Read Online A Stranger in the Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher - Free Book Online

indistinct and softly contoured, drifting along the horizon more like smoke themselves than a lofty range of northern peaks. But the birch canoe and the amber river, the sparse yellow butternut leaves and the vivid scarlet maples and the lone Abenaki Indian hunter with the single name are as clear to me now as when I was four or five years old and my father read to me from Pliny’s big book for the first time. The man is listening, with his head slightly cocked, his lips slightly parted. His paddle is arrested in mid-stroke. A thin stream of droplets slides noiselessly from its cedar blade back onto the motionless surface of the river.
    â€œImagine our wayfarer’s astonishment,” Pliny writes, “when he crept up a steep wooded hillside and emerged on a jagged clearing in the wilderness only to behold a towering lean raw-boned man hacking away at a heap of freshly felled spruce logs, attempting to raise a cabin before snowfall in a mountainous fastness where Sabattis had never before seen any sign of another man within fifty miles.”
    â€œHow is the trout fishing in these parts?” my ancestor is said to have asked Sabattis, who, according to Pliny, was so impressed by his singlemindedness that he stayed on for the rest of the fall to help him complete his cabin and learn his story.
    Charles Macphearson Kinneson had been born in the Outer Hebrides Islands, off the western coast of Scotland, in 1730, the eldest son of a Highland salmon poacher and implacable Jacobite put to the sword by the British during the abortive Uprising of ’45. After his father’s death, young Charles fled to France, where he dedicated himself to a single objective: to fight the British wherever and whenever possible, though never in formal affiliation with another government since as a Reformed Presbyterian bound by the Oath of the Covenant, he was forbidden to swear allegiance to any secular authority whatsoever.
    Soon after he arrived in France, Charles took passage on a Marseilles privateer bound for the West Indies to harass the English rum, molasses, and slave trade. In 1766, with the proceeds of his pirate’s booty, he established the first printing press in Guadeloupe, on which he composed hundreds of anti-British broadsides and which, a decade later, he moved lock, stock, and barrel to Bath, Maine, to assist the rebelling American colonists with his literary efforts. After the war Charles successfully petitioned President Washington for a pitch of one hundred and sixty acres on the northern slope of the New Hampshire Land Grants (subsequently to become part of Vermont) along the Canadian border. Here in 1786 he wed Sabattis’ youngest daughter, the sixteen-year-old Memphremagog (Abenaki for “Beautiful Waters”). The following year he established
The Kingdom Monitor
, which he used chiefly as a vehicle for his undiminished Anglophobia. In 1793 he built the first of six potato-whisky distilleries that would eventually grace the banks of the Lower Kingdom, whose proceeds this strict Scottish teetotaler reserved exclusively for the construction of his crowning accomplishment—the First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Kingdom Common.
    On Easter Sunday morning of 1952, as my father and mother and I headed up the slate flagstone walk of the church during the bell’s final call to worship for the day, the wind was gusting straight up out of the south, bringing with it a tantalizing intimation of earlier and gentler springs farther downcountry. Everyone lingering in the unseasonably mild sunshine on the church steps that morning knew that despite the advent of mud season and trout season there would be more sudden snow squalls and gray subfreezing Kingdom days and frigid Kingdom nights before warm weather set in to stay. But everyone seemed grateful for the temporary break in the cold and eager to discuss the unusually good weather, the banner early runs of maple sap, the Red Sox’ promising