On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  They eased the guide boat out of the leanto and turned it right side up. It was beautifully varnished, with two slim, jaunty racing stripes, one blue and one orange, running around it just under its gunwales. After transferring their gear from the hand sled and propping the sled in the bow, they pushed off, with Jane manning the oars. She told Henry that she had mounted the pins on ball bearings, thereby making her boat exceptionally silent. She could slip up on a rising char or a drinking deer as quietly as in a canoe and much more swiftly.

  The guide boat had a name inscribed neatly in black under its bow. Miss Jane had christened it the Sairy Gamp, after the tippling nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit. Like Dickens’s red-nosed Nurse Gamp, Jane’s craft took no water. “Troll your flies along behind us, why don’t you, Henry?” Jane said. “Let us see what we shall see.”

  Henry dragged his flies thirty feet behind the boat as they glided across Pond Number One. Jane had rigged a leader for him with a Duchess of Kingdom Mountain lead fly and two droppers, a Green Drake and a Queen of the Waters. This was how her Scottish ancestors had fished in their deep lochs, with a cast of three different flies. Today the surface of Pond Number One was choppy, which often made for good fishing. But the sun was very bright on the water, which didn’t. This was fine with Henry. After the hot walk up the pike and across the barrens, he was content just to sit on the cane seat of the guide boat and enjoy the breeze over the water. He couldn’t help thinking, as they skimmed across the little lake, what a very attractive woman Jane was, with her light hair, gray eyes, and strong, shapely arms working like an extension of the oars. “Miss Jane,” he said, “I hope you will not think me forward if I tell you that you are a fine figure of a woman.”

  “Why, sir,” she said, turning pink, “I don’t think you forward at all. It is kind of you to say such a thing to a woman of my age. You are the living picture of a gentleman.”

  “Well, I truly mean it,” Henry said. “Perhaps we should just sit on the porch of your cabin enjoying each other’s company and leave the bees to their own devices.”

  “Ah ha,” Miss Jane said. “I see where you are headed with your blandishments. We will indeed sit on the porch and”—she gave him an arch look—“enjoy each other’s company. After we line our bee back to its tree.”

  “Of all crafts, give me your flat-bottomed guide boat,” she said a minute later. “It’s responsive to every impulse of the oars yet much more stable than a canoe. One sudden movement in a canoe, and you’re in the drink.”

  Not being much of a swimmer, Henry was glad to be riding in a craft that was much more stable than a canoe. The portage to Pond Number Two was only about an eighth of a mile. Henry offered to help carry the guide boat, but Miss Jane easily swung it up to her hip and from there upside down above her head so that the gunwales rested on her shoulders. Kinneson women were all rugged, she assured him. Huswife Kinneson had discovered the flume on the far side of the mountain on a solitary fishing expedition when she was ninety-three. Even so, as Henry poked along behind, pulling the hand sled and picking his way around wet spots to protect his white shoes, he was amazed at how easily Miss Jane managed the guide boat, which must have weighed close to a hundred pounds.

  Pond Number Two was smaller than Pond Number One. The fishing conditions were the same, direct sun on wind-ruffled water, but Henry had a strike almost immediately, then another, then a third, and he played and boated three handsome blue-backs, the largest about a foot long. Ahead a loon whooped, a big, low-riding bird with a large black head and a black-and-white-checked back. Miss Jane said the bird was vexed with Henry for stealing his fish. Soon it dived out of sight. Jane pointed to where she thought it would come up and Henry pointed in the opposite direction. Neither of them came close to guessing correctly. The bird gave a long, hooting laugh, and Miss Jane said that they might as well try to predict the weather on Kingdom Mountain as predict where a diving loon would come up. Her father had once told her that a loon was one-third bird, one-third fish, and the rest mostly laugh.

  After another short portage they reached Pond Number Three, where Bad Brook came rushing down the steep cataract known as the flume. Running along beside it was the wooden logging chute down which Miss Jane and her father had sent her first buck. Jane said that the great slide, which rested on stone-filled cribs spaced about forty feet apart, was more than a thousand feet long. In recent years the last hundred or so feet had rotted away. Now the chute ended at the foot of the mountain in a grove of young fir and spruce trees.

