By Louis Silcox as seen in the Wilmot-Tavistock Gazette
Area residents may have noticed boaters on the Nith River this summer. Some of them were research biologists from the General University of the Great Lakes (GUoGL) aiming to prove once and for all that there is no Nithy. Leading the research team is Dr. Reid Hairing, a graduate of the GUoGL fisheries program.
I happened to meet with Dr. Hairing at the canoe docks in Scott Park as he was pulling his boat out of the river. He acknowledged that the project was unusual but said, “We still learned much about the things that live in the river.”
“Did you find any evidence of Nithy?” I asked. “No. Nothing. Sorry,” he reported.
“We are confident that there is no monster anywhere in the river.”
I followed up. “Where might Nithy have gone? Where is it now? Has it moved into the Grand River?”
Dr. Hairing seemed surprised at my question.
“It’s not here,” he said.
“Then where is it now?” I wanted to know.
I know the General University of the Great Lakes is a fine institution, but Dr. Hairing seemed to be hiding something. So, I pressed him further.
“How have you studied the river?”
He said they looked all up and down from below Haysville up to Wellesley. “You looked?” I exclaimed. “The river is so muddy, you can’t even see below the surface! You looked?”
Dr. Hairing finally realized he wasn’t going to slip a fast one past me and added, “We also used sonar, we set up night-vision cameras at several spots, hung hydrophones in the water to listen. We examined bottom material for DNA and we collected water samples from the Haysville area. We found DNA evidence of muskrat, beaver, walleye, bass, frogs, salamanders – everything we found we could identify.
“The only conclusion possible is that there is no monster in the river.”
Well, I guess that’s it. We now have reliable scientific evidence, reported by Dr. Hairing, a wildlife biologist from the University of the Great Lakes, that Nithy has moved on to some other body of water, maybe the Grand River or the Speed River
When contacted by the Gazette, Dr. Hairing confirmed that there was no indication that Nithy was in the river but claims he never said it had moved on.
Editor’s note: This story may be entirely fiction and none of the people quoted or the institutions listed are real except, maybe, for Louis Silcox. I’ll let you be the judge of that.
