Hailstorms and Hoop Snakes

Nicholas Pashley was a bookseller and a freelance writer and editor in Toronto.

In recent years, the allegedly lost art of storytelling has enjoyed something of a renaissance in Canada. In Hailstorms and Hoop Snakes, Manitoba writer Ted Stone assembles a lively collection of tall tales he has gathered across North America. These stories — some of them familiar even to a city-dweller — are rural tales, usually humorous, often packing a philosophical punch.

Stone’s technique is decidedly non-academic. He tells his stories through Pete, Sparky, and Jake, three old-timers who gather at the Deer River general store to discuss cattle prices and tell lies. Pete, Sparky, and Jake are the sort of men who believe that the earth is two-thirds water because God meant man to spend a third of his time working and the other two-thirds fishing. Not surprisingly, then, a good many of their stories deal with fishing, interspersed with yarns about hunting, dogs, horse trading, city folk, moonshine, the old days, the weather, and more fishing.

The ideal tall tale is able to masquerade as the truth right up to the punch line, and Stone succeeds in presenting almost convincing stories about some extremely unlikely phenomena, including a fish that drowns and a hunting sheep. The author’s style is suitably colourful and folksy to capture the spirit of the stories; after all, the delivery of a tall tale is most important.

Sparky said that Jake told him once about a day so cold a tea kettle full of boiling water froze solid right on the stove. “Jake told me the whole thing happened so fast that when he picked up the kettle the ice was still warm.”

Stone finishes with a short chapter of tips on telling stories. His advice, together with the abundant stories in this book, should be enough to get a budding storyteller nicely on the way.