Every summer on Canada Day at the North End Community Hall there is a fair and the whole island comes out and takes part in the festivities. There are many events to choose from: sack races, pie eating, a water balloon toss. However, one Canada Day was a very special one. That year it had been previously announced on posters all around the island that there would be a slug race. This was an island first and my father, curious about this new event, thought it might be a good idea to start looking for a worthy specimen to enter in the race. Cement was the name given to the giant slug he found eating my mothers kale in the garden.

When I was a child growing up on a small island, it seemed we always had someone staying at our house. As it so happened our current houseguest had a doctorate in biology and specialized in shell-less terrestrial gastropod mollusks (slugs). He and my father conversed for a while about the upcoming slug race and the good doctor told my father that slugs love the odour of one thing above all foods available to all slugs everywhere on earth. Dog poo.

In the interest of science it was decided that an experiment be conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of dog poo as a slug motivator. We already had the test slug, Cement, who to my mother’s disapproval was now living on the kitchen table in one of her Mason jars now with a screened top. Cement currently did not do much. In fact, the slug did not do anything at all, it was just a dark slimy lump in a jar. I decided slugs don’t make good house pets.

That afternoon my grandparents came to the island bringing with them their beloved dog, Coco, who soon made a big poo on the lawn. My father collected some of Coco’s poo in a jar for safekeeping. The experiment was on. He then dipped a stick in the jar so that there was some poo on its end and put the poopy end of the stick near the Mason jar on the kitchen table.

Cement the slug perked up.

It was like someone had turned on a switch; Cement’s little slug optical tentacles shot out of their dark little slug head and went straight for the poo.

 My father by now is convinced that Cement the slug will be a winner.

The next day was the big race. We all drove up to the North End of the island. I was holding the jar that Cement was somewhere in, I hoped was conserving energy for the big race. When the race was announced everyone gathered around a big table that had been marked like a little race track with lanes down its length and a start and a finish line. Everyone put their slugs on the start line. All the slugs stayed where placed, in one spot, dormant. They looked like black turds on a table.

father stood tableside, holding a stick and the small jar of dog poo. He opened the jar and put some poo on the end of the stick. Someone asked him what was on the end of the stick. He told them that it was his Russian grandmother’s secret slug food recipe. As soon as he waved the stick near Cement all the slugs could smell the poo but Cement knew what was up and went straight for it.

The race was on and everyone huddled around the table watching my father coax a slug forward with a stick covered with dog poo.

Children cheered, old ladies clucked, some men made bets. I was ecstatic and just tall enough to see the race table where I focused on Cement. Cement was focused on the end of the stick. My father was conducting the entire event with a baton of dog poo.

Cement steadily slimed down the race track towards the finish line.

In the end, my father, slug race winner, proudly took home the grand prize–a giant, orange, papier-mâché slug. He would forever hold the title of Island Slug Race Champion and to this day every summer at the North End Hall Canada Day fair he recalls the Great Slug Race and how he and Cement won it and changed the face of island slug racing forever.

After his remarkable victory, Cement was released back into the wild. He was never seen nor heard from ever again.

-the end-