Martin Marten (9781466843691) (33 page)

So it was that the dog began to fit into his new community, and by subsequently avoiding the greens on the golf course, he found himself for the first time in his life not subject to attack; a refreshing state of affairs. As Mr. Shapiro said later, the first condition for substantive and nutritious relationships is the safety and security of all parties concerned, after which denser webs may be woven—and the denser the webs among beings, said Mr. Shapiro to the dog, the less likely a breach of the peace, could that be the case? The thicker the threads, the less likely their sundering? The dog, curled on his chair, considered all the cases he knew of sudden violence between and among mates and partners and tribes and packs, but he refrained from comment, aware that his experience was not comprehensive of all possibilities. He very much liked hearing Mr. Shapiro propose and speculate, ponder and wonder, consider and offer conjecture; a warm and affectionate voice being the one thing the dog had never heard in his whole life and to him something very much like fresh water when you are desperately thirsty.

*   *   *

Cadence weighed herself one morning, and she had lost eight pounds. The vice president of the senior class asked her out that afternoon after seeing her at the store. She said yes. Dave said no when she told him. She said she would make her own decisions about whom to date or not date thank you very much. Dave said that he was under the impression that they had a special relationship. Cadence said that yes they did but that did not mean that she could not date whomever she liked. Dave said that the only reason the vice president had asked her out was that she was skinnier. Cadence said that might well be the case, but she would find out his motivations and character for herself, and was he calling her fat? Dave said well, that pretty much meant the end of their running together, didn’t it, and he was
not
calling her fat. Cadence said that would be a mean thing to do to quit running with her because he was jealous. Dave said he wasn’t trying to be jealous or possessive, but he didn’t think it would be much fun for
him,
at least, if they went running together while she was dating another guy. Cadence said she understood how he felt, but she could not behave according to someone else’s dictates or rules. Dave said he understood, but part of the problem maybe was that he had been about to ask her out but had not done so because he was not sure what she would say and because they had a special relationship that he really liked and because he didn’t want to ruin that, but now he is kicking himself because he should have asked her out. Cadence said she understood but that even if he
had
asked her out, she would have accepted the invitation from the vice president, because she was not ready to be dating only one person at the present time. Dave said actually he
was
ready to be dating only one person at the present time, and he had rather hoped it would be her. Cadence did not say anything, but Dave could hear what he thought was crying on the telephone, and then Cadence said I have to go now, and maybe we should take a few days off before we talk again, okay? Dave said he understood, and he turned off his phone and felt a stagger in his stomach. His mom and dad and Maria were out, and he packed two sandwiches and two bottles of water and left a note on the table that he was in the woods and would be back for dinner, and he stepped outside and walked upriver and vanished into the woods.

*   *   *

Martin spent the morning hunting and the afternoon ranging restlessly again. He could feel the imminent change in seasons, he could smell it, he saw it everywhere he looked: vine maple past its brilliant autumnal color, the last berries shriveled on browning bushes, geese and cranes croaking overhead, the elk finishing the rut and settling into their winter clans and companies; school buses on the highway, the ebbing of summer tourists; soon the weasels and hares would turn white, and the bears would lumber into their winter bunks and barracks, and the snow would fall—a flurry or two at first and then the first steady snows and then the deluge.

Up and up he went, drawn by some inchoate urge to be above the forest in the last brilliant bit of summer. He skirted the lodge cautiously—even with fewer tourists, there were always human animals in the woods and trails near it, pressing their faces or bodies together, holding bottles and cans to their mouths, sleeping, reading, chanting aloud, clanking and clambering along the trails, raising waist-high dust clouds, trampling the little asters in clearings and sunny spots. But they were easily avoided, and none of the human animals near the lodge appeared to have weapons or traps that he could see. Even so, he was never less than cautious near the lodge, even when he occasionally used the back wall along the outdoor swimming pool as a shortcut toward his pillar stone—he could leap from the pool wall into a line of towering pines and so save a long detour around the ski lift, a contraption he did not like and avoided whenever possible.

He used the pool wall this time, waiting patiently until the two women in the pool had retreated into the lodge, and he leapt up into the pines, energized by their sharp rude smell. He ran happily through the familiar trails in their canopies; the pines were close enough together in their procession that he easily slipped from one to the next. One person saw him flowing through the trees, quicker than a cat, more surefooted than a squirrel, utterly comfortable in his body and his milieu and the moment: the third chef, who happened to look out a window at just the instant Martin casually leapt from one tree to another, a chasm of about eight feet. A single instant in the unimaginably long history of the mountain and of marten and of men, but not one the chef ever forgot—and not because it was the one glimpse of a marten he would ever have in his relatively short life but because of the sheer confident wild soaring grace of the animal, the way it absolutely knew where it was and where it was going, the way it
belonged
there in a way no man or state or country claiming possession ever quite could. That imprinted itself mightily on the chef’s mind, and curiously it was an image that came back to him often, especially when he was half-awake in the morning, not sure if he was dreaming. He would see the creature again suspended in the air, a splash of golden brown against the bright green pines and startling blue air and gleaming snowfield. Once or twice he even tried to paint what he had seen, but there was something missing, some verve and zest and almost humor—and besides, his mother made fun of his attempts, laughing in that awful wheezing cackle so that she could hardly get her cigarette going, laughing at him so bitterly that he crumpled up the paper and stuffed it in his pocket and slammed the door of the trailer behind him as he left.

