Martin Marten (9781466843691) (6 page)

Good point, said Miss Moss. Such as?

Repair the bell over the door, said Dave. Computerize inventory and organize storage. Create and execute advertising and marketing plan. Establish social media presence. Research and execute online sales. Do something about the backyard. Research possibility of expanding hot food sales beyond soup and coffee. Other repairs and renovation as needed.

Persuasive, admirably detailed, and slightly embarrassing to hear, said Miss Moss. Excellent points. And the third area? The character of the applicant?

Honest and ready to work any hours possible, starting today, said Dave, mentally thanking Maria for that last touch.
Starting today,
that’ll sound impressive, Maria had said, and she was right—it did sound impressive.

References?

Ma’am?

Character references. Anyone able to attest to your character?

Yes, ma’am. My parents. My teachers.

Maria?

Ma’am?

Your sister will attest that you are kind, honest, generous, diligent, steadfast, reverent, thoughtful, responsible, energetic, self-sufficient, creative, and good at heart?

I think so, Miss Moss, said Dave. I think she would. I’m sure she would.

Then you’re hired, said Miss Moss. Anyone whose kid sister thinks the world of him can work here anytime. Welcome to the staff.

Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.

Eight bucks an hour to start, raised to ten in a month if you earn it?

Yes, ma’am. Very fair, ma’am.

Can you really start today?

Yes, ma’am.

Start with that damned bell, said Miss Moss, smiling. I have fixed that bell ten times, and obviously we need an expert on that project. Then go around and make a list of everything you see that needs repair, and we will prioritize. Give me four hours today, and then go home. Thank your sister for her character reference.

I’ll do that, ma’am. And thanks, ma’am.

Good to have you on staff, Dave. I’ve never had a staff before. At the moment, you are the finest staffer I’ve ever had. Stay in that exalted state.

Yes, ma’am, said Dave, and he suddenly had a powerful urge to ask Miss Moss about the marriage proposal again, but somehow he knew this wasn’t the moment. He went to fix the bell.

10

THE BEARS ON WY’EAST
had many centuries ago quartered the mountain according to mysterious clan and tribal lines, and the rare battles between and among them were all occasioned by flouting of the lines; and every bear knew the ancient stories of arrogant young muscled bears who went deep into a forbidden territory and did not return, their bones scattered across the mountainside for all to see. And there were darker old stories too of wars between bears and cougars, for example, an enmity nearly as old as the mountain itself, or between bears and wolverines, despite the eerie similarity of their furious strengths, their capacities for a sort of grim rage few other animals knew or desired. Indeed, among the marten and the other members of the mustelid clan, there was at most a cold respect for the biggest of their tribe and no affection whatsoever. While the fisher, for example, could lose its temper when its kits were threatened or attacked, it did not and would not muster the savage, utter destruction of a bear or wolverine in full and uncontrolled rampage; the fisher preferred a sudden, swift violence and then a swifter disappearance so that there were hunting dogs, for example, who leapt after a hissing fisher and never knew the manner or incredible rapidity of the blow that caused their death, a terribly fast slicing of the jugular and instant retreat so that the dog found itself suddenly gushing out its life in the snow, a great weariness arriving like a tide.

But the marten, like the otter, fought rarely if at all, seeing no need for it except to assert territory or fend off danger to its kits, and the tools of battle rusted all the more because the marten was graced and given such astounding physical tools. It was the fastest and surest of all animals in trees and canopies, able and thrilled to rocket through the branches faster and more accurately than even the wood hawks who could arrow like small feathered jets through thickets, spinning and turning as necessary with an exquisite timing no human athlete could even imagine. And they were a muscular race, the marten—for all that they weighed less than ten pounds; they had steel chests and a boundless endurance that together spelled doom for all but the luckiest headlong squirrel or sprinting rabbit. Claws of razor wire, teeth like tiny daggers, the ability to hear a snapped twig from a thousand feet away, vision equally sharp day or night, and a coat of the thickest warmest glossiest waterproof fur, it was as if Time, who designs all beings and whittles them to their absolute essence, had decided to build the most perfect small mammalian hunting machine, mixing a bit of bear and lynx and hawk together into a small dose of cheerful, efficient predation, giving it the wildest wilderness for home and making its enemies few, relentless though they be—the hawk and eagle to pluck up wriggling kits, the coyote and lynx and fox to cull the old and slow adults, and most of all man, who did not even eat those he killed but stole their skins to make coats for himself, because he did not have his own fur or enough hair to keep him warm against the wind.