  At the head of Pond Number Three the flume dropped over a twenty-foot-high waterfall into the pond. When viewed from below, the falls seemed to jet directly out of the side of the mountain. Nearby was Camp Hard Luck. Beyond it to the north lay the Great Northern Slang, a vast expanse of cotton grass, wild cranberry bushes, bog rosemary, tamarack trees, and dead water, relieved here and there by beaver and muskrat lodges, eventually leading out to Lake Memphremagog.

  Camp Hard Luck was constructed from matching American chestnut half-logs facing each other across the main room of the cabin. As a little girl Jane had been delighted to discover that whenever she located half of a knot on the west side of the room, she’d be sure to find the other half directly opposite it on the east side. She loved looking at the ruddy-colored wood, which had come from the last stand of chestnuts in northern Vermont, high on the north side of the mountain, near where she had shot the huge deer as a teenager. Mounted on the log wall was the ridge runner’s sixteen-point rack. Henry could see where one tine had been snapped off when Jane and her father had sent it down the chute to the frozen pond. Below the deer was nailed a small rectangular box, open at the top, and inside was a pencil stub and a notepad on which someone had scrawled, “Used camp in June took six trout to eat shot yearling mouse Canvasback Glodgett ps left woodbox fulle.” The “yearling mouse” puzzled them until Miss Jane deduced that Canvasback probably meant that he’d shot a young moose.

  A clearing in the woods behind the cabin was choked with late-blossoming daisies, buttercups, paintbrush, and jewel-weed, all of which had sprung up after the overdue rains. Miss Jane set the saucer from the sweetgrass basket on a ledgy outcropping bright with summer wildflowers, shook up the concoction in the Mason jar, and poured a few drops of the amber-colored treacle onto the saucer.

  “Teatime, Mr. Satterfield,” she announced.

  Honeybees seemed so well adapted to Kingdom Mountain that Henry had been surprised to learn from Miss Jane that like the purple lilac bush growing at the opposite end of her porch from the Virginia creeper, they were not native to northern New England. Over the century and a half since domestic bees had been introduced to the mountain by Huswife Kinneson, however, many colonies had emigrated from their hives to dwell in the woods. The opening in the woods behind Camp Hard Luck on the far side of the mountain was alive with them.

  “My goodness, hear them converse,” Jane exclaimed.

  “What do you think they’re saying?” Henry asked uneasily.

  “Why, I know perfectly well what they’re saying. They’re telling each other where the best nectar is.”

  Just then a bee appeared beside the blue saucer. It climbed over the rim and loaded up with the sugary concoction, then flew off in the direction of the flume. “Let the lining begin,” the Duchess said. Out came her ancestor’s spyglass, which she trained on the departing bee.

  Replacing the lid on the Mason jar, Miss Jane struck off up the mountainside with the reluctant aviator tagging along behind, pulling the hand sled with the saw and the sweetgrass basket. The understory was a tangle of wild blackberries, virgin’s bower, mullein, and evening primrose. Miss Jane lost sight of their bee a couple of hundred yards above the camp. She stopped and repeated the process, unscrewing the lid of the jar, pouring out some of the cloudy liquor, setting the saucer on the floor of the forest. After three or four minutes a bee appeared. Whether it was the same one or another was impossible to say. Jane said it didn’t matter, they were all
likely from the same nest anyway.

  “I didn’t see him flying in,” Henry said.

  “Her,” Miss Jane corrected him. “The workers are females, Henry. And you rarely do see them arrive. One of their most charming ways is that they seem just to materialize. My father used to tell me that all the best gifts in life arrive by surprise,” she continued. “Like my mother, Pharaoh’s Daughter, who just appeared in the barn one Christmas morning.”

  “Miss Jane,” Henry said as they continued up the mountain after the bee, “I am interested in your mother. She had a most unusual name.”

  “If she had been a boy, my grandparents would have named him Moses. I suppose that her mother, the itinerant basket weaver Canada Jane Hubbell, wished her to have advantages not available to her, and therefore left her in the sweetgrass basket, like the infant Moses, for my grandparents to raise.”

  “You mentioned that she had no Indian ways.”

  “None at all, Henry. My father said I inherited all of the Indian ways from Canada Jane and her people.”

  “Were your father and Pharaoh’s Daughter raised as brother and sister?”

