On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Let us hope so, Miss Jane,” the pilot said. “I have the strongest idea that the riddle could be of considerable importance, perhaps of very considerable importance, to both of us.”

  And once again he lifted his finger like a choir director and spoke the word “behold,” and spoke it a second time, and then a third. All to no avail. Henry Satterfield, it seemed, could no more remember his grandfather’s riddle than climb into his biplane and fly to the moon.

  7

  JANE’S KNEE-HIGH rubber barn boots swished through the wet grass, as Henry minced along behind her in his white showman’s shoes like a cat trying to keep its feet dry. They each carried a bamboo pole and, in a wicker fish basket, a soup can of garden worms. In a pack basket on her back Miss Jane had stashed a number-four iron frying pan, a box of wooden kitchen matches, salt and pepper and cornmeal and butter, four slices of bread, her wooden flask of Who Shot Sam, and two wooden drinking cups she’d carved from beech burls.

  Miss Jane had also brought, slung over her shoulder on a strap, a sharpshooter’s rifle, Lady Justice, which her father had carried south on his quest to find his missing brother. Lady Justice was a special gun, with over and under barrels. The top barrel fired seven .54 caliber rifle bullets capable of hitting precisely what a good marksman aimed at up to a mile away. The bottom barrel fired buckshot or a slug and could drop a moose or a black bear in its tracks at one hundred yards. Embossed in silver on the stock was the figure of a blindfolded woman holding up a set of scales. It was a formidable weapon, and Henry could not imagine what purpose it could serve on a fishing expedition.

  As they hiked up the pike, here just a single-track lane through disused fields, Miss Jane delivered a schoolteacherly lecture on their quarry. “There is a vast difference, Mr. Satterfield, between a common upstart trout and a char. In Vermont, rainbow trout and brown trout are mere Johnny-come-latelies, imported from afar and not worth our attention. But our so-called eastern speckled, or brook, trout are direct descendants of the char conveyed here from the far north ten thousand years ago by the glacier. Let us admit, however, that char are not the most intelligent of the fishes. Not by a long shot.”

  Abruptly, Miss Jane veered off the lane, marched over to the nearby burn, flipped her worm into the current, hooked a fish, lost it, rebaited, and hooked it again. This time she swung it, bright and splashing, with a distinctly bluish back, out of the water onto the bank. “A brown trout,” she said as she dropped the fish into her basket, “would have learned its lesson the first time I hooked it and not returned for another taste of the same. Char, I’m afraid, even my unique blue-backed char, are quite uneducable.”

  As they fished down the brook together, the sun came out, retreated behind sailing gray clouds, emerged again. Here in the abandoned farmland west of the home place, Miss Jane’s fields were rapidly growing back to brush. Thorn apples, gray birch, poplars, and junipers were springing up where sheep and cattle had grazed not so long ago. The borders of the fields were choked with bracken. One by one, the mountain was reclaiming for itself the farms of Miss Jane’s ancestors.

  Henry was fascinated to learn that each of the pools on the burn had names. Sheep Meadow Pool. Short Sheep Meadow Pool. Somebody’s Home, a sweeping curve with an undercut bank where, Miss Jane told him, a trout always seemed to be lurking. Nobody’s Home, a hidden pocket behind a black boulder where last year’s tall brown grass leaned out from the banks and touched over the narrow channel. You’d think there should always be a fish in Nobody’s Home, Miss Jane said, but there hardly ever was.

  Late in the morning they entered the bog between the foot of the mountain and the river, where the stream slowed to a dark crawl between thickset cedar trees. Miss Jane usually timed her fishing expeditions so as to arrive at the spawning pool, where the burn ran into the river, around noon. The pool, about two hundred yards long and thirty feet wide, divided her property on the north from Eben Kinneson Esquire’s on the south, where work on the right of way for the Connector had already started. Miss Jane and Henry could hear the rumble of machinery and, occasionally, the shouting of loggers in the distance.

  The burn entered the big pool between two low, nearly identical knolls, East Round Hill and West Round Hill. The gap between them was known as the Gate to Canada. On the hillsides grew more cedars, hemlocks, some sugar maples, white and yellow birch, beech, basswood, fir, and spruce. The spawning pool was in the shade nearly all day and had a clean gravel bottom. It was about eight feet deep in the middle and refrigerated all summer long by the icy waters coming off the mountain. Here, Miss Jane announced, for untold centuries the blue-backed char of Kingdom Mountain had foregathered in the autumn to hold their annual matrimonial ceremonies.

