by Doyle, Brian
You wouldn’t believe how fast it whipped through the branches, said Dave. It was shocking fast. Faster than any squirrel, that’s for sure. I was going pretty fast, as fast as I can go downhill, and it was flying through the branches, and it didn’t even look like it was trying hard. And when I stopped, he stopped.
Or she.
Or she. Seemed like a guy, though.
Can I see it tomorrow?
If I see it again and you are nearby, I will signal to you, and you can come over without a sound.
Okay.
Okay.
Same signal as usual?
Yes.
The year Maria turned three years old, she and Dave had hatched a series of private signals, their own silent language, as Dave said. Left hand up meant pay attention; left hand balled meant caution; left hand flat meant come over without a sound. Signals with the right hand mostly meant people, and there were a whole array of these, mostly having to do with their parents: tension in the kitchen; Give Dad a break—he’s weary; Be careful—Mom is worried about something; Don’t say anything about money. There were two signals made with both hands: one meant I love you, although neither Dave nor Maria used that phrase and instead would say something like You are slightly better to have around than a bad cold if they had to put the message into words; and the other meant, essentially, Let me be alone for a while. The first signal was two open hands placed against your chest; the second was two closed hands huddled against your chest like two tiny locked rooms.
14
AS JULY LENGTHENED, Martin and his sister and their mother spent less time together; this was usual and natural and normal, the way of their species for millions of years, but Martin and his sister felt their mother’s attention waning, one bright grain less per day, with some deep sense of … what? Sadness, regret, loss, nostalgia? We don’t have good words yet for what animals feel; we hardly have more than wholly inadequate labels for our own tumultuous and complex emotions and senses. It’s wrong to say that animals do not feel what we feel; indeed, they may feel far more than we do and in far different emotional shades. Given that their senses are often a hundred times more perceptive than ours, could not their emotional equipment be similarly vast?
Suffice it to say that Martin and his sister felt their mother drawing ever so gently away from them as the days lengthened toward solstice and shrank afterwards. They went their own ways from the new den, exploring different territories and coursing different landscapes, and they came together again only to sleep. Now that Martin and his sister were able enough hunters in their own right to survive and even to flourish, their mother ceased to bring them food and even ceased mostly to share it, although occasionally some deep chord of memory, perhaps, led her to bring home a vole to share and, once, a brush rabbit.
That was a day for the annals, if martens chronicled their doings. The last salmonberries and the first huckleberries filled the forest; grasshoppers and crickets leapt in the clearings like energetic appetizers; a new crow too young to fly had fallen near the burrow and made a lovely lunch; Martin had discovered and swallowed the contents of a swallow’s nest artfully hidden under the eve of a woodshed near Miss Moss’s store; and to cap it all off with fresh redolent rabbit, without the slightest effort expended in procuring it … well, of such repasts many a tale has been told among men and women and children—and perhaps among the other species, if we only could read their chronicles and annals. And to those who say animals have no chronicles and annals, no literature and sagas, no common memories and master storytellers, I say, are you sure? How would you know? Just because you have never seen them, they do not exist? Are you sure about that? Don’t be. Whatever you are most inarguably sure about, as Miss Moss says, don’t be.
* * *
Martin had his first fight in the opening days of July. This was with a male marten almost exactly his age and size. The battle was brief and savage. The cause of conflict was most of the left rear leg of a fawn that had been executed and dismantled by a cougar. The cougar had eaten most of the fawn but, in dragging the remains to a cache, lost some leg. The battle was short and intense and a great surprise to both combatants. The other marten had discovered the leg first, but there are no rules of possession and ownership and property and discovery that are inviolate except by adamant defense, and Martin was very hungry. He snatched a shred of the leg and was attacked, and he responded with a surge of swift violence so shocking to him—let alone his opponent—that when the battle was over, Martin found himself shaking with surprise and rage. You would have to call the battle a draw, if you were scoring the battle as regards injuries incurred and inflicted and rewards gained or retained. Both marten lugged shreds of meat away, and both were bruised and startled, and both sustained shoulder wounds that bled briefly and then were sore for days. Curiously, this was the first fight ever for the other marten, as well. We will not have time to delve into his life and story any longer than the end of this paragraph—and in a real sense, that’s a shame, because this other marten has had a most interesting life to date, surviving somehow on his own after his mother was killed by a bobcat and his father was caught in a trap, and he will have a most interesting life over the next eleven years. He will, for example, be hit by lightning and assumed to be dead but then rise up spitting and utterly alive as if by magic. He will briefly find himself atop a running horse, which is a remarkable story all by itself. He will be a rare and perhaps unique case of a marten who learns to kill and eat porcupines after watching a fisher accomplish that potentially puncturous and eminently painful task. He will father more kits than we could easily count if they were somehow piled wriggling in front of us in a seething mewling pile. He will die finally in an act of stunning courage in defense of the object of his enduring love, a story which all by itself you could write three books about, and by heavens what a terrific movie it would make. And he is only one of a million, no, a billion stories you could tell about the living beings on just this side of the mountain. The fact is that there are more stories in the space of a single second, in a single square foot of dirt and air and water, than we could tell each other in a hundred years. The word amazing isn’t much of a word for how amazing that is. The fact is that there are more stories in the world than there are fish in the sea or birds in the air or lies among politicians. You could be sad at how many stories go untold, but you could also be delighted at how many stories we catch and share in delight and wonder and astonishment and illumination and sometimes even epiphany. The fact is that the more stories we share about living beings, the more attentive we are to living beings, and perhaps the less willing we are to slaughter them and allow them to be slaughtered. That could be.
