The swamp flowered all summer, no matter how dry the season. Above it, the granite crisped its lichens in the sun, baked as fiercely dry as if the heat struck outward from furnace fires within. But the growth around the pond stayed brilliant, electric green. Alders grew thick as a man’s thigh, and some of the old swamp birches were three feet through at the base. Tall trees and the hill kept away the wind, so that air hung hot and still, full of jungle-rich smells of mud and moss and lush, sunny leaves. Squirrels lived in the swamp, and deer, and mink and beaver and muskrat. Hermit thrushes sang there all spring long. The trees were full of wing-flash and flutter and the four or five clear notes, repeated a thousand times, of white-throated sparrows. Ducks gathered in the pond; at fall dusk, it might be brimful of them, floating side by side. To these inhabitants, at any time of year, the swamp offered shelter, either of shade or snow.

The Indians made a few scratches on the land and went; early white settlers sailing along the coast eyed the rugged island warily. “No harbor,” they said, and passed on to other islands.

One of them must have gone ashore there for a while, and built himself some kind of house on the western side by the Passamaquoddy spring, for he left a stone foundation over a shallow cellar hole, and his initial, “A,” chiseled in a ledge by the shore. But no one knew what his name was, nor how long he might have stayed. When Robert MacKechnie and Ansel Gilman, early settlers, went to the island in 1855, they found the marked boulder; but “A’s” cellar stones were fallen in and green with moss, his initial almost obliterated by the gray rosettes of the lichen that grows on granite.

Robert MacKechnie and Ansel Gilman were quarrymen—stonecutters by trade, looking for stone. In the cities, public edifices were building—churches and courthouses, post offices, tombs. Already in the coast country, south and west, quarries were coining money, the two- and three-masted schooners sailing to New York and Boston and Philadelphia loaded deck-deep with the pink-gray granite that split so straight along the grain of the stone. MacKechnie was newly over from Scotland, where his people had owned and operated quarries for generations. Ansel Gilman, a Connecticut man, knew a good deal about stone, too, though perhaps not by instinct and by heritage, as MacKechnie did.

From the deck of a small sloop hired for the day, they saw the granite hill on Chin Island heaved up against the bay’s blue water, and MacKechnie looked and whistled. Ansel shook his head.