Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Immediately after breakfast my grandfather headed across the road to his sawmill. He had to pass quite near the snow owl and I hoped he would try to scare it away again. He did not, though. He never looked in its direction.

  My grandmother washed the breakfast dishes and swept the kitchen floor while I brought in the morning’s wood and checked the henhouse. A few orange feathers lay on the floor under the nailed-up ceiling chute. They were the only sign of the owl’s assault the night before.

  Back in the kitchen, my grandmother was waiting in her boots and long black coat. She had put her black shawl over her head and fastened it under her chin like a huge scarf, and she was peering into my grandfather’s gun cabinet by the hall to the dining room. “Which one of these does he use for birds, Austen?”

  I pointed to the double-barreled twelve-gauge, and my grandmother opened the cabinet and lifted it out. I had never before seen her touch a gun of any kind. This one was nearly as long as she was tall, and delivered a kick like a logging horse.

  “Do you know how to operate this weapon?” she asked.

  I was more alarmed than ever. Apparently my grandmother intended to order me to shoot the owl, which would infuriate my grandfather.

  A desperate idea sprang into my mind. I would deliberately fire over the bird’s head, as my grandfather had done, to scare it away. Last night’s snowstorm was certainly the winter’s final one, and any day now the owl would fly back to his home in the Far North. But my own light twenty-gauge would be far better for this purpose than my grandfather’s old cannon.

  “Look, Gram. This single-barreled gun’s a lot safer. This is the one I use.”

  “Get some bullets,” my grandmother said quietly. “For the double-barreled gun. Then put your warm wraps on. You and your grandmother have a job to do this morning, Tut.”

  It was terrifically cold outside, with a cutting wind, more like a wind in January or February than May. The shadow of the woodsmoke blowing from the kitchen chimney writhed over the snow in the dooryard like something alive. Miniature snow spouts whirled across the road, though high overhead the sky was blue and once again the snowy pasture had acquired a temporary azure hue.

  I was hoping against hope that the sight of my grandmother advancing across the barnyard with the shotgun would scare the owl away. Instead, he watched fearlessly as we crossed the road and headed into the pasture through the swirling snow twisters. Gram marched ahead of me. The wind blew her coat away from her boots and tugged at her black shawl. I had the strongest impression that if she hadn’t been weighted down by the shotgun, she would have been blown right off her feet.

  When we were halfway across the pasture the big saw from my grandfather’s mill shrieked out, causing me to jump. It rose to an angry crescendo as it ripped through a log. Then the sound of the saw seemed to blow away on the wind.

  Still the owl held its perch, motionless as an alabaster bird in a china cabinet. When we were about twenty feet away my grandmother stopped and looked at it steadily. Then in her own odd way, I believe that she gave it one last chance to leave our lives forever.

  “You, Satan,” she said in a sharp, unafraid voice.

  The great bird swiveled its head around and looked at the snowy woods across the river, as though considering a retreat. Then the bluntly-rounded white head with its tremendous amber eyes swung back toward us, and I realized at last what my grandmother had known from the start: that the owl had absolutely no intention of leaving our farm until it had killed every last one of the hens.

  Gram turned to me and held out the twelve-gauge. “Load the weapon, Tut.”

  The moment I had dreaded was here. I no longer had any faith at all that I could fool my grandmother by deliberately missing the bird, or that it would fly away if I did. Nor did I see how I could betray my grandfather by shooting the owl.

  “Load the gun.”

  As reluctantly as I had ever done anything in my life, I broke open my grandfather’s shotgun, shoved two number-four shells inside the twin dark chambers, and closed it back up with a hollow thunk. At the same time I was vaguely aware of my grandfather’s log saw, shrieking out again in the background.

  “Now tell me, Tut,” my grandmother said. “How does it fire?”

  I looked at her dumbly. Surely my diminutive grandmother did not intend to fire my grandfather’s huge old twelve-gauge herself? Yet that is exactly what she planned to do, despite her great fear of guns.

  What choice did I have? I had to demonstrate how to cock back the hammers and which trigger went with which barrel; how to hold the gun in tight to her shoulder to absorb as much of the recoil as possible.

