Martin Marten (9781466843691) (9 page)

In fact, added the trapper to the now-gaping bystander, he would, without undue self-indulgence or self-promotion, venture to guess that he, the trapper, did more on a steady basis to protect and conserve healthy populations of, for example, marten and fox and bobcats and mink on Wy’east than the bystander did; so that attacking him, the trapper, for the way he made his living was perhaps a misguided endeavor. And this was not even to inquire as to how the bystander made
her
living and what the
bystander
did to protect and conserve marten and fox and bobcats and mink on Wy’east.

There’s absolutely no question that contributing
money
to various and sundry environmental protection agencies and entities is a useful and indeed crucial aspect of protection and conservation of healthy populations of small fur-bearing mammals in the forest here, said the trapper gently, but I think we can both acknowledge that there is also a useful and crucial role to be played by men and women like me who attend meetings of forest advisory councils, and speak at public fish and wildlife hearings, and walk in the woods enough to be aware of possible fire hazards and invasive species and unusual patterns of death or disease or degradation, and stay in touch with their elected representatives, and stay in constant contact with both the scientific and enforcement professionals, all of whom I know by name and nearly all of whom I have pulled out of some ditch or other when winter seizes the mountain by the throat. And finally, this is not even to begin to discuss the manner in which you also kill other living beings in the normal conduct of your day, from the mammals you eat, to the other sentient vegetative beings you eat, to the remnants of former sentient beings who now compose the oil and gas in your car, to the sentient beings who are destroyed by the dams that provide the electricity that
powers
your house and car. That
is
your car, sitting outside, is it not?

Miss Moss said that the bystander, to her credit, stood there silently for a long moment, and then stepped up and shook the trapper’s hand and said something like
you are right and I am wrong
and then drove away, after which she and the trapper agreed on prices for his furs, and she made him a huckleberry milkshake to go, on the house, just because.

18

WIDE AS HE RANGED ON HIS OWN,
however, and deft and able and experienced in the ways of the woods as he was fast becoming, Martin was still very young that summer, and many times his headlong curiosity and his innate caution were at war, and many times his survival was a near thing. Sometimes you could say that he was saved by his incredible senses and reflexes; very few animals in the woods are as liquid quick and preternaturally alert as the marten. As Dickie the trapper had observed more than once, the marten, like its cousin the mink, despite being a predator, was still small enough to be prey to a startling number of larger animals, including its own larger cousins the fishers and wolverines.

Not that I have ever
seen
fisher or wolverine on the mountain, said Dickie to Miss Moss from his chair by the fire, but I’ve
heard
stories of fishers eating marten, given the chance. Tough family, the mustelid family. Of course the wolverine would have no compunction eating the fisher neither. The wolverine, from what I hear, has no compunction about eating
anything
. There’s stories of wolverines eating tires and bicycles and llamas.

Llamas?

Llamas.

You just like saying the word
llamas
, said Miss Moss.

Also supposedly there was a wolverine that ate a double-wide trailer in Alaska, and there’s a story of a wolverine that tried to eat a high school football team, but I am not sure about that one. I think that’s apocryphal. Unless it was seven-man football.

*   *   *

But sometimes Martin was also saved from dangerous moments by a growing sense of … what word can we use? Something larger and deeper than caution—a sort of ever-growing awareness of subtle pattern, let’s say. Without consciously filing information away, he constantly filed information away, and he never forgot anything he learned, from the way owls were more dangerous in the open than they were in the thick woods, to the way wood hawks could fly sideways through branches to pick off animals in the canopy, to the way fishermen along the Zigzag would occasionally leave their catch in easily opened wicker baskets while they went to answer the call of nature, to the way dogs were terribly dangerous in the open but not so dangerous in the forest, to the way the best huckleberries were higher on the bush closer to the sun, to the way that gray foxes could climb trees but red foxes could not, to the way that rabbit runs and the little clearings where grouse liked to take dust baths were good places to find the thin wire snares set by human beings for rabbits and grouse.

