God's Kingdom (2 page)

Gramp looked at Jim to make sure he was listening. The only sound in the camp was the low ticking of the fire in the Glenwood.

“Four miles west of here, where the river empties into the big lake, Rogers's advance scouts came across a small band of Memphremagog Abenakis drying salmon on wooden racks. The Rangers bided their time. Come nightfall, they formed a human chain, crossed the rapids, and crept up on the Indian encampment. According to Charles I, the Memphremagogs were ‘holding high frolic' around their campfires, dancing and celebrating. The Rangers caught them unawares and slaughtered every last man, woman, and child.”

Jim's father closed the camp journal. “That was a long time ago, Dad,” he said. “It happened and it was a terrible thing. But times have changed, thankfully.”

The editor gave Gramp a look Jim couldn't read, but Gramp continued his story. “Charles I reported, Jimmy, that some of the Rangers cut off the heads of the murdered Indians and played at tenpins with them. Finally, Major Rogers made them stop.”

“Jesus, Dad,” the editor said. “We don't know that for a fact. Jimmy doesn't need to hear that.”

Charlie winked at Jim. “I wonder what they used for pins?” he said.

“Who's telling this story, gentlemen, me or you?” Gramp said.

“The story's over,” the editor said. “It's pretty much the story of the settling of America, and thank Jesus, it's over.”

“Not quite,” Gramp said. “Some years later, Charles I returned here. He married a Memphremagog woman named Molly Molasses and became the first white settler in God's Kingdom. He said he settled here to do penance for killing the Indians.”

“If so, he could scarcely have picked a better purgatory,” Jim's dad said. “This was the end of the known world in those days. ‘Territory but Little Known,' they called it.”

“Actually,” Gramp said, “Charles I built a trading post and a whiskey distillery at the mouth of the river and became quite wealthy.”

“That's a good way to do penance,” Charlie said. “I wouldn't mind doing penance by getting rich.”

They all laughed, and Jim felt relieved because he did not like tension in the family, even when some of it was just joking.

“What do you say, boys?” Gramp said, standing up. “If we're going to tumble out early tomorrow morning and get this young fella blooded, we'd better tumble in now. Hop down, Jimmy. Time to bank the ashes.”

Jim jumped down off the woodbox lid and Gramp got a chunk of yellow birch and put it in the Glenwood's firebox and raked coals and ashes over it. The burning birch bark gave off a wintergreen fragrance. Jim could still smell the sweet scent a few minutes later from the camp loft, where he lay in his sleeping bag in the darkness, waiting to fall asleep, waiting for morning to arrive.

*   *   *

That night Jim stayed awake in the dark a long time, too excited about hunting the ridge runner the next day to sleep. He thought of the years he'd spent practicing. The training started about the time he began school. He and Gramp would go out to the maple orchard behind the farmhouse after a snowfall. Gramp would hand Jim his gold pocket watch. “A quarter of an hour,” he'd say. Then he'd head up the slope into the maples.

Fifteen interminable minutes later Jim would start out after his grandfather, following his boot prints in the snow. Gramp would be waiting for him on the upper edge of the sugar bush. “Good hunt,” he'd tell Jimmy.

A couple of years later they began tracking on bare ground. At first Gramp left plenty of sign. Broken branches, wet spots on stepping-stones in the brook. Later the tracking got tougher. A single heel mark in a wet meadow, bent-back blades of marsh grass, jittery crows over a copse of balsam fir trees. Once Jim came to a hillside where Gramp's footprints in a dusting of new snow stopped as though he'd been snatched from the face of the earth by a flying saucer. It had taken Jim a long time to figure out that Gramp had walked backward in his own tracks, stepped off into the brook, cut back down the slope in the water, and slipped in behind him.

That was the fall Gramp began taking Jim to the woods with a gun. At ten Jim wasn't allowed to carry the gun, just to accompany Gramp while he walked down a deer. Gramp could track a deer over bare ledge or through the worst cedar jungle. He knew where and when a deer would take to deep water to elude a hunter, when a buck sought high ground instead. He told Jim that over a short distance a deer could outrun a racehorse. But a man had much more endurance than any deer, and could think, besides. If a man used his head, he could always walk down his deer.

