the country moved on and it stayed behind. (“Hea’d you had a Depression down theah,” my father used to say to the tourists, with a heavy Down East cant. “Hea’d it was ovah.”)
    We tied our little boat at the dock and walked