God's Kingdom Read Free

he and Gramp might get their woods sense from Molly Molasses and her Abenaki ancestors. He liked thinking that his original Kingdom forbears were Indians. He did not like to think about Charles I and the other Rangers slaughtering the Memphremagog Abenakis and bowling with their heads.
    Jim’s dad was always trying to get Gramp to write down his stories, even if the editor didn’t entirely approve of Gramp’s telling Jim every last gruesome detail. Gramp said he’d leave it to Jim to write the stories of the Kingdom. At fourteen, Jim had already begun to. Now he decided that when he wrote Charles I’s story, he would put in the part about the Rangers playing at tenpins with the severed heads. It was both the worst and best part of the story.
    This was Jim Kinneson’s last thought before drifting off to sleep in God’s Kingdom, up in the little-known mountains of northern Vermont hard by the Canadian border.
    Clang clang clang clang.
    Gramp was beating on the bottom of the dishpan with a spoon. “Wake up, boy. Tumble up, roll out,” he called up to Jim. Then the old breakfast joke: “If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs—if we had some eggs.”
    They did have ham and eggs, and Mom’s homemade bread toasted over an open lid of the Glenwood, and fried potatoes, and tinned prunes since Gramp was a great hand at making sure everyone stayed regular at camp. All washed down with the editor’s famous camp coffee: three heaping handfuls of freshly ground coffee thrown in the blue porcelain coffeepot with a broken eggshell to settle the grounds.
    Gramp and Jim headed out at first light. They stopped on the edge of the big cedars beside the Dead Water to watch the eastern sky turn pink. Kingdom and Canada Mountains loomed high above the flow. Fifty years ago the Great North Woods Timber Company had erected a long earthen dam across the mouth of the river, flooding out the rapids and creating the deep flow known as the Dead Water in order to prevent logs from jamming up in the notch during the spring drives.
    â€œWalk up through the cedars along the edge of the Dead Water,” Gramp said. “You should jump him someplace between here and the notch. Don’t push him too hard at first. You don’t want to panic him into swimming across the flow into Canada. If you run into trouble or need help dragging him out, fire three shots ten seconds apart. Wait twenty minutes and do it again.”
    Gramp handed Jim his watch. They stood together near the edge of the water, watching the color in the east bleed higher up the sky, as if in defiance of gravity. “All right, then,” Gramp said. “Have a good hunt.”
    Gramp headed back toward the camp, moving in easy, even strides. Ahead, the reflection of the sunrise glowed crimson on the granite wall of Kingdom Mountain. Jim checked his rifle to make sure the safety was on. Then he started into the cedars. The flow crawled along through the swamp, bloodred in the spreading sunrise.
    *   *   *
    Jim cut the runner’s track twenty minutes later. He’d expected it to be impressively big, but when he first saw the deer’s prints in the snow under the cedars he thought they might belong to a moose. At the foot of the twin cliffs, where the dammed-up Dead Water passed through the notch, the deer had angled back up Kingdom Mountain on an ancient game trail. The wind was quartering from Jim toward the ridge runner. That was what he wanted. He wanted the big buck to know that he was on its trail, as long as he didn’t panic it into going to water and vanishing into Canada.
    Partway up the mountain, in a former log landing growing up to wild raspberries, the game trail forked. The more-traveled branch ran straight up over the mountain past the Balance Boulder. A lesser-used trace angled off to the south, traversing the mountainside high above the three ponds. The runner had taken the