Martin Marten (9781466843691) (3 page)

You can also buy parts of old cars at Miss Moss’s store, but the way that works is that you have to go out back behind the store in the clearing where there are old cars, tractors, trucks, snowmobiles, wooden carts and wagons, bicycles, snowboards, skis, ski poles, ski-lift cables, airplane seats, propellers, refrigerators, washers, dryers, pipes, card tables, shelving, planks, barrels, a toboggan, and many other things, and you find what you want and haul it to the back door of the store, where Miss Moss comes and stares at it with a cold appraising eye and offers a price, which you accept immediately, because, as Dave’s dad says, Miss Moss knows exactly what things
ought
to cost, but sets her prices slightly
lower
for reasons that are murky. In this way, Dave found and bought a small long-spring trap, only a little rusted, and enough strong wire to use for snares or trap anchors; and he walked back home through the woods, along the river, excited and afraid. Could he catch grouse and rabbits for the pot? Could he catch fox and marten? Could or should he kill animals just for their skins? Wasn’t that just savage and brutal? But they did kill some animals for food, he thought, chickens and fish, mostly, and they did use the skins of other animals for coats and blankets.

The trap clanked against his shoulder as he walked along the river. By now, almost June, the snow was gone, this far down the mountain, but the river was still crammed with melt, and it raced and thrummed and braided in endlessly riveting ways. You could, as Dave many times had, just sit there in the sun with your back against a tree and watch and listen to the river sprint and thurble and trip and thumble; you had to invent words for the ways it raced and boiled and dashed and crashed, and indeed Dave had once spent an afternoon trying to write one long word that would catch something of the river’s song and story when it was full of itself like this, not yet the shy trickle it would be in summer and fall, before the Rains came on All Souls’ Day, and then the dim chamber of winter, when snow fell slowly all day every day for weeks at a time, and the woods were filled with soft slumps and sighs as trees shed their loads. Somewhere in the cabin, he had that piece of paper, he knew, for Maria had tried to read the word recently and only got halfway through; it was something like trilltrickleslipwhirltumlullrill, he thought; and he remembered that his mom had read it and said it sounded, by heavens, Welsh, didn’t it?

He sat down, smiling. The trap was heavier than he had thought, and a brilliant warm sunny spring day like this was a rare enough meal on the mountain that it ought to be eaten slowly, savoring every bite; and dinner wouldn’t be for a long while. He leaned back and sat as still as he possibly could and waited for the world to present itself, and soon enough he heard the rattle of a flicker, the hammer of a gray jay (the whisky jack, as his dad called it), and the shirring of a squirrel somewhere above him, nervous and curious. The river thwirled and bubbulated. He heard a raven’s deep squark and a chipmunk’s chitter and skitter. The squirrel above him crept closer and dropped pine seeds on his head and shoulders to test if he was alive or stone. He tried to be smiling stone. Take even breaths and fall into the moment and the light. The first few times he’d tried this, tried to get so absorbed in the sights and sounds and smells of the moment, he’d fallen asleep, but now he’d had enough practice at it to savor and relish the treeness of the trees, for example. Trees moved gently, if you paid close attention, and they brushed against each other, and you could only imagine their sensory apparatuses, their particularly sylvan and dendritic take on the world; perhaps, he had sometimes thought, they are staring at me and trying to dig the Daveness of Dave. That could be.

Damselflies whirred close, and four of them, one brilliantly red, landed on his knee and camped for a while; a small fish leapt from the river; a young male blacktail deer browsed a huckleberry bush for a few moments, its first spike antlers all of four inches high; and then Dave saw, one after another in a line like hikers on a narrow trail, five small lustrous golden brown animals slip out of the woods on the other side of the river. Four were smaller than the leader, who was clearly in charge, probably a parent, and the last one in line looked for all the world like he or she was the trusted deputy, bringing up the rear as a precaution against stragglers and mischief. Even as Dave watched, one of the smaller animals lurched to one side after a damselfly, and the last animal in line shoved the explorer back into place with an easy authority that made Dave grin. What
were
these animals? Not cat or fox, not squirrel or marmot, not mink or otter. Too small for bears, too big for weasels, too lithe for skunk. They looked rather like lean unmasked raccoons, though the coloring was all wrong, and they had none of the bearish big-butt waddle of the raccoon clan. More than anything, they looked like pocket-sized wolverines, but that wasn’t possible, was it? Wolverines were bigger than dogs, and besides, no one had seen wolverines on Wy’east in a hundred years. But wolverines have cousins, don’t they? Fisher and badger and …

Marten!

