Points North by Howard Frank Mosher

Author:Howard Frank Mosher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

8

Dispossessed

For sixty years and more, on Memorial Day weekend, Jim Kinneson and his brother Charlie had made the canoe run together. They put in by the Canadian border, in the Great Northern Bog where the river rose, and paddled down through the bog and the gore to the family hunting and fishing camp on Pond Number Three. After spending the night at the camp, they canoed and fished their way to the mouth of the river where it emptied into the big lake, Memphremagog. It was a thirteen-mile paddle past seven mountains, so they had always called their two-day canoe trek the Seven Mountain Run. Sometimes Charlie jokingly referred to their annual expedition as a “two-rig fish” because they would leave Charlie’s pickup at the trailhead on Monadnock Mountain and carry the Old Town the three miles through the woods to the bog and fish their way down to Jim’s pickup at the mouth of the river. They could have accomplished the trip in one long day. But they preferred to take their time, fishing as they went, and they loved staying over at camp, which went back in the family seven generations to Charles Kinneson I, their great-great-great-great-grandfather.

They left Jim’s beater in a pull-off beside the river’s mouth the evening before and headed east out the county road before dawn the next morning with Gramp’s green Old Town in the bed of Charlie’s rig, turned north in Pond in the Sky, and arrived at the trailhead at sunrise. It was misting a little so they put on their rain jackets and rain pants to hike in through the wet bush to the bog. The light rain wouldn’t hurt the fishing at all. The trout should be feeding hard in the morning rain. Jim’s Nikon, which he used mainly to take pictures for the Monitor, was wrapped in an oilcloth inside his waterproof knapsack. The Nikon was safe from the rain. The rain pants were a little cumbersome but no one wanted to sit in a canoe all day with a wet behind. If the sun popped out later, they could take off their raingear and fold it up and stick it under the bow with the knapsack containing the camera.

Almost no one other than a few stalwart deer hunters in the fall of the year used the game trail over the shoulder of Monadnock. It dead-ended at the edge of the bog, a few hundred feet south of the border. As for the bog and the gore and the river, the brothers had a much better chance of sighting a pine marten or a Canada lynx there than another human being. The Great Northern Bog, which stretched across the border deep into the Quebec forest, was the haunt of three-toed and black-backed woodpeckers, spruce grouse, lemmings, and Canada jays, none of which were found elsewhere in Vermont. In the winter it was visited by gyrfalcons and great gray owls with yellow eyes as deep and unknowable as the boreal heart of the bog.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.