Martin Marten (9781466843691) (7 page)

*   *   *

Martin’s mother did move the den the next evening, this time to a small cave near the river; indeed, the new burrow was so close to the river that it had been the home of minks, until Martin’s mother arrived. The new den was longer and thinner than either of their previous homes, but there were fewer of them now, and even Martin and his sister, by no means fully grown, sensed that this would be their last residence with their mother.

From this final home they ranged farther and farther afield, the kits; in much the same way Dave’s parents let their children range within reason, so did Martin’s mother let her son and daughter go. Day by day, Martin and his sister began to claim their own territories, drifting naturally toward landscapes they liked and found congenial. In general, Martin’s sister liked remote meadows, where mousing was always rewarding, and fairly open woods, where birds were more likely found than in the dense woods and above timberline. Martin, however, liked the stimulation and bustle of country closer to human things; while he remained properly terrified of the road, he was not averse to exploring near the farthest-flung cabins, and it was Martin who discovered that the lodge where Dave’s mother worked was a wonderful source of chipmunks and tiny golden ground squirrels. Something about human beings and their works interested him; dogs were annoying, yes, but the dog who could catch a marten in the woods had not yet been born, and the sheds and cabins and woodpiles and scraggly gardens and pastures of human beings were also a rich hunting ground for mice, voles, snakes, and moles. Woodpiles were especially trustworthy as meat lockers; Martin learned that if he tucked himself into a crevice and waited a few moments, the world would present him soon enough with a chipmunk, and there is nothing quite so delicious when you are sharp with hunger as a chipmunk. Not to mention that they are so wonderfully easy to dismantle, if you have the requisite tools, as Martin did. With total respect for mice and voles (also beautifully packaged and savory meat), and with a deep affection for the eggs of any bird whatsoever (eggs being the most easily opened meal of all), Martin loved nothing so much as a fresh steaming chipmunk when he was hungry. Entertaining to chase, just the right size for a substantive meal without having to drag remnants of it back to the burrow, and populous to the point of profligacy—the chipmunk was one of the great glories and beneficences of the mountain, and Martin was ever more curious about new places where even more herds and troops of them might be found. So he explored closer and closer to Zigzag High and Miss Moss’s store and the lodge where Dave’s mom worked and to the resort with nine holes of golf in the summer and to the laundromat that doubled as a used bookstore and chapel on Sunday afternoons for the Church of the Risen Lord, Wy’east Synod, and to the trailer where methamphetamine was made and to the vast cut in the woods through which telephone poles and wires marched for miles, a swath of open land scythed and mown regularly by a trail crew, a long, straight hole in the forest where trees used to be, some of them older than the telephone itself.

13

LIVING
ON
THE MOUNTAIN,
you never get to actually
see
the mountain, said Dave’s mom that night at dinner. Isn’t that ironic? People come from all over the world to see this mountain, and here we are, and we never see it. If we never see it, does it really exist?

This made Maria laugh so hard she nearly shot milk out her nose.

How’s the running going, Dave? asked his dad.

I was going to start morning and evening runs tomorrow, said Dave, but …

Everyone looked up from their plates.

… I got a job. At Miss Moss’s.

Whoa, said his dad. That is
real
news. Holy moly. Congrats.

Doing what? asked Maria.

General service. “Dave-of-all-trades” is Miss Moss’s term.

Dave, that’s great, said his mom. That’s just great. Hours?

Four a day to start. Six if things work out.

Wow, said his dad. That was a sudden decision. Admirable ambition, though. Prompt action. Admirable all round, I’d say, wouldn’t you?

Absoluterlishly, said Maria without the hint of a smile, before her mom could get her affirmation out, and everyone cracked up.

Working more hours than his old man, Dave is, said his dad later in the kitchen. Maybe he should work more hours, and I will go to high school. We could do one of those switch things like in the movies.

I worry he thinks he has to take on more responsibility, said Dave’s mom. He’s fourteen. He’s a kid.

Soon to be fifteen, and there’s four players on this team, and you and I were working at that age. Personally, I think Maria needs to get a job. She’s smart. She can run a homework service for kids or something. She’s as useless wagewise as her dad at the moment.

It’s unseemly of you to wallow, Jack.

Unseemly
is a lovely word, said Dave’s dad. Also
wallow
. I believe I’ll check both of those words out of the library tomorrow and take them out for a ramble, put them through their paces. I bet if I harness them together properly, they would pull like hell.

