On Kingdom Mountain (3 page)

Twenty-five miles long by eight to ten miles wide, Kingdom Mountain was an anomaly. Unlike the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, its long axis ran east-west rather than north-south. Technically, it did not belong to the Appalachian chain at all but had been formed from the same pink Laurentian granite that made up the Canadian Shield north of the St. Lawrence River. The glaciologist Louis Agassiz, who visited Kingdom Mountain on two occasions, was the first scientist to perceive that it actually belonged one hundred miles to the north, in Canada. It was, Jane thought, a mountain worth fighting for, worth preserving from Eben Kinneson Esquire's road and all roads. On its mile-high summit, above the tree line, perched two boulders that she could see from the fishing shanty. One, flat on top, was called table rock. The other sat atop table rock and was almost perfectly round. Known as the balancing boulder, it was thought to be the largest freestanding boulder in New England, a great glacial erratic decorated on its south side with carvings of caribou, mammoths, whales, and walruses. Whether the Arctic animals had been inscribed before or after the glacier deposited the boulder on Jane's mountaintop was impossible to say. Weathered into the northeast side of the boulder was the outline of a satanic face, known locally as the devil's visage.

Far below the devil's visage, on the lower northeastern slopes of the mountain, lay three glacial tarns called the Chain of Ponds. Like the Upper East Branch of the Kingdom River and the swift, cold burns that ran off the mountain, the Chain of Ponds contained a unique species of blue-backed trout, or char,
otherwise found only in a lake on Baffin Island. Beyond the Chain of Ponds a huge, wild bog known as the Great Northern Slang stretched deep into Quebec.

At the south foot of table rock on Kingdom Mountain was a pile of stones known as the peace cairn. It consisted of thousands of rocks and pebbles, many not native to northern Vermont, plus shells, bits of bone, even petrified wood, brought to the mountaintop over the centuries by Miss Jane's Memphremagog Abenaki ancestors. If any criminal or adversary of the Memphremagogs managed to reach the peace cairn, he would be granted sanctuary from retribution. More recently, Jane's grandfather, Quaker Meeting Kinneson, and her father and uncle, Morgan and Pilgrim, had conducted hundreds of fugitive slaves over the mountaintop to Canada. Then there was the legend of the Kingdom Mountain Treasure, which had long since taken on its own life. It was confidently reported in the Common, and wherever else storytellers came together throughout the county, that the Confederate raiders had buried the gold somewhere on Jane's mountain, intending to return for it after the war but, inexplicably, never doing so.

What Jane knew for certain was that the mountain had sheltered and provided sustenance for several generations of Kinnesons and that it created its own weather and seasons, quite sharply different from the weather and seasons elsewhere in the county. It nurtured its own species of trout and, on its summit, several boreal plants and lichens found nowhere else within a thousand miles. Looking up at the peak from the frozen lake, Miss Jane also knew why Eben Kinneson Esquire and the town fathers were so keen on their high road. As soon as the new highway was completed, they planned to purchase the mountain from her for a song and transform it into northern New England's first ski resort—a winter spa, as she thought of it—for ne'er-do-wells from Away with more money than they knew what to do with. The road would pave the way.

“Over my dead body,” she said aloud. This the Duchess of Kingdom Mountain meant as much as she had ever meant anything in her life.

I
N THE EARLY AFTERNOON
Miss Jane rummaged through her bag of kindling and found a piece of basswood about six inches long. She moved her apple crate outside into the sunshine, got out her pocketknife, and began to carve, the shavings curling away onto the ice beside her boots. Her jackknife moved in quick, sure strokes. In her hands the stick of wood was swiftly becoming a fish.

Jackson, dunderhead that he was, had once said that he saw the animal he wanted to carve in the wood before he began carving. Santiago had grandly pronounced that his animals came straight from his carving hand. Miss Jane believed that her carvings resided first in her head or, in the case of her dear people, her heart. What you loved you always created from the heart. In the North American Bird Carving Contest, held each summer in Montreal, she had never placed higher than third, behind Jackson and Santiago or Santiago and Jackson. She was quite certain that this coming summer would yield a very different outcome. For this year's contest she had in mind a true marvel, something neither of her two chief rivals would ever think of in the first place.

