Martin Marten (9781466843691)

by Doyle, Brian

  * * *

  Here’s a question for you: why do we use the word mate when we talk about nonhuman animals achieving a physical confluence of bodies and spirits? Why do we not use the word mate with human animals? We use all sorts of other words for human animals when we describe moments and relationships like this, but none of them have the flat ostensibly neutral rudeness of mate. It’s inherently inaccurate simply by the limit of its nuance. It’s not a big enough word. It doesn’t look into the corners and levels and languages and confusions and epiphanies and subtleties not just of the physical moment of confluence but the layered dance that ideally leads to and enhances the moments of shiver and serenity. So why do we force such a poor word on animals? Did you think that human animals were the only animals who seethed and boiled and sagged and sang with feelings as complex and staggering as the thousand kinds of wind? Did you think we were the only animals whose bodies sometimes wrapped and coiled and curled and slid and slipped and wrestled and grappled as the brains and hearts inside those bodies swirled in eight directions at once, and then after it all, they both subsided, came to rest, achieved equilibrium, tired and thrilled, and everything afterwards was different? For that is the case for all animals, including, early one morning in late July, Martin and his companion; and inside her, the seeds for two kits are now set in place, side by side, to wait patiently through the winter and be born in spring, long after the last page of this story.

  56

  SPEAKING OF COMING TO REST, speaking of subsiding and equilibrium, nowhere in this book have we come to a point of utter stillness, when all beings are at rest. It’s been action action action all the way, go go go, walking and running and sprinting and riding bicycles and cars and a large horse, fights and arguments, a woman with no legs hauling herself sobbing through the mud to help a friend, a small girl huddled inside a tree listening to a howling snowstorm. But let us here pause and rest. Let us see beings at rest. Let us choose a moment when the labors of the night are done and the labors of the day not yet launched. Let us range about the hamlet and the woods and the river and the west side of the mountain and visit each being with reverence and affection. We have been with them a long time in this book, and we have come to know and appreciate them a little, at least, and let us go together and look at them sleeping and wish them well and savor their slow, regular breathing and pray for them by our silent witness.

  So here is Dave, sleeping on his right side, facing the slim moon, snoring gently. Here is Maria, asleep in the bear den, maps pinned on every surface, even her blanket a map of The Journey of Joel Palmer on the Glacier, woven by her mother. Here is the finch, sleeping in a nest of old shoestrings Maria made for her in the corner of the windowsill so the finch could see her natural element. Here is Martin, asleep in his den in the cottonwood tree, and there is his companion, asleep in her tremendous fir tree in the middle of a creek, her den smelling ever so faintly of honey. Here is Mr. Shapiro asleep on his couch, sitting up, the only position in which he can sleep because of his back, and there is the dog asleep on the reading chair, and neither of them remembered to turn out the reading light. Here is Dave’s mother asleep curled against Dave’s father like a vine against a fence, both of them dreaming of Maria. Here is Louis asleep in a bed of ferns while near him sleep his wives and children, one of his sons sleeping on his back with his legs folded against his chest like the biggest hairy praying mantis ever. Here is Emma Jackson asleep on her left side, facing the slim moon, and the morning waitress on her right side, facing the huge poster of a surfer that she and everyone else always assumed was Mr. Billy Beaton, though it is not. Here is Martin’s mother, asleep in her new maternal den in a cave in a ravine with her three new kits; and here is her daughter, Martin’s sister, asleep in her own first den, a former red squirrel nest high in a fir tree that Joel Palmer himself had once leaned against for a moment to smoke a meditative pipe and eat gobbets of dried salmon. And here are Mr. and Mrs. Robinson together in their grave, garlic and tomato and bean plants rising from the soil above them. And here is Mr. Douglas asleep in his cabin in the last days he is an unmarried man sleeping alone, wearing nothing but his threadbare wool socks under a blanket made from all the old beach towels his mother had ever given him as a child in their shack by the sea. And bobcats and coyotes and trout and herons and snakes and beetles and turtles and toads asleep, and the pike that ate the raccoon asleep, and the armies of the frogs asleep. Here is Cosmas asleep outdoors on a burlap sack on the very pillar of stone high on the mountain from which Martin saw the bear slowly climb to her ending in the approaching shadow. Here is Miss Moss asleep in her bed with her spectacles placed carefully on a table exactly eleven inches away so that in the morning her right hand can reach for them without her mind being involved quite yet. Here is Edwin asleep standing up in his shed, and in his dream he is speaking the language of bees, and they are laughing in their strange electric way, because he is telling jokes about human beings and their odd and confusing adventures bumbling through the delicate and impatient world. Here are Moon’s parents asleep in their bed, so big it has an area code, as Moon says; but their feet are touching. Here is Moon asleep at his desk, the right side of his face pressed against a page about Bill Walton in a book about the greatest basketball players ever, pressed so firmly against the page that in the morning, ever so faintly, if you looked very carefully, you would see Bill Walton’s headband on Moon’s cheekbone. Here is Dave’s running coach, asleep, and Moon’s basketball coach, asleep, and falcons and snails and swans asleep, and everyone in the lodge asleep, and trees and bushes and sedges and asters and ferns asleep, and fleas and midges and mosquitoes asleep, and even all the little lakes around the mountain for an instant are still as glass, unrippled, shining, frozen without ice. For an instant, all over the west slope of the mountain, for a sliver in the river of time, every single thing animate and inanimate is utterly still … except the Zigzag River, which never sleeps and is always a story that wants to be heard by the sea.