  “I understand,” she said. “Hand me the weapon.”

  She took the gun from me, brought it up to her shoulder, pulled back the hammers, aimed in the general direction of the bird, and fired both barrels.

  There was a crashing roar and the snow owl gave a hard jerk and toppled over like a painted tin duck at the shooting gallery at Kingdom Fair. Beyond all doubt it was dead. But its feathered talons still gripped the branch of the maple tree, from which it now hung upside down, swaying slightly in the wind, defiant and fierce, even in death.

  The impact of the shotgun’s kick had driven my grandmother back two or three steps. She tottered briefly, then sat down in the snow. It would be inaccurate to report that the gun knocked her off her feet. Rather, she seemed to sit down almost as an afterthought. The roar of the gun had echoed off the ridge behind the farmhouse and dispersed over the snowy landscape in the wind. Except for the ringing in my ears the morning was now silent again.

  My grandmother dropped the gun and extended her left hand. “Help your grandmother up, Tut.”

  As I pulled her to her feet, her right arm hung straight down at her side. “Pick up the weapon,” she said.

  I picked up the gun and brushed off the snow. My grandmother walked over to the maple tree, her right arm limp at her side. She peered up at the owl, hanging upside down from the limb. A steady trickle of blood dripped onto the snow at her feet.

  “Finished,” she pronounced. “He won’t be carrying off any more chickens, Tut. Or keeping boys out of college.”

  With my ears still ringing from the gun blast, I walked back across the pasture with my grandmother. My eyes stung from the fine blowing snow. Or maybe I was crying. I did not know or care which.

  Suddenly I saw my grandfather. He was standing in the entranceway of his mill, watching our progress toward the house. I wanted to shout to him that I hadn’t killed the owl, but a second later he was gone. Before we reached the road the angry scream of his saw ripped out over the pasture again.

  We went quickly across the barnyard. I opened the woodshed door with the weasel pelt nailed to the inside, and held it against the gusting wind for my grandmother. But she grasped the handle in her good hand and told me to go inside first. For a second or two she stood in the half-open doorway, looking back across the barnyard and pasture. I waited just inside the woodshed, and in that fleeting moment beheld the tableau of the snow owl, the white weasel, and my grandmother, her profile grim and fierce and triumphant against the morning sky.

  4

  The Green Mountain Whale

  In the beginning, my grandfather told me soon after I came to Lost Nation, there was only the river. There were no farms, no sawmills, no towns. Icy and amber-colored, it seeped out of an impenetrable cedar bog high on the northernmost ridge of the height of land dividing the present-day Connecticut and St. Lawrence River watersheds, and ran southwest through hills heavily forested with fir and spruce and white pine. It flowed past the future site of my grandparents’ farm, and wound down through the narrow valley that my ancestor, Sojourner Kittredge, would name Lost Nation Hollow in ironical commemoration of his geographical miscalculation. At the foot of the Hollow it joined the Main Branch of the Kingdom River to run due west for ten miles, to the spot where the county seat of Kingdom Common sits today. There it dropped over a long, steep catara
ct later known as the High Falls.

  Below the falls, the Kingdom passed through a flat where willow trees grew thick on both sides. Then, having already transformed from a lacy network of hidden rills into a swift brook and from a brook into a small river, it metamorphosed in character once again. It broadened out, deepened, slowed to a crawl, and entered a marshy wetlands full of ducks and snapping turtles, muskrats and minks and otters and moose. Leisurely, almost unnoticeably, it twisted north through the swamp another ten miles, to the south bay of Lake Memphremagog, “Beautiful Waters,” in Abenaki, which stretched twenty-five miles into Canada between tall mountains before emptying into yet another river that headed out to the great St. Lawrence.

