God's Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher Page A

friend in an all-out race. He had to hope that Gate would stop to thaw out at one of the fishing shanties on the South Bay.
    As Jim skated north up the river, tracing its oxbows through the frozen wetlands south of the lake, the wind buffeted his body like a hockey defenseman checking him at every turn. He had to twist his head aside to breathe. He tried burying his mouth and nose in the fleece collar of his jacket, but when he did, his breath froze to his face. He covered the five miles through the swamp to the bay in thirty minutes. Gaëtan’s skate tracks, silvery in the dwindling light of the short winter afternoon, continued past the enclave of fishing shacks toward the big lake and Canada.
    The wind funneling through the notch between the mountains struck Jim with frightening force. The peaks of Kingdom and Canada Mountains were obscured by blowing snow. Far to the southwest the sun was a pewter disc. It touched the peak of Mt. Mansfield, then vanished.
    Something came hurtling Jim’s way, tumbling wildly across the ice. As it rattled past him, he recognized Gaëtan’s lunch pail. Jim thought of Gate’s wet trousers and socks, frozen stiff by now.
    Briefly the gale let up, as if gathering itself for a more fierce assault. Just ahead, at the Great Earthen Dam, the Upper Kingdom River marking the Canadian border flowed into the lake from the east. Suddenly Jim knew where Gaëtan was headed. He was going home.
    North of the dam, the lake rarely froze until mid-January. In the last blue light of the day, Jim could see whitecaps angling from shore to shore. He heard the breakers crashing. He was almost out of ice.
    Jim skidded sideways, stumbled, regained his balance, and came to a stop. The wind picked up again, and he had to lean into it to stay on his feet as he screamed out Gaëtan’s name again and again. He thought of his friend standing at the blackboard in a pool of his own urine. He thought of himself doing nothing to help Gate, even when Miss Hark had called him a “Black Frenchman,” and of Prof’s last words to the class.
    â€œIt’s murderously cold out there,” Prof had told them, and it was. Yet somehow Jim knew, as he started back down the ice with the howling wind at his back, that however treacherous the cold and snow and wind and fathomless dark heart of the lake might be, the greater dangers of this place they called God’s Kingdom lay closer to home.

 
    4
    Haunted
    In those years every village in the Kingdom boasted its own haunted house.

    â€”PLINY’S HISTORY
    It was May Day in Kingdom County. This was the time of year when Jim and his close friend and fishing mentor, Prof Chadburn, would toss their fly rods in the back of Prof’s Rambler station wagon and head out the county road along the river to fish the rainbow run. They’d spend the entire day on the stream, stopping at noon to cook their catch over an open fire for a shore lunch, fishing on through the afternoon together for the gigantic silver-and-crimson trout that ran up the river to spawn in the spring of the year.
    Not today. Today Prof had recruited his prize Latin student and star shortstop on the Academy baseball team to help him empty out Miss Hark Kinneson’s former house in the village. This was Saturday. The past Monday, before the students arrived at the Academy, Prof had stepped discreetly into Miss Hark’s classroom to tell her that her employment would be terminated with the end of the current school year. He’d discovered the math teacher slumped over with her head on her desk, her eyes wide open and glaring angrily out over what had been her domain for fifty years, as if she’d divined his intention and upstaged him. To his further astonishment, a few days later Prof learned that he had inherited Miss Hark’s house, just across the street from the north end of the village green.
    Prof may well have been the only Commoner to whom the news