by Doyle, Brian
20
WE HAVE THIS IDEA that there are Domestic Animals and Wild Animals, but it’s not such a clean dichotomy, of course; there are lots of animals who live between those worlds, who are wild in nature but quite comfortable around people and their domiciles and habitats.
Some are readily seen, like raccoons and sparrows and deer and squirrels and coyotes, who are all flourishing, tribally, what with the vast and savory dining opportunities that people provide, consciously (bird feeders, tossing nuts to squirrels, salt licks for deer) or unconsciously (providing cats for coyote appetizers, garbage cans for deft raccoons, warm basements and bulging pantries for our friend the house mouse). But some are not so readily seen; the smallest, of course, like the myriad insect and arachnid clans, and the quietest, like the swifts living in the chimney and the swallows under the eaves of the toolshed. And then there are the many creatures who populate the edges of our settlements, the abandoned houses, the empty mills, the derelict cottages, the riddled boats, the slumping cabins heavy with moss, the logging-camp barracks where once a hundred men wrestled and roiled, now left for the forest to reclaim.
And this is especially true of Dave’s village. There are deer living in three houses on the east side of town, where a developer’s dream failed and not even the county saw a point in maintenance; those three houses, each exactly the same, were to be the vanguard for a resort community, for which the streets were platted and the rights of way cleared through the timber. But now many years have passed, and the only way you can tell what were to be streets are the lines of young alder trees between the ten-times-taller firs.
Deer in the dining rooms and kitchens, deer in the garages, deer in the downstairs bedrooms; all sorts of birds living upstairs and squirrels in the cramped attic; garter snakes in the laundry room, warmer than the rest by virtue of its soundproofing; the porches front and back colonized by bees and wasps, the chimney filled with swifts, ten generations of moles aerating the faint remnants of the lawns; shrews under the driveways, possums in the playhouse, carpenter ants slowly grinding the walls to the finest golden dust.
For a while one family lived in one of the houses, waiting the population of the others, to no avail, and finally they surrendered and returned to the city, leaving behind scraps and shards of their lives, now turned to use by other families. See, the small daughter’s red wagon, filled with rainwater, the common pool and spring for sparrows and juncos and robins. The bag of compost fallen from the father’s truck, now thrilling with earthworms. The latticework cupola in the garden, now a city of spiders and occasionally a rest stop for a haughty heron between ponds. The doghouse, so painstakingly and meticulously built by the son as a form of therapy and concentration and penance and prayer after a sea of troubles; for the last five years it has housed a pair of foxes whose kits annually explore the yard and garden and houses with awe at the wonders of the world. Were there ever fox kits like these, so well housed in carpentered wood? Who found, hidden and wrapped in a blanket in the garage, the very rifle once fired at their great-grandmother, to no avail? Who found, hidden beneath the floorboards in the third house, a small bag filled with a white powder that smelled so much like medicine that no creature would eat it, though the fox kits happily licked the vestiges of salt from the sweat of the boy’s fingers on the bag and left the powder to sift away in the eddying winds of winter in the room.
* * *
Subtly, gently, without obvious sign or signal, it became clear to Martin that his mother and his sister would stay together in the third den, and he would leave and make his own way; so in his wanderings farther and farther afield, he began to look for a den of his own. He explored likely holes in old trees, he investigated windfalls, he poked cautiously into burrows that looked uninhabited and unattended—although this, he discovered, was a chancy business; twice he was challenged by furious residents with flashing teeth, and once he evaded being bitten on the nose by an angry marmot by a hint of an inch.
For some reason, he found himself drawn to possible dens right at the line where the biggest trees gave way to smaller juniper and alpine fir; for one thing, there seemed to be an endless supply of squirrels and chipmunks in the tiny meadows and rockslides there, and for another, he felt a curious security with the open face of the mountain looming behind him. Above timberline he was dangerously exposed to eagles and the bigger hawks, and even to the rare enterprising owl who ventured up this far after Rodentia, but there was an endless supply of good denning possibilities among the rocks, and he was close enough to the canopy to escape easily from any serious threat. Plus he found himself drawn somehow to the lodge; while he had no urge to den anywhere near it, he did find himself passing it regularly in his rambles, and often he would perch lazily far above it on a warm rock in the broad light of the alpine afternoon and watch with interest as people and dogs and cars milled about below him, the people in their jackets and sweaters as bright as birds, the dogs addled by the alluring scents of chipmunks and sandwiches, the cars climbing eagerly up and then wearily retreating back down toward the city. Occasionally Martin would turn his attention to the people who slid down the mountain on pieces of plastic, some of them screaming as they did so, but they were not as interesting as the activity around the lodge. It was the lodge that interested Martin most. He could not have explained, even in a common language, why all this interested him so; it just did. Some things fascinate us and some do not. Some things call alluringly and some do not. Some things sing and some are mute.