Yet some stories we must let go. Most. Almost all. We let them wander off into woods, dragging shreds of deer meat. We are sorry to see them go—how does a marten get atop a sprinting horse, anyway, and what possible combination of factors would lead to that?—but we cannot share them all, and we have to choose, and so here we choose to follow Martin, who watches the other marten go and then curls up high in a fir tree and licks his shoulder for a long while, pondering. He is so motionless in the crook of the tree that not even the swifts at twilight or the first owls of evening notice him there, and the owls see everything; or so they think.
15
DAVE PROVED INDISPENSABLE to Miss Moss within the first hour of his formal employment. The bell he had fixed over the door remained fixed, which Miss Moss called a blessed and inarguable miracle. Dave learned how to make milkshakes. He fixed the computer printer which for more than three months had been in the habit of eating every second sheet fed into it. He learned how to make grilled cheese sandwiches on the griddle, which is not at all the way you make them in a frying pan. He learned how to run the cash register and how to process credit cards and how to seed the tip jar with dollar bills to make the existence of the tip jar a subtle but alluring reality. By the end of his first hour, Miss Moss had crossed off six of the ten tasks she
had in mind for Dave’s first day, and she said, wander around outside and come back in ten minutes with some ideas about what needs to be done out there.
Yes, ma’am, said Dave.
We are going to have to find something other than ma’am for you to use, Dave, said Miss Moss. I don’t think ma’am is going to cut it. Doesn’t fit, quite. I am no madam.
I could stay with Miss Moss, Miss Moss, said Dave.
That’s a lot of words, though, said Miss Moss. Not to mention the constant alliteration. Pretty soon, you would be calling me Missmash or Mossmush, and I couldn’t bear that. For one thing, we would spend more time laughing than working, and we cannot afford that.
I could call you by your first name, if that’s not too … forward.
You could, I suppose, said Miss Moss. I call you by yours, to be sure. But … I don’t know. No one in town calls me by my first name.
The trapper did, said Dave. The man who was talking about the silver fox and Louis the elk and Rocky Raccoon, remember?
You heard that?
I was just coming through the door.
Were you? I don’t remember that the bell rang.
No, ma’am. It was broken, remember?
Indeed I do, said Miss Moss, and you are the able youth who repaired it. Well, let’s postpone nomenclature decisions for the moment. Right now I suggest you take a brief break from your labors and then scout around the perimeter and see what needs to be done out there and in what order. Prioritize loosely. The biggest job out there, of course, is inventory and organization of used goods—even I admit it’s chaos out there—but that will take you all summer, so do me a favor and use your sharp young eyes to see what else needs to be painted, shored up, nailed over, resealed, cleared out, bagged up, cut down, stitched up, trimmed, snipped, shorn, pruned, burned, or cheerfully ignored. Fair enough?
Yes, ma’am, said Dave without thinking, and Miss Moss laughed.
See, now, Dave, we cannot afford more than a few minutes of laughing per day, she said. We should probably set the limit at ten minutes or so on each of your shifts. That’s healthy. Less than that, and we are dour, and more than that I’ll go out of business. While I would go out of business smiling, still, I would go out of business, and then where would we be?
Yes, ma’am, said Dave, and he went out, smiling.
* * *
Miss Moss’s store was built mostly of tremendous fir logs, although the whole structure rested on a solid foundation of stone, and Dave sincerely doubted that anything less than Wy’east destroying itself in a cataclysmic volcanic event would have the slightest effect on the building. It had been built more than a century earlier, and no one now remembered who had built it or why—titles and deeds and accurate county records were not common features in the early days. The brown people who had lived there for thousands of years laughed at the idea of people actually owning imaginary squares and rectangles and triangles of land and air, and the paler people who were intent on owning the squares and rectangles and triangles of land and air were often none too careful about who paid what to whom for what and why. Sometime after Joel Palmer walked on the glacier and before your mother arrived on the mountain, said Dave’s father, that’s when someone built Miss Moss’s store, and what it was used for in its early days is a total and complete mystery. Probably a speakeasy or a church, which is finally the same thing—a place of rest and restoration.