  * * *

  At the end of July, Moon went down to the city for two weeks to a basketball camp at a college, and although Dave ran every morning with Cadence, worked at Miss Moss’s store every afternoon, and hung out with Maria almost every evening, he found to his surprise that he really missed Moon. This was a startling state of affairs. They had been friends for years, but in the way of guys had never put it in words; they just were friends, arguing and laughing and banging shoulders on the basketball court and diving into lakes and eating.

  Mostly it seems to me we eat, if you have to say what it is that we do when we do stuff, said Moon when he came back from camp in August. I mean, we eat, and then we do something or think about going to do something, and then we eat, and then we think about maybe getting something to eat. Are girls like this? What does Cadence do?

  Not eat, says Dave. She says she’s fat, and all she eats is avocados. Me personally I think her skin is a little green lately, but I am not going to tell her that.

  You guys make out yet?

  What?

  You know what I mean. Did you go further?

  Moon.

  Well?

  No.

  No, what? No, you didn’t go further, or no, you didn’t even make out yet?

  Well, no, that I don’t want to talk about this, and no to the other questions also.

  You didn’t even make out?

  No.

  Why not?

  She’s not my girlfriend.

  Yet.

  We just go for runs, and we talk, and she eats avocados, Moon. That’s all.

  Don’t you want to go further?

  Yes.

  Well?

  Well, yes, I want to go further, but I am not sure with Cadence.

  Who cares with who?

  What?

  You heard me.

  Actually, I think that should be whom there. Who cares with whom?

  You heard me, Dave.

  But that’s crazy, Moon. You are a
ctually saying to me you don’t care who you do stuff with—you just want to do stuff? Who it is doesn’t matter? You’re actually saying this to me?

  Well … yes.

  That’s crazy.

  Why is that crazy? Are you going to marry the first person you do stuff with? Or wait to do stuff until you are sure enough about someone to marry? That could be forever.

  I don’t know. I haven’t worked it all out. I want to do stuff, you bet I do, but I like Cadence, and just doing stuff with her unless I really like her and she really likes me … that just seems cold. It’s more complicated than just doing stuff.

  Is it?

  To me it is, I guess, says Dave. I figure I’ll just wait and it’ll figure itself out. Meanwhile I just like running with Cadence and talking, although I am not much for avocados. Also let me point out that the guy lecturing me about being cool with just doing stuff with people who you don’t even care about who they are has never done stuff or even had a date.

  Yet, says Moon. Actually I am going to have dates starting the second week of school. I am going to ask girls out starting in September. I’m moving the program up a year from the original plan. I feel that I am ready. One date a week. If no one says yes in September, I’ll go through October. That will be six total asks, and I am figuring I’ll hear yes twice, so I will have a choice. I’ll test drive them in November, and the winner will be Miss December, and right around Christmas, we will do stuff. Girls get gooey at Christmas. Things change after you do stuff, so if she doesn’t like me anymore after that, I’ll take winter break to regroup and then start again second week of school in January. You have to have a plan. It’s time to launch the plan.

  You’re crazy.

  Am I? I’ll be doing stuff by Christmas, while you will be running through the snow with a green person. Who’s crazy, you or me?

  You, says Dave, and for the first time ever he is angry with Moon, really angry, so angry that he has a sour taste in his mouth. Because, he says, after you do stuff with someone you don’t even like, if you get that far, and she gets it that you don’t even like her and all you wanted was to do stuff, she’ll be so hurt even you will feel like shit. Mark my words. I know you, man. This is not you. This is some weird cocky you, and it stinks. Did you go to basketball camp or idiot camp?

  Don’t be such a geek, Dave. This isn’t like when our parents were kids and had to get permission slips to make out. Things have changed.

  Have they? Girls don’t feel bad anymore when guys are jerks? Is that so?

  Man, what’s with you? You spend too much time with Cadence while I was gone? You look a little green too, come to think of it.

  I’m out. See you.

  Dave, come on. No need to get mad. Let’s go eat.

  Maybe this is a goof, says Dave. In which case I am a prize idiot and you got me. But even if it’s a goof, it’s slimy. There’s guys who do think like this, right? Guys who are going to ask my sister out on a date just so they can do stuff? Guys who don’t care what kind of person she is at all? Nine years from now Maria is the girl who gets asked out in September so she can be Miss December? I’m out. Call me when you want to play ball.

