Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  One of the very real perils of haying with horses was that a horse could at any time step in a woodchuck hole and break its leg. Therefore my grandfather shot all woodchucks on sight, and at the age of nine, I began to hunt these otherwise harmless rodents myself with a light .22 Gramp had given me. Right after the first cutting in June was the best time to spot ’chucks; and I loved to go out in the evening after supper and walk the stubbly summer fields with my grandfather, looking for them. Other regular pests and, for me, fair game on the farm included pigeons, which were terribly messy, and which my grandparents encouraged me to pick off the ridge of the barn and the top of the silo with my .22; porcupines, or hedgehogs, as Gramp called them, which would chew their way through a half-inch plank to get into our woodshed, icehouse, and outbuildings; and, worst of all, a plague of white rats, the descendants of an escaped pair of tame ones my little aunts had given me as pets for my tenth birthday: against which, with traps, poison, and a veritable squadron of scrawny barn cats, not to mention the formidable Lynx Kittredge, my grandfather waged a no-holds-barred war; but we could see no diminution in their numbers, which were now beginning to breed with the indigenous population of brown barn rats to be found on all Vermont hill farms, to produce an especially large, bi-colored, prolific, and intelligent hybrid rodent that even Lynx Kittredge had trouble catching.

  Finally, in the summer of 1952, my grandfather sent away for a pair of very lively, six-foot-long Kentucky blacksnakes, which he promptly christened Cole and Bob Younger and released in the barn. Not only did the Younger Boys all but eradicate the hybridized rats; they served the unanticipated function of scaring the daylights out of uninvited and unwanted visitors to my grandfather’s barn. One of their favorite basking spots was the lintel shelf just inside the milk house door. From here the Boys would casually lower the front third or so of their thick, jet-black bodies, and flick their split tongues inquisitively in the faces of astonished and terror-stricken milk inspectors, tax assessors, border patrol agents searching for illegal aliens, and other undesirable guests, who rarely tarried longer than the time it took them to reach their parked vehicles at a dead run. “They went back down the Hollow quicker than they came up,” my grandfather liked to say about these visitors. Of course the introduction of Cole and Bob to the Farm in Lost Nation also enhanced my grandfather’s local reputation for misanthropy, though in fact the Younger Boys were perfectly harmless and actually quite amicable—unless, of course, you were a rat.

  I, for my part, didn’t mind the blacksnakes at all. I don’t know that one could call them affectionate; but they were tame enough, and allowed me to lug them around the barn draped over my neck and arms for hours on end. I did notice that the barn cat litters seemed to fall off at about the time of the snakes’ arrival, but we never actually saw one of the Boys go after a kitten, and very probably most of the adult cats just exercised the better part of feline valor and moved down the road to another barn.

  Now, as my grandfather very well knew at the time he ordered the snakes, my grandmother had a great hatred and loathing for serpents of any stripe. Woe betide the garter snakes—more commonly known in the Kingdom County of my youth as “gardener” snakes—she came across in her flowerbeds or pea patch if her hoe was handy; and she had more than once instructed me, in great seriousness, that when I became a famous archaeologist like Mr. Howard Carter, I must never neglect to wear snake boots when poking around the pyramids. Many times during my boyhood Gram reminded me that it was a poisonous asp with which the love-lorn Egyptian princess Cleopatra had taken her own life; and one of the most horrifying clippings in her Doomsday Book of catastrophic local newspaper accounts described, in lurid detail, the horrible death by snakebite of a young man known as “Lucky” LaPorte, who, while unloading a bunch of green bananas from a freight car in Kingdom Common in 1921, was bitten on the neck and killed nearly instantly by a fer-de-lance hidden in with the fruit.

  After the advent on the Farm of the Younger Boys, my grandmother assiduously avoided the barn. During haying time, instead of setting the switchel jug inside the cooling tank in the milk house, she left it outside the door in the shade of her hollyhocks. And when my grandfather teased her one evening, by threatening to bring the Boys into the kitchen for a fireside chat, she declared that if the blacksnakes ever appeared within one hundred feet of the house, their remaining minutes would be as numbered as Lucky LaPorte’s after his sad encounter with the fer-de-lance.