  At one time, according to my grandfather, glaciers crept down into our hills from northern Canada, inching their way south by their own immense weight. That was ten thousand years ago. Then the mile-high mass of ice had retreated, leaving an inland sea extending from the wide valley of the St. Lawrence to the southernmost boundary of what would become Kingdom County. This was a saltwater sea, connected directly to the ocean by a vast tidal arm five hundred miles long, and my grandfather told me that in those ancient times, salmon and seals and occasionally even whales swam all the way up this inlet. The whales passed icebergs hundreds of feet high, broken off from the retreating glacier, and swam between the soaring mountain peaks on each side of Lake Memphremagog, and on up the drowned-out valley of the Kingdom River into the flooded hollows, high over the future site of the Farm in Lost Nation. My grandfather referred to these whales as Green Mountain whales, and said that the original Abenaki Indians who had roamed through these parts had hunted them from kayaks. Still, all this seemed as fantastic to me as Aladdin’s treasure caves and genies in my Arabian Nights storybook.

  “There’s one now, Austen,” he said, and pointed to a cloud shaped vaguely like a whale, high overhead in the summery Vermont sky.

  I was seven at the time, and we were taking a short break from haying. During the past year, I had learned that my grandfather frequently liked to pull my leg, and could do so with a perfectly expressionless face. I looked at him, and he looked back at me with his pale blue eyes. Then he winked.

  I had no idea whether to believe what he said about the glaciers, the inland sea, and the long-ago Green Mountain whales. For all I knew my grandfather was kidding about those, too. With him, it was hard to tell.

  The East Branch—our branch—of the Upper Kingdom River was by no means wide. By the time I was eight I could easily wing a stone across it from bank to bank. But it was very quick, very cold, and full of colorful, hard-fighting native brook trout. For two or three weeks in the early spring it was strong enough to drive a moderate quantity of logs; and in my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Sojourner Kittredge’s time, when it ran through mile upon mile of dense, uncut forest, its flow was steadier still.

  The river is one of my earliest memories from the time I first went to live with my grandparents. For years it was the last sound I heard out of the narrow, slanted window of my upper bedchamber before going to sleep at night, and the first sound I heard when I woke up the next morning. And like the Canadian border just north of our place, and the Boston and Montreal Railroad through the village of Kingdom Common, the river was a tangible geographical link, for both my grandfather and me, to the world beyond Kingdom County.

  For my tenth birthday—I had lived in Lost Nation four years by then, and it had become as much my home as anyone else’s, and my grandparents were now as much my parents as my grandparents, though I remained on the best of terms with my father and saw him quite frequently—Gramp got me a Hammond’s World Atlas. I distinctly recall his opening it on the kitchen table and showing me how a chip of wood from his sawmill could ride merrily down the Kingdom River to Lake Memphremagog and thence all the way to the St. Lawrence and Quebec City. Possibly, that hypothetical woodchip might even wind up off the barren coast of Labrador, where my grandfather had gone as a young surveyor and to which he had promised to return, with me, when I turned eighteen.

  “There,” he said, planting his blunt, rough forefinger in the middle of the blank white interior of that little-known, boreal wilderness on the two-page map of Canada in the birthday atlas. “Right there, Austen. You and I and a canoe. You’ll see rivers there that’ll make the East Branch look like a meadow brook in August.”

  Yet my grandfather liked the East Branch, too. It powered his sawmill; he trapped along its banks in the winter; in the spring and summer he and I fished it together every chance we had; and he still drove logs down it from the big Idaho woods northeast of our farmhouse, to the horseshoe-shaped oxbow bend just above the millpond—where, more often than not, his logs jammed together in the tight U of the curve, in monumental pileups that took days and sometimes weeks to untangle.

  The year I turned ten, which also happened to be the year when the first electrical line was run up into Lost Nation Hollow, was an especially bad one for logjams in the oxbow. By the middle of May, my grandfather had fifty thousand feet of thirty-two-foot-long logs hopelessly piled up in the crook of the elbow, and nothing he contrived to do with his pick pole or peavey budged them an inch.

  One afternoon when my grandmother’s apple orchard in the meadow adjacent to the jammed-up oxbow was just blossoming out, my grandfather was waiting for me in his lumber truck when I got out of school. A hefty coil of new fence wire lay on the floorboards. On the seat beside my grandfather was a long wooden crate with the words “Granite State Blasting Company” stenciled in black letters on the top. Packed inside the box in sawdust, Gramp informed me, were thirty-six sticks of dynamite. The box sat lengthwise on the seat, and stretched all the way from my grandfather, behind the wheel, to the passenger door of the cab.