  A mature butternut tree leaned out over the junction of the burn and the spawning pool. Its crooked lower trunk formed a natural seat where Jane loved to sit while she fished. She knew exactly where the largest fish in the pool were and how to give her wriggling angleworm the most natural drift, moving the tip of her pole directly over her line as it went down the current so that there was no drag on the bait. Miss Jane could always tell the difference between a bite and a snag. A fish vibrated the line. Through the quivering leader she felt connected to the river and to her beloved mountain, past and present.

  Henry, for his part, was thinking that cedar bogs, like jungles and frozen wastes, were best viewed from aloft and not meant to be tramped through on foot unless you happened to be, say, a wolf or a panther. He wondered if panthers were native to Kingdom Mountain. Very probably. Bank-fishing the little creek that ran through his father’s place with his granddaddy the captain had been one thing. This austere northern wilderness was a different matter altogether. What if he’d had to land here in the trees instead of out on the lake? No one would ever have found him.

  As they emerged from the corridor of cedars onto the spawning pool, Miss Jane felt some of the old excitement of coming here as a little girl with her father. Today the river would be up from the rain the night before, and high water usually meant good fishing. But suddenly Jane stopped in her tracks. Both sides of the river had been stripped bare of trees. Not a hobblebush or barberry or lone buggy-whip sapling remained standing. Her fishing tree had been sliced off just above the ground. Both hills were crisscrossed with raw gashes of bluish clay and mud. Just upstream from the truncated butternut, a section of bank had slumped into the burn, washing more mud into the river every second. Piles of evergreen slash clogged the spawning pool, choking off its flow in several places. Two tractors were chugging back and forth across the muddy hillsides, leaving deep ruts in their paths. The Gate to Canada had been clear-cut.

  The infuriated Duchess found the woods boss, who wore a green wool shirt over a red wool shirt. On his head sat a blue tuque. In a heavy French accent he claimed to work for Eben Kinneson, who owned the paper mill in Kingdom Landing as well as the land across the river. His woods crew had contracted to clear the right of way for the Connector. Eben had given him a map showing him where to cut.

  “Well, you’ve just cut twenty acres of my prime timber,” Miss Jane said. “Without my permission.”

  Twenty acres? The woods boss showed his tobacco-stained teeth. “Mademoiselle, in one little week we cut ten times twenty acres.”

  “Yes. But those twenty acres belonged to me.”

  The boss shrugged. From the side pocket of his wool trousers he pulled a round dollar watch. It was twelve o’clock. He got a case of beer out of a cooler and set the bottles, one by one, on a high yellow pine stump, like Rip Van Winkle’s tenpins.

  “À table!” he called out, waving his crew in.

  The boss opened a beer, tipped back his head, and emptied the bottle in four or five gulps. He tossed the empty onto a pile of slash and reached for another.

  “The fish, too, will come back,” he said. “Mademoiselle.”

  He winked at the men gathering around the stump. A short man with a black patch over one eye like a pirate laughe
d behind his hand. Unhurriedly, Miss Jane unslung Lady Justice from her shoulder. Using both thumbs she cocked back one of the two big hammers. In a single swift motion she raised the gun to her shoulder and blasted the beer bottles on the stump into a thousand pieces with a load of buckshot.

  Through the ringing in his ears Henry Satterfield heard her say, “If any of you gentlemen see Eben Kinneson Esquire before I do, tell him Mademoiselle Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain will be paying him a call.”

  8

  THAT AFTERNOON MISS JANE and Henry set out in the Model A truck for Kingdom Landing to beard Eben Kinneson Esquire in his den. Miss Jane wore her long black driving duster, green goggles, and a black motorman’s cap with a leather visor. The truck was painted a shiny black, with green and yellow wheel spokes. She drove with one hand on the big wooden knob of the wheel, also painted black. In her other hand she gripped her flask of Who Shot Sam.

