by Doyle, Brian
It started on a Friday morning. Dave’s dad was fixing a bus at the school. Dave was in geometry class. Maria’s first-grade class was discussing how arithmetic was a language as well as a tool. Dave’s mom was at the lodge working with Emma Jackson Beaton, who had a terrible cold and should not have been working but was stacking up vacation days so she could, she said, surf with Mr. Billy Beaton on the west coast of Africa. Miss Moss was in the store, feeding an entire busload of Swiss Presbyterians. Mr. Douglas the trapper was in his cabin reviewing his finances, filling out his Oregon Furtaker License Application (fifty dollars this year!), reviewing season opening dates and special regulations (no beaver trapping on the mountain at all now, for example, and no bobcat trapping west and north of the peak), and pondering whether to even bother with trapping weasel and coyote this year at all; while there was open season on both all year long, the pelts sold for relatively little, and it would be better resource management, he decided, to focus on bobcat, marten, mink, and fox. He was tempted to try for otters, but of all the animals he knew, otters were the most entertaining and interesting, and not even penury could persuade him to set for them. He rationalized this by explaining to himself that he would spend enough time in and around creeks after mink that the extra wet time for otter would just inevitably lead to pneumonia, which he could absolutely not afford, given the state of his rickety and wheezing finances.
But he laid his plans for red fox (opening day October 15), marten (November 1), gray fox and mink (November 15), and bobcat (December 1), and he checked his traps and gear and winter clothing for the fiftieth time and then decided to split more wood; it looked awfully foreboding outside, and it was always an excellent idea to lay down more wood to dry. You just could not have too much dry wood for the fire, in his experience, and more than once, he had built stacks as tall as his cabin—although, to give him credit, he then often gave a lot of it away, sometimes as barter for food or gasoline but often as friendly gestures or as the sort of thing people do when they bring casseroles or pies to those who have been hammered by illness or death. Easily a dozen people around Zigzag had found half a cord of good dry cedar in their sheds or porches or under tarp and immediately knew whence it came and thanked him for it when next they met. Mr. Robinson, in fact, claimed that he could tell just from the look of the cut who had split the wood; that man wields an amused axe, he said, a remark which Mrs. Robinson found entertaining every time she heard it, which was often.
* * *
Dave’s dad knew that it was going to snow. He could tell. The clouds were pregnant, it was too cold for rain, and there was a sort of glower in the air; that is the best way to say it. A sort of chilled expectation or premonition—like the air was grimacing, and soon it would begin to cough relentlessly.
He checked in the school’s shed for sand, salt, shovels, and the snowplow attachment for the tractor. He checked to see that there were not only tire chains but backup tire chains. He dug out the spare generator and tested it. He dug out the sump pumps on general principle. He contemplated the layout of the school and prevailing wind directions and access points and road grades and laid his plans for bus egress and parent ingress. He wandered by the cafeteria and asked about food supplies on general principle. He found snowshoes and cross-country skis and ski poles in the shed and cleaned and oiled them just in case. He filled the gas tanks of the school’s two trucks and one all-purpose tractor.
But the morning passed without snow, although the chill deepened; and the lunch hour passed without snow, although the air grew grayer and denser; and not until the first buses were driving off and the sports teams started practice did the first hesitant pellets and then flakes fall. For more than an hour the snow was merely flurries swirled this way and that by eddies in the wind, and Dave’s dad began to think that it was a brief fluke in the seasonal cycle. He stood by the shed for a moment to watch the cross-country team return from its daily run and start interval training on the track. Dave was fifth in the straggled line of returnees, running easily, neither trying for a dramatic finish nor easing up, but finishing just behind the lead pack of three seniors and the tall thin sophomore. Dave’s dad watched with a complex mix of feelings—unutterable pride in his son (that kid was two years old two minutes ago, and look at him now those scything legs!), a sigh that he was so damned skinny (how can he possibly compete against those kids—they are twice as thick as he is … he looks like a heron running with deer), worry about him not being dressed properly (aw, a sleeveless shirt and shorts in snow for heavens’ sake), and deepest of all, beyond any words he could have summoned to drape on the feeling, a sense of impending loss and the cruelty of time and the yaw of mortality. Very soon, all too soon, Dave would go away—college, work, the navy, traveling, who knew? And while his dad, from layers one through fifteen of his soul, was delighted and thrilled and proud and happy that this would happen, pleased that things looked good for Dave to grow into a cool and responsible young man over the next four years, enough that he could launch into a stimulating life of his own, which every good dad wants for his kid, he also felt, silently, at level sixteen, in the innermost chamber of his heart, a terrible sadness that there would come a day when, look for him as he might, there would be no Dave in the cabin, in the school, on the mountain, and good and right and healthy as that would be, it would also be a hole that could never be filled by anything or anyone else. He loved Maria with a deep and powerful love, but he had two children, and one is not two.
