God's Kingdom Read Free Page B

the silent mountaintop in the sunset, the click of the firing pin falling on the empty chamber sounded louder than it was. Jim lowered his gun and took a few steps and the ridge runner was gone, off down the far side of the mountain toward the big lake where Jim’s Abenaki ancestors had once fished for salmon. Jim thought about the Indians celebrating their catch by firelight, unaware of Charles I and the Rangers crossing the rapids just upriver. As the sun rested on the peaks far to the west, and the Balance Boulder glowed red in its reflection, Jim turned to head back down the mountain, and saw Gramp standing behind him in the clearing, the unspent shells from Jim’s rifle gleaming in his hand.
    *   *   *
    On the way down the mountainside in the snowy dusk, they jumped a spikehorn stripping the bark from a moose maple, and Jim shot it cleanly through the heart. Probably it was the same young deer whose tracks he’d cut late that afternoon in the raspberry brake.
    â€œWell, son,” the editor said when Jim and Gramp dragged the spike into the camp yard at twilight, “that young skipper wasn’t what you were looking for, but it will get you blooded just as quickly.”
    â€œDon’t feel bad, bub,” Charlie said. “Your runner isn’t going anywhere. He’ll be there for you next year.”
    â€œHe made a fine, running shot on the spike,” Gramp said. “No buck fever. I call this a good hunt.”
    In the morning Charlie and the editor hunted the edge of the Dead Water for a few hours. Jim and Gramp caught a mess of out-of-season trout for chowder. Jim split wood and filled the woodbox for whoever came to God’s Kingdom next. He recorded his deer in the camp journal:
    Shot a spikehorn on Kingdom Mountain. J. Kinneson III, Nov. 28, 1952.
    That afternoon Charlie rowed the editor across the three ponds in the bateau. Gramp and Jim paddled out behind them in the Old Town. The spike lay in the bottom of the canoe, its head lolling over the gunnel. Jim hadn’t mentioned the ridge runner and neither had Gramp. What had taken place on the mountaintop would remain there.
    It was snowing again when they reached Charlie’s rig, the flakes beginning to collect on the spike’s dark winter coat. Jim rode in back with his deer and the Old Town.
    Snow was still falling that evening when Charlie and Gramp and the editor drove Jim and his deer around the village green three times in Charlie’s truck, horn honking, in a procession of half a dozen other pickups carrying boys who had shot their first deer and been blooded by the oldest hunter in their family. Gramp had dipped his index and middle fingers into the cut in the spike’s throat where they’d bled it out and painted two stripes down Jim’s cheeks and two more across his forehead. Jim felt proud and a little self-conscious to be paraded around the green. He hoped that, in the years to come, he would have many more good hunts in God’s Kingdom with his grandfather and father and brother, but he knew in his heart that this would be the last deer he would ever kill.

 
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    White Knights
    During the War Between the States, we sometimes amused ourselves with a version of One Old Cat we called “Base-ball.” I later introduced the game to Kingdom Common, where we created what I believe was the first baseball “diamond” in New England.

    â€”PLINY TEMPLETON
    â€œThe Knights need a teetotaler driver tomorrow, Jimbo,” Harlan Kittredge said. “Are you a teetotaler?”
    It was the evening of June 20. Tomorrow the White Knights of Temperance, formerly the Kingdom County Outlaws, were headed to Boston to catch the twin bill between the Sox and the Yankees. They’d gotten together tonight at the Common Hotel to put the finishing touches on their plans for the trip.
    At fifteen, Jim Kinneson, the Knights’ shortstop and leadoff hitter, was the