Martin Marten (9781466843691) (26 page)

But Dave’s mom has risen and opened her coat and wrapped each side of her big coat around Emma Jackson too so that she and Emma are both standing inside the coat, and Emma Jackson leans her face down on Dave’s mom’s shoulder into the thick soft wool that smells like woodsmoke and coffee and burnt toast and laundry soap, and Dave’s mom brings up her left hand and very gently puts her hand on the bottom of Emma Jackson’s neck, and they stand there for a really long time not saying anything at all. It might be that Emma Jackson is crying or weeping or sobbing into the coat, but the coat is so amazingly thick that it absorbs any and all sound like the sound had never been born. Whatever kind of wool that coat is made from is the kind of wool where sound goes to die, and that’s a fact.

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There was a boar raccoon over toward Dollar Lake who liked to tear one leg off frogs and toads and then leave the frogs and toads to live or die. He would catch them and tear one leg off and then poke at them to watch them wriggle in pain and then leave them there in the mud, not even eating them. Sometimes he would catch a frog and tear off one leg and impale the frog on one thorn like a shrike does but then impale the torn-off leg on the next thorn, so that the frog would be wriggling on one thorn while staring at his or her leg on the next thorn. Sometimes he would catch several toads and tear their legs off and leave the legs all in a row on a rock while the rest of the toads lived or died. He never ate any of the frogs or toads he caught and dismembered, and he did this for two years until one night when he came down to the lake looking for frogs and toads and something happened. He waded into the shallows to wash his hands. There was a full moon. The raccoon noted the brilliant path the moon cut across the water. The lake was as still and quiet as he could ever remember. He walked another step into the lake, feeling for crawdads, when dozens of frogs erupted from the lake and fell upon him like small, wet, green sticks. He snarled and flung them off and grabbed one and tore it in half, but dozens more erupted from the lake and covered him completely and then dozens and dozens more, too many to count. He fought savagely, but dozens and now hundreds of frogs leapt from the lake and fell upon him and crammed themselves into his mouth between his gnashing teeth—so many that he could not get purchase with his teeth, and he began to gag. Now dozens of toads leapt from the banks of the lake and fell upon the raccoon also, and if you were standing on the shore of the lake you couldn’t see even a hair of the raccoon, because he was so covered with dense frogs and toads. More and more toads and frogs leapt from the lake and the bank, and their soggy weight forced the raccoon out farther and down into the lake. He fought desperately, ripping and shredding at the brown and green blanket of frogs and toads with his paws, but their weight was too much, and he could not breathe with the frogs cramming themselves down his throat. Their weight forced his head under the lake, and more dozens and hundreds of frogs now came up from below and hauled him down. The surviving toads struggled back to the surface and back to the shore, but the hundreds and hundreds of frogs, so many that if you were underwater and were watching this, you would see nothing but an amazing seething knot of frogs, stayed with the raccoon as he sank. There was a last struggle and writhing and then he died. For another few seconds, the ball of frogs fell slowly and silently and then it gently hit the lake bed just at the edge of a deeper pool. At the impact on the lake bed most of the frogs released and rose toward the surface. A few escaped the raccoon’s open mouth as his body began to roll slowly into the deeper pool. As the last surviving frog of the ones who had crammed themselves headlong into the raccoon’s mouth launched up and away from the body, an immense pike emerged endlessly from the dark and took the raccoon and turned with it back into the depths of the pool.