The little fish Miss Jane was carving had a dorsal fin, a notched tail, and a couple of shallow slashes on each side of its head for gills. She took a small box from her outer shirt pocket. Inside, on cotton batting, were two treble hooks on screw eyes
and a single eye hook. She twisted the three-pronged hooks into the bottom of the wooden fish, front and back, and inserted the eye hook under the fish's jaw.

Jane took her felling ax and a short metal casting rod from the shanty out toward the middle of the narrows and chopped another hole through the ice. She tied the carved fish onto the thin wire leader of her line and attached a bell-shaped, two-ounce lead sinker a foot above it. Slowly she lowered the weighted lure into the dark water, where it swayed slightly with the deep pulse of the lake.

Jane's father once told her that before his brother Pilgrim went off to war, he had caught, in Lake Memphremagog, a sturgeon weighing one hundred pounds, a great bewhiskered denizen that had probably worked its way up into the lake from the St. Lawrence River. Miss Jane wasn't sure what might be attracted to her lure, suspended hundreds of feet below in the black and silent depths. Although nothing extraordinary had happened yet, she had little doubt that between now and sundown something important was going to take place. Late one snowy afternoon a month ago she'd been reading
A Tale of Two Cities
, perhaps for the tenth time, when for no discernible reason she had experienced what, over the years, she had come to think of as a Kingdom Mountain moment. An image had come to her, fleeting, unbidden, vivid. In her mind she pictured the colorful fishing shanty, the frozen lake, herself on the ice. Somehow she knew that it was the twenty-first of March, the spring solstice. How she had divined this she had no idea. She simply had. Then the moment passed and she was back with Mr. Dickens, far away and long ago, in the best and worst of times.

As the day wore on, another school of perch cruised by. Miss Jane set her metal rod down on the ice and took a few minutes to pull up half a dozen fish to take home for supper. It was colder now. She put her lumber jacket back on. Occasionally, the
spring ice on the lake gave out a tremendous booming roar as a great crack zigzagged through it. What if it started to break up before she and her oxen got safely back to shore? She put this thought out of her head as unworthy of the vision that had brought her here. Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson believed that when she could no longer trust her second sight, she could no longer trust herself. It was part and parcel of who she was. Yet she knew she should not tarry on the uncertain ice much longer. As she cleared freezing slush away from her line with her tea mug, the blue shadow of Owl's Head across the narrows crept toward her, and the sun angled closer to the mountains in the southwest. Time to go.

Laying her casting rod on the ice again, she fetched the oxen and hitched them to the runnered shanty. They easily pulled it off the ice into the copse of spruce trees on the island, where it would be out of sight of summer boaters. Then she gathered her tip-ups and the bucket of perch and set them on the sledge. “That big fish will be down there for you to catch next winter,” she said as she started to reel in her lure.

Abruptly, it stopped. It didn't feel like a snag. There was nothing in the middle of three hundred feet of water to get snagged on. Up through the line came a vibration, a heavy, thrilling weight. “Ah,” Miss Jane said.

The word was scarcely out of her mouth before the line was screeching off her reel. “The song we like to hear,” Miss Jane told her oxen. “The song of the singing reel.”

The fish was headed straight down the lake toward the former poor farm. Soon he would stop to turn the lure in his mouth. When the fish paused for a second or two, Miss Jane lifted the tip of the rod sharply, feeling immense resistance.

She struck again, and the reel shrieked like a bagpipe as the hooked fish headed into the unplumbed heart of the narrows between the mountains, where Memphremagog was rumored to be bottomless. When at last he stopped, Miss Jane began to
reel in fast. The dancing rod tip bent out of sight in the water, but the line held and now the fish was coming her way.

Miss Jane was famous throughout the Kingdom for being able to identify each of the ten varieties of game fish in Lake Memphremagog by the way they struck and fought. For once she was stymied. This fish fought too long for a great northern pike, yet it seemed too big for a rainbow trout or landlocked salmon.

At last the mystery fish was swimming in tight circles just below the ice. Each time Jane drew it to the hole it stopped, dead weight. Suddenly, she began to chuckle. The opening, she realized, was too small. Holding her rod above her head in one hand and gripping the shaft of the felling ax just below its two-bitted head with the other, she enlarged the hole in the ice, careful not to cut her line in the process. Then she shrugged out of her coat. Still holding the rod high with her left hand, she lay down and reached into the icy lake water all the way up to her shoulder. Soon she began lifting the thrashing fish up through the hole by its bright red gills. It was a lovely dark silver color. And it was gigantic.

“Upon my word, it's a togue,” she said. “You've caught yourself a lake trout, Mistress Jane. Twenty, maybe twenty-five pounds.”

While she was pleased to have landed such a fine trophy, Jane could not help feeling let down. Surely, her second sight had not brought her out here on the untrustworthy spring ice just to catch a big fish. But she briskly thwacked the trout twice on the head with St. Peter and shrugged back into her jacket. There were worse ways to spend a birthday than fishing. And the afternoon was not over. Any number of things could still happen. She glanced down the lake. Between the gap in the mountains the sky was the color of her lead sinker. A gust of wind blew a few tiny snowflakes up from the ice, sharp as pinpricks on her face. It was definitely time to head back. First, though, she must clean her fish. One of the earliest lessons Miss Jane had learned from her father was to clean her fish where she caught them. Like closing a farm gate behind herself and cutting her winter firewood a year in advance, it went beyond tradition.

Inside the stomach of the big togue was a brook trout nearly a foot long. Strife, Miss Jane thought. The way of the world. Curious to see what a brook trout found to eat in the wintertime, she cleaned it, too. Its stomach sac was empty save for a coin about the size of a quarter, though how a quarter had found its way into the stomach of a brook trout inside the stomach of a togue was a great puzzle to her.

She rubbed the coin against her wool hunting jacket and held it up in the fading daylight. To her amazement, it was a twenty-dollar gold piece. Turning the double eagle over between her fingers, she made out the date: 1852.

Found money signified that a stranger was coming. Always, when she discovered even a lone forgotten dime in the pocket of an old smock, a stranger had shown up on the mountain soon afterward. Perhaps that was why her second sight had directed her to go out on the ice so late in the year. To lead her to the coin that would alert her to the arrival of a stranger who might help her prevent her cousin and the township from ramming that highway onto her mountain. Miss Jane shook her head over her own foolishness. She had no idea who might visit her mountain, and she needed no help in her battle with Eben and the high road. She really should think about acquiring a cat, she thought. An able, strong cat that lived rough and knew enough to appreciate a barn roof over its head and table scraps to eat in exchange for keeping down the mice. She might even invite it into the house of a winter evening, as long as it didn't jump on her bed. There would be no cats on Miss
Jane Hubbell Kinneson's bed, thank you kindly. She pocketed the double eagle, picked up her ox goad, and prepared to head over the ice toward home.

M
ISS JANE'S LEGS
were stiff and cold from her long day on the ice. She had intended to ride at least partway home on the sledge, but the monstrous lake trout took up most of the space. An antic notion occurred to her. From the shanty she fetched a short length of rope, which she ran through the trout's mouth and gills. Taking up the free ends like a pair of reins, she sat down astride the fish on the sledge as if it were a horse or pony. “Giddap,” she said, laughing at herself. “Giddap, Ethan and Ira.”

Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, riding a great silver fish across the ice behind two oxen. What a splendid carving it would make for On Kingdom Mountain. This was more like the adventure she had expected a month ago while reading Dickens.

She had not been under way for long when she heard the storm hissing toward her over the ice. It struck so hard and suddenly that she nearly lost her seat on the fish. The oxen staggered in the blast of wind, regained their momentum, stumbled again. Snow pellets flew through the air around them, sizzling off the ice, bouncing off the steers and the sledge and Jane's clothing.

“Trot,” she called out to her team. “Trot, boys.”

They moved over the ice. The rime-covered fire tower on the mountain summit disappeared in the oncoming snowstorm. The balancing boulder vanished. And then Miss Jane
glimpsed a speck in the sky, headed her way above the frozen lake, and heard, over the wind, a faint buzzing. At first it sounded like the humming of bees in the hollyhocks by her woodshed door on an afternoon in haying time. The buzzing grew louder as the flying object approached, now resembling one of the great winged reptiles that she knew had once terrorized the land. But this creature had a double set of wings and, unlike a bird's wings, or even a flying lizard's, they were fixed in place. It was a bright yellow biplane, racing directly up through the notch between the mountains, attempting to outrun the oncoming blizzard.