  “Hop up on top,” my grandfather said. “It’s stable.”

  Winter frost was still thawing out of the Hollow road in sheltered places through the woods. It was full of potholes and washouts, and as bumpy as a road can be and still be passable. All the way home I stole glances at the case of dynamite beneath me, though my grandfather assured me that it couldn’t possibly explode until it was lighted or detonated with an electrical current. I was far from persuaded. As we jounced up the Hollow, he told me harrowing stories of his days as a shooter, or dynamite man, on the last big Connecticut River log drives. When we finally pulled into our barnyard, I was so relieved I forgot to ask him, in accordance with our ritual, who lived there. “The meanest old bastard in Kingdom County,” he said, anyway. “Remember that you heard it first from me.”

  Although there was still plenty of snow back in the woods, it was a warm and sunny spring afternoon. Bright yellow cowslips were in blossom near the steep limestone bank of the oxbow, where the logs were jammed up. My grandfather seemed very confident as he walked out onto the ledge in a jaunty, lumberjack gait. With him he had three dark red sticks of the Granite State dynamite, which he lighted from his cigar and tossed into the jumble of logs. He hurried back into my grandmother’s orchard as the dynamite went off with three terrific reports, one right after the other. The air was filled with smoke and a gunpowder odor, but the jam didn’t shift a foot.

  Next Gramp cut a long pole from a brown ash sapling growing near the river. To one end he lashed half a dozen sticks of dynamite. Standing on the ledge, he ignited a fuse and thrust the business end of the pole deep into the tangled logs. He scrambled back up onto the bank, and I hunkered down behind an apple tree full of fragrant blossoms and put my hands over my ears. A second later a tremendous explosion shook the ground under my feet. Chunks of bark and woodchips rose twenty feet in the air. I was sure the jam had broken apart. But as the acrid smoke began to clear, I saw that the towering pile of logs was exactly where it had been for the past week.

  My grandfather nodded grimly. He seemed quite satisfied by this turn of events. “It’s that limestone ledge, Austen,” he said. “That’s what’s hanging the logs. It runs out underwater from the bank halfway
across the river and blocks off the channel.”

  My grandfather tied all but one of the remaining sticks of dynamite together in a single tight bundle, and hitched the free end of the new coil of wire to a detonating cap attached to the explosives. He wedged the package of dynamite down into a crevice in the riverside ledge, and instructed me to unroll the coil of wire back through the apple trees in the meadow, toward the road, while he went to get his truck. In the meantime, I’d spotted my grandmother, watching us from the farmhouse porch through her opera glasses. Their brass fittings gleamed in the mild spring sunshine, somehow accentuating her disapproval.

  My grandfather drove the truck partway down the muddy lane into the apple orchard, shut it off and opened the hood. I handed him the ends of the wire, which he wrapped around the starter coil. “Get inside and start her up,” he told me.

  Under my grandfather’s supervision, I’d been driving his farm truck around the barnyard and fields for nearly a year. But it was always a great thrill for me to slide in under the big rubber-coated steering wheel with the smooth wooden knob for a handle. I turned on the key and reached for the starter with my foot, stretching as far as I could. It ground twice, and the engine coughed, turned over, and caught. At the same instant, an immense detonation ripped into the spring afternoon. From the oxbow, chunks of ledge rose higher than the barn cupola and came raining out of the sky all over the blossoming orchard. Several hit in the muddy lane near my grandfather, who paid no more attention to them than to a summer hailstorm. Then I was out of the truck and running through the apple trees behind my grandfather.

  Ahead of us, beneath a great cloud of smoke, the jam was moving. In a solid mass, it progressed about thirty feet—only to come to a stop in the lower curve of the bow, just above the millpond. Then in the cleared bend above them, a great slab of the limestone ledge where my grandfather had stood to place the dynamite charges suddenly toppled outward into the river, leaving a sheer rock wall plunging from the top of the bank down into the water.