63

MR. SHAPIRO, THIS TIME SUBBING
for a teacher who was in the National Guard and had been suddenly sent abroad, is addressing his class. We have now spent a good deal of time on natural history, and I hope that one of the things you are discovering is that the very term
natural history
is essentially specious; all history is natural history, even what we would reasonably call unnatural; even the human pathology that results in massacre is in a sense natural as an aspect of the human animal, correct?

Unfortunately, said a student.

But that’s our next month’s work, the analysis of murder, excuses for murder, pathologies like religion and racism that lead to murder, possible correctives and therapies for such pathologies, said Mr. Shapiro. Today, I want to finish our natural history section by coming home, as it were—thinking about this place, this side of the mountain, this mountain, and all the ways we could consider the
natural history
of this place. Start with the orthodox.

Joel Palmer, logging, native history, said a student.

Native?

Native Americans.

Poor term. Specify. Most of us in this room are native.

American Indians.

Columbus’s erroneous label, said Mr. Shapiro.

First Peoples.

Better. Klickitat, Molalla, Chinookan. Still labels, but.

Founding of the Zag.

Good.

Building of the lodge, visit by President Roosevelt.

Good.

Fish, mammals, insects, amphibians, reptiles, said a student.

Good, said Mr. Shapiro. Interesting, though, that it took us this long to get to what are undeniably the majority of the population in this place, by a factor of millions.

Trees, plants, bacteria, said a student.

Good. Also nematodes, microbes, fungi, and other life beneath the surface of the ground. A third of all life-forms are in soil.

Photons, rock, ice, water, quiescent lava, said a student.

More like incipient or patient lava, probably, said Mr. Shapiro. Very good. Note that it also took us this long to get to aspects of natural history that are not living beings. Do we have a species predilection or bias to living beings? Do we unconsciously rank them higher and consider them more important than other forms and aspects of the place we share? Is that just or fair? Or is that an evolutionary filter that developed because we have for so long ranked existence by what moves quickly and might be food? Worth thinking about. Anything else?

Music? Sounds? said a student.

Very
good. Think, now—natural history means every conceivable aspect of this place, in every conceivable iteration.

Climatology, weather patterns, weather events, said a student.

Good.

Legendary events, said a student.

Very
good. Such as?

Well, eruptions of the volcano that Indians … early people would remember.

Very good. This is the direction I wanted us to go for a while. Doesn’t natural history include story and legend, what we remember and what we tell of the place and what happened here? So that a map of this side of the mountain that shows only topography and roads and rivers and elevation and human settlements is a thin or shallow map, isn’t it? A better map would also show layers of story and anecdote and memory. A better map would explore why certain places have certain names; names are the handles of story, aren’t they? And each part of a place is not only a dell, a thicket, a bend on the river, a meadow, but a collection of the things that happened there over more years than we can count—and more things than just human things or living being things. Some things we know; here is the place where a man named Joel Palmer walked barefoot through the ice in 1845, for example. But what else happened there? Perhaps that is the place that wolverines cache elk calves. Perhaps this is the place where a woman ever so gently laid her infant and covered him with snow many years ago. Perhaps that is the place where ravens gather to ordain their holy ones. Perhaps that is the place where crabs gathered to give birth a million years ago when the mountain was the sea. Perhaps that is a place that rock born a billion years ago emerged again into the sunlight after an unimaginable stretch of darkness. You see what I am suggesting? That natural history is wider and deeper and thicker than we usually assume. So your homework assignment is only to consider that, briefly, in some thoughtful way. Take something of this place, your place, and
open
it for me. Due Monday. You can write an essay, draw a map, gather revelatory materials, record stories, record sonic revelations, write suitable music, carve or sculpt as you see fit. What is this place made of, composed of? What is the shape and nature of its flavor and endurance? Tell me in any way you like. I ask that you sit and think for a while before you do something. Dream first; do second. Yes, this will be graded, but I’ll grade you on how much you thought about the assignment more than what you bring to class. A lot of a place is made up of voices. A lot of it is what happened in that air, on that water, in those woods. Most of a place is not what human beings think. Maybe we will be better human beings when we begin to see all the other things a place is besides all the things we think it is or wanted it to be.

64

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES,
really, that a boy, aged fifteen, good in the woods but rattled by recent events and perhaps not paying full attention to safety concerns, and a marten, good in the woods but in an essentially reflective mood and so perhaps not quite as attentive to irregularities in pattern as he usually is, would both set forth from their dens, so to speak, on a lovely late afternoon on the mountain and end up heading for the exact same spot—and that spot a seemingly unremarkable pillar of rock that very few creatures of any species frequented or even knew about, anyway?

Not good, those chances, right? Infinitesimal, remote, miniscule … yet that is exactly what just happened.

Dave was there first, having shinnied up for the view and for a breather and perhaps at some level because the pillar looked so remote and inaccessible—a good place to mourn, contemplate, simmer, pout, ruminate, lacerate, grieve, ponder, reflect, recalibrate, reboot his personal operating system. Once atop the tower, he took his socks and sneakers off and guzzled some water and finally took his shirt and jacket off. This might well be the last brilliant day of summer’s tail, and even this late in the afternoon, the sun was sharp and warm on his pelt, although he knew the mountain well enough to know that there would be a drop of thirty degrees by midnight. First frost was a week or two away, perhaps, and someone like Mr. Douglas, who knew the mountain well, would say you could smell the ice growing more confident of its time by the day.