And just as Dave realized what sort of animals they were and blurted it aloud, they vanished back into the woods, graceful and silent as wraiths; but the last one heard Dave say the word and turned and looked at Dave, and he and Dave stared for a long instant at each other before Martin slipped under a fern frond, following his family, and Dave stood up, thrilled and stiff, and walked home to tell
his
family what he had seen.

4

MARTIN’S MOST ADVENTUROUS BROTHER,
the one who had been stung by the honeybee and who was inquisitive about damselflies, the firstborn of the four, was so curious and headlong and headstrong and inquiracious about everything that you could write four books about his adventures alone without undue strain. He poked into everything—and by everything, I mean
everything
. Any hole, den, shadowed place, rockfall, deadfall of leaves and branches, nook, cranny, pool, rivulet, blind corner; in he went, curious and careless, and half the time he came out sprinting in terror, escaping in some cases literally by the hairs on his tail. He jammed his head into one den and discovered a very angry bobcat. He was driven from burrows by minks and weasels. He was stabbed above the right eye by the same owl who had been displaced from her hole in the fir tree and never forgot the indignity and was more than willing to punish the next stranger who appeared to be looking for a home. He was again and again stung by bees and wasps and hornets; he never seemed to learn that, small as they were, they defended their homes with alacrity and tiny awls. He was kicked in the jaw by a rabbit. He was chased headlong through a meadow by a fox. He was chased by a young dog and an old coyote. He was chased through another meadow by a grim doe. He drew the attention of a cougar near timberline, who marked his passage and filed away his pattern of movement and routes of escape when harried by a hawk. He drew the attention of a golden eagle above timberline, who watched him amble through the rock-fields, sniffing after pika and chipmunks; the eagle considered a sudden attack but calculated that her chances were better with a troop of golden-mantled ground squirrels slightly too far from their warren to prevent sudden death for one.

Martin, hidden in the lee of a rock nearby, watched with awe as the eagle arrived, huge and silent, and snared a sun-sleepy squirrel and was away in a flurry and rush of immense dark wings. Martin emerged carefully and watched the eagle flap away and somewhere in his brain stored the ponderous sound of an eagle on the wing. It would be useful to know that sound but more useful to remember that an eagle on the attack was silent and used wind as a cover for a sudden strike. He would remember these things, Martin would. More than his siblings, certainly more than his oldest brother, more perhaps even than his mother and his unknown father, he remembered what he saw and heard and smelled, and paid close attention to cause and effect, and drew his own mysterious conclusions.

*   *   *

Most of their first lessons from their mother were about what to eat and how to procure what they ate; inasmuch as marten eat pretty much everything, their culinary curriculum was extensive and demanding. How to catch voles and mice; how to chase squirrels through the trees at lightning speed; how to snatch insects from the air and slurp them from their lairs in rotten logs and under rocks; how to rob birds of their eggs and later kill the parents asleep in their empty nests; how to anticipate the circular path of tree-creepers and nuthatches and snare them unawares; how to swipe frogs from ponds and mudholes; how to pin a garter snake from behind and eat it like a wriggling stick of meat; how to tell a caterpillar chrysalis from a dead leaf and harvest the delicious interior of the former; how to strip berries from their prickly armor and which berries were best among the many available; how to dash in, steal a chunk of honeycomb, and dash out without undue damage except to the oldest brother, who, as usual, suffered the stings and lances of the infuriated bees at ten times the rate his brothers and sister did; how to stun beetles with a blow and eat them slowly as afternoon snacks; how to crack snails against rocks like nuts and savor the unshelled result; and even, in Martin’s case, how to catch small fish in creeks and rivers by waiting patiently at the edge of a pool for a fish to hold against the current and then pinning it against the bank for an instant with a paw so that he could get his teeth into play. He taught this technique to his family and was interested to see that his mother and sister were deft at it before his brothers; and true to form, his oldest brother was so curious about the deeper pools in the Zigzag that he finally fell in and was bundled along for a hundred feet before he managed to crawl out, sodden and mewling for his mother.

