As True As I’m Sittin’ Here

collected by Archie Neil Chisholm • edited by Brian Sutcliffe & Ronald Caplan • 34 storytellers • 224 pages

LAUGHS, COMEBACKS, GHOSTS, PUT-DOWNS, and all-round wit from Dan Angus Beaton, Jim St. Clair, Sid Timmons, Hector Doink MacDonald, Annie "The Tailor" MacPhee, Alex John MacIsaac, Paddy MacDonald and more.
    Stories that shorten the road, lighten the work, and fill the pauses between tunes. They were collected by the godfather of storytelling, Archie Neil Chisholm, in settings where good stories are born and thrive—kitchens and living rooms throughout Cape Breton Island. Gleaned from the CBC radio show "Archie Neil's Cape Breton"—now in one riotous book—a treasury of the stuff that makes life worth living.
    Here`s just one from Archie Neil Chisholm:
    "Hector Doink was a very active and athletic fellow and he used to talk about the stunts that he'd pull off when he was young. He was telling me one time that he was travelling in the state of Maine. He was cruising timber and he was admiring the trees. There was one particular tree that he was looking at and he said he looked up and he estimated that from the ground to where the first limbs were it was at least forty-five feet. It was just a beautiful tree. Just when he was attentively looking at the tree he heard some crashing behind him and there, not five feet from him, was one of those big, brown bears just beginning to rear up on his hind legs. I asked him, 'What did you do?' 'What could I do?' he said. 'There was only that tree and the limbs forty-five feet up. I took one spring in the air!' And I said, 'Did you make it, Hector?' 'Not going up. But I caught them on the way down!'