  Dave …

  But indeed, Dave is out, and Moon watches him run smoothly across the vast lawn of the vast house, and he feels like an ass. He makes a sandwich and then for no reason does the laundry and even folds the sheets and towels, for no reason.

  57

  IT IS SAID AND WRITTEN and reported that marten in North America are generally solitary except for the mating season in spring and that they prefer to hunt alone and that sometimes fights and battles will erupt when marten encounter each other at the edges of their vast territories (as big as six square miles, often bounded by rivers or mountain ranges or other topographic features, like clear-cuts and lakes and scarps and marshes) and that they will range much farther afield than you might think an animal weighing three pounds would like to go, but all these remarks, of course, are data, bits of news, akin to a few branches ostensibly representing a forest. They are true facts, as far as they go; yes, many marten are solitary except when impelled by dreams of congress, and yes, many marten establish and defend startlingly large territories against competitors for the food and congress therein, and yes, many marten will range ten miles in a night and thirty miles in a week when young and seeking a territory of their own. But the very men and women who say and write and report these facts are the first to admit that there is so very much more we do not know about the lives and habits and personalities and characters and lore and idiosyncrasies and cultures of marten. So Martin’s continued interest in and affection for his companion, long after the seeds of their kits were planted and Martin—according to our science—should be ranging afield alone, was unusual by our dim lights and not at all unusual by his or hers. His habit of bringing her voles and mice and squirrels, without even kits yet to explain his paternal urge, was just what he did, two or three times a week. Their napping together, without an explanatory urge to congress, was their mutual occasional pleasure, as was his now nearly daily habit of racing through the canopy above Dave as the boy lengthened his daily workouts to prepare for cross-country practice and the opening of the school year. Why a marten, untamed and untamable, in his second year of life, at nearly his full growth and grace and musculature, should choose early in the morning to rise from his den and make his way through the forest to a certain tree by a river and there wait quietly until below him a young man, noticeably taller since spring if not an ounce heavier, should arrive and stretch and tighten the laces of his running shoes and look up to find the marten and nod in acknowledgment of their—friendship? companionship? arrangement? respect?—is a mystery not even a book devoted to the intricate mysteries of some creatures on a particular mountain can explain. And yet the marten does this every morning, and the young man does this every morning, and their two or three seconds of absorbed acknowledgment is something gentle and wild and mysterious and beyond any words we can find in our dictionaries and translation software. They attend, they see, they witness. The young man nods, he inclines his head, an ancient human-animal gesture of respect and peace and even reverence. The marten stares, he twitches an ear, he shifts his grip on the branch. The young man sets his watch, and then away they go, not sprinting but cruising easily to start, although more than occasionally they will both sprint the last quarter of a mile, the marten winning each and every time. On days beginning with the letters T or S, they run upriver first and finish downhill; on the other days, they run with the river and then run toward the ice to finish. They run every day. The young man thinks he should also now be running every afternoon, but his sister has persuaded him, using charts and graphs, that he is better served athletically by spending the afternoons with her, usually swimming in a lake, although here and there they have ridden bicycles along the intricate trails Cosmas has made in the power line cuts—and even once, for a hilarious and frightening moment, raced Cosmas along the trail by the river, but Cosmas went so incredibly fast that Dave pulled up breathless at a little clearing—coincidentally the very one where he had first seen marten after he bought his traps at Miss Moss’s store. Maria would long remember the afternoon they raced Cosmas, for they saw a tremendous salmon holding in a pool in the river, a fish bigger than any she had seen in her life, and never was there a fish so gleaming and brilliant and green and red and speckled and massive and akin to a long intent muscle in the water. It hung there in the pool effortlessly, facing into the current with only the occasional twitch of its tail to indicate that it was alive, and for the longest time, Maria and her brother hung over the lip of the pool, staring. They did not think of trying to catch the fish or of doing anything but staring in awe, and finally, for no reason they could tell, it moved gently forward a few inches, and then, as smooth and fast as the river itself, vanished upriver. Though the water upriver from the pool was no more than two feet deep, neither Dave nor Maria saw the slightest ripple or roil, not
the slightest swirl or boil. They rode home silently, smiling.

  * * *

  Miss Moss and Mr. Douglas, after consulting with Maria, set the date for the Unwedding Ceremony as October 4, Joel Palmer’s birthday, and Maria’s dad said yes, she could take her magic amazing lifesaver sneakers off the mantel and wear them to the Ceremony if she chose, as she would be in the key position of Lordess of the Rings.

  Yes, there would be rings exchanged, even though this was not a Wedding, a Marriage, or a Religious or Civic Event in any way shape or form, said Miss Moss. No civic or religious entity or organization has the slightest role or authority in this matter, which is a private matter.