  Miss Jane drove fifteen miles an hour at all times, in town and in the country, with her left tires rolling down the exact center of the road. She took great pride in never having run off into the ditch in her entire motoring career. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the oncoming motorists she encountered. The aviator, who had survived two years flying Sopwith Camels over Germany for the RCAF during the Great War, rode the ten miles from Jane’s mountain to Kingdom Landing with one hand braced against the wooden dash panel.

  As they approached the Landing, a truck loaded with pulpwood for Eben Kinneson’s Great North Woods Pulp and Paper Company came roaring up behind them. Its horn blared out and the driver gestured impatiently for Miss Jane to move over.

  “I think he wants to get by,” Henry ventured.

  “Let him attempt it,” Miss Jane said. “He passes me at his peril.”

  They arrived at the paper mill, with the pulpwood truck riding their rear bumper, in the late afternoon. The weather had turned sunny, but the sky above the town was hazy with smoke from the factory. Sometimes, when the wind was out of the south, Miss Jane could smell its rotten-egg stench on Kingdom Mountain.

  Eben’s mill, which sprawled along the Lower Kingdom River, was larger than the whole hamlet of Kingdom Landing. A yellow mountain of crushed sulfur loomed up against the smoky sky. Nearby was a huge stack of sawdust and another of pulpwood. More pulp floated in the river. Two sooty brick smokestacks thrust a hundred feet into the air with the words GREAT NORTH WOODS INCORPORATED painted on them. Thick black smoke poured out of the stacks. Along the riverbank sat several dozen identical wooden rowhouses.

  “In those wretched cribs, Mr. Satterfield,” Miss Jane said, “dwell my cousin’s peons. What a terrible destiny for my beautiful little butternut tree,” she continued, pointing at the mountain of pulp. “I will exact retribution in full measure. Do you doubt it?”

  Henry did not doubt it, and said as much. He was relieved that Miss Jane had seen fit to leave Lady Justice back at the home place.

  On the hill above the factory sat a building the size of a small castle, white with red tile roofs and soaring turrets. A golf course was laid out beside it, bordered by a small lake. This was Eben Kinneson Esquire’s Monadnock House, second in grandeur among northern New England resorts only to the fabled Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire. Miss Jane frowned up at it. “How visitors can come to this pestilential town is beyond me. My cousin hopes to add Kingdom Mountain to his holdings and develop a great winter spa there, where roistering layabouts with too much time on their hands will slide downhill on staves by day and fornicate by night. I trust you are not a skier, Mr. Satterfield?”

  “No, ma’am, I am not,” Henry replied, hoping that Miss Jane would not proceed to inquire whether he was a fornicator.

  “Good.” Miss Jane steered her Model A with its carnival wheels up to the main gate of the mill. “I mean good that you are not a skier. I have no use for them.”

  A guard in a blue uniform sat in a white booth hardly larger than a dollhouse. The Duchess rolled down her side curtain. “I am Jane Hubbell Kinneson from Kingdom Mountain,” she said. “I wish to see Eben Kinneson Esquire about a criminal act.”

  The guard stared at Miss Jane, resplendent in her motoring outfit, as though she’d stepped out of another dimension. “Mr. Kinneson isn’t in, Miss Kinneson. If you’d like to park in the visitors’ lot, I’ll take you to see Mr. Brown, the plant manager.”

  As they walked across the parking lot, the guard had to speak loudly to make himself heard over the deafening rumble of a whirling elevated drum as large as one of the row houses along the river. Inside this gigantic metal cylinder thousands of four-foot-long pulp sticks tumbled together at a furious rate to remove their bark. Nearby was a huge vat, which, the guard explained, was full of acid to decompose the peeled wooden sticks into fibers to make paper. They entered the factory, where endless rolls of snow white paper ten feet wide spun off revolving spools. Immense swordlike cutters snapped off newsprint-sized sheets. The steel-decked floor vibrated beneath their feet in time with the rumbling machinery. Henry was interested in the papermaking process, but Miss Jane was not. As she stalked across the shaking floor, looking neither right nor left, the workers stared at her.

  Mr. Brown worked in a glass-enclosed office on the far side of the mill floor. He was a harried-looking man with a green bookkeeper’s visor, which, Miss Jane was certain, he wore so that he wouldn’t have to look anyone in the eye. “State your business,” he said without looking up.