And much else, much else. More than we could account in a thousand books. Isn’t that amazing that the lessons learned by one young marten on one side of one mountain would take us years to try to explain? But that’s no exaggeration—the plethora and panoply of scents in his talented nose alone are beyond our mutual eloquence, and you and I would have to invent lots of languages just to get
close
to a few of the things Martin knew without having words for them; the rich, golden, sneezy smell of the grouse dust bath, for example. Within a few seconds, Martin knew how many grouse had been there and their genders and their approximate ages (four were chicks) and approximately when they had been there (five hours before), and he could hazard a guess at when they might return, for the bath was well worn, either by this one tribe or several; and he filed away this information somewhere deep in his brain. He did not
think
about evidence and implication as we do; he absorbed the evidence and drew conclusions and implications in another way that we do not yet understand and perhaps never will. We would be very foolish and arrogant to conclude that our way of thinking is necessarily better or deeper than his, especially as we don’t actually understand his way; wouldn’t that be like saying your language is better than another, though you do not speak the other? Does that make sense? No? Yet that is what our species has done for many long years. Perhaps the less we think we know, the wiser we are and the closer to actual understanding we get. Perhaps the more we learn, abashed and humble, about the ways other beings think, the closer we get to other ways of living.

*   *   *

Me personally, said Dickie from his corner by the fire, I don’t think of myself as a trapper so much as a student of animal life and customs, specializing in the fur-bearing small mammals of this particular place. And while I know enough to make a small living on what I know, I know I don’t know hardly a thing. Any one individual is enough to prove that whatever you think you know isn’t very much. That silver fox is a good example. And there are many more. There’s a bobcat over to Hood River who is a total loner, a hermit, as far as I can tell. I bet he’s ten years old and I don’t think he’s ever been in love. He’s got his territory, he defends it in season, and he must be a hell of a defender, because I have seen some worn and torn young male cats coming out of there
not
happy about having challenged the old guy who they probably thought they could knock off with one paw but they couldn’t. But once he knocks off all the young pretenders, he fades back into the woods, and I don’t see sign of him again until the next batch of cocky princes comes after him. So what’s his story? I don’t know, and if
I
don’t know, you can be sure no one knows. Maybe he’s got religion or he had a romantic setback that left a scar on his heart or he’s got a political beef with his cousins or who knows what. And that’s just one individual cat. Imagine what we don’t know about
all
the bobcats on the mountain. Maybe they’re working out some huge treaty with the cougars this summer, for all we know. Or there’s a young genius bobcat on the rise who is going to persuade his companions to work together in teams like wolves so they can take down more deer or make a run at old Louis.

It would take a hundred bobcats to pull down Louis, said Miss Moss from the kitchen. Maybe a thousand. Louis is bigger than a bus.

You know I have never seen Louis? said Dickie. Me, who has seen a thousand amazing things in the woods, and I have never seen the one animal that everyone and his kid sister has seen? Bizarre.

I’ve seen him, said Miss Moss, emerging from the kitchen with two cups of coffee. I saw him from the lodge one day, at the edge of the woods. Emma was with me, and we just stood there staring at him. No question it was Louis. For one thing he was enormous and for another he knew it and was allowing us an audience, as Emma said. You know how people say the words
king of the mountain
in fables and stories? He’s the king of the mountain. You should have seen his posture. I expected to see a court painter nearby.

Somebody will kill him eventually, said Dickie. That’s what happens to kings.

Not this king, said Miss Moss. He’ll live forever. He’ll probably be elected governor someday. We elect actors all the time now, right? Plus I don’t think he talks, which is a plus.

This is the best coffee I have ever tasted in my whole life, said Dickie.

Liar.

Except for the coffee you made yesterday.

Hmm.

Or the coffee you will make me tomorrow.

You hope.

I hope.