*   *   *

The most and best meat, however, was what had died in the woods, and while all five of the marten were delighted to eat from dead deer and once, late in the summer, an elk, only Martin and his mother sensed the danger of carrion. In general, carrion close to the highway, deer and raccoons and skunks killed by cars and trucks, were safe from the possessive and powerful, but carrion deeper in the woods were usually claimed by their killers, and these shadowy and fearsome animals, as Martin’s mother made clear, would be only too happy to kill and eat marten. Bear, cougar, lynx, bobcat, coyote, fisher, and fox: these were the creatures to beware, to flee without question; for all the astounding liquid speed of the marten on the fly, all but the bears were just as fast, in bursts; and several could and would rocket right up into the trees after their prey. There was no question of fighting or outwitting these creatures, and Martin’s mother reviewed the lessons again and again, forcing her kits to know and fear those scents, to avoid carrion with too-fresh scent, to approach carrion knowing emergency escape routes, to avoid areas too open for instant flight into the canopy. In her own experience, the most terrifying of all these enemies was the fisher; as a juvenile herself, six years earlier, she had very nearly been caught and eaten by a fisher and had never forgotten that stunning speed and slicing teeth—all the more terrifying because the fisher had looked like nothing so much as a large marten. For an instant that was nearly her last on earth, she had stared at the fisher, interested and perhaps even inclined to be amorous, if it were indeed a large and lustrous marten, until it spun and attacked so quickly that she trembled to this day when she smelled even the faintest hint of its scent. According to all the biologists and hunters and trappers and attentive human residents of the mountain, there were no fishers on Wy’east, and there had been none for many years, just as there were supposedly no more wolves or wolverines; yet Martin’s mother smelled the dark hint of fisher sometimes—just the faintest tendril, to be sure, but enough to make her move her kits into their sylvan den as quickly as possible.

*   *   *

Three of the kits stopped nursing when they were about five weeks old, although the second brother stayed by his mother’s side and tried to nurse for another two weeks; something seemed slightly wrong with him, and he did not move as quickly or deftly as his siblings. His mother, even as she spent her days teaching the four kits how to survive on their own, tried to hunt for this one, as well, killing a mouse or a vole every other day and feeding it to him, the smallest of the brothers; but finally she stopped this effort, turning her energies to a new den in an enormous old cottonwood tree in a slight clearing by the river—a good place, she thought, with access to all sorts of food and good sight lines in case of attack. Here too she commandeered a large and roomy hole, killing the small squirrels in it and saving the bodies for her kits.

Her kits were three months old when she moved them into the new den. She led the way, leaping onto the cottonwood’s trunk as light as a shadow and running up to the hole with something very much like pride in the achievement of new quarters. Martin, as usual, brought up the rear, nudging his siblings along, nearly carrying his second brother into the new den. This domicile was slightly smaller but wonderfully dry and thickly lined with moss and meadow grass, and their first night in the new den was a pleasurable feast of red squirrel, one for each member of the family.

But very little activity in the woods goes unseen, and more than one interested creature noted a new family of marten in the cottonwood. In the meadow, the rabbits knew that scent, and something of their wary fear was communicated to the voles and mice, the moles and shrews. In the trees and bushes, the jays, who see all things, shouted the unwelcome news to their cousins; a Cooper’s hawk, big enough to snatch a marten kit given the chance, noted the den’s whereabouts and calculated angles of attack if a wriggling line of marten meat should present itself apace; and even the deer for acres around were apprised of the news, though they had no reason to fear marten. One creature among them was most interested of all: a gray fox, hidden in an alder tree on the other side of the clearing. Thrice as big as a marten, hungry, smart, and experienced, she had subsisted on mice and voles and the first salmonberries of late spring, but a marten of any size would be a rare and delicious treat. Many animals in the woods would make a meal of the kits, but only a few creatures could catch and overwhelm an adult marten; and here was one of those very creatures, unbeknownst to the newest residents in the little meadow. As darkness fell, they slept, but the fox did not, her eyes sharp green stars in the dark alder thicket.