52

AN ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT JUNE DAY,
crisp and redolent, just enough breeze to charge the air but not so much to demand a jacket; and something about the light, the sheer delight and pleasure of it high above the valley and the city, high above highways and huge slow rivers, electrified somehow with the glint of glaciers and the ripple of snowmelt, aware of bears and elk and cougars and eagles, brought lips and fingers and noses and beaks and paws closer together; so that as Dave’s mom and dad sat on the porch ostensibly having a family budget meeting at which Dave’s dad was going to propose jocularly that they put Dave up for sale and pour the proceeds into Maria’s education, they instead kissed gently, each surprised by the other, each startled and moved by the sudden quiet charge of the moment. And Dave and Cadence, running uphill along the river, more than occasionally jostled shoulders ostensibly at narrow points in the path but not always. And Martin and his companion were also sprinting through the canopy above Dave and Cadence for reasons they could not have articulated and occasionally they too jostled seemingly by accident but not. And there is Dickie Douglas the trapper reaching gently for Miss Moss to assist her down the steps of the store after they had tiptoed back toward warm after that cold moment on the mountain. And there is Louis nuzzling his newborn twin sons, the two of them with enormous noses and feet and otherwise seemingly built of thin brown sticks, so far. And there is the Unabled Lady with her hands cupped like a bowl in her lap and Maria’s hands cupped inside her hands and the finch burbling while standing in the double bowl of their twenty fingers. And there is Emma Jackson and the morning waitress holding hands as they pick their way along a creek looking for first thimbleberries but also scouting for, as Emma says, secret huckleberry havens and refuges. And there is a bobcat mother cuffing her sons and a kestrel father ever so gently handing the large intestine of a vole to his daughters, and there is Mr. Shapiro scratching the dog who appeared last night on his porch and knocked on the door for admittance and curled up in Mr. Shapiro’s favorite reading chair as if he had been doing so for years. And there is Cosmas on his knees smoothing out the soil over the graves of Mr. and Mrs. Robinson as he plants tomatoes and beans and garlic because he knows they would have wanted to be working and productive even after their expiration dates. And there are Moon’s parents dancing very slowly in the kitchen as the milk for their coffee boils over quietly but they don’t care, and Moon comes in and sees them and steps back abashed and embarrassed but then for some reason he could never explain he steps forward and wraps his arms as long as a story around both his parents, and there is a delicious, brief moment before Moon’s mother says oh my god the milk!

*   *   *

Listen, this dog on Mr. Shapiro’s reading chair—let’s take a minute and listen to his story, because it’s an amazing story, and you hardly ever hear a story like his. This dog was born in a breeding shed on a farm that didn’t farm anything anymore except puppies. The biggest cutest ones were sold and the runty awkward ones were thrown out of a speeding pickup truck in the deep woods where they would live for a few days and then become meat. The dog on Mr. Shapiro’s chair had been a runty awkward one who also annoyed the breeder by having the wrong father by accident. When the dog was two months old he was thrown out of a pickup truck as it sped through the deep woods. This was near a mountain the old people called Loowitlatkla, the fire mountain. In the old days, the mountain called Wy’east, where Dave and his family lived, was in love with the mountain called Loowitlatkla, where the puppy landed in a mat of ferns and lay unconscious for a few minutes, but their love affair didn’t work out, although the two mountains still gaze at each other across a huge river and dream of what still might happen. The dog awoke after a while and limped to a creek and drank and took stock of the situation. Luckily this happened in late spring so there were lots of small newly born creatures to find and eat, and as his first summer wore on he learned how to lie in wait for rabbits along their runs and how to wait patiently for squirrels to venture to earth. Here and there, he found dead things that were good to eat—like once a buck deer gut-shot by a hunter and abandoned in a thicket—and then in the fall he discovered a small river with a healthy salmon run. By winter he was twice as large as he had been when he was thrown out the window of the truck.

The winter, though—that almost killed him. Several times he was so desperately hungry that he ate bark, and he lost a fang in a brief savage fight with a cougar over a deer carcass, and once when he fought a coyote for a rabbit he was slashed so badly across the chest that he nearly bled to death—although he killed and ate the coyote who slashed him, which may have been just the meat that saved his life.

By his next spring, he was gaunt but alive, and he enjoyed another three seasons of hunting, the only terrifying moment being an encounter with a bear. When the snow melted in May, he began to travel. At first he followed the remote logging road from which he had been thrown as a puppy, then he followed a county road that descended the mountain slowly, and then he found himself in a wide valley of farms and ranches and orchards and vineyards. Had he known he was less than a mile from the puppy mill where he was born, and had he the slightest urge for vengeance, he might have paused there and wreaked silent havoc, for the man who threw him from the truck kept chickens and ducks and geese. But his nature was peaceful, and on he went.

He did not know his destination, but he knew his direction, straight south. He traveled by night to avoid human beings and their cars; he ate as he went, catching squirrels and birds who had never encountered a dog so fast and deadly. He grazed here and there in fields and orchards, developing a lifelong taste for wine grapes and carrots. The one time he felt flummoxed, by a tremendous river far too wide to swim, he soon found a highway bridge and crossed so early in the morning, in such a dim mist, that the only driver who saw him assumed that he was a whopping large coyote, which he reported to his fellow workers at the airport, who didn’t believe him, as usual. That crazy Henry Hutto, always making stuff up, they said, but for once they were wrong, and Henry Hutto was essentially right.