  “If those vipers come sashaying in here, Mr. Kittredge, their sashaying days will end on the spot,” my grandmother said. “You may inform them I said so.”

  “Why don’t you inform them yourself?” my grandfather said. “That way they’d know you meant it.”

  My grandmother gave a sigh, and did not reply.

  “I guess Grandma’s afraid to go down to the barn,” my grandfather said.

  “Don’t call me Grandma,” my grandmother said. “I’m a mother and a grandmother. Not a grandma.”

  But I noticed that she did not deny being afraid of the Kentucky blacksnakes. It was hard for me to believe that my grandmother feared anything on earth; but I understood that some people seemed to be born with an aversion to snakes; perhaps my grandmother was one of these persons.

  The next morning when I came around from the hayloft to get the jug of switchel, my grandmother met me in the barnyard. “Tut,” she said, “do you think your grandmother is afraid of those reptiles?”

  “No,” I said doubtfully. “Of course not. You’re not afraid of anything, Gram.”

  “Come,” she said, seizing my wrist.

  She led me across the barnyard and into the milk house.

  Sure enough, one of the Younger Boys—I could never tell Cole from Bob—was reposing on the lintel shelf. With that effortless gliding motion peculiar to snakes when they are unalarmed, he shifted himself and depended over the shelf a couple of feet to examine this new interloper. He flicked out his double tongue and as he did so my grandmother grasped him behind the head. “Get behind me, Satan!” she said, looking him right full in the face from less than a foot away.

  She released him unharmed and we returned to the barnyard. Only then did she give a little shudder.

  “I knew you weren’t scared of those old snakes, Gram,” I said with tremendous relief. I couldn’t wait to tell my grandfather what had happened.

  But again my grandmother reached out and took my wrist. She fixed her dark, kind eyes on me, and with another small shudder she said, “Yes, I am, Tut. I’m terrified half to death by the creatures.”

  I didn’t understand. “But, Gram, you were braver than the milk inspectors, the tax men—any of them.”

  “Ah,” my grandmother said. “Then you’ve learned an important lesson.”

  “What lesson, Gram?”

  “That being brave has nothing to do with being unafraid,” she said, heading up for the house. “Never forget that, Tut.”

  For three or four weeks each year, in what we called high summer, between the first and second cuttings of hay, my grandfather subcontracted from the International Boundary Commission in Washington, D.C., the job of clearing the sector of the American-Canadian border running between Kingdom County and southern Quebec. The Vista, as the Canadian Line was sometimes called, was a thirty-foot-wide strip of unfenced and unguarded no-man’s-land which, in Vermont, happens to coincide with the Forty-fifth Parallel circling the globe exactly halfway between the Equator and the North Pole. For many years, my grandfather had been responsible for clearing the stretch from the Upper Connecticut River separating Vermont’s eastern boundary from New Hampshire, all the way to the Green Mountain Range, just north of Jay Peak, to the west: a total distance of about seventy miles. Each summer he cleared a segment of approximately ten miles.

  In addition to cutting down the ever-encroaching brush and trees, and repairing any damage to the granite monuments set a mile apart along the Vista, my grandfather sometimes had to resurvey the boundary where i
t followed a changing streambed or river. Using survey chains and his theodolite, which he referred to as the instrument, and taking most of his sightings several times, he prided himself on registering some of the most precise latitudinal recordings along the entire thirty-five-hundred-mile border from eastern Maine to western Washington.

  From my first summer on the Farm, I’d worked with Gramp on this annual project. We’d leave home in the lumber truck each morning as soon as we finished our barn chores and return in time for evening chores and supper, after a long day in the woods. Much of the border country between Vermont and Quebec was still quite wild in those days, accessible only by single-lane, corduroy lumbering traces, and clearing the remote terrain was ideal work for a boy. I liked learning how to use a one-man bucksaw and an ax, and as I grew older, I mastered the technique of reading the theodolite as well. Sometimes, too, under my grandfather’s stem direction, I reset missing brass monument plates in the granite obelisks along the Vista.

