You may be familiar with Joni Lincoln’s Maud, the Erie Canal Dog, a book about a dog that played many roles at the Van Detto’s Erie House saloon at lock 52, now part of the  Old Erie Canal Heritage Park  in Port Byron NY.

Maud was a real canine, now enjoying the afterlife.

Among the thousands of images in the collections of the Canal Society of New York is this enigmatic photo identified as “Fort Ann Canal.”  

An authoritative source has further identified it as showing a man and a child (a boy?) “standing on the north side of the Champlain Canal at Fort Ann with Lock 18 in the background and the “D. O. Biggs” residence beyond, which you can place on the vintage map below.

I say enigmatic for multiple reasons:  who are these people, why the unusual pose of the man standing at attention with hat in hand but staring off to the right, what has captured his attention, and what is the relationship between the man and the child, who is looking directly at the photographer?  And . . . 

what is the story of that well-fed cat, a super-mouser perhaps?  Some answers about the cat could lead to an Erie Canal book, a companion to Maud?