Still south, but now slowly up the gentle slopes of another mountain; through industrial wasteland and suburban villas, through schoolyards and playgrounds, across the campus of a community college, always up toward the glacial air he could smell like a new home; always avoiding trucks of any kind, always avoiding human beings, always moving at night and napping during the day, being seen only once, when he caught and ate an arrogant cat in a yard right in front of a four-year-old boy, who watched with interest; and finally to Mr. Shapiro’s door at night and wearily into the reading chair. There are so many ways we could close this chapter of this dog’s story for a moment before coming back to him later, but let’s stop right here with Mr. Shapiro on the couch, staring at the dog, and the dog in Mr. Shapiro’s reading chair, staring at Mr. Shapiro, the two of them puzzled and delighted at having met each other at last.

53

SILLY AND INEXPLICABLE THINGS HAPPENED
on the mountain every day, every moment. How could they not? Such as a garter snake unaccountably attacking a rabbit and not being able to get more than a snatch of the rabbit’s tail in her mouth and the terrified rabbit taking off a high speed with the snake bouncing along grim and addled behind the rabbit for a while until the snake finally was dislodged and was cocky and sore for a week. Or the day Cosmas was riding his bicycle headlong down a trail faster than fast and he, no kidding, no exaggeration,
ran over a wolverine dozing in the sun
even though biologists say with absolute conviction that there are no wolverines on the mountain, but by gawd there is at least
one
, as Cosmas will tell you with absolute assurance. Or the time a guy was fishing in the Salmon River and snagged a trout by the dorsal fin and yanked up to dislodge the fish but the fish stayed hooked and went flying past the fisherman’s face and landed in a jay’s nest, and was
that
jay ever surprised! Or the young osprey on the Zigzag who dove on a glittering fish and ended up with an Elvis Presley action figure complete with rhinestone Las Vegas cape. Or the bear who smashed open a nest of honeybees who specialized in huckleberry nectar, and the bees conspired to retaliate not with indiscriminate attacks on the general corpus of the bear but with ferocious concentrated attention in consecutive waves of twenty on the bear’s testicles, which led to a bear with nuts the size of pumpkins. Or the time a troop of Girl Scouts were boating on Lost Lake as part of a weekend retreat, and just at dusk an enormous white sturgeon leapt out of the lake and crashed back with a crash so loud that the troop leader thought an air force jet must have broken the sonic barrier overhead or somehow a whale had been planted in the lake unbeknownst to any and all. Or the Presbyterian clown convention that showed up one day at the lodge, every one of the clowns dressed head to toe in comic performance gear. Or the bow hunter who pursued a buck deer for hours and hours one day and finally got close enough to get a shot off, and suddenly a set of antlers came flying at him at such high speed that they impaled an inch deep in the tree he had providentially hidden behind. Or the time Miss Moss, walking along the river at dusk, found a tiny smoldering campfire, no bigger than a half dollar, with a tiny frying pan the size of a dime next to it. Or the day that Maria found the perfect bed of moist clay in the woods, just the right consistency for molding birds, and she sat down and made four sparrows, and then she went to wash her hands in the creek, and when she looked back, four sparrows were taking flight from exactly the spot where she had left the four clay sparrows, and there was no clay to be seen where a moment ago there had been four clay sparrows.

*   *   *

And deep mysteries too, things that no one could ever explain and in most cases no one ever knew or apprehended or discovered—a new species of snow flea mutating in a dark crevasse on Joel Palmer’s glacier; a blue bear born to two black ones but alive only for a day; a place where trees and bushes and ferns decided to intertwine and make a small green cottage complete with walls and a roof and a door; a cave with the bones of a creature eight feet tall inside; a pencil lost by Joel Palmer at nine thousand feet of elevation on the south side of the mountain, long ago encased in ice and now some twenty feet beneath the surface, waiting to be found in the year 2109 by a young woman named Yvon, who would be amazed that the pencil never wore out no matter how much she used it, as if it had patiently stored up words for two centuries; and much else, more than we could account even if this book never ended and its pages and pulses went on forever, and it was the longest book in the history of the world. Even then, it couldn’t catch more than scraps and shards of the uncountable stories on the mountain, of bird and beast, tree and thicket, fish and flea, biome and zygote. And this is not even to consider the ancient slow stories of the rocks and their long argument with the lava inside the mountain and the seething and roiling miles beneath the mountain, all the way to the innermost core of the sphere, which might be a story of metallic heat so intense that to perceive it would be your final act in this form; another mystery.