by Doyle, Brian
Her kits were three months old when she moved them into the new den. She led the way, leaping onto the cottonwood’s trunk as light as a shadow and running up to the hole with something very much like pride in the achievement of new quarters. Martin, as usual, brought up the rear, nudging his siblings along, nearly carrying his second brother into the new den. This domicile was slightly smaller but wonderfully dry and thickly lined with moss and meadow grass, and their first night in the new den was a pleasurable feast of red squirrel, one for each member of the family.
But very little activity in the woods goes unseen, and more than one interested creature noted a new family of marten in the cottonwood. In the meadow, the rabbits knew that scent, and something of their wary fear was communicated to the voles and mice, the moles and shrews. In the trees and bushes, the jays, who see all things, shouted the unwelcome news to their cousins; a Cooper’s hawk, big enough to snatch a marten kit given the chance, noted the den’s whereabouts and calculated angles of attack if a wriggling line of marten meat should present itself apace; and even the deer for acres around were apprised of the news, though they had no reason to fear marten. One creature among them was most interested of all: a gray fox, hidden in an alder tree on the other side of the clearing. Thrice as big as a marten, hungry, smart, and experienced, she had subsisted on mice and voles and the first salmonberries of late spring, but a marten of any size would be a rare and delicious treat. Many animals in the woods would make a meal of the kits, but only a few creatures could catch and overwhelm an adult marten; and here was one of those very creatures, unbeknownst to the newest residents in the little meadow. As darkness fell, they slept, but the fox did not, her eyes sharp green stars in the dark alder thicket.
5
THE PROBLEM with trapping and snaring animals for profit and the pot, Dave discovered, was that it entailed what could only be honestly called murder. He even looked up the word murder in the battered dictionary over the fireplace to be sure that he was using the right word. Killing with malice aforethought, that was certainly what he was doing, and while the dictionary was careful to define murder as having to do with unlawful killing of human beings only, and he was lawfully killing beings that were not human, Dave did not feel much better about it. In a way he felt worse, because the dictionary was only emphasizing something he already felt was generally unfair, which was the way human beings assumed they were the best and coolest beings and had all final rights and say in the matter of life and death, without much or any consideration of what other beings thought or felt.
I mean, as Dave said to his dad one night by the fire, I know we eat other beings of all kinds, from animals to plants, and we live in houses built of the bodies of other creatures, and here we are in front of a fire built from the bodies of fir and cedar creatures, and this is all normal and ancient and the way we evolved, but sometimes it just sort of floods in on you that you survive by killing other creatures, and you get a little sad.
An excellent point, said his dad. But at least you are sensitive to it. That’s a step in the right direction. At the moment, we do not have much of a choice about what to eat, our bodies having evolved in this way over millions of years, but at least you have a certain respect and honesty about the system. That’s good. That’s a step toward reverence. Better that than the arrogant assumption that you can kill anything you like any time you like. That’s the wrong direction. That direction leads to more killing. Trust me on this one.
These kinds of conversations by the fire were probably Dave’s favorite times with his dad. His dad was not much for sports and not much for hunting and fishing and not much for playing video games or watching television—although he did like watching movies with the family once in a while, the four of them curled up on the couch. Dave’s mom and dad usually then fell asleep within minutes, and Dave and Maria would finish watching the movie and then gently wake up their parents, who would deny having fallen asleep and talk knowledgeably about the movie as if they had seen it, which they certainly inarguably had not.
* * *
The first animal who died at Dave’s hands was a rabbit, for which he had meticulously set a wire snare. The rabbit, only slightly bigger than Dave’s hand, had sprinted into it and strangled and was hanging limp and horrifying in the air like a small brown accusation when Dave checked his snares. It had only been dead for thirty minutes, perhaps—long enough to go cold, but not long enough to be wholly stiff, and after opening the snare that had choked it to death, Dave held it in his hands for a moment, wondering at how something so small could be so deft and vibrant in life and so infinitesimally small and weightless in death, almost as if its life had the weight and the loss of life shrank the creature to an empty skin.
