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March/April 1997 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: Saguenay Floods Write to Know Our Home and Native Tongue

Duelling dads

YES, THEY CAN. So can puppies, piglets and even people. Any female mammal capable of producing more than one baby at a time can, theoretically at least, do so through different sires. In the case of kittens, cats are induced ovulators. It is the act of mating that stimulates the ovaries to produce eggs. A queen — a female cat — might be bred by one tom one day and another the next, and both breedings could produce fertilized eggs. Other female mammals, including dogs, are receptive for a set number of days. If a bitch breeds with more than one male dog over her receptive period, it might be the strength of individual sperm cells that decides who fertilizes the available eggs. This principle has farmyard applications. Pig breeders have found that, in artificially inseminating sows, using a mélange of pig semen in which individual sperm cells compete results in better litters. In the case of humans, a woman who conducts successive affairs and happens to produce two eggs could produce twins who are only semi-fraternal. Getting back to cats, just because kittens in the same litter look completely different doesn’t mean they have different daddies. Cats, particularly the common domestic short-haired variety, have been mixing for ages and generally carry wide ranges of colours and markings in their genes.

Missing Countess

In 1943, while visiting Canada under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, I was fortunate enough to cross the country by rail. In the course of the journey, we stopped at Winnipeg where I remember being impressed by an ancient railway locomotive named the Countess of Dufferin which stood outside the station. On speaking to a friend who has recently visited Winnipeg, I was disappointed to hear that the old locomotive is no longer there. Could you tell me what happened to it?
John H. Russell, West Sussex, England

OUR ENGLISH READER will be relieved to hear that the Countess of Dufferin is still around and enjoying a well deserved rest in The Railway Museum at the VIA Rail depot in Union Station, Winnipeg. The Countess, wood-burning and about 16 metres in length, holds a special place in Canadian railway history as the first locomotive in the Canadian Northwest. It was built in Philadelphia in 1872, spent five years with the Northern Pacific Railroad in Minnesota and Dakota Territory, then was purchased by railway contractor Joseph Whitehead, who shipped it, plus six flat cars, a caboose and a load of rails, on a barge up the Red River to St. Boniface. It was while the locomotive was being loaded onto the barge at Fishers Landing, Minn., that the Earl of Dufferin, then Canada’s governor general, came by. Whitehead named the engine in the Earl’s wife’s honour. The Countess became a construction locomotive on contract number 5 of the Pembina branch of the CPR, the first contract issued on the railway promised to British Columbia as a condition of Confederation. Later it worked east of Winnipeg, then in B.C., then for a lumber company in Golden, where in about 1905 it was dismantled and the boiler used to power a sawmill. In 1909, a Mr. Waugh recognized the old Countess, and the engine was shipped back to Winnipeg, reassembled in the CPR’s Weston Shops, and put on display in front of the CPR station. It was moved once or twice after that, and in 1992, was installed as the centrepiece of the Midwestern Railway Association’s collection.

Levelling lakes

During a tour of Prince Edward County, Ont., in 1957 I was intrigued by Lake on the Mountain, which sits some 60 metres higher than Lake Ontario and is near enough that, with a strong arm, I could have thrown a stone into either one. Wisdom then was that the two lakes were connected by an aquifer and that the level of Lake on the Mountain rose and fell with the level of Lake Erie. After 40 years, I still wonder about this.
Hugh J. Black, Victoria, B.C.

NOT ONLY was the aquifer story widely known, but it was also reported that a man drowned in Lake Erie and his body washed up in Lake on the Mountain. Current theories are somewhat tamer. But the height of the lake and the fact that it has no visible water source have generated some fanciful stories. To pioneer observers, it was a bottomless water body, an ancient volcano, a meteorite crater, and a glacial whirlpool. Nowadays, it’s thought that the lake is a giant sinkhole. It sits atop the Prince Edward Escarpment wherein, over the ages, water has dissolved limestone and created cavities. One of these cavities is believed to have collapsed, forming a hole 40 metres deep which, over time, filled up with water from rain and snow and springs in the rock. Even without a direct link to Lake Erie, Lake on the Mountain remains an oddity — and the principal attraction today of Lake on the Mountain Provincial Park.

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