Jack Noon wrote his first book right after graduating from Dartmouth College in the few weeks before he left to hitchhike across Europe to a reaching a job in Greece in 1968. He's been writing ever since.

He was cook on an archeological dig in Alaska and then wrote for a winter in Fairbanks. During a four-year teaching stint in Vermont, he spent one summer traveling in West Africa-including a July crossing of the Sahara-and two summers in northern New Hampshire building log cabins on the Dead Diamond River. Other horse-logging, leading winter camping trips and an instructor for Outward Bound, laboring at construction sites, building a log home, managing the Ravine Lodge at Mount Moosilauke for many years, and working as a loon biologist.

The author is a long-time resident of Sutton, where he now writes full time about New Hampshire, both fiction and non-fiction. He enjoys fishing and canoeing in New Hampshire and Canada and has a particular love of New Hampshire's north country in all seasons of the year.

Patriotic enthusiasm from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 carried over into musters, but by 1830, musters days were under attack from those who resented the required participation. They were joined by temperance advocates, who objected to the considerable public drunkenness attending each muster, and later by critics of the Mexican War, who claimed that the existence of a peacetime militia had in fact led to this conflict. Ironically, the abandonment of muster days and the militia system left New Hampshire totally unprepared for the Civil War.

Researched from state and town archives, town histories, early newspapers, and private collection of unpublished letters and documents, this study sheds light on a little known aspect of the Granite State's past.

New Hampshire's Mt. Moosilauke, westernmost of the White Mountain peaks, offers all-encompassing views of the North Country. But for those who know where to look, it also provides glimpses of a forgotten past. Fragments of that past have been explored here in eight short stories; among them cutting the first trail (1840), opening the summit's Prospect House (1860), the gold craze (1875), mountain poet Lucy Larcom (1892), skiing Hell's Highway (1942). With excerpts from Ruth Barston's Moosilauke journals (1860-68).

This collection is the latest in the series from Jack Noon's Connecticut River towns of Barston and Wheelock.

In response to a teasing bet from the oldest settler in the village about the size of the fish, Malik sets out to catch something bigger. He and Sue start fishing out in the big eddy below the falls and there make an astounding discovery.