My grandfather threw his tea leaves into the fire, in a gesture dismissive of the Farm. “Lost Nation Hollow is a bygone place. I watched it pass into history and so did you, though at the time you were too young to know what was happening. The farms are all gone. The big woods are gone. The best of the hunting and fishing is gone. The kids, including all four of mine, have grown up and gone away and not come back. What is there for them to come back to? What is there for any of us to come back to?
“Now, Austen, they say living in the bush adds twenty years to your life. I don’t know about that but I intend to find out. Not sit around the stove on a gone-by farm and dry up and fade away. And I’ll tell you something else. Lost Nation is no place for you to live now, either. Use the camp for a hunting camp if you can find anything left to hunt. But don’t go back there to live. What would you do there, even with a college education? Go to schoolmastering like your father? That would be a fine thing for a smart young fella like you that’s supposed to be heard from. The world is bigger than Lost Nation, boy. That’s what I’m saying to you.”
Suddenly I was very angry with my grandfather—angrier than I’d been when he had insisted that we put in eighteen-hour days mapping the territory we’d crossed, angrier than when he’d led me on the forced march up the flooded gorge and on through the fire-ravaged country into the blizzard. I was angry because he and I had been inseparable for twelve years and now his decision to stay here seemed like a rejection of me.
“Fine,” I said. “Then I’m staying too. You and Mr. Snowball and I can all run the trapline together.”
“You’ll do no such thing, mister,” my grandfather said.
“Then where the hell else do you think I should be? I can’t stay here with you. Lost Nation’s dead and gone. I can’t go back there. Where should I be?”
“In college,” he said. “I promised your grandmother I’d see you through your schooling, Austen. By my calculations, you’ve got four more years to go. In the meantime, you can come up here and work for me summers. I can pay you some from my trapping proceeds. I’ll need a man to help me map these Barrens, no doubt. There’s a lot of them.”
Again my grandfather began to rummage in the grub box. “These are for you, Austen. Take proper care of them because someday, despite what you think now, you’ll come to value them.”
He’d taken out the flat metal case containing the maps he’d drawn over the summer of the Great Lost Gomer of Labrador. The only maps in existence of that vast tract of wilderness, soon to be inundated by an inland sea.
I didn’t know what to say. The maps were undoubtedly the greatest gift my grandfather could possibly have given me. But he just threw his cigar butt into the fire after his tea leaves and said, “This meeting is adjourned for the evening. Douse the fire before you come to bed.”
When he reached the entrance of the cabin my grandfather turned back. “Austen,” he said out into the darkness, “you did all right this summer. You’re a good fella to go down the river with.”
My grandfather was both right and wrong about life in the Far North. Living in the bush did not add twenty years to his life, but it very well may have helped to add ten. For a full and happy decade, he dwelt on No Name Lake with his trapping partner and friend, Donny Snowball, and I spent some of the happiest summers of my life visiting him there.
In the late fall of 1970, when the caribou began returning from their summer migration to the big hidden lake beyond the Snow Chain Mountains, my grandfather, then eighty-two though looking scarcely sixty, went through the ice on No Name’s outlet and took a bad chill. He and Donny had been on their way into the Barrens for the fall trapping, and Donny told him flatly that they should return immediately to their cabin and wait there for Gramp to regain his strength. “You stay out in the bush now, you’ll catch pneumonia and die sure as shooting,” Donny warned him.
“When I can’t stay out in the bush anymore I don’t give a good goddamn if I do die,” my grandfather said, and insisted on pushing on.
Four days later, Austen Kittredge died of pneumonia. Donny towed his body back across the ice on a hand-sledge and buried him under a cairn on the top of No Name Mountain, next to Mira, though how he managed this, alone in the Ungava winter, I have no idea. It was a great act of loyalty, after which Donny ran their trapline alone for another two or three winters, before establishing a fly-in hunting and fishing lodge on the outlet of No Name, which today is a lucrative business. “Things change, Tut. You can’t predict the future.”
The Farm in Lost Nation Hollow? I stay there summers with my family, though of course the true hill country of my youth and the hill people who lived there then long ago passed into history. There has been no farming in the Hollow now for decades.
Recently I have found myself dreaming of family pictures, most never taken. I see my grandmother and my great-aunt, two young girls standing on a Halifax dock, looking gravely through the sleet into the camera of my imagination.
And my grandfather at seventy-two, with the best decade of his life still ahead of him, standing on the shore of the island at the outlet of No Name Lake as the floatplane I am riding in wheels and banks and whines off over the wilderness toward Schefferville.
Here I am at six, standing next to my grandfather beside his millpond, learning to use a fly rod. “Cast short and straight, Austen,” he says harshly. “I won’t fish with a fancy-Dan caster.”
In stark tones of black and white, I see my sable-clad grandmother against Lost Nation’s wintery hills, drawing a bead on the great white snow owl. And I see her rising off the pillows of her deathbed, fierce and exultant in her vision of Egypt, and lying in state in the tamarack sarcophagus my grandfather built for her, surrounded by her strange and wonderful Egyptian artifacts.
They come at night, unbidden, just before I fall asleep and on nights when sleep comes slowly. They are photographs, sepiatinted. Most are of my grandfather and grandmother, who throughout my boyhood were at the center of everything for me. They remain at the center of my memories today, frozen in those recollections of my youth in Lost Nation, along with all their ancestors and mine back to my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Sojourner Kittredge. They are a lost nation themselves now, existing in my memory, and on these pages, and nowhere else.
About the Author
HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten books, including Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account, and A Stranger in the Kingdom, which, along with Disappearances, was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont.
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