  “Well, that was a rather delicate point. Of course, Pharaoh’s Daughter was my father’s stepsister—I’ve lost sight of our bee, Henry. Let us pause and see if we can lure it back. They were of an age, and inseparable as children, the greatest chums in the world, I judge. Then he went off to war and she to Mount Holyoke College. After the war, Pharaoh’s Daughter married my father, and they were very happy together. They had me rather late in life. I think my arrival was a great surprise to them both. As I told you, they had their own little Kingdom Mountain particularities, but I know this much. Neither of them would have stood still for a minute for Eben’s ridiculous high road. Here’s our honeybee, right on schedule. I don’t think their nest can be far from here.”

  “Miss Jane, I don’t mean to pry, but I have to ask. Do you think your mother knew about Slidell? And Elisabeth?”

  “I expect that she did, Henry. My parents were lifelong friends as well as man and wife, and they had few secrets from each other.”

  “Do you believe he divulged to her what he discovered when he went south to find Pilgrim?”

  “I don’t know,” Jane said, capping the Mason jar and starting up the steep, wooded slope. “If so, I’m sure neither of them ever told anyone else.”

  Through gaps in the trees above them, Henry could see patches of gray cliffs and, high above them, the devil’s visage on the north face of the balancing boulder. This was not a place he would care to visit alone after dark. There was something forbidding about the far side of the mountain. Jane’s determined bearing as she set off up the steep slope under the trees made Henry wonder if she might sense it herself.

  The flume roaring through the nearby gorge made Henry dizzy. Miss Jane showed Henry where, over the millennia, sand and pebbles had scoured out a deep pool she called Satan’s cauldron. Upstream was a black rock shaped like a foot. Satan’s boot.

  Here in the deep woods the derelict log chute had an eerie look. Miss Jane said that because of the great speed of the logs hurtling down the chute, and the friction they created, the lumbermen had sprinkled sand on the boards to keep them from catching on fire. The man charged with sending down the logs was called a kedger. In Jane’s grandfather’s time Jean “Kedger Jack” Riendeau had somehow tumbled onto the chute. As he hurtled down the mountainside, his clothes caught fire. Kedger Jack hit the pond at an estimated one hundred miles an hour and was killed on impact.

  With this inspiring image in mind, Henry followed Miss Jane higher into the Limberlost. They came to fresh blowdowns where the tail of the recent hurricane had roared through. The few trees still standing were mostly hemlocks, though here and there grew a few lone beeches. Miss Jane pointed out where black bears had climbed them to eat the beechnuts in the fall, then slid back down the trunks like great sooty firemen coming down a pole, grooving the smooth gray bark with their claws. She remarked that very probably the honey tree they were searching for would turn out to be a basswood.

  “Look for that linden, Henry,” Jane said, peering into the thick green canopy overhead.

  “Say what, ma’am?”

  “Linden tree. A basswood. Bees dearly love an old basswood tree. So do I, for that matter. It’s my favorite wood to carve.”

  Sure enough, a few yards away stood a soaring hardwood tree that Miss Jane identified as a basswood. That’s not where they found the bees, though. They were nesting in the tallest of the last three remaining American chestnuts on the mountain, beneath which Miss Jane had shot the great ridge runner.

  The limbs of the bee tree were longer on the east side of the trunk, indicating that the prevailing winds were from the west. High overhead, two major horizontal branches jutted out opposite each other at right angles to the trunk. Ten feet below them another large branch appeared to have broken off long ago. Perhaps the missing branch had been struck by lightning. Where it had once grown, a long, dark cavity bisected the trunk. A steady squadron of bees flew in and out of the fissure.

  “Well, Henry,” Miss Jane announced, “the hollow tree ought to come down anyway. We’ll cut it.”

  They collected some damp wood from old chestnut stumps and a few handfuls of last year’s fallen leaves and built a smudge fire under the tree to calm the bees. Miss Jane notched the chestnut tree with her ax so it would fall up the mountainside, away from the bee cavity. Then they fell to with Freethinker’s crosscut saw. The maple handles were worn to a glassy smoothness from generations of use, and Miss Jane had kept the teeth filed sharp and shiny. Smoke from the fire curled up through the leaves of the towering old chestnut. Agitated bees zoomed past their heads. “Cower not, Henry,” cried Miss Jane. “The bees won’t harm us if we don’t harm them.”

  How, Henry wondered, were the bees to know that he and Miss Jane posed no danger? Two gigantic marauders who were choking them with thick black smoke in order to level their home and pillage their larder?

  The straight-grained chestnut wood cut easily, and the two sawyers made quick progress. In a quarter of an hour they were halfway through the trunk. As they worked, the smoke stung their eyes. They stopped once to add more wet wood and leaves to the fire.

  “Soon you’ll have a fine new home,” Miss Jane called up to the bees. “Be patient a short while longer, my friends.”

  Henry shot a wary look at the crease high in the tree trunk. It looked large enough for a good-sized bear to come out of. An enraged bear, he thought, was all they needed. An entire battalion of bees now hovered just outside the opening. Miss Jane chuckled. “Saw on, Henry. All we need fear is our own trepidation. The bees can scent it.”

  If so, thought Henry, he was a goner. But at just that moment the massive chestnut gave out a long creak and started to sway. As they scurried out of the way, it toppled, crashing down through the smaller trees around it, hitting the ground with a tremendous metallic clang, as if the trunk were petrified and had landed on a boulder. The bees were now buzzing all around the opening, but as Miss Jane approached with her hand-held smoker and gave them several friendly puffs of smoke, they rose as one and alighted on a low branch of a nearby striped maple tree, from which they depended in a great inverted, humming cone.

  The Duchess, carrying the hive, stepped boldly up to the cone of bees. “I am Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson,” she told them. “Come, friends, dwell with me on my side of the mountain. No thieving, flyblown bruins with rooting black snouts will pilfer your honey. I’ll leave plenty to tide you over for the winter. You’ll meet my swarms and make powerful new alliances.”

  The bees hummed louder, as if they were considering Miss Jane’s proposal. Then out of the throbbing heart of the swarm crawled a pale-colored individual, larger than the others.

  Miss Jane held out the thatch-roofed hive, and soon enough the pale queen walked inside on her six legs at a stately pace, followed by her subjects. For better or for worse, the bees from the far si
de of the mountain had cast their lot with the Duchess.

  Now it was time to gather the honey. Miss Jane stepped up to the fallen chestnut with her double-bladed ax. Just below the bee hole, she dealt the trunk a powerful blow. It shattered apart, laying bare comb upon comb of dark wild honey. That wasn’t all, though. Inside the hollow tree, encased in honey and beeswax, were the perfectly preserved remains of a butternut-clad soldier, still holding his rifle. The soldier had a ragged dark beard and long dark hair. His gray eyes were wide open and he was or, rather, had been at the time of his death, very young, no more than twenty or twenty-one. Spilling out of eight large white linen sacks wedged into the hollow beside him, covering parts of his uniform like the bejeweled armor of some ancient and fabulously rich emperor, were hundreds upon hundreds of honey-coated gold coins.

  Henry was beside himself with glee. He was fairly capering at the sight of the long-lost treasure, dancing a jig on the forest floor, whooping and throwing his white hat high into the air.

  “Sir, please, desist!” Miss Jane cried. “These antics are beyond unseemly in the presence of the dead. The Confederate dead, I might add.”

  “Who in thunder is he?” Henry said when he regained some control over himself.

  Miss Jane had been staring at the soldier’s tattered uniform jacket bedizened with coins. Gently, she turned him on his side and pointed at a small hole, about the size of a quarter, in the back of his tunic. Then she showed Henry, in the front of the soldier’s jacket, what he hadn’t seen before. Just below his breast pocket was a second hole, filled with honey and beeswax and somewhat obscured by double eagles, but considerably larger than the hole in his back. Whoever the soldier standing vigil over the Treasure of kingdom Mountain might be, he appeared to have been murdered.

  39

  THAT NIGHT AT Camp Hard Luck, in the camp journal recording the blue-backed char and great-racked deer and fabled bears that she and her Kinneson forebears had taken on the far side of the mountain, Miss Jane wrote, “Found a swarm of bees, the Treasure of Kingdom Mountain, and one (1) preserved Rebel soldier in hollow American chestnut tree below devil’s visage.” Then, from Pharaoh’s Daughter’s sweetgrass basket, she handed Henry a folded sheet of stationery. He unfolded it and read the following letter written in faded brown ink.