by Doyle, Brian
Down below their tree, the snow melted, even in the shadowed parts of the ravine, and bushes sprouted new green fingers, and trees awoke from their long slumber, and all sorts of mammals and birds and insects found the doors by which their new generations entered this wild world; and there came a momentous day in late May when the mother marten led her four glossy kits, now the size of fists, headfirst down the fir to the redolent and seething wilderness below. She went first, showing her progeny how to grip lightly with their razor claws and walk confidently on the dense bark; the third brother, the one who had been kind to his sister, brought up the rear. Though he was the youngest of the brothers, he was noticeably the largest, and he seemed nearly twice as large as his sister. Tiny though she was, she learned quickest and was the only one of the four who did not tumble into the ferns at the base of the tree; instead, she leapt as lightly and deftly from the tree as her mother, while Martin, the youngest of the brothers, rounded up the other two and cuffed them back into line behind their mother. And so it was the five marten made their way to the river through an astonishing new world of trees and rocks, songs and whistles, bushes and scents, mud and flowers, all bathed in the high thin light of a mountain afternoon in spring. You could write a thousand books about this first walk alone, but of this opening adventure, Martin would remember only this one event: a honeybee rumbled by, and the oldest of his brothers leapt and snapped at it, and the bee stung the kit exactly between his teeth and his nose so that his upper lip swelled to epic proportions, and the kit could not suckle his mother for two days, so there was that much more milk for the other three, who enjoyed the largesse with a deep and humming pleasure as their brother moaned and bubbled and bemoaned the flying dagger it had been his misfortune to investigate.
3
DAVE’S DAD WAS A SORT OF LOGGER, as he said. He worked with two other men in a little three-man company that did selective logging on the mountain on contracts from the State of Oregon and Clackamas County. They also did a whole slew of other jobs, like hauling timber after forest fires, and maintaining and replacing signage in the national forest, and hauling drivers out of ditches after blizzards on the mountain, and helping repair bridges and washouts after storms and floods, and so many more things that if we listed them all, this page would go on for a week. Dave’s dad also volunteered at the library in Zigzag once a week and occasionally did a little yard and carpentry work for people who needed it done but did not have any money, like Miss Moss. Dave’s dad pretty much worked all the time, even on Sunday around the cabin doing this and that and the other thing, but he never made a fuss about it or seemed to sweat or move fast, and he always had time to sit and answer questions or stare at woodpeckers for a while if that’s what needed to be done. What with Dave’s dad’s several jobs and Dave’s mom’s job in laundry services at the lodge, we seemed to have just enough money to get by, says Dave, if nobody got sick or broke anything and the car kept working.
Then my dad lost his job, says Dave.
Dad says that he didn’t lose it, exactly, says Dave. He says that he declined to further participate in suspicious activity which he believed to be not only unjust but illegal. This is how my dad talks, even in a moment like this, when he is explaining to my mom at the table why he lost his job. It turned out that the two men he worked with had signed contracts to do work that Dad says is clearly against the law, not to mention poor business for the citizens of the mountain of every shape and stripe, and when he made his feelings known, the other men said grimly, in or out, Jack, and Dad said grimly, out, so he is out. Mom says she is proud of his decision and supports him without reservation, but her face is haggard, and she is asking to add Saturdays and probably Sundays to her job at laundry services at the lodge. Maria and I have talked about what we can do for money, and she says she will have to think about this more before she can come up with a plan, because she is not yet six years old, and perhaps turning six will afford her some new ideas. I myself, said Dave, have decided to snare birds and rabbits to eat, and then when the snow comes, run a fur-trapping line. I have read a lot about fur trapping, and I think a young man with some experience in the woods should be able to make a small profit, if he approaches the task with caution and diligence and persistence. If I prepare thoroughly this summer and scope out the right places for traps and familiarize myself with the lives and habits of the animals in question, I think I can be of material assistance to the family, which certainly, despite the fact that no one is talking about it, needs help.
* * *
There is a store in Zigzag that sells every single possible small important thing you could ever imagine you could ever need, if you lived on a mountain far from the flurry and huddle of stores in the city. In this store in Zigzag, you can buy string of every conceivable strength and fiber. You can buy traps. You can buy arrows. You can buy milk and cookies. You can buy tire irons and shoehorns. You can buy false teeth and denture glue. You can buy comic books and kindling. You can buy apples and pork tenderloin. You can buy kale and rock salt. You can buy explosive caps for removing rubble from a precarious situation. You can buy saws and drill bits. You can buy nightgowns and shotgun shells. You can buy old cassette tapes, and you can order iPads and iPods, which Miss Moss will have for you next week at the earliest, a phrase she much enjoys using for all sorts of things, only some of them having to do with the store; Dave remembers when he was little and asked Miss Moss when the sun would come up the next day and she said distractedly, next week at the earliest. Miss Moss also claims that she can order iGlasses and iWash, although no customer has as yet ordered those things. She once with a totally straight face told a small boy that, yes, she could order an iPanther, the most interactive mountain lion app imaginable, but it would not arrive until next week at the earliest.
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 fi
ghting 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.