He also found that he felt bad. He had not expected that; he had expected and rather looked forward to feeling triumph, that he had laid plans that worked, that he had procured food for the family in the ancient tradition of the hunter and provider. But instead, he felt small and mean, holding the shell of the rabbit in his gloves. He had planned to reset the snare along this path, clearly a rabbit run, but instead, he packed up his stuff and went home.
Skinning and cleaning the rabbit presented another whole set of logistical and emotional challenges, not to mention a rigorous examination in anatomy—is that a liver or a kidney? How could there be so little obvious meat? Should the internal organs, including a truly disgusting length of what seemed to be the colon, be buried or tossed in the river or securely bagged in plastic and placed in a garbage bin in town? Could it really be the case that he, Dave, the successful hunter, a man who had brought home meat from the wilderness for rabbit stew for his family, would have to ride his bike into town with a reeking bag of rabbit guts on his handlebars and then sneak it into the garbage bin behind Miss Moss’s store?
He stared at the charts of rabbit anatomy he had downloaded from the Web and printed out for exactly this moment, when he had to separate the good parts from the foul parts, and after a moment, all the words swam together—the sacculus rotundus, the vermiform appendix, the squamous epithelium, the proximal duodenum, the convoluted jejunum, the ampulla coli.… Dave gave up. He carefully put all the disjunct parts of the former rabbit into a black plastic bag, tied it off with three tight knots, washed his hands four times in water slightly hotter than he could stand, and rode down to Miss Moss’s store with the bag. Luckily no one was out behind the store, and he slipped the bag into the garbage bin and then went into the store to buy milk and coffee, feeling that he ought to pay for the loan of Miss Moss’s facilities somehow. Also, he suspected that the rabbit would reek by the time the bin was ready to be emptied, and this made him feel even lower; so he bought a small bag of the fig cookies that Maria loved and everyone else hated. Miss Moss, handing him his change, stared at him over the edge of her spectacles for a moment but said nothing, and he rode home feeling small.
6
MARTEN ARE GENERALLY MORE ACTIVE by night than day, but summer, with its long days and lovely weather, was not only an attractive time to be out and about but provided a veritable grocery store of savory opportunities for eating, and Martin and his brothers and sister had the most delicious education during June and July. They tried to eat everything they could catch and anything stationary that smelled good. This led to some delicious adventures, like catching and eating moles, shrews, mice, voles, robins, jays, thrushes, towhees, warblers, woodpeckers of various sizes, snakes, and every sort of egg; but it also led to painful misadventures, like bees, wasps, hornets, skunk, porcupine, and what seemed like a house cat but which turned out to be a bobcat, which is a whole different order of cat than a house cat, and which slashed and tore at Martin and his oldest brother until their mother entered the fray in such a fury that even the bobcat, fully a match for an adult marten, quailed before such maternal rage. Martin was nicked and sliced in several places, the worst a cut on his shoulder so serious that his skin flapped open, but his brother, face-first into trouble a
s usual, was hurt so badly that Martin and his mother had to haul him back up to the den, where it took him days to recover.
* * *
As summer went along, the kits’ education continued, and their various characters and personalities became more pronounced. The oldest brother, now nearly as big as Martin, continued to be either incredibly brave or astonishingly foolish, which are sometimes the same thing. The second brother, graced with preternatural patience, learned to hunt on his own, but only prey that did not flee and entail pursuit; he could catch mice and voles by waiting calmly along their avenues and byways, but he could not muster the energy to dash after squirrels, for example, like the others. This second kit was intelligent, certainly—not for him the constant stings his oldest brother endured, snapping after bees and wasps, the oldest brother never seeming to see the lurid stripes on wasps as flags of danger—but curiously weary, as if his reserves of energy, no matter how much he ate, were easily depleted by the briefest burst and flurry of activity.
Martin’s sister, however, changed the most that summer, from the tiniest of the kits to the deftest; it was she alone who could decapitate an egg with the daintiest of blows, losing not a drop of the elixir within, and she who one day followed a young weasel into its burrow and killed and removed it so quickly that the furious mother weasel could do nothing but stare in a towering rage as her own kit was dismembered and eaten in a tree far above the burrow. Martin’s sister also, like Martin, turned an interesting color that summer—if Martin was a dark golden bronze, she was such a deep glowing brown that she sometimes appeared to be black in certain lights. She did not grow large, but she grew muscled and sleek by the end of July; she and her second brother were by far the quietest of the four young marten—the brother seemingly from lassitude, but on her part almost a studied silence, as if sounds were dangerous and should be used only in the direst emergencies and situations.
* * *
And the kits learned about the most dangerous other beings on the mountain—bears, cougars, bobcats, foxes, dogs, coyotes, and most of all, people and their machines. Three times their mother brought them to within a hundred yards of the highway, huddled safely high in a towering fir, and made them watch the cars whizzing and the trucks roaring by: log trucks, construction vehicles, delivery trucks on their way to the lodge; hikers and campers, headed into the national forest; fishermen and hunters, scouting territory for when their seasons opened; tourists and vacationers in every sort of car and van and trailer; brightly clad bicyclists laboring slowly up the mountain or flying down at amazing speeds. And the plethora of smells along the highway! Oil and gasoline, burnt rubber and overheated steam—smells the kits caught nowhere else and which became instantly associated in their minds with whirring death. To them, the traffic was a species of monster, a sort of immense roaring steel snake big enough to eat the world, and they were afraid, and they cowered—even Martin and his too-bold brother, which is exactly the fear their mother had wanted them to learn and remember.
We have not spoken much of her, this remarkable and nameless female being, but in many ways, she was a walking wonder, as mother, as teacher, as leader, as defensive mastermind, as provider of food, as brave survivor of the trapline that had caught and killed her mate. They had been racing through the low canopy along the river, carefree and excited by what we would call a blooming romance in human terms, when her mate was snared by the thinnest wire snare either of them had ever seen, and it was his own liquid speed that killed him, for he hit the snare so hard that it tightened instantly, and he struggled for only a moment before he was strangled to death. His body hung in the air between two young alder trees, all his bristling energy gone, as if he had been instantly emptied of himself, leaving behind only a bag of dense gleaming fur. She walked around him, every fear and caution aflame to its uttermost pitch, sniffing his body, confused and angry and bereft, and then she slipped back into the high canopy and vanished. Inside her were the seeds he had planted for their kits, seeds that would become embryos in the winter and squirming, tiny kits in the spring—the kits he would never see. The trapper sold the skin for eighty dollars and considered that a good price, given that it was an early winter pelt; he might have gotten a hundred dollars or more if the male had been taken later in the winter, but you took what you were given by the woods, in his view, and were grateful. With the money, he bought sixty cans of fruit and vegetables, giving the canned peaches and pears and cherries to his daughter for her pantry and the tomatoes and beans and peas to the food bank at the church in Zigzag.
7
THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL this year is three days earlier than usual, because of the state budget shortfall; teachers and students were officially on “furlough,” a word some students looked up in dictionaries and most on the Web and about which they had to write a short final essay. Dave wrote his on how the American word furlough had come from the Dutch word verlof, or permission; and he grinned, sitting in the back of class, at the fact that as soon as he scribbled his final sentence, he had permission to run screaming out the door of the school and sail home on his bike along the river trail. Free! An early summer! No scholastic academic scholarly formal educational duties whatsoever absolutely until cross-country tryouts for high school in August! By which time he planned to be the most amazingly prepared freshman athlete in the history of Zigzag High, home of the Lightning Bolts! So fit and trail-tested would he be that the coaches would blink in amazement as he, Dave, smoothly caught up to and passed the experienced and cocky seniors, who would stare at him in amazement as he went by like mist whipped by winter wind! And the coaches would call him over, Hey, kid! And he would jog toward them, not even breathing hard, Yes, Coach? And they would say with real surprise and maybe even a hint of awe in their voices, Hey, who…?
And just as he was about to say something cool like my name is Dave, and that’s a name you all will know soon enough, he saw that young pine marten again, this time flying through the tree branches along the path just as fast as Dave was going on his bike. Not a squirrel, not a bird, certainly not any of the animals that couldn’t get into the trees at all, let alone rocket along like lithe furry bullets. It was a marten, sure enough, and almost surely the same large young one he had seen in the clearing the other day; it was a curious deep golden brown color, not as dark as russet, not as bright as orange. He remembered this color particularly, for this one’s companions, probably family, were all darker and, except for what must have been a parent, smaller. Dave skidded to a halt to get a better look at the animal, and to his surprise when he stopped, so did the marten, who crouched on a branch a dozen feet away and stared at him.
* * *
Now Dave had heard of marten, sure he had, from his dad and from hunters and loggers and skiers and even snowboarders and from his grade-school teacher Mr. Shapiro, who was a scholar of the mustelid family, as he said in his orotund sonorous baritone; and he had heard the most about them from a friend of his mother’s in the laundry service at the lodge, who claimed that an entire family of marten lived in the drainpipes on the roof and used them as highways through the epic snowfall the lodge endured every winter, sometimes a hundred feet of snow from October through June. This was Emma Jackson Beaton, age thirty, who had a bright-blue Mohawk haircut and a steel ring in each eyebrow and a Maori tattoo that circled her neck like a scarf, all of which gave her an intimidating appearance, although she was the most gentle kindhearted soul imaginable and did double shifts without a murmur when Dave’s mom was well and truly exhausted and needed a day off. Emma Jackson Beaton, young and dangerous as she appeared to be, was also supposedly a married woman—she always said happily married, although no one had ever actually met the mysterious Mr. Billy Beaton, who was supposedly a superstar surfer and spent months at a time on the professional circuit in Hawaii and Australia and Africa—although Emma Jackson Beaton did come back tanned and shining from her biannual vacations, about which she said little, though much speculation swirled through laundr
y services and even up into food services, some members of whom had private crushes on Emma Jackson Beaton, even though she was happily married as she always said, the two cheerful words as regular on her lips as hello and pillowcases and snowplow. The third chef had a crush on her, for example, but he was too awed by her Mohawk and marriage to say anything about his inchoate feelings; and one of the morning waitresses had a crush on her too but was too confused by the very fact of having a crush on a girl to say anything or even to admit it to herself except sometimes when she was almost asleep—that calm wild place which is the freest of all countries.
* * *
But Dave had not actually seen marten until the other day, and that was a glancing glimpse, really just a quick sense of heft and wriggle in lithe brown packages, whereas this—this was a confirmed sighting, as his teacher Mr. Shapiro would have said. Mr. Shapiro would then have pursued at least a cell-phone photograph or a snatch of iVideo or happily collected scat, but Dave didn’t move a muscle, and just stared back at the marten. He realized somehow, in the deep part of his own ancient mammalian brain, that to move just now would be to break the moment and lose the connection, and he was fascinated not only by this most interesting creature but by the fact that it had stopped when he had and seemed just as fascinated by Dave as Dave was by Martin.
Rarely does a book switch viewpoints at a crucial juncture like this, but perhaps we should, just so we can get a good grip on the momentous nature of what’s going on here. Dave, young as he is, has lived on this planet for fourteen years, almost fifteen—his birthday is October 4, same as the great explorer Joel Palmer, who walked over Wy’east barefoot. But Martin is, at this particular moment, only about seven weeks old; while he is no longer suckling milk from his patient and hardworking mother, he does still live at home with his mother and sister and brothers, and it has not yet entered his mind that in a few months he will be living alone and working for his living. In a sense, he is a new teenager too, like Dave, if you compare life cycles—an interesting and difficult project, that, as the fir tree in which Martin is sitting is itself rather a teenager as the life spans of fir trees go. So we have a teenager of one species sitting in a teenager of another species staring at a teenager of a third species. If only a young hawk would float over or an adolescent deer blunder by!