Summer evenings Gramp taught Jim to shoot in the meadow beside the farmhouse. They started with a single-shot .22. When Jim was eleven, he began going with Gramp for grouse and ducks with a sixteen gauge. At twelve he learned how to shoot Gramp's .30-30. Once he heard Gramp tell Dad, “The boy is an accurate shot and noticing in the woods.” For his age, Gramp said, Jim was as good as the best. Lying in the camp loft, Jim thought that he and Gramp might get their woods sense from Molly Molasses and her Abenaki ancestors. He liked thinking that his original Kingdom forbears were Indians. He did not like to think about Charles I and the other Rangers slaughtering the Memphremagog Abenakis and bowling with their heads.

Jim's dad was always trying to get Gramp to write down his stories, even if the editor didn't entirely approve of Gramp's telling Jim every last gruesome detail. Gramp said he'd leave it to Jim to write the stories of the Kingdom. At fourteen, Jim had already begun to. Now he decided that when he wrote Charles I's story, he would put in the part about the Rangers playing at tenpins with the severed heads. It was both the worst and best part of the story.

This was Jim Kinneson's last thought before drifting off to sleep in God's Kingdom, up in the little-known mountains of northern Vermont hard by the Canadian border.

Clang clang clang clang.

Gramp was beating on the bottom of the dishpan with a spoon. “Wake up, boy. Tumble up, roll out,” he called up to Jim. Then the old breakfast joke: “If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs—if we had some eggs.”

They did have ham and eggs, and Mom's homemade bread toasted over an open lid of the Glenwood, and fried potatoes, and tinned prunes since Gramp was a great hand at making sure everyone stayed regular at camp. All washed down with the editor's famous camp coffee: three heaping handfuls of freshly ground coffee thrown in the blue porcelain coffeepot with a broken eggshell to settle the grounds.

Gramp and Jim headed out at first light. They stopped on the edge of the big cedars beside the Dead Water to watch the eastern sky turn pink. Kingdom and Canada Mountains loomed high above the flow. Fifty years ago the Great North Woods Timber Company had erected a long earthen dam across the mouth of the river, flooding out the rapids and creating the deep flow known as the Dead Water in order to prevent logs from jamming up in the notch during the spring drives.

“Walk up through the cedars along the edge of the Dead Water,” Gramp said. “You should jump him someplace between here and the notch. Don't push him too hard at first. You don't want to panic him into swimming across the flow into Canada. If you run into trouble or need help dragging him out, fire three shots ten seconds apart. Wait twenty minutes and do it again.”

Gramp handed Jim his watch. They stood together near the edge of the water, watching the color in the east bleed higher up the sky, as if in defiance of gravity. “All right, then,” Gramp said. “Have a good hunt.”

Gramp headed back toward the camp, moving in easy, even strides. Ahead, the reflection of the sunrise glowed crimson on the granite wall of Kingdom Mountain. Jim checked his rifle to make sure the safety was on. Then he started into the cedars. The flow crawled along through the swamp, bloodred in the spreading sunrise.

*   *   *

Jim cut the runner's track twenty minutes later. He'd expected it to be impressively big, but when he first saw the deer's prints in the snow under the cedars he thought they might belong to a moose. At the foot of the twin cliffs, where the dammed-up Dead Water passed through the notch, the deer had angled back up Kingdom Mountain on an ancient game trail. The wind was quartering from Jim toward the ridge runner. That was what he wanted. He wanted the big buck to know that he was on its trail, as long as he didn't panic it into going to water and vanishing into Canada.

Partway up the mountain, in a former log landing growing up to wild raspberries, the game trail forked. The more-traveled branch ran straight up over the mountain past the Balance Boulder. A lesser-used trace angled off to the south, traversing the mountainside high above the three ponds. The runner had taken the south branch.

Jim knew this side of the mountain well from partridge hunting here with Gramp, and berrying in the summertime. It was steep and ledgy, with stiff, gray-green caribou moss growing on the floor of the forest. Twice that morning, from far off to the south, he heard the echoing boom of some other hunter's rifle. While the ridge runner was now heading away from the flow and Canada, it occurred to Jim that he might drive the deer out of the woods in front of a weekend hunter like the down-country sports who stayed at the Common Hotel and ventured out to road hunt for a few hours in the middle of the day, hoping for a lucky shot at something with horns that they could put on the wall back home. When the runner turned off the game trail and headed down the snowy mountainside toward Pond Number Two, far from the lumber roads cruised by the weekend hunters, Jim was relieved.

