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putter and the ‘give away’ balls.
    Bob offered one of his good balls to Melanie
once and all she said was “I don’t hit the ball, I swing the club.”
He and Helen looked at each other and shrugged since neither had
any idea what she meant.
    Helen announced once at the end of a hole
that Melanie had beaten Bob and Melanie just looked at her in a
strange way and said, “I what?”
    The only crack in her golf game showed up on
the seventh hole. The Folly stretched down two sides of the North
Saskatchewan and the seventh hole was the one that took players
from one side to the other and it required an in air flight of 200
yards to carry the ball to the small landing area and two more
shots to make the 300 yards to the par five green. Melanie made the
first and second landing areas but her third shot landed in the
longish grass beside the green. Bob had been missing the tiny
greens all day but this was the first one she had missed and it
took her three shots to get the ball up to the pin. Bob was puzzled
by this until he realized she rarely missed a green and apparently
had no experience at ‘around the green’ play. He was sure she
rarely had to hit a shot from a sand trap for example.
    Whatever it was, it did not seem to bother
her and she happily bounced over to the next hole, her one
decorative tongue on her worn out golf shoes bouncing up and down
with her stride. By the end of eighteen holes, even Bob was more
intent on watching Melanie play than playing his own game. He was
both intrigued and puzzled. Intrigued that a young girl could
actually be so good and intrigued as to how she learned such an odd
swing. It also puzzled him as to why no one in the golfing world
knew her. He was already working in his mind how he would address
the latter. It was only at the end of the round that he started to
learn how she came to be good.
    It was just after lunch when the three of
them finished their round. Despite it being a beautiful prairie
summer’s day – clear blue skies, a gentle breeze, low humidity and
moderate temperature, they had had the course and Melanie totally
to themselves.
    “Are you very busy here in the summer
Melanie?” Helen asked.
    “Not much during the week days,” Melanie
replied. “We get the odd tourist passing though. The odd campers
like you folks. On the weekend, though, we get groups that come up
from Regina or down from Saskatoon. They seem to have a lot of fun
here. They certainly hit a lot of balls into the fields!”
    “Do you ever play with them?” Bob
inquired.
    “No. I only play by myself. Or maybe once in
a while with some of the guys that have been coming down from
Saskatchewan once a year since. They are the ones who give me old
clubs and stuff.”
    Bob hesitated for a moment and then asked
what he had wanted to all day.
    “Are they the ones that who taught you to
play?”
    “Not really. Most of them are pretty bad.
One guy taught me how to hold the club and he also brought me a
sawed off 7-iron he had made for me to play with. He used to come
every year but I haven’t seen him for a few years. But he left some
golf magazines for me to look at so I learned from them. One had a
bunch of pictures of a guy named Hale Irwin swinging so I tried to
look like him”
    “So, you think that you look like Hale Irwin
when you swing?”
    “Yeah, or maybe that guy Andy Bean. He is
tall like me and he’s only six years older than me!”
    “I’m sure that they would both be flattered
by your mimicry,” Bob suggested. “But surely someone else helped
you with your swing?”
    “Doesn’t your Dad play golf?” Helen
inquired.
    “Nope. He hates the game and golfers.”
    Bob and Helen gave each other a surprised
look. Bob interjected.
    “But he built this golf course? It must have
taken years? And you say he still takes meticulous care of the
greens? We don’t understand.”
    “He hates golfers because my mom ran away
with a golfer. Some guy who managed to get lost looking for