You’ll get work, Jack.

Sure.

You will, you know. Don’t you just stand there and
agree
with me.

Okay, he said. Or
not
okay. I disagree, agreefully. Maybe I should have stayed in the service. Steady pay with the prospect of a pension if no one shoots you over twenty years. Did I ever tell you I had a friend in the service who loved calculating possibilities and percentages? He calculated we had a 40 percent chance of surviving our tour without substantive physical damage, which did not include illness, foot rot, psychological and emotional and spiritual trauma, sensory overload, and permanent gastrointestinal distress. He also figured out that anyone’s chances of surviving twenty years in the service without substantive physical damage, given our cultural addiction to violence, was 8 percent. The only way to make it through a whole career undamaged was to get promoted as fast as possible, and the only way to get promoted that fast was to constantly and deliberately expose yourself to damage. You know what my friend did after the war?

Afraid to ask.

Accountant. I kept telling him that he should be a professional ironist or absurdist, but he said he liked to eat.

*   *   *

Dave and Maria slept upstairs in the cabin, Maria in the bear den, the half of the room with the roof slanting down sharply, and Dave in a sort of loft on his half of the room. Dave and his dad had discussed walling off the bear den with cedar planks or even building a wall of cedar down the middle of the room to give each child privacy, but Dave voted against both, as he liked puttering around with Maria, and Maria voted both down, on account of she liked talking to Dave and wandering into the bear den. Also, the den had the only upstairs window, which sometimes was obscured by snow so that the room had a gentle silvery cast to it. Dave and his dad did wall off the bottom of Maria’s bunk bed with cedar, so she had a tiny wooden room for doing homework, which she loved, even though her homework to date had been mostly art projects and elementary alphabet stuff. Dave thought Maria actually liked the homeworkness of homework, so to speak, rather than the actual or ostensible learning
effect
of homework—she liked rulers and graph paper, pencils and pencil sharpeners, the old calculator she had purchased from their mom for ten dishwashing nights, the old compass she found at Miss Moss’s for fifty cents, the Rapidograph pens she’d been given by an aunt or a godmother, the colored pens she wheedled whenever anyone went to the dentist or doctor or church or office of any kind whatsoever. She also loved maps and charts and had what their dad called a thoroueclectic collection of them pinned up all over her tiny wooden room: topographic maps of the mountain, of course, but also geologic charts, a map of the Zigzag River, a maritime map of Semiahmoo Bay in Washington that Miss Moss sold to Maria for three jokes about frogs, and a map of the interior of Dave’s brain that she had drawn for a school project and which her mom wanted to frame, but Maria said, no, it was only an accurate map on the day I drew it, and maps that are not accurate are only curiosities, not utilities.

It was upstairs in the bear den that night that Dave told Maria about seeing the marten in the tree canopy near the river. She was fascinated, and they pored over everything Dave could find online and in his wildlife atlases.

You wouldn’t
believe
how fast it whipped through the branches, said Dave. It was
shocking
fast. Faster than any squirrel, that’s for sure. I was going pretty fast, as fast as I can go downhill, and it was flying through the branches, and it didn’t even look like it was trying hard. And when I stopped, he stopped.

Or she.

Or she. Seemed like a guy, though.

Can I see it tomorrow?

If I see it again and you are nearby, I will signal to you, and you can come over without a sound.

Okay.

Okay.

Same signal as usual?

Yes.

The year Maria turned three years old, she and Dave had hatched a series of private signals, their own silent language, as Dave said. Left hand up meant
pay attention
; left hand balled meant
caution
; left hand flat meant
come over without a sound
. Signals with the right hand mostly meant
people
, and there were a whole array of these, mostly having to do with their parents:
tension in the kitchen; Give Dad a break—he’s weary; Be careful—Mom is worried about something; Don’t say anything about money
. There were two signals made with both hands: one meant
I love you
, although neither Dave nor Maria used that phrase and instead would say something like
You are slightly better to have around than a bad cold
if they had to put the message into words; and the other meant, essentially,
Let me be alone for a while
. The first signal was two open hands placed against your chest; the second was two closed hands huddled against your chest like two tiny locked rooms.

