Martin Marten (9781466843691) (11 page)

Martin watches cautiously; even an old bear has paws like huge hammers, paws big enough to break all the bones a marten has—bones Martin preferred uncrushed.

The bear enters a blind alley among the boulders. Martin watches to see if she will clamber over the stone wall. She rears up, slowly. Something is wrong inside her, some dark illness of the blood, some slow freezing of the bones, some gray exhaustion of the organs; Martin can hear her wheeze in pain. But she no longer has the energy to leap or climb, and she turns around and contemplates retracing her steps down out of the alley to find another path up the mountain. But something in her finally calls it quits, and she backs up to the vaulting wall and folds herself down, grunting with pain, and then she is still, watching the sprawl of slope below her, waiting for … something. Who knows what she is waiting for? A raven, endlessly curious, alights on the wall behind her, out of range from any sudden leap, and cocks its head in puzzlement; but the bear does not even turn her head. Martin wonders if the raven will jump down, hoping for a tremendous windfall of protein, but the raven also is old and experienced and knows that the bear is not yet dead. After a few minutes the raven floats off, perhaps to share the news of meals to come. But Martin stays atop his pillar and watches. Damselflies whir past, shadows lengthen, the ravens establish a loose perimeter. The sun declines over Martin’s shoulder. The long cold shadow of the mountain reaches for the bear; and then it is night, and the curtain slides over all, and Martin slides silently off his pillar and back down into the woods, as noiseless as a shard of moonlight.

*   *   *

By late August, Martin sensed the impending winter, and he doubled his search for the right den; but he also had the oddest urge to range wider and wider before he settled on a home, and what had been daily jaunts of several miles now became journeys of many miles. He explored every lake he could find: Scout Lake, Wahtum Lake, Ottertail Lake, Lost Lake, Blue Lake, Rainy Lake, North Lake, Badger Lake, Clear Lake, and Frog Lake, which indeed featured frogs; something about lakes fascinated him, and he much enjoyed milling through cattails and marsh looking for small delicious meats. He went down the mountain far enough to cautiously skirt the towns of Brightwood and Rhododendron, on the west side, and to see the town of Parkdale in the distance, to the northwest; but towns of that size reeked of oil and gasoline and rubber and dogs and trouble, and he stayed high in the canopy and safely deep in the forest fringe even while examining them with interest for hours at a time.

He saw much that puzzled him in these voyages of curiosity, but he was already experienced enough to gauge which astonishments were fraught with danger and which were by some few degrees safer. In general, anything having to do with human beings should be watched with immense caution, let alone approached that way, while interesting things and places without the smell of human beings could be explored with a little more freedom, although by now he had developed an extra sense for escape routes and situations that, given the right enemy, could prove fatal. Seemingly empty dens and burrows, for example—tempting as it was to just stick his nose in on the good chance that they were either abandoned or rented by something good to eat, there was also a chance that they were occupied by something big and violent enough to eat him. The most memorable lesson he’d had along these lines was from a bobcat, which rocketed out of its burrow in a windfall with horrifying talons and a quicksilver fury Martin evaded by the thinnest of chances. He had fled instantly into the trees, but the cat flew up the trunk right behind him, and for the next few seconds, Martin’s early death was a distinct possibility; death was less than an inch behind his golden tail until the cat abruptly abandoned the chase and leapt back snarling to the forest floor. Martin sprinted on for another few minutes, changing directions faster than any football player could ever emulate, until he was sure the cat was gone. But again, he filed away some crucial information in some deep file folder in his brain: the bobcat’s incredible sprinting speed, a match for his own in a brief burst; the fact that it could and did rocket up into the trees after him; and the fact that it apparently was not a long-distance pursuer through the canopy, although this last was not a data bit he could bank on, given the small sample size.