It began to snow. The buck had turned back to the north again, seeking shelter in a thick stand of black spruce trees between Two and Three. Jim came to a deer yard where the runner's tracks mingled with the prints of other deer. Twice he lost its trail and had to backtrack. Even so, he was gaining on the animal. He picked up its deep tracks again along the boggy southern margin of Number Three. Here the two-pronged impressions were so recent that groundwater was still oozing into them. The water reminded Jim that he needed to drink more. He refilled his canteen from an icy rill coming off the mountainside. Nearby, he came to a place where the deer had lain down beside a brush pile. It was time to begin pushing the tiring buck. Jim checked the .30-30 to make sure that the safety was still on. Then he began to trot.

The deer surprised Jim by passing less than a hundred yards behind the hunting camp, which sat empty-looking, its stovepipe smokeless, on the slope above Three. His grandfather and father and brother were miles away, each one looking for his own deer. They might not be back at camp until long after dark.

Near the raspberry brake where the trail forked, the ridge runner had crossed the tracks of a smaller deer, a yearling doe or a young spikehorn. Ordinarily, a mature buck in rut would follow the smaller track, to breed the doe or chase off the spike. Not today. Today, knowing that it was being hunted, Jim's deer took the trail up the mountain toward the timberline.

On the edge of the tree line, just below the height of land, the deer had collapsed again in a miniature forest of ancient, wind-twisted spruce and fir trees no higher than Jim's knees. As he approached, it sprang up and went crashing through the snow, its tail flashing like a white flag waved in surrender. But the runner was not yet ready to give up.

The mountaintop above the timberline was strewn with mossy boulders. The largest of these was the almost perfectly round Balance Boulder, a huge glacial erratic. To Jim it looked like a gigantic, dark bowling ball. The runner was standing at the base of the great round boulder, its legs trembling from fear or exhaustion or both. In the westering sun, hazy through a film of crystalline snowflakes, the animal was as red as it had been in its summer coat when Jim and Gramp had come upon it drinking from the pond back in August. One of its antler points had been snapped off, probably in combat with another buck. The runner squatted and peed nervously, its legs shaking, as Jim slowly approached it.

Jim raised his rifle. His hands on the stock and trigger guard were as steady as the granite outcropping on the mountaintop. His heartbeat seemed to slow as he thumbed off the safety. Before the boy knew he was going to do it, he lowered the rifle. He thumbed on the safety and jacked each of the five brass-jacketed shells out of the chamber onto the mossy rocks at his feet.

The deer stood motionless as Jim raised the rifle again, flipped off the safety, aimed at the animal's chest, and pressed the trigger. On the silent mountaintop in the sunset, the
click
of the firing pin falling on the empty chamber sounded louder than it was. Jim lowered his gun and took a few steps and the ridge runner was gone, off down the far side of the mountain toward the big lake where Jim's Abenaki ancestors had once fished for salmon. Jim thought about the Indians celebrating their catch by firelight, unaware of Charles I and the Rangers crossing the rapids just upriver. As the sun rested on the peaks far to the west, and the Balance Boulder glowed red in its reflection, Jim turned to head back down the mountain, and saw Gramp standing behind him in the clearing, the unspent shells from Jim's rifle gleaming in his hand.

*   *   *

On the way down the mountainside in the snowy dusk, they jumped a spikehorn stripping the bark from a moose maple, and Jim shot it cleanly through the heart. Probably it was the same young deer whose tracks he'd cut late that afternoon in the raspberry brake.

“Well, son,” the editor said when Jim and Gramp dragged the spike into the camp yard at twilight, “that young skipper wasn't what you were looking for, but it will get you blooded just as quickly.”

“Don't feel bad, bub,” Charlie said. “Your runner isn't going anywhere. He'll be there for you next year.”

“He made a fine, running shot on the spike,” Gramp said. “No buck fever. I call this a good hunt.”