When I was about 8 years old, me, my father and sister were out on a dinghy fishing for mackerel and flounder. That's when you could catch flounder around our area. We were all using drop lines. I felt a huge pull on my line, and I reacted, but my dad thought I was taking the piss. (I used to expertly mimic the sound of a police siren from the back seat)...he realized (sorry Tony) that I wasn't joking and grabbed my line. He started to draw the thing up, and then my sister started screaming and frantically trying to control her line. She hooked the thing's tail. So the shark was long enough to form a U underneath our boat. My father pulled the thing close enough to the surface that we saw how big it was, and it opened it's mouth to us, like trying to defend itself. My father took his knife and cut the line. We started to panic a little bit and he rowed like an Olympian back to dry land. We determined that it was a sick or dying shark, who sometimes enter rivers to die. The thing was big, but my dad still managed to draw it closer.
I also saw old Kennebec drawings inside a hidden cave on a small island off the Maine coast. The Kennebecs inhabited much of the midcoast of Maine. They were driven out of the country entirely, by the British Crown, you assholes
i saved a squirrel from the jaws of my cat Willie, when I was about 12 years old. I took the thing into a wooded area and put it on the ground. He scampered up my back leg, up my back and rested on my shoulder. He was thanking me, and didn't want me to leave him. Cute little critter.
I remember the older kids in my neighborhood park trying to sell me mescaline. The basketball nets were always stolen, so it was always just the rims. There was a swamp nearby and one time I saw a dead dog stinking up the area there for a whole summer. This was before people got all uptight about that kind of shit. The dog died a dignified death under that log, goddammit.