These were his thoughts as the last of the runners staggered through the fence around the track just as the snow picked up its pace. The wind had died, and the snow fell thicker and thicker; even the cross-country coach, who usually ignored the weather, noticed the shift from scatter to storm and finally called everyone in and sent them home. The runners, gleeful at their early escape, sprinted toward the gym and hot showers, laughing. Dave didn’t notice his dad by the shed, and his dad didn’t say anything as the boys ran past; he just watched his son float up the hill to the gym, snow in his hair, laughing.
32
JUST AS DAVE reached the gym door and his dad turned to lock the shed and Dave’s mom settled into Emma Jackson Beaton’s car, calculating that she would be home a full twenty minutes before Maria’s bus dropped her and the other three kids from their neighborhood at the bus stop, from which they walked twenty yards (Alicia), forty yards (Aidan), seventy (Honora), and ninety (Maria) to their cabins, Maria stepped into the woods behind the grade school, fishing for the compass in her backpack. She noticed the quiet increase in the snow but didn’t worry about it; most of the trees along the trail home were firs and cedars with arms as wide as the world, practiced at catching snowfall and shucking the weight as necessary. Plus this was September, and it never snows in September.
She’s mapped out the trail in her head and on her lunch bag: through the woods for two hundred yards to Snag Creek, then up the creek four hundred yards until it met the river, then up the river four hundred yards to home, quick and easy as pie. On the last leg she would go right past Alicia’s and Aidan’s and Honora’s cabins, and maybe she would wave at them if they were in their windows, and they would be amazed and jealous that she had walked home All by Herself. Honora, she knew for a fact, was not allowed to walk even to or from the bus stop by herself, and that was only seventy yards, or two hundred and ten feet. Poor Honora.
Through waist-deep ferns and arches of vine maple, around massive firs and bigger cedars, through a secret little ravine filled with dwarf yew trees with their bright red berries; past rotting stumps with their ladders of fungi and immense slugs, around boulders with bright-green and bronze blankets of lichen and moss, past a stump exactly as tall as Maria with a new tree exactly as tall as Maria growing out of it; past skittering thrushes and towhees and wrens underfoot, past a tree with a massive rusted wire cable locked to its base so tightly that the bark had shrunk above and below from the pain, around two little sudden tiny black pools of muddy water in th
e path as dark as ermine eyes; and there was the creek trilling gently in its bed of rocks and pebbles. Part one of the journey successfully accomplished!
Here and there, alders overhung the creek as it descended gently in a series of small pools, but for the most part it was open to the sky, and now Maria noticed uneasily that actually it was snowing heavily; any relatively flat surface already had several inches of new snow, and the path along the creek could be discerned only as a white line between the edge of the woods and the creek. She had worn her high-top sneakers today, thinking that they would be better in the woods than her other shoes, but she had not even conceived the possibility of snow. Snow in September? No way. But it sure was snowing. It couldn’t possibly stick. Yesterday was sixty degrees, and tomorrow would probably be seventy—that’s how September had been her whole life. It was always the last lovely month of summer, and then rain in October, and snow in November, and this was most certainly not November.
But it was inarguably snowing. You can object to reality, her dad liked to say, but you cannot successfully argue with it, so she formally registered a protest but reached into her backpack for her blue cap and red jacket and set forth up the trail along the creek. Within minutes her feet were wet and cold, and she began to hurry.
* * *
This being Martin’s first experience of serious new snow, he was enjoying himself immensely. He flew through the canopy after squirrels, the chase sending sheets and plummets of snow to the forest floor. He studied the wonderfully evident tracks of rabbits, their origins and destinations written on the ground nearly as clearly as their scent in the air.
Chasing a grouse through the trees, he drew near to the high school and froze silently as a sudden line of runners passed below him on a trail; but then he saw that one of the runners near the front of the line was the human animal from the beech tree, and from some deep impulse he left off grouse hunting and followed the boy for a while—not as fast and freely as he did when the boy ran alone, but discreetly and from a farther distance, so none of the boys saw hide nor hair of him but only vaguely noticed a flurry of falling snow here and there off to the side.
When the runners turned to head back to the school, though, he faded back into the woods, and here again we have to thrash after words for what was going through his mind—or really through his entire electric muscle of a body—for the marten often thinks and feels and acts all at once. He was interested in the boy for reasons he did not know. He felt some subtle connection, some inchoate wish to know that animal and its ways. He did not wish to befriend it, eat it, or defy it, which were generally his range of possibilities; he felt some curiosity, some mysterious urge to know that particular story is the closest we can get to it. Yet he was already immensely cautious, young as he was; this wariness had stood him in good stead, and would do so many times again in his life, and was a crucial and constant part of his consciousness. So it was that he instinctively knew that being seen too much or too clearly was dangerous, and so he faded back into the forest, drifting generally toward the river. He was not hungry enough to work for squirrels or to pick up the grouse’s trail, but the Zigzag was always a rich vein of possibilities, and it may be that he was idly pondering crawfish or how to catch a water ouzel when he noticed a small red jacket below him, slowly slogging through the deepening snow along a creek.