  Over the huge noon dinners my grandmother packed for us, my grandfather told me stories of his travels, and as we looked off along the Vista while eating, I liked thinking that it stretched all the way across the country. It seemed somehow to link me with the fabulous places it bisected: Niagara Falls, the Great Lakes, and the Great High Plains. Someday I would see those places for myself. In the meantime, I was content to work in the Vermont woods with the man I most admired of all the men in the world, my grandfather and namesake, Austen Kittredge.

  Not all of the exotic places along the Line were as faraway as the Rockies or even Niagara Falls. There was, for instance, the enclave of collapsing wooden frame buildings just south of the border and less than a mile west of my grandfather’s hunting camp known as Fort Kittredge. Fort Kittredge had originally been just that, a tiny stockade where, according to my grandfather, our Loyalist forebears had stockpiled muskets and ammunition in anticipation of that glorious day when the British Red Coats would march south to retake Vermont and the United States. Later, the place had been used as a lumber camp, a hideout for Chinese alien smugglers, and, during Prohibition, a rendezvous for whiskey runners. To me, it was a spooky yet fascinating spot. I liked exploring it—in the daylight, with my grandfather.

  Quite frequently, my grandfather hired his two old cousins, Whiskeyjack Kittredge and his brother, Preacher John Wesley an Kittredge, to help us with our work. Like my grandfather, who despite his alleged antisocial behavior had the greatest relish for eccentric and unusual characters, I loved to get my two ancient cousins going, as we called it. In fact, this was never very hard to do.

  Cousin WJ began each working day like a house afire, hacking away at the encroaching brush like a man possessed. By mid-morning, he invariably ran out of steam and slipped off to fish a nearby brook or nap in the sun with his slouch hat pulled down over his eyes. Still, he was fond of drawing me aside and inveighing against the low wages paid to him by my grandfather. And he filled my head with all kinds of wild, unlikely tales, which I was always ready to listen to.

  “Have you ever bedded down two women to once, boy?” he inquired of me one afternoon when I was eight or nine. “I did one time, in a whorehouse up to Montreal.” Under Cousin WJ’s tutelage I became intimately acquainted by the ripe old age of ten with the delectations of Montreal whorehouses, which he had no doubt learned about from his endless stock of F•U•C•K Books, since my grandfather confided to me that WJ had never been to Montreal in his life.

  Preacher John Wesleyan seemed equally determined to enlighten me in matters at the spiritual end of the spectrum. JW refused to work within earshot of WJ and my grandfather, whom he characterized as blasphemers and heretics. This charge seemed especially unfair in the light of my grandfather’s very genuine concern for Preacher JW’s safety and welfare. At eighty, our sanctimonious old cousin the lay preacher was rather stiff and tottery. Each morning, my grandfather carried JW’s ax, saw, and lunch to the section of the Line where he would be working, half a mile or so from the rest of us, blasphemers that we were. As the day progressed, Gramp dispatched me several times to “check up on the pious old son of a bitch and make sure he was all right.” But Gramp’s charitable solicitude did nothing to soften Cousin John Wesleyan’s condemnations of my grandfather’s soul to eternal perdition.

  “Ain’t that a lovely prospect, boy?” JW said to me one noon when I was checking up on him for my grandfather. He pointed off over a typical Kingdom County landscape of distant, dark green mountains, with lighter green farms running up into their foothills. It was as various and beautiful a view, no doubt, as nearly any in the world. But without waiting for me to reply, the preacher declared, “Vermont’s beauty is as nothing compared to the splendor of God’s Paradise. And do you know what I anticipate most about dwelling there? Do you, boy?

  “I’ll tell you,” he continued. “What I most look forward to in Paradise is the prospect of being there alone, without my scofflaw brother or your grandfather to trouble me.”

  “Where will they be, Cousin JW?”

  “Oh, we won’t talk about that now,” he said in a merry voice, crinkling up his eyes with glee. “We won’t ruin our day by going into that, boy.”