  “I shall state my business,” Miss Jane replied. “Some trespassing rapscallions who work for this concern sashayed onto my mountain and cut a great deal of valuable timber without authorization. I want you to tell Mr. Eben Kinneson Esquire that Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson is here to see him.”

  “Mr. Kinneson isn’t here, Miss Kinneson. I believe he’s up at his private trout pond.”

  “Char,” Miss Jane said.

  “Char?”

  “Not trout,” she said. “Char. Come along, Mr. Satterfield.”

  Back across the mill floor she marched, with the white-clad aviator hurrying at her side, past the staring workers, out the door, and beneath the whirling debarker, straight to the Model A. She drove down the middle of the single street of the company town at her usual pace. A coal truck headed their way ran up onto the curb, blowing a front tire with a loud report. For a terrible moment Henry feared that he might have been shot.

  PRIVATE ROAD FOR GUESTS ONLY announced a sign beside a steep road winding up to Monadnock House. Without slowing down, Miss Jane swerved onto the private road, very nearly oversetting her high-topped truck.

  They passed the horseshoe-shaped lake, where a guest in a tweed jacket was fly-casting at one end. Ahead a golfer, tall and thin, with straight black hair parted in the middle, was crossing the road. He wore a knit sweater and spiked golfing shoes and carried a golfing bag. Miss Jane gave a blast on her klaxon, and Eben Kinneson Esquire scowled at the Model A. Then he continued walking toward the green near the pond.

  Miss Jane left the Ford running in the middle of the road and approached the green with Henry in tow. On the hillside above them Eben’s resort gleamed in the late-afternoon sunshine. “Golf links,” Miss Jane said. “And a private fishing pond. Remark upon all this opulence, Mr. Satterfield. Thoreau, ordinarily the most insufferable of pronouncers and proclaimers, was on one occasion half right. Not necessarily the mass of men, but many rich men, lead lives of desperation. Not so very quietly, either.

  “Hello, Eben,” she said. “I scarcely recognized you in your fancy footwear. I can remember when you went to school barefoot. This is my friend Mr. Henry Satterfield, of Beaumont, Texas. Mr. Satterfield is a renowned aviator and meteorologist.”

  “I know who and what Mr. Satterfield is,” Eben said with the air of a man who knows everything about everybody.

  Eben stepped up to his ball and stroked it briskly past the pin, off the green, and into some cattails beside the lake. He frowned in the direction of the errant golf ball as if it h
ad personally offended him.

  “The aim of this game, cousin,” Miss Jane said, “as invented by our Scottish ancestors, is to knock the ball into the cup, not the horse pond.”

  “That is no horse pond but my private speckled trout lake.”

  “Char,” Miss Jane corrected him. “Which brings me to my purpose. Your cutters came onto my land without permission and felled several hundred trees and laid waste to the spawning pool where my blue-backed char have perpetuated their kind since time out of mind. I hold you and you alone accountable.”

  “You have been offered generous restitution, cousin, for the small amount of land appropriated by the township for the right of way for the Connector. However, I will recommend that the highway be rerouted, away from your trout pool and up the pike road.”

  “There will be no highway on my mountain, period. What’s more, I want you to pay me a thousand dollars for the stolen timber. It will cost at least that much to replant the Gate to Canada with seedlings. Also, I expect you to fill in those ruts, which will turn into little mud-choked rivers every time it rains. Pull the slash out of the burn and the river, dump gravel and sand into the pool where it’s been washed out, put some crib dams on the brook, and replace my butternut fishing tree.”

  “Why, that’s absurd. All that would cost many thousands of dollars,” Eben said as he headed toward the driving tee of the next hole. “I am a very conservation-minded man, cousin. But I did not rise to become owner of the Great North Woods Pulp and Paper Company by throwing away money. I hear, by the way, that in confronting my crew, you weren’t content to rely entirely on verbal persuasion.”

  “Your crew is fortunate not to be in the morgue. I shall see you in court, cousin.”

  For the first time since Miss Jane and Henry had arrived at the golf course, Eben Kinneson Esquire smiled. “Court, cousin Jane, is my bailiwick. You will indeed see me there if you persist with this nonsense. Meeting me in court will not be an enjoyable experience, I assure you.”