19

THE DAY
that Maria turned six years old turned out to be a terrific day everywhere you looked. Dave went for not one but two runs and both times turned in personal bests. Dave’s dad got a phone call and when he hung up the phone he turned and hugged Dave’s mother so hard she said hey, you are going to crack my ribs! Emma Jackson Beaton did a complete no-kidding head-over-heels flip while snowboarding the glacier, a flip she had been trying to accomplish since last winter, and when she finally did it she lay down in the snow and made snow angels, laughing, and both the morning waitress and the third chef watched her from their respective windows in the lodge and sighed that she was so thrilling and lovely and inaccessible. Miss Moss was inundated by, in order, a group of Lutheran dawn hikers, a group of German skiers, a college summer botany class, a book club reading only books of alpine adventure in alpine settings, a Forest Service trail crew, a group of Pacific Crest Trail hikers who had smelled bacon and broke their vegan vows, a group of snowboarding competition judges, a group of nudists who thankfully weren’t yet, a group of Finnish fishermen, a wine club, and a flower club, and that was all before noon.

It was a Saturday, and Dave worked at Miss Moss’s between runs, and then he had the afternoon off for Maria’s birthday party. Maria had specified that she wanted a “real picnic,” with baskets of food and running in a meadow and someone playing a guitar. She had seen her party in a dream and was quite particular about it. She invited six friends from kindergarten and she specified that each member of the family could invite up to three friends each. Her mother invited Emma Jackson Beaton and two friends from the library; her father invited his two former partners from the logging concern in an effort to mend bridges; and Dave invited Moon.

It was the most beautiful Saturday you could ever ask for at the Saturday store, as Maria said. The meadow was an easy walk along the river; it was the same meadow where Dave had seen Martin for the first time. Emma Jackson Beaton brought a ukulele, which she could almost play and which was, when you thought about it, a cousin of the guitar, was it not? And there were not one but three picnic baskets of sturdy burly wicker and many delicious and savory things to eat, and children ran headlong and laughing through the meadow, and Dave’s dad’s partners lit cigars under a tree and allowed as they were sorry for the misunderstanding, and Dave’s dad said is that anywhere within an acre of an apology? and the brothers said, well, sort of, we guess, you might say so, and they all three smoked for a while, grinning.

Also in the meadow of course were many other guests either resident therein or visitors passing through on business, and Dave and Moon made a list of all the other beings who attended Maria’s birthday party and presented her with the gift of themselves, as Moon said: crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, ants, worms, wasps, bees, hornets, damselflies, dragonflies, moths, butterflies, swallows, jays, crows, warblers, a tiny woodpecker, squirrels, chipmunks, and what sure seemed like a peregrine falcon, although it went by far too fast to get a good look. Also Moon was sure he saw a deer’s long sad face in the shadows under the trees, and Dave pointed out that if you considered the meadow to be an endless vertical space as well as a finite horizontal space, you could include geese, cranes, ravens, and what probably was an eagle, although it was too high to see clearly.

Usually a bucolic scene like this one, in a mountain meadow, on a lovely summer afternoon, either turns dark for some reason—contrast is such an interesting literary device, isn’t it?—or is arranged to house some character revelation; a meadow is a kind of open stage, when you think about it, a sort of theater in the round, with our cheerful subjects gathered in the center, and we readers, and perhaps a deer, watching from the edges. But this bucolic scene is just what it is, happy and warm and sunny and gentle and friendly and cheerful. Dave’s dad, having received the phone call that gave him a maintenance job at Zigzag High, is happy to have made some peace with his former partners. Emma Jackson Beaton is secretly delighted to be around children, because she loves children and wants more than anything to have sons and daughters and has never told anyone, and she plays the ukulele all afternoon as deftly as she can, because she never wants this afternoon to end, because the meadow is as crammed with children as she someday hopes her house will be. Moon is happy to be shyly among lots of people, which is rare and intimidating and thrilling for him. Dave is happy for his family, and he finds himself watching his mother’s pleasure in Maria’s pleasure; being happy at someone else’s happiness, he is beginning dimly to realize, is a form of love. The ladies from the library are happy to be out in the sun and wind, especially as one is “Unabled,” as she says, and never hardly gets out into meadows without major logistical help.