  Quite often, the black flies and mosquitoes along the Line were fierce, and their numbers legion. In places the brush we cut was so thick that you couldn’t have fallen down if you had tried. I did not always relish being the butt of Whiskeyjack’s ribald jokes and John Wesleyan’s tirades. Still, I learned things working up in the woods on the border with those hard old men that I would not have been apt to learn anywhere else; and I am nearly as grateful for that experience as I am for my free education at the state university. For I think that the likes of Cousin Whiskeyjack, Cousin John Wesleyan, and my Grandfather Austen Kittredge himself will not soon be seen again, in Vermont or elsewhere.

  In the middle of September, the hills of Kingdom County shone gloriously red and yellow and gold. Then at the peak of the fall foliage season, my grandfather began going to the woods again, now to cut timber for his sawmill. On weekends I accompanied him.

  As I grew older, my job was to skid the logs down to the mill with Maiden Rose’s horses, Henry David and Ralph Waldo, which my grandfather used in exchange for helping Rose with her maple sugaring and haying. Later on in the fall, I worked Saturdays and after school sweeping up sawdust or tailing one of the saws in Gramp’s mill below the pond.

  The sawmill, with its big whirling log-saw, its several razor-sharp smaller saws and its shrieking planer, was a dangerous and fascinating place. What I liked best about it was my grandfather’s cramped office, jutting out over the penstock. Gramp’s office contained a pot-belly stove, a rolltop desk, and two or three straightback chairs. It was cluttered with bills and order forms, antique saw-files, worn-out gears, wooden boxes full of drill bits and nails of all sizes, chalklines and measuring tapes. Best of all was an ancient, battery-operated Stromberg Carlson radio as large as a big bread-box, on which my grandfather listened to the news and weather from Montreal.

  On certain clear fall and winter evenings, when the reception was good, my grandfather and I convened around the pot-belly stove in his sawmill office to listen to our favorite programs. We especially loved Lowell Thomas’s travelogues. Two programs my grandfather heartily despised yet rarely missed were Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and Our Miss Brooks. Gramp regarded Sergeant Preston as a bold-faced imposter, a deep-voiced charlatan who knew nothing about the Far North. And he disliked Miss Brooks for the singular reason that in it, Eve Arden played the part of a schoolteacher.

  Gramp loved Jack Benny and detested a detective thriller called The Shadow. Many times he declared that if Lamont Cranston, aka the Shadow, ever came slinking around the Farm in Lost Nation with his wild laugh, he’d be a shadow, all right—a shadow of his former self.

  I loved listening to the Stromberg Carlson with my grandfather. The big red and green tubes winked and flashed like Christmas lights. My grandfather scowled. And I sat enthra
lled by the crackling old radio, magically bringing the outside world up over the rugged hills and mountains to Lost Nation Hollow, where electricity was still years away.

  My grandfather was one of the few remaining hunters in Kingdom County who, each November, still ventured up to the high hardwood ridges, far from roads and road hunters, and shot one big buck each year. And although he refused to shoot a bear, which, he pointed out, after it has been skinned has an uncanny resemblance to a human being, Austen Kittredge was a lightning-quick wing-shot with his old double-barreled twelve-gauge. Frequently when I got home from school on October afternoons we went up to the overgrown apple orchard behind the house and Gramp filled the game pocket of his red-and-black wool hunting jacket with a limit of four partridges. And he was pure hell on ducks and geese, though you’d never catch Austen Kittredge holed up in a heated duck blind with a steaming jug of coffee. Instead, my grandfather loved to walk the marshy riverbanks below his sawmill on sleeting gray fall mornings and jump-shoot male mallards with their brilliant emerald heads and big black ducks with blue epaulets on their wings, not to mention the little wood ducks, colorful as tropical parrots—though he wouldn’t shoot a merganser, or allow me to shoot one after I started to hunt ducks with him, because mergansers tasted fishy, like their diet, and my grandfather did not hold with shooting any game that he did not intend to eat.

  Of course my Uncle Rob Roy and my father were both expert hunters, and fishermen, too, having been taught at a very early age by my grandfather, who, for all his prejudices against schools and schoolteaching, was himself a superb instructor.

  “Cast short and straight,” he’d say, showing me how to cast a wet fly with his limber bamboo rod, as we stood by the sawmill pond after supper. “I won’t fish with a fancy-dan caster, Austen.”