*   *   *

It was a brilliant summer. Day after day, the mist inherent on a mountain with glaciers and a permanent snowpack burned off by noon, the afternoons stretched as long and languid as napping cougars. The rivers and creeks burled along furiously right through the summer, when usually they slowed by August, as the last of the melt finished leaving the peak on its way to the ocean. The rains from the west that usually dropped their last loads on the mountain in June and July before petering out, exhausted, in the high sage desert beyond were scattered and confused this year and lost their way and ended up drenching British Columbia to the moist spluttering puzzlement of the British Columbians. The woods stayed wet enough from winter to fend off the late-summer fires that sometimes raged after lightning strikes, and the ferocious thunderstorms that sometimes roared along the mountain’s shoulders were missing in action; no hikers or bicyclists or drivers tossed burning butts of cigarettes or cigars into the brush; no campers left their fires unattended or unbanked or forgotten; no boaters on the dozens of pristine tiny lakes accidentally sent sparks from fuel lines racing through the thickets. So the afternoons grew more crisp and clear and lovely and long by the day, and on the mountain that summer, every resident felt this, from the tiniest shrew to Louis himself, the elk bigger than any bear.

*   *   *

But Martin’s youngest brother grew quieter and less active by the day. By early July, he no longer came down the tree from the den. He slept all day, as much of the family did much of the time, but he also slept, or seemed to sleep, at night, when their mother led the growing kits down the tree and into the woods to hunt. For a time, their mother and then Martin continued to bring mice and voles back for him, but finally he ceased even to eat and remained curled in a tight ball in the dim rear corner of the burrow, his eyes open. On the morning he died, Martin had just come back to the den, carrying a shrew just in case his brother was awake and hungry; his brother lifted his head a little but did not move otherwise or even blink.

As Martin watched, his brother’s eyes dimmed, and his head sank back down onto his paws, and he died. He was three months and three days old when he died. Many other creatures died that day on the mountain, creatures of many species, death by many causes—predation, accidents, battle, age, illness, happenstance, perhaps a quiet suicide, who knows? And the larger the creature, the more noticeable the death, so that the aged electrician who had been a war veteran was widely mourned, and the old doe struck by a car on the highway drew a public works team to remove her body gently from the road, and the young eagle electrocuted by chance at a ski area was photographed by a dozen phones, her sudden death a viral sensation within moments; but Martin’s brother was one of the thousands of small deaths, and no one knew but his brothers and his sister, who were saddened and confused, and his mother, who carried his body down from the den in her jaws, and the animals who found his body in the forest the next day, an unexpected and welcome provenance for many creatures, some too small to see.

So there were now three marten kits where there had been four, and from some ancient impulse, their mother again decided to move the den, from some old fear of death, from some sensible fear that there were larger animals in the woods who watched and waited with an ancient patience for one infinitesimal chance at such elusive meat; but before she could do so, the gray fox saw just such a rare chance, and seized it.

11

DAVE’S BEST FRIEND
is a kid named Moon. Moon is real tall and skinny. He owns every mechanical technical engineered electric electronic computerized digitized shiny gleaming cool machine ever made, it seems. His house is so big that you could put Dave’s entire cabin in the kitchen of Moon’s house. Moon’s
kitchen
is so big you could ride a bicycle in circles and never come close to touching the walls or stoves or sinks.

Moon has not one but three phones, all of which communicate with each other and probably hatch conspiracies when we sleep, says Moon. He has at least three computers and maybe four if you count the old one upstairs that no one uses anymore. He has so many routers and docks and plugs and wires and chargers that he keeps them all in a box so they don’t wander off and electrify the cat by accident. His mom and dad work for technological companies that are so huge and vast and extensive and international and complex that neither Moon nor Dave knows what the actual products of the companies are. Moon says he thinks the companies actually just mint money on a contract from the government somehow, that they no longer have to manufacture anything but instead just hatch money, which they give in wheelbarrows and pallets to their shareholders and employees, who distribute it in turn to car dealers and housing agents and airplane companies. Mostly airplane companies, Moon thinks. Moon says the price for working for those companies is that you have to live on airplanes. Moon says his dad has reserved seat 3B on every flight offered by every airline in the United States for the rest of this year and half of next year, after which he has an option to renew. Moon says his mom does not go so far as to reserve the same seat on every flight on every airline, but she
is
partial to seat 2A. She is more of a landscape and wilderness person than my dad, says Moon, and she loves looking out the window, whereas Dad loves sleeping. My mom can look out any window of any airplane in any state and tell you within ten seconds where exactly you are and what mountain range that is and what agricultural products are being nurtured by irrigation thirty thousand feet below the window. She’s amazing. I tested her last time we were all on a flight together, when we went to Costa Rica, and she was right every single time. I mapped out the trip beforehand and had it all downloaded to match the plane’s flight plan. I would have tested Dad, but he was asleep.