14

AS JULY LENGTHENED,
Martin and his sister and their mother spent less time together; this was usual and natural and normal, the way of their species for millions of years, but Martin and his sister felt their mother’s attention waning, one bright grain less per day, with some deep sense of … what? Sadness, regret, loss, nostalgia? We don’t have good words yet for what animals feel; we hardly have more than wholly inadequate labels for our own tumultuous and complex emotions and senses. It’s wrong to say that animals do not feel what we feel; indeed, they may feel far more than we do and in far different emotional shades. Given that their senses are often a hundred times more perceptive than ours, could not their emotional equipment be similarly vast?

Suffice it to say that Martin and his sister felt their mother drawing ever so gently away from them as the days lengthened toward solstice and shrank afterwards. They went their own ways from the new den, exploring different territories and coursing different landscapes, and they came together again only to sleep. Now that Martin and his sister were able enough hunters in their own right to survive and even to flourish, their mother ceased to bring them food and even ceased mostly to share it, although occasionally some deep chord of memory, perhaps, led her to bring home a vole to share and, once, a brush rabbit.

That was a day for the annals, if martens chronicled their doings. The last salmonberries and the first huckleberries filled the forest; grasshoppers and crickets leapt in the clearings like energetic appetizers; a new crow too young to fly had fallen near the burrow and made a lovely lunch; Martin had discovered and swallowed the contents of a swallow’s nest artfully hidden under the eve of a woodshed near Miss Moss’s store; and to cap it all off with fresh redolent rabbit, without the slightest effort expended in procuring it … well, of such repasts many a tale has been told among men and women and children—and perhaps among the other species, if we only could read their chronicles and annals. And to those who say animals have no chronicles and annals, no literature and sagas, no common memories and master storytellers, I say, are you sure? How would you know? Just because you have never seen them, they do not exist? Are you sure about that? Don’t be. Whatever you are most inarguably sure about, as Miss Moss says, don’t be.

*   *   *

Martin had his first fight in the opening days of July. This was with a male marten almost exactly his age and size. The battle was brief and savage. The cause of conflict was most of the left rear leg of a fawn that had been executed and dismantled by a cougar. The cougar had eaten most of the fawn but, in dragging the remains to a cache, lost some leg. The battle was short and intense and a great surprise to both combatants. The other marten had discovered the leg first, but there are no rules of possession and ownership and property and discovery that are inviolate except by adamant defense, and Martin was very hungry. He snatched a shred of the leg and was attacked, and he responded with a surge of swift violence so shocking to him—let alone his opponent—that when the battle was over, Martin found himself shaking with surprise and rage. You would have to call the battle a draw, if you were scoring the battle as regards injuries incurred and inflicted and rewards gained or retained. Both marten lugged shreds of meat away, and both were bruised and startled, and both sustained shoulder wounds that bled briefly and then were sore for days. Curiously, this was the first fight ever for the other marten, as well. We will not have time to delve into his life and story any longer than the end of this paragraph—and in a real sense, that’s a shame, because this other marten has had a
most
interesting life to date, surviving somehow on his own after his mother was killed by a bobcat and his father was caught in a trap, and he will have a most interesting life over the next eleven years. He will, for example, be hit by lightning and assumed to be dead but then rise up spitting and utterly alive as if by magic. He will briefly find himself atop a running horse, which is a remarkable story all by itself. He will be a rare and perhaps unique case of a marten who learns to kill and eat porcupines after watching a fisher accomplish that potentially puncturous and eminently painful task. He will father more kits than we could easily count if they were somehow piled wriggling in front of us in a seething mewling pile. He will die finally in an act of stunning courage in defense of the object of his enduring love, a story which all by itself you could write three books about, and by heavens what a terrific movie it would make. And he is only one of a million, no, a
billion
stories you could tell about the living beings on
just this side of the mountain
. The fact is that there are more stories in the space of a single second, in a single square foot of dirt and air and water, than we could tell each other in a hundred years. The word
amazing
isn’t much of a word for how amazing that is. The fact is that there are more stories in the world than there are fish in the sea or birds in the air or lies among politicians. You could be sad at how many stories go untold, but you could also be delighted at how many stories we catch and share in delight and wonder and astonishment and illumination and sometimes even epiphany. The fact is that the more stories we share about living beings, the more attentive we are to living beings, and perhaps the less willing we are to slaughter them and allow them to be slaughtered. That could be.