Had he known it, the only animal capable of surpassing his liquid speed through the canopy and killing him far above the ground, other than raptors, was a fisher, his larger cousin among the mustelids; but no fisher had been seen by people on the mountain for many years. Thus no young marten had filed away knowledge of that particular manner of death and communicated it to his or her kits—just as no mountain marten knew that the largest of their cousins, the fearsome wolverine, could and would eat marten, given the chance, as no wolverine had been seen on Wy’east for a century. Not even Mr. Douglas the trapper had heard of wolverine in this forest, and he alone among all the men and women on the mountain had sought out the oldest residents and walkers in the woods and asked their tales and solicited their stories and welcomed the memories of the stories they had been told by the oldest before them. So it was that Mr. Douglas knew stories from before even Joel Palmer walked over the glacier barefoot, stories of the occasional wolverine—or carcajou, as the oldest First People called them—stealing kills from bears and cougars and killing snow-floundered elk and confronting human beings with a grim violent confidence that no other animal showed. But the animals in those stories had not been seen by human beings on the mountain since before the trees were felled to make Miss Moss’s store.

23

ONE DAY AT THE END OF AUGUST
when Dave reported to work at Miss Moss’s, she was waiting for him on the porch with the trapper. Your assignment today, Dave, she said, is to accompany Mr. Douglas on his expedition through the woods and keep your eyes peeled for entrepreneurial opportunities for the store. You are a sales agent for things I do not know we are going to sell yet. I think we need more entrepreneurial innovation and product variety, but I am not in a position to explore those opportunities as much as you are, and I would like you to spend your shift today studying the possibilities with Mr. Douglas. Mr. Douglas will be responsible for safety and edibles. I have implicit trust in Mr. Douglas and you can be sure he is a trustworthy and personable companion. Report back on your progress tomorrow. No need to return to the store. I’ll credit you with up to eight hours, depending on your progress and the nature of the country. Feel free to pepper Mr. Douglas with questions. His reputation as a taciturn man is undeserved in my experience. Questions?

No, ma’am.

Away with you, then. Safe passage, gentlemen.

And off they went on one of the most interesting days that Dave ever had in his life. Indeed he would remember this day for many years to come, and often accounted it a sort of beginning for the life he led. To be completely honest with you here, Dave had a slightly higher opinion of his woodcraft than perhaps was totally accurate, but to give him credit, he also was not fulsome or cocky about it, and he was quick to acknowledge his betters—and in Mr. Douglas, within the first few hundred yards of their journey, he discovered his better.

Let’s start by learning to be silent, said the trapper, and for the next hour they were, as they picked their way along the river through a series of old clear-cuts and windfalls. For a few minutes, Dave noticed, being silent was no effort, especially as Mr. Douglas set a fairly rapid pace, but then he found the lack of conversation a little unnerving; but after another twenty moments or so of wanting to ask questions and make observations, he noticed that he did seem to notice more when he wasn’t able to speak, an observation he made to the trapper when they paused finally and Mr. Douglas asked what he’d been thinking.

For the next hour, then, said Mr. Douglas, let’s concentrate on walking silently while not speaking. Let’s slow down and walk carefully. Look down and see where your feet are headed. Pause when necessary to negotiate your next step. See what’s down there, rather than just walking through it. We spend a lot of time not seeing, it seems to me. Report on what you noticed.

At the end of this second hour, Dave was able to say that he had seen salamanders, two kinds of frog, what might have been a lizard but it was way too fast for even rough identification, and the vanishing tail of a dark snake that might well have been after what might have been a lizard.

That all?

No, sir, said Dave. Lots of crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, snails, spiders, caterpillars, moths, butterflies, quick small brown birds with tiny tails that I believe were wrens, more than a few sparrows, two towhees, a thrush, and a large bird that I believe was a blue grouse. Also various feathers—this one I am almost sure is an owl, and this is surely a jay feather. Also several beer bottle caps, a plastic knife, and a pencil.

Sharp eye, Dave. That pencil still work?

Yes, sir.

Keep it—another lost treasure of the vast and mysterious forest.

Yes, sir.

You don’t have to call me
sir
, Dave.

Yes, sir.

Want me to call you
sir
?

No, sir.

Want me to call you Elmore, or Mohammad?

No, sir. Dave is good.