33
SURE, MARIA WAS LOST. Sure she was. Wouldn’t you be? By her calculations she had gone up Snag Creek four hundred giant steps, which should be four hundred yards, but there was no Zigzag River where it was supposed to be, and now the snow was slurring from the sky like people were dumping it off the sides of immense trucks with enormous shovels. Twice she had slipped and fallen, once almost into the creek, and her sneakers were wet through and growing colder by the minute. She had stopped twice to check her map and to eat a candy bar. Now she stopped again to calm down and to think slowly, like her dad said you should do when you are rattled. When you are rattled, make the rattle stop, and then you can think clearly again, he said.
Okay, Dad, she said aloud.
Go slow, she said in his voice. Prioritize.
Dad, there’s no river, and there should be, right here.
Can you hear it?
No. I hear water, but that’s the creek.
Can you get a better view? Higher?
Good idea.
She climbed up on a huge fir trunk fallen across the creek.
I don’t see it, Dad.
Can you keep going up the creek?
My feet are awfully cold.
You scared?
Yes. I am really scared. My feet are awfully cold.
But when she tried to say something wry and warm and fatherly in his voice, nothing came out of her mouth, and she started to cry.
* * *
Mr. Douglas and Miss Moss were in Miss Moss’s store playing chess by the fireplace. The snow was so heavy that traffic up the mountain had ceased for the moment, and the store was quiet, and the snow fell so thickly outside the windows that there was a silvery light everywhere except by the fire. Mr. Douglas had carved the chess set. The queens looked rather like Miss Moss, but all the other pieces were animals: the pawns were chipmunks, the rooks were ravens, the knights were owls, the bishops were falcons, and the king was some sort of new animal equidistant between wolverine and bear.
A bearverine, Mr. Douglas had explained when he first presented the set to Miss Moss as a birthday present. There may be such creatures in the woods. Who’s to say? Not me. Who knows what’s out there? Not me. I know a little but not a lot. Your move.
Miss Moss dearly loved to play chess, but what with the press of duties at the store and her weariness after duty at the store, she did not play as much as she would like. Mr. Douglas dearly loved to play chess and he played anyone anywhere anytime. His favorite games were against Mrs. Robinson, who was a deft and masterful player and who as a girl had been county champion.
Where was that? Mr. Douglas had asked when that little tidbit slipped out one day.
O, long ago and far away, she said, smiling, and Mr. Robinson laughed aloud in the kitchen, and Mr. Douglas had thought—not for the first time, either—that someday, if he was very lucky, he too would be able to speak in complex secret affectionate amused code with someone in such a way that people who heard you would not know what you meant but would understand full well that you were speaking a dual language of your own made of sweat and laughter and tears and work and time and arguments and lust and labor and respect and annoyance and witness and some sort of reverence that has nothing whatsoever to do with religion and everything to do with love.
Check, said Miss Moss. Her owl was threatening his bearverine, and the only way out was to lose his falcon. He reached for it but then paused; more than once while playing Miss Moss he had moved too quickly to address one problem and then been snagged by the second and subtler trap.
Outside, very faintly, they heard a car mumbling uphill against the snow, going very slowly; so slowly that Mr. Douglas realized how deep the snow was.
I’d better get out there with old Edwin, he said to Miss Moss. There’ll be people in the ditches for sure. Can’t believe it’s snowing like this in September.
Your move, said Miss Moss.
Want to call a halt? Pause it where it is?
Your move.
I am registering a protest against undue and overweening pressure.
Move.
I feel cornered and harassed.
Move.
He looked up from the board to see if he could see her eye, but she was intent on the board. He stared down for a moment and moved his falcon. She immediately moved a chipmunk.
Mate.
A fascinating word, that, said Mr. Douglas, staring for a moment and then reaching down and gently placing his bearverine on its side. Do you know where it comes from, in this usage? Ultimately from the Persian, in which the meaning is something like ambushed or surprised, as in war, where you are
suddenly invaded or overcome by a force beyond your ken. How apt and suitable, how very accurate. For me, anyway. I acknowledge being invaded or overcome. I admit it with humility. You win. I’d better go. If I know Edwin, he will be annoyed that we are not out there already. He knows when more than six inches of snow fall, we are on ditch duty. You’d be surprised how accurately horses can measure snowfall. I don’t know how he does it.
Be safe, said Miss Moss, not looking up from the board. Be careful. Please? Come by for coffee later. I’ll keep the store open until you come back. Be careful. Please?
* * *
Martin followed the red jacket, curious. This was no animal he recognized, and his angle of vision and the density of snow were such that he didn’t realize it was a human animal until it sat down suddenly and made high plaintive noises. Was this some sort of territorial statement, or was it calling its companions? He couldn’t tell—you never really were sure about anything with human animals, other than the fact that you could never be sure about what they were doing or would do—but he found that he had the same subtle interest in this one as he did with the one who ran through the woods every day. Had he been versed in a dozen languages, he still would struggle to define the feeling he had for the running one in particular—some hint of deeper interest, some kind of subtle assurance that it was not overly dangerous and would not cause him harm; and to a lesser degree he felt this same odd inexplicable feeling of relative safety and interest about the one in the red jacket by the creek. So when she finally stood up again from her huddle in the snow and continued to shuffle up the creek, he followed at a safe distance, high in the canopy, as the snow grew thicker and the daylight thinner.