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divorced, and he’s still putting up commercial buildings in and around Portland. As I write this, he and I are planning a week at the cabin in November. We will have the boys and others who helped us along the way up for the opening of the deer season. Paul will be the cook and I will be the documentarian, and if nobody shoots a deer that will be fine too. It will carry on a long family tradition. I feel good about all of this. Later in the month, I will visit Adam and together we will try to get in some fishing. It will be spring in Peru. And there’s this: a hawk has been visiting the hillside. He lands in a tree near the cabin and sits menacingly on a branch looking for quarry among the creases and folds of my hillside. I pay him no mind. He is casting no shadow.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A mong the books and articles that I consulted to write this book were William Hubbard’s A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England from Pascataqua to Pemmaquid, which is the source for the story of the drowning of Squando’s child; The History of the Indian Wars in New England, by William Hubbard, edited by S. G. Drake; Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England, by Colin Calloway; the eminently readable The Eastern Frontier: The Settlement of Northern New England, 1610–1763, by Charles Clark, my former history teacher at the University of New Hampshire; Lovewell’s Town, by Robert C. Williams, a town history written with the scholarship and sweep of a professional historian; Blueberries and Pusley Weed, by Pauline W. Moore, which provided marvelous detail on the early trades such as barrel making in the region; “The Rise and Decline of the Sheep Industry in North New England,” by Harold Wilson; The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, by Jill Lepore; “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England,” by Virginia DeJohn Anderson; The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe, by Chet Raymo, a fascinating telling of the industrial and natural history of a New England town; Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England, by Tom Wessels, an engaging guide to seeing the ways in which the history of middle New England is written on the wooded landscape; The Northeast’s Changing Forest by Lloyd Irland, who has been researching and writing with intelligence and care about Maine’s woodlands for decades; Glaciers and Granite: A Guide to Maine’s Landscape and Geology, by David L. Kendall; The Interrupted Forest: A History of Maine’s Woodlands, by Neil Rolde; and the unpublished journal of Sumner Kimball, a nineteenth-century Lovell farmer, which was made available to me by the Lovell Historical Society.

I also have many people to thank: Jill Kneerim, my agent, who has been a source of unflagging encouragement and guidance; Paul Slovak, my editor, for his early enthusiasm for the idea behind the book, his careful reading of the manuscript and his thoughtful suggestions; Trish Hall, of The New York Times, who embraced, shepherded and edited “From the Ground Up,” the blog that I wrote for the Times as the cabin went up; the people of Stoneham, Maine, and especially Dan Barker, for his willingness to generously share his extensive knowledge of the town’s past; the helpful staff at the Charlotte Hobbs Memorial Library in Lovell, where I often went to write in the summer of 2010; the librarians at the Maine Historical Society, who were always helpful; Laurie LaBar, chief curator of history and decorative arts at the Maine State Museum, who pointed me toward the military records of the Adams brothers; the Bethel Historical Society, for access to its archives, including old census data; the library staff of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City; my graduatestudent research assistants Emma Dong and Tina Tam; Boston University for supporting my work as a teacher and writer; and especially Sara Rimer. As my partner, she encouraged me to make myself into a writer. Without her, there would be no book. I also