21
DAVE RAN AND RAN and ran and ran. He ran in the morning and he ran in the evening. He ran down along the river and back up along the highway. He ran the track at the high school. He ran along the corridors in the woods cut by telephone crews. He ran along game trails. He ran loops around and above and below the lodge. He ran up empty ski runs through grass as high as his waist. He ran around lakes and ponds. He ran mountain bike trails. He ran off-road vehicle trails. He ran around and through golf courses. He ran logging roads. He ran Forest Service roads. He ran up ravines above timberline that were arid and dry in summer and twenty feet under snow in winter and roaring with snowmelt in spring. Once a week he ran with Moon who started their runs gasping and barfing and then slowly got his wind. Once he ran with his dad, who quit after half a mile, laughing at how ancient and useless he was, like an old horse; I should probably be traded in for a new model down at the dad store, he said. Twice he ran with older guys from the high school track team, who did not speak to him and pointedly pulled away over the last mile. Once he was running along the river and a tall thin shirtless guy with long hair floating behind him like a cape pulled alongside, running as effortlessly as a breeze, and they ran together for three miles, and then the guy said thanks for the run and he vanished into the woods suddenly. Once he was running down the river trail when behind him he heard a cheerful voice shouting, watch out Dave watch out! and Cosmas shot past him going what sure seemed like eight thousand miles an hour. That time Dave had to stop running because he was laughing so hard his breathing got messed up. You would laugh too if you saw a huge guy dressed in an orange jumpsuit rocket past you on a bicycle while singing at the top of his voice.
The thing is, said Dave’s dad later at dinner, you can never tell what song Cosmas is singing. Isn’t that the great mystery of our time? What is that man’s music? If you could find that out, you would have the key to everything. It’s like the secret code to the universe, the Song of Cosmas. Or a new book in the Bible. But you never can tell because all you ever hear is a loud snatch of it as he goes by like a freight train. And why the orange jumpsuit? There are so many pressing questions in this life, don’t you think? Pass the butter?
* * *
It was Dave’s mom’s habit when she worked the day shift in the laundry at the lodge to sit and eat lunch with Emma Jackson Beaton outside the lower laundry delivery door, where she and Emma sat like the queens of the nether reaches, as Emma said, and ate their sandwiches. Somet
imes they sat silently all through their sandwiches and watched ravens float around the mountain chuckling in their dark amused voices, but often they had interesting conversations that took interesting leaps and turns, like today.
Tell me about the eminent Mr. Billy Beaton, superstar surfer, said Dave’s mom. Is he in Hawaii today or Australia or Africa?
Mr. Billy Beaton, said Emma through her sandwich, is off the grid at the moment, you could say.
Due home anytime soon?
Not to my knowledge, said Emma. Have you ever noticed that ravens croak one way when they are aloft and another way when they are stationary? Do they have a flight vocabulary and a landed vocabulary?
I hadn’t noticed, said Dave’s mom. You have a sharp eye for the birds, Emma J. B.
I like the ravens, said Emma. They have a sense of humor. I mean, they can tear a dead animal down to the bone in an hour, but they have a sense of play about the whole thing. I admire their panache, you could say. I used to think about being a biologist.
And then you met the eminent Mr. Billy Beaton?
Then I ran out of money and got this job where I get to be interviewed by my esteemed and gracious colleague Gracious McGracious.
Haw, said Dave’s mom, and being actually a gracious and perceptive soul, she bent the conversation toward other matters, but she did wonder then and later about Mr. Billy Beaton. What was the story with Mr. Billy Beaton, and why, even if someone casually looked through sports sections of newspapers and past issues of surfing magazines at the library, was there no mention at all of Mr. Billy Beaton? Were there such things these days as superstars no one knew? Many things were changing these days, and perhaps there was now a new kind of superstar who quietly asked reporters and bloggers not to mention his feats, perhaps for spiritual reasons or for some incredibly deft and subtle marketing effort; could it be that the more mysterious you were, the more famous you became? If your face was never seen and your voice never heard and your actions legendary but undocumented, but there were rumors and intimations of your existence, did you exist? Can someone be mythic and real at once? It’s awfully tempting to be merely logical here and begin to wonder if there even is a Mr. Billy Beaton, thought Dave’s mom as she and Emma brought their chairs back inside the laundry, but then again, that which a lot of people call God operates on exactly this principle. It’s a puzzle.
22
UP AND UP COMES a very old bear through the thinning juniper and alpine fir and into the tumbled rock fields, and Martin watches from a high stone pillar. This is an ancient bear; her fur is grizzled gray on her haunches and a brilliant white on her muzzle, and she picks her way slowly and painfully up the slope, paying no attention to the scurry and scuttle of marmots and pikas in the rubble around her. Her enduring idea is to go higher to die for reasons no one will ever know and no biologist could ever really explain; something deep inside her mind wishes to finish her story high above the dense moss and green light of the forest, and lie down for the last time amid sharp rocks, under a blue sky, near the ice, maybe even in the ice if she can get that far.
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 sol
icited 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.