On Kingdom Mountain (28 page)

Miss Jane deemed red squirrels in the house partitions auspicious. Every evening Henry could hear them rolling last year's butternuts around in the walls as if they were playing at tenpins. The brown summer weasel in the woodpile augured equally well. Weasels, Miss Jane assured Henry, were the best mousers in all the world. A family of swifts took up housekeeping in the disused chimney of Henry's former bedchamber upstairs. More good fortune. Under the eaves of the kitchen dwelt several extended families of bats, and in June a saucy raven with a glittering yellow eye had soared down from the mountaintop cliffs and plucked up half of Jane's sweet corn as soon as it sprouted. Instead of chasing him off, she taught the raven to warn her when Eben Kinneson Esquire came driving up the lane. “Here's the shyster, here's the shyster.”

But nothing, so far as Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson was concerned, betokened so much felicity as a swarm of honeybees.

Like many Appalachian mountain folk, from Georgia north to Quebec, Miss Jane maintained an apiary. Her Kingdom Mountain honey came in several flavors. From the hives near her buckwheat patch she obtained a rich honey that was sweeter than most. Her clover fields yielded a light and delicate honey as pale as fancy-grade maple syrup. But Jane's favorite was the dark, syrupy, delicious wild honey that she procured on her occasional beelining expeditions. Every few summers she went “a-lining bees,” an adventure that Henry Satterfield might well have enjoyed for the opportunity it afforded to explore new territory on the mountain where he might stumble across the treasure. However, as a small boy, he had been severely set upon by yellow jackets and ever since he had been terrified of every member of the stinging tribe.

“Why, friend Satterfield, the wicked bees that assailed you as
a child were no Kingdom Mountain honeybees,” Miss Jane declared. “Kingdom bees are noble creatures. Their ancestors were brought here by Seth's wife, Huswife Kinneson, in a thatch-roofed hive. For all we know, they might be the descendants of those regal bees Samson discovered nesting in the dead lion. No Kinneson, I assure you, was ever afraid of a little bee. Nor was young Samson. Nor need you be.”

Henry refrained from reminding Miss Jane that young Samson had also blithely squared off against an entire regiment of Philistines with no other weapon than the jawbone of a donkey. He had once watched his grandfather sell a family Bible to a burly moonshiner in Tupelo, Mississippi, whose genealogy, for an extra three dollars, the captain obligingly traced back to Samson. He didn't tell Miss Jane this, either. When the Duchess of Kingdom Mountain said it was time to go beelining, a-beelining they would go.

 

“A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay,” Jane announced as they headed out on their latest mission one very fine morning. Why she repeated this old saw Henry had no idea. It wasn't May, it was early September. And they wouldn't be looking for a swarm but for one individual bee to line back to its tree, which Miss Jane would then, in entirely good conscience, cut down and plunder of its contents.

Nor did Henry understand why they had to traipse all the way around to the far side of the mountain to locate a bee tree. There were bees by the hundreds in the multicolored hollyhocks right beside the high drive of the five-story barn, and the golden glow growing eight feet tall around Jane's immaculate outhouse was abuzz with them. But she was not interested in harvesting honey from dooryard bees, which probably lived in her hives behind the barn. Nothing would do but she must venture off to the back side of the mountain and find the dark, precious honey manufactured by wildwood bees. She and
Henry would make an overnight trip of the outing and stay at her hunting and fishing camp, Camp Hard Luck, in order to combine their honey foraging with some wilderness fly-fishing. It would all, Miss Jane assured him, be most romantic.

In the sweetgrass basket she brought a pint Mason jar containing a solution of maple syrup, crushed tansy buds, and dooryard honey; a chipped blue tea saucer wrapped in a clean white dishtowel; and a small tin smoker, resembling a miniature bellows, in which a handful of burning leaves and a few strips of cloth soaked in kerosene would produce a stream of thick smoke to pacify the bees. On a flat-bottomed hand sled pulled by a long handle, they brought Miss Jane's two-headed felling ax; Freethinker Kinneson's crosscut saw; an empty beehive with a thatched roof, similar to the hive in which the estimable Huswife Kinneson had conveyed the first honeybees to Kingdom Mountain; two fly rods; Lady Justice; and the brass-bound spyglass that had come down in the family from Seth Kinneson's seafaring Massachusetts father. As fearless as Samson himself, Miss Jane brought no net, bee veil, or gauntlets to ward off stings.

They followed the eastern extension of the Canada Pike past several abandoned farms grown up to barberry, thorn apple, and poplar, out to the blueberry barrens on the remote lower east slopes of the mountain. They continued along the edge of the barrens toward the Chain of Ponds, where the East Branch of the Kingdom River rose. Once again, Henry was impressed by the sheer immensity of Kingdom Mountain and the astonishing variety of its terrain: bogs, a subarctic climate at the summit, vast forests, disused farmland, several brooks, even a cold, rushing river and a unique species of char.

Miss Jane led the way to a leanto hidden in the evergreens near the outlet of Pond Number One. Inside, under a sheet of green canvas, was a boat about sixteen feet long and curved up at both ends like a canoe but fitted for oars. The sides were
constructed of thin cedar planks beveled along the edges to fit together so that nowhere were they more than half an inch thick. This elegant craft was Miss Jane's Kingdom Mountain guide boat, patterned on the fabled Adirondack guide boats of the past century. In her day, she told Henry, she had probably brought more fish over its upswept sides than any other Vermont angler had caught in a lifetime. This was not a boast. It was simply what Miss Jane believed to be a statement of fact. She had built the boat with an ax and a North Woods crooked knife, and, like her birds and dear people, it had been a labor of love.

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.