Moon and Dave hang out. Those are the words they use for an answer when any one of their parents says, so what did you guys do today?
Hang out
can mean any of a number of things. Sometimes it means eating or running or watching movies, but mostly it means lazing around in Moon’s room playing video games or wondering what they are going to do next year when they are freshmen at the Zag. Moon’s room is the whole second floor of Moon’s house. Moon’s parents’ room with the fireplace and the hot tub and the exercise room and the sauna is downstairs, but they are rarely ever home at the same time, so when Moon’s mom is gone and his dad is home, his dad sleeps in the den, and when Moon’s dad is gone and his mom is home, she sleeps in the sunroom off the porch, so in general, Moon says, if you consider average occupancy and house volume, you could say that my room is the whole house, which is to say that I very probably have the biggest room of anybody on the mountain.

Not that Moon considers himself cool because his parents are rich. He is actually sort of quietly embarrassed that his parents are never home. He is politely awkward when other parents say courteously at school events, now, Moon, I do not think I have had the pleasure of meeting your folks, have I? He quietly worries that if he and Dave make the cross-country team at the Zag and run in cross-country meets and Dave’s parents come to watch, people will notice that Moon’s parents did not come to watch because they are in Taipei and Brunei. Moon is not angry or annoyed or hurt or resentful of his mom and dad; actually he really likes them and enjoys their company and even would say he loves them if he was being honest with someone he trusts, like Dave. And he likes their family house and the tremendous view of the rolling velvet foothills to the south and his phones and screens and cloud library in which last he looked there were more than five thousand movies and shows and six thousand songs on instant demand. But he is sort of quietly embarrassed that most of the time he is pretending that it’s cool to be in a huge house alone, pretending to be happy that he can instantly obtain pretty much anything he wants, pretending to not mind at all that the mom and dad he really likes and even would admit that he loves work so hard for him that they don’t actually see him much.

We do at birthdays and holidays, though, he says to Dave. You have to give them major credit points there. Not once that I can remember have both of them missed a birthday or a holiday, and holidays for us include the small ones that a lot of people blow off, like Saint Patrick’s Day and April Fools’ Day. You have to give them credit there. And my mom makes a point of being home for summer solstice every year. How many moms make a big deal out of summer solstice, huh? Not so many, Dave. Not so many.

12

IT WAS MARTIN’S HEADLONG
older brother who was caught by the fox. Sure it was. You knew it would be, didn’t you? He wasn’t careful, Martin’s brother. He didn’t pay attention. He wasn’t sensible. He ran out in the street after the ball without looking both ways. He rode his bike off the bluff without gauging the drop below. He saw something interesting and he sprinted after it without the slightest reflection or planning or caution. He had no reasonable doubt. He was brave and fearless and stupid and selfish. He was independent and carefree and careless and dead. He was afraid of nothing. Doesn’t that sound cool? Isn’t that what we all want, to be afraid of nothing? But he died. Maybe we
should
be afraid of some things. Maybe being afraid of a few things is a good way to not die. Maybe being afraid of some things is a survival tactic. Maybe being headlong and afraid at the same time is a good way to live. Maybe two contrary things can be true at once. Maybe a lot of things in life are like that. Martin’s brother was caught by the fox just after dusk, just after he leapt headlong to the earth from the base of the tree, because the fox had watched the marten family leave the den again and again and had noted how the headlong older brother did not bother to stop and smell and listen to the waiting darkness, to use his amazing gifts of smell and hearing to sense what might be waiting, for good or ill; and so he died, because the fox set up for him and caught him in the split second he was available to be caught.