Martin Marten (9781466843691) (37 page)

Martin conducts his martenesque business all during the day of the Unwedding, but he returns again and again to the meadow, fascinated by the activity and curious about these animals in their riotous caperings. Once in the afternoon, he brings his companion, and they sit high in a fir tree on the uphill side of the meadow and watch. He sees Dave dancing with Miss Moss and with his mother and with Maria and once carefully, painfully, with Cadence. He sees the finch sitting on the piano as the Unabled Lady plays “A Tarantella for Eleven Dancers, One of Whom May Be Equine.” He hears Cosmas explain his plans for a bicycle ramp an eighth of a mile long down a clear-cut with the exit point being thirty yards out over a small lake. What an attraction that would be for children from the city and environs!

Martin’s companion returns to their den for a nap before the evening hunt, but Martin remains above the clearing and watches. He is there when the bonfire begins to burn down. He is there when the first meteorites whip through the sky so fast that before anyone can say
o my god shooting stars!
they are memories sharp against the sky. He is there when Cosmas says, Richard? and slips away into the darkness, and he is there when Mr. Douglas pauses at the edge of the meadow and thinks
this was our chapel
, and he is there watching when Mr. Douglas too slips into the darkness under the fringe of the trees, and nothing remains of the day but the gentle swaying of fir and fern where Mr. Douglas passed. For a long moment, Martin remains on the branch, high above the meadow, listening, aware of every rustle and thrum. And then, quicker than the eye could follow and quieter than any ear could catch, he vanishes; and you will have to dream the rest of his story yourself, perhaps as you walk in the woods or sprawl in a mountain meadow or lie abed early in the morning and stare out the window, sure that you just saw, just for an instant, a flash of golden brown against the long green splash of the trees.

THANKS & STUFF

My particular thanks to two attentive students of life in the Northwest woods: Sue Livingston of the U.S. Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service in Oregon and Alan Dyck of the U.S. Forest Service in Oregon. Generous souls, open to any number of foolish questions, in my experience. You know, everyone wails and moans about The Government, but hardly ever do we stop and say, boy, are there a lot of expert, generous, brilliant people working for us. I say so here, now, and I mean it.

Also it seems to me that writers ought to admit here and there that many books and writers have seeped into their unconscious over the years and swirled and seethed mysteriously in their heads and hearts (“macerate your subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look in—and there your stuff is, good or bad,” as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote) and surely influenced and shaped their own work, and that is certainly true of me and
Martin Marten;
so I here thank and laud Jim Kjelgaard and Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles George Douglas Roberts and Barry Lopez and Cameron Langford and Henry Williamson and Marguerite Henry, whose
Cinnabar, the One O’Clock Fox
I must have read a hundred times when I was a small boy.

Also I have spent many hours with the wonderful series of books published by Arthur Robert Harding in the opening decades of the twentieth century, books I love dearly for their odd mixture of declarative fact and salty story. Harding, who started trapping for fox and mink at age nine, eventually started
Hunter-Trader-Trapper
and
Fur-Fish-Game
magazines (the latter still in print, with more than one hundred thousand subscribers), and among the many books he published are
Mink Trapping, Fox Trapping, Fifty Years a Hunter and Trapper,
and
Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit
. Me, personally, I think Arthur Harding did a great deal to save and celebrate the beings he wrote and published books about, as he was an early and articulate voice for conservation.

Also I thank my family, who long ago concluded with a collective grin and sigh that I was a total nutcase about the mustelid family in North America (marten, fisher, otter, wolverine, badger, skunk, ferret, mink, and weasel), and especially our canine friend Ringo, a hunting hound who has taught me a great deal about attentiveness and patience and predation and alluring scent and angles of attack and how to dismember a mole in twelve seconds or less. You wouldn’t believe how fast you can dismember a mole, even if you only have one fang, the other having been lost somewhere over the years, reportedly in a forest called the Dark Divide in Washington State, but that is a story for another day and a second glass.

My thanks also to the gracious souls at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, who have allowed me to wander widely in and around what amounts to the coolest old wooden mountain lodge in America, and especially to the McPhee family of Oregon, who lent me their mountain cabin on Wy’east, experiences which surely sparked this book; it is their cabin in which Dave and his family live. And finally a particular thanks to my son Joe, who one day, when he was fifteen, picked Cameron Langford’s lovely
The Winter of the Fisher
off our bookshelf and read it with such pleasure, such empathy, such absorption, such amazement that there were such extraordinary beings in the world that something awoke again in me; and so let the final words in this book be gratitude to the late Cameron Langford, who was paralyzed in a car crash at age twenty-four but then threw himself into the study of the beings of his beloved northern Canadian woods and wrote his one great book before he died. Poor boy, trapped in his broken body, and dead even before his book was published—but what a spirit, what reverence and love for life, what courage to sing beautifully and humbly against the descending darkness!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Doyle
is the editor of
Portland Magazine
at the University of Portland and the author of seventeen books of essays, fiction, poems, and nonfiction, among them the novels
Mink River
and
The Plover.
Honors for his work include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He lives in Portland, Oregon. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

ALSO BY
BRIAN DOYLE

Fiction

The Plover

Mink River

Cat’s Foot

Bin Laden’s Bald Spot & Other Stories

Nonfiction

The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart

The Grail: A year ambling and shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir wine in the whole wild world

Essays

A Book of Uncommon Prayer

Children & Other Wild Animals

The Thorny Grace of It

Leaping

Grace Notes

Two Voices
(with Jim Doyle)

Credo

Saints Passionate & Peculiar

Poetry

A Shimmer of Something

Thirsty for the Joy

Epiphanies & Elegies

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

MARTIN MARTEN.
Copyright © 2015 by Brian Doyle. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Cover design by Steve Snider

Cover photographs: marten © PaulReevesPhotography / iStockphoto.com; boy in woods © SSokolov / Shutterstock.com; back cover © Lerche&Johnson / Shutterstock.com

Illustrations by Katrina Van Dusen

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: