by Doyle, Brian
* * *
It was a brilliant summer. Day after day, the mist inherent on a mountain with glaciers and a permanent snowpack burned off by noon, the afternoons stretched as long and languid as napping cougars. The rivers and creeks burled along furiously right through the summer, when usually they slowed by August, as the last of the melt finished leaving the peak on its way to the ocean. The rains from the west that usually dropped their last loads on the mountain in June and July before petering out, exhausted, in the high sage desert beyond were scattered and confused this year and lost their way and ended up drenching British Columbia to the moist spluttering puzzlement of the British Columbians. The woods stayed wet enough from winter to fend off the late-summer fires that sometimes raged after lightning strikes, and the ferocious thunderstorms that sometimes roared along the mountain’s shoulders were missing in action; no hikers or bicyclists or drivers tossed burning butts of cigarettes or cigars into the brush; no campers left their fires unattended or unbanked or forgotten; no boaters on the dozens of pristine tiny lakes accidentally sent sparks from fuel lines racing through the thickets. So the afternoons grew more crisp and clear and lovely and long by the day, and on the mountain that summer, every resident felt this, from the tiniest shrew to Louis himself, the elk bigger than any bear.
* * *
But Martin’s youngest brother grew quieter and less active by the day. By early July, he no longer came down the tree from the den. He slept all day, as much of the family did much of the time, but he also slept, or seemed to sleep, at night, when their mother led the growing kits down the tree and into the woods to hunt. For a time, their mother and then Martin continued to bring mice and voles back for him, but finally he ceased even to eat and remained curled in a tight ball in the dim rear corner of the burrow, his eyes open. On the morning he died, Martin had just come back to the den, carrying a shrew just in case his brother was awake and hungry; his brother lifted his head a little but did not move otherwise or even blink.
As Martin watched, his brother’s eyes dimmed, and his head sank back down onto his paws, and he died. He was three months and three days old when he died. Many other creatures died that day on the mountain, creatures of many species, death by many causes—predation, accidents, battle, age, illness, happenstance, perhaps a quiet suicide, who knows? And the larger the creature, the more noticeable the death, so that the aged electrician who had been a war veteran was widely mourned, and the old doe struck by a car on the highway drew a public works team to remove her body gently from the road, and the young eagle electrocuted by chance at a ski area was photographed by a dozen phones, her sudden death a viral sensation within moments; but Martin’s brother was one of the thousands of small deaths, and no one knew but his brothers and his sister, who were saddened and confused, and his mother, who carried his body down from the den in her jaws, and the animals who found his body in the forest the next day, an unexpected and welcome provenance for many creatures, some too small to see.
So there were now three marten kits where there had been four, and from some ancient impulse, their mother again decided to move the den, from some old fear of death, from some sensible fear that there were larger animals in the woods who watched and waited with an ancient patience for one infinitesimal chance at such elusive meat; but before she could do so, the gray fox saw just such a rare chance, and seized it.
11
DAVE’S BEST FRIEND is a kid named Moon. Moon is real tall and skinny. He owns every mechanical technical engineered electric electronic computerized digitized shiny gleaming cool machine ever made, it seems. His house is so big that you could put Dave’s entire cabin in the kitchen of Moon’s house. Moon’s kitchen is so big you could ride a bicycle in circles and never come close to touching the walls or stoves or sinks.
Moon has not one but three phones, all of which communicate with each other and probably hatch conspiracies when we sleep, says Moon. He has at least three computers and maybe four if you count the old one upstairs that no one uses anymore. He has so many routers and docks and plugs and wires and chargers that he keeps them all in a box so they don’t wander off and electrify the cat by accident. His mom and dad work for technological companies that are so huge and vast and extensive and international and complex that neither Moon nor Dave knows what the actual products of the companies are. Moon says he thinks the companies actually just mint money on a contract from the government somehow, that they no longer have to manufacture anything but instead just hatch money, which they give in wheelbarrows and pallets to their shareholders and employees, who distribute it in turn to car dealers and housing agents and airplane companies. Mostly airplane companies, Moon thinks. Moon says the price for working for those companies is that you have to live on airplanes. Moon says his dad has reserved seat 3B on every flight offered by every airline in the United States for the rest of this year and half of next year, after which he has an option to renew. Moon says his mom does not go so far as to reserve the same seat on every flight on every airline, but she is partial to seat 2A. She is more of a landscape and wilderness person than my dad, says Moon, and she loves looking out the window, whereas Dad loves sleeping. My mom can look out any window of any airplane in any state and tell you within ten seconds where exactly you are and what mountain range that is and what agricultural products are being nurtured by irrigation thirty thousand feet below the window. She’s amazing. I tested her last time we were all on a flight together, when we went to Costa Rica, and she was right every single time. I mapped out the trip beforehand and had it all downloaded to match the plane’s flight plan. I would have tested Dad, but he was asleep.
Moon and Dave hang out. Those are the words they use for an answer when any one of their parents says, so what did you guys do today? Hang out can mean any of a number of things. Sometimes it means eating or running or watching movies, but mostly it means lazing around in Moon’s room playing video games or wondering what they are going to do next year when they are freshmen at the Zag. Moon’s room is the whole second floor of Moon’s house. Moon’s parents’ room with the fireplace and the hot tub and the exercise room and the sauna is downstairs, but they are rarely ever home at the same time, so when Moon’s mom is gone and his dad is home, his dad sleeps in the den, and when Moon’s dad is gone and his mom is home, she sleeps in the sunroom off the porch, so in general, Moon says, if you consider average occupancy and house volume, you could say that my room is the whole house, which is to say that I very probably have the biggest room of anybody on the mountain.
Not that Moon considers himself cool because his parents are rich. He is actually sort of quietly embarrassed that his parents are never home. He is politely awkward when other parents say courteously at school events, now, Moon, I do not think I have had the pleasure of meeting your folks, have I? He quietly worries that if he and Dave make the cross-country team at the Zag and run in cross-country meets and Dave’s parents come to watch, people will notice that Moon’s parents did not come to watch because they are in Taipei and Brunei. Moon is not angry or annoyed or hurt or resentful of his mom and dad; actually he really likes them and enjoys their company and even would say he loves them if he was being honest with someone he trusts, like Dave. And he likes their family house and the tremendous view of the rolling velvet foothills to the south and his phones and screens and cloud library in which last he looked there were more than five thousand movies and shows and six thousand songs on instant demand. But he is sort of quietly embarrassed that most of the time he is pretending that it’s cool to be in a huge house alone, pretending to be happy that he can instantly obtain pretty much anything he wants, pretending to not mind at all that the mom and dad he really likes and even would admit that he loves work so hard for him that they don’t actually see him much.
We do at birthdays and holidays, though, he says to Dave. You have to give them major credit points there. Not once that I can remember have both of them missed a birthday or a holiday, and holiday
s for us include the small ones that a lot of people blow off, like Saint Patrick’s Day and April Fools’ Day. You have to give them credit there. And my mom makes a point of being home for summer solstice every year. How many moms make a big deal out of summer solstice, huh? Not so many, Dave. Not so many.
12
IT WAS MARTIN’S HEADLONG older brother who was caught by the fox. Sure it was. You knew it would be, didn’t you? He wasn’t careful, Martin’s brother. He didn’t pay attention. He wasn’t sensible. He ran out in the street after the ball without looking both ways. He rode his bike off the bluff without gauging the drop below. He saw something interesting and he sprinted after it without the slightest reflection or planning or caution. He had no reasonable doubt. He was brave and fearless and stupid and selfish. He was independent and carefree and careless and dead. He was afraid of nothing. Doesn’t that sound cool? Isn’t that what we all want, to be afraid of nothing? But he died. Maybe we should be afraid of some things. Maybe being afraid of a few things is a good way to not die. Maybe being afraid of some things is a survival tactic. Maybe being headlong and afraid at the same time is a good way to live. Maybe two contrary things can be true at once. Maybe a lot of things in life are like that. Martin’s brother was caught by the fox just after dusk, just after he leapt headlong to the earth from the base of the tree, because the fox had watched the marten family leave the den again and again and had noted how the headlong older brother did not bother to stop and smell and listen to the waiting darkness, to use his amazing gifts of smell and hearing to sense what might be waiting, for good or ill; and so he died, because the fox set up for him and caught him in the split second he was available to be caught.
* * *
Martin’s mother did move the den the next evening, this time to a small cave near the river; indeed, the new burrow was so close to the river that it had been the home of minks, until Martin’s mother arrived. The new den was longer and thinner than either of their previous homes, but there were fewer of them now, and even Martin and his sister, by no means fully grown, sensed that this would be their last residence with their mother.
From this final home they ranged farther and farther afield, the kits; in much the same way Dave’s parents let their children range within reason, so did Martin’s mother let her son and daughter go. Day by day, Martin and his sister began to claim their own territories, drifting naturally toward landscapes they liked and found congenial. In general, Martin’s sister liked remote meadows, where mousing was always rewarding, and fairly open woods, where birds were more likely found than in the dense woods and above timberline. Martin, however, liked the stimulation and bustle of country closer to human things; while he remained properly terrified of the road, he was not averse to exploring near the farthest-flung cabins, and it was Martin who discovered that the lodge where Dave’s mother worked was a wonderful source of chipmunks and tiny golden ground squirrels. Something about human beings and their works interested him; dogs were annoying, yes, but the dog who could catch a marten in the woods had not yet been born, and the sheds and cabins and woodpiles and scraggly gardens and pastures of human beings were also a rich hunting ground for mice, voles, snakes, and moles. Woodpiles were especially trustworthy as meat lockers; Martin learned that if he tucked himself into a crevice and waited a few moments, the world would present him soon enough with a chipmunk, and there is nothing quite so delicious when you are sharp with hunger as a chipmunk. Not to mention that they are so wonderfully easy to dismantle, if you have the requisite tools, as Martin did. With total respect for mice and voles (also beautifully packaged and savory meat), and with a deep affection for the eggs of any bird whatsoever (eggs being the most easily opened meal of all), Martin loved nothing so much as a fresh steaming chipmunk when he was hungry. Entertaining to chase, just the right size for a substantive meal without having to drag remnants of it back to the burrow, and populous to the point of profligacy—the chipmunk was one of the great glories and beneficences of the mountain, and Martin was ever more curious about new places where even more herds and troops of them might be found. So he explored closer and closer to Zigzag High and Miss Moss’s store and the lodge where Dave’s mom worked and to the resort with nine holes of golf in the summer and to the laundromat that doubled as a used bookstore and chapel on Sunday afternoons for the Church of the Risen Lord, Wy’east Synod, and to the trailer where methamphetamine was made and to the vast cut in the woods through which telephone poles and wires marched for miles, a swath of open land scythed and mown regularly by a trail crew, a long, straight hole in the forest where trees used to be, some of them older than the telephone itself.
13
LIVING ON THE MOUNTAIN, you never get to actually see the mountain, said Dave’s mom that night at dinner. Isn’t that ironic? People come from all over the world to see this mountain, and here we are, and we never see it. If we never see it, does it really exist?
This made Maria laugh so hard she nearly shot milk out her nose.
How’s the running going, Dave? asked his dad.
I was going to start morning and evening runs tomorrow, said Dave, but …
Everyone looked up from their plates.
… I got a job. At Miss Moss’s.
Whoa, said his dad. That is real news. Holy moly. Congrats.
Doing what? asked Maria.
General service. “Dave-of-all-trades” is Miss Moss’s term.
Dave, that’s great, said his mom. That’s just great. Hours?