Alright, then, Dave. What say we go for a couple of hours now as quietly as we can and keep our eyes peeled, this time for animals and their habits and customs and trails and territories. Animals live in certain ways, and when you pay close attention to their ways, what they like, what they are most comfortable with, that’s when you go down a few layers deeper, sort of. Know what I mean? My job is to catch some of them, but the larger pleasure isn’t the money, it’s the literature of their lives, so to speak. And it’s very humbling, which is refreshing. You never get to the end of knowing about them. There’s always something new that the books and Web sites and grizzled old veterans of the woods don’t know. That’s a good thing to remember. Whatever you know beyond the shadow of a doubt out here, you don’t. On the other hand, a working knowledge of habit and probability is a good thing. If you are looking for mink, for example, you’re probably not going to find a whole lot of them above timberline. That narrows down your search engine, so to speak. Ready?

Yes, sir.

So we’ll just walk and talk quietly. You ask anything you want and tell me anything you see, and I’ll do the same. We’ll be quietly companionable. Two students in the biggest school there is. Both of us working for Miss Moss.

Can I ask you about Miss Moss, sir?

No, sir, said the trapper, smiling. She’s not on the agenda. For one thing we are both on task here, and for another I don’t know anything for sure about the estimable Miss Moss. She’s a mystery from head to foot and tip to toe. No, sir.

And off they went for two hours and then a lunch break and then two more hours, looping back downhill another way and eventually back to the store. And indeed they walked and talked quietly, and Dave never forgot, all the rest of his life, the gentle murmur of the trapper’s voice in the shadows as he talked about how most predators of any size like to establish territories, which he called yards, and how they would patrol their yards every day, rain or shine, and how any encroachment on their yards was a flagrant offense, and how not only would they defend their yards against enterprising members of their own species seeking to snatch some new yard but also sometimes against members of other species even if they were larger and dangerous, and how some animals seemed to have a détente or treaty going for reasons you couldn’t really tell. And on top of that, some individuals of some species established their own treaties for their own reasons—for example, a cougar he knew that just would not eat deer no matter what, even when apparently presented with the world’s easiest chance at venison for dinner. Who knew what was up with
that
, said the trapper. You could speculate that maybe she, the cougar, tasted poisoned meat or associates deer with pain or trouble or something, but you don’t
know
, and it’s all the more mysterious because every other cougar on the mountain would take a train and a
bus
to get deer for dinner. But there you go.

They talked about marten and what they ate and where they lived and when the kits left their dens to establish their own yards, and they talked about foxes and how usually on the mountain there were few red foxes and lots of gray foxes, but lately in the last few years there were montane foxes, which are red foxes particularly adapted to mountain life, with thicker coats and more muscle in the chest, seems to me, said the trapper. And they talked about deer and elk, and mink and otter, and bears and bobcats, and how in the old days there were lynx up here and fisher and wolverine but probably never much badger; your badger is not much for mountain life, all things considered, said the trapper. And they talked about chickarees and chipmunks and bats and birds and snakes and skinks and every other sort of animal the trapper knew and Dave was curious about. And they stopped, here and there, and stood silently when a resident presented himself or herself—an owl half-asleep in a tree bole, two rabbits in a clearing, a kingfisher rattling down a creek on a blue trail in the air. At one point, Dave turned and could have sworn he saw a golden brown flash of fur in the canopy, but it vanished so quickly and thoroughly that he didn’t mention it to the trapper; and later that night, in his bedroom, he realized that to have mentioned the young marten would be to have instantly endangered it, for the trapper would have marked the spot and returned to look for sign. He fell asleep, exhausted and pleased. When he awoke in the morning there was a bright yellow warbler feather on his chest, a gift from Maria in gratitude for the owl feather he had left for her the night before.

24

INDEED IT WAS MARTIN
in the trees above Dave and the trapper, watching curiously. By now he recognized the smaller human being as the one who ran without being chased, and something about this particular being drew Martin like a lure. He could not have explained it, even given a language we could understand; it was a feeling composed of interest and even affection. He
liked
this being, felt a certain empathy for it, much like he had felt for his lost brothers and felt still for his quiet sister, despite not seeing her much anymore as summer waned. He was intrigued by Dave; he felt some inarticulate assurance that Dave was not dangerous, and he liked both proximity to him and sprinting through the trees overhead as Dave flew along the forest trails. Granted the eloquence in our tongue he already had in his own, he might have said simply that he liked Dave and felt somehow that Dave liked him too.