Four a day to start. Six if things work out.
Wow, said his dad. That was a sudden decision. Admirable ambition, though. Prompt action. Admirable all round, I’d say, wouldn’t you?
Absoluterlishly, said Maria without the hint of a smile, before her mom could get her affirmation out, and everyone cracked up.
Working more hours than his old man, Dave is, said his dad later in the kitchen. Maybe he should work more hours, and I will go to high school. We could do one of those switch things like in the movies.
I worry he thinks he has to take on more responsibility, said Dave’s mom. He’s fourteen. He’s a kid.
Soon to be fifteen, and there’s four players on this team, and you and I were working at that age. Personally, I think Maria needs to get a job. She’s smart. She can run a homework service for kids or something. She’s as useless wagewise as her dad at the moment.
It’s unseemly of you to wallow, Jack.
Unseemly is a lovely word, said Dave’s dad. Also wallow. I believe I’ll check both of those words out of the library tomorrow and take them out for a ramble, put them through their paces. I bet if I harness them together properly, they would pull like hell.
You’ll get work, Jack.
Sure.
You will, you know. Don’t you just stand there and agree with me.
Okay, he said. Or not okay. I disagree, agreefully. Maybe I should have stayed in the service. Steady pay with the prospect of a pension if no one shoots you over twenty years. Did I ever tell you I had a friend in the service who loved calculating possibilities and percentages? He calculated we had a 40 percent chance of surviving our tour without substantive physical damage, which did not include illness, foot rot, psychological and emotional and spiritual trauma, sensory overload, and permanent gastrointestinal distress. He also figured out that anyone’s chances of surviving twenty years in the service without substantive physical damage, given our cultural addiction to violence, was 8 percent. The only way to make it through a whole career undamaged was to get promoted as fast as possible, and the only way to get promoted that fast was to constantly and deliberately expose yourself to damage. You know what my friend did after the war?
Afraid to ask.
Accountant. I kept telling him that he should be a professional ironist or absurdist, but he said he liked to eat.
* * *
Dave and Maria slept upstairs in the cabin, Maria in the bear den, the half of the room with the roof slanting down sharpl
y, and Dave in a sort of loft on his half of the room. Dave and his dad had discussed walling off the bear den with cedar planks or even building a wall of cedar down the middle of the room to give each child privacy, but Dave voted against both, as he liked puttering around with Maria, and Maria voted both down, on account of she liked talking to Dave and wandering into the bear den. Also, the den had the only upstairs window, which sometimes was obscured by snow so that the room had a gentle silvery cast to it. Dave and his dad did wall off the bottom of Maria’s bunk bed with cedar, so she had a tiny wooden room for doing homework, which she loved, even though her homework to date had been mostly art projects and elementary alphabet stuff. Dave thought Maria actually liked the homeworkness of homework, so to speak, rather than the actual or ostensible learning effect of homework—she liked rulers and graph paper, pencils and pencil sharpeners, the old calculator she had purchased from their mom for ten dishwashing nights, the old compass she found at Miss Moss’s for fifty cents, the Rapidograph pens she’d been given by an aunt or a godmother, the colored pens she wheedled whenever anyone went to the dentist or doctor or church or office of any kind whatsoever. She also loved maps and charts and had what their dad called a thoroueclectic collection of them pinned up all over her tiny wooden room: topographic maps of the mountain, of course, but also geologic charts, a map of the Zigzag River, a maritime map of Semiahmoo Bay in Washington that Miss Moss sold to Maria for three jokes about frogs, and a map of the interior of Dave’s brain that she had drawn for a school project and which her mom wanted to frame, but Maria said, no, it was only an accurate map on the day I drew it, and maps that are not accurate are only curiosities, not utilities.
It was upstairs in the bear den that night that Dave told Maria about seeing the marten in the tree canopy near the river. She was fascinated, and they pored over everything Dave could find online and in his wildlife atlases.