Dave wandered around the building, looking at it carefully for the first time and thinking that it’s amazing how we can see something a thousand times but never actually see it, you know? He’d been wandering around this particular collection of logs and cedar shingles and fir planks since before he could remember, mostly eating ice-cream cones and guzzling the very milkshakes he had just a few minutes ago learned to make, but he had never really looked closely at the tremendous heft and burl of the logs or the deft overlap of shingles or what sure seemed like cement patches here and there among the logs. For all the hours he had spent on the porch slobbering ice cream, he had never noticed that it was propped up on massive gray stone pillars that looked older than the world, and that the boards and planks that composed the porch seemed to have been cut from one unimaginably enormous tree. He had noticed, vaguely, all his life, that the porch creaked and croaked and moaned and groaned when you walked or sat on it, but he had never noticed the different chords and keys in which the porch sang, depending on where you walked. He had never noticed that the wooden railings, which he had assumed to be unadorned, were lined with faint forest motifs—ferns, huckleberry brambles, aster flowers. And the four sturdy railing posts, he now saw, had originally been carved as rough versions of four animals—bear, cougar, elk, and eagle—though the carvings, after the ministrations of a million hands, were gentled and softened as if by an invisible rain. You could tell, if you looked closely, that the two posts by the door, for example, were cougar and bear, but whatever blunt and violent dignity their anonymous sculptor had given them long ago was now much faded, and they seemed more like dreams of bear and cougar than powerful princes of the mountain.
16
MARTIN, BY THE END OF JULY, was ranging farther and farther afield from the third den, and more and more there were days when he did not come home at all but curled up in a tree bole, a windfall space, an abandoned burrow. As the days grew infinitesimally shorter and the nights longer, he began to spend more time hunting at night and sleeping during the day, although still, while summer offered such a bounty of foods and flavors, he made the most of the long light to explore new territory and familiarize himself with all sorts of landscape. He went down the mountain, all the way to where the highest apple and pear orchards grew; he went up the mountain along the river until the river vanished into nothing more than a trickle emerging from a stone; he went east around the mountain, discovering, among other amazements, a rhododendron jungle so thick that even he was briefly lost and confused; and he returned to the lodge where Dave’s mother worked. Indeed, this time, he actually saw Dave’s mother eating her lunch at a table outside the laundry with Emma Jackson Beaton, whose steel eye rings glinted alluringly in the sun, but the smell of people and their dogs and machines was powerful and frightening, and he withdrew silently when Emma and Dave’s mother finished their sandwiches and went back to work. He marked the lodge firmly in his memory, though, as a good place to catch chipmunks and golden squirrels, some dozen of which he saw sprinting recklessly around the paths and porches. A deft hunter, it seemed to Martin, could make hay among such careless appetizers—at first light, perhaps, when the squirrels first emerged and before people were up and about, or at last light, when the squirrels were scouring the grounds for a last snack and the people were distracted by wine and sunset and alpenglow.
* * *
Even during high summer on the mountain there was enough morning mist and occasional gentle rain from the dense clouds wreathing Wy’east for animals to leave noticeable trails and prints, and by the end of summer, Martin was a serious student of the marks left both by residents and visitors. His first concern was the tracks of animals he could eat, and so he grew most familiar with the tiny prints of mice and voles, even unto the infinitesimal marks left by their trailing tails. He also learned to notice gnawed twigs and little piles of cut grass stems where a vole had fed; such piles, he learned, almost always meant a vole runway through the grass nearby, and a runway was an excellent place for a patient marten to procure a meal. Similarly the rabbits who established runways through grass and thickets and generally held to their highways for transport; the trick there was to choose a bend in the road and wait until eventually a rabbit slightly too comfortable with his or her usual commute turned the corner and commuted no more.
Higher up the mountain was the pika, the little rabbit of the rocks who lived in boulder fields and ravines filled with stone and rubble; their tracks, Martin learned, often did not proceed in a line but were spaced nine or ten inches apart as they leapt from place to place in thei
r endless harvesting of grasses and plants and even flowers. When hunting pika, Martin learned to look for their harvest piles, deftly hidden under the rocks; when he found one with fresh-cut greenery on top of the pile, he would wait in a crevice for the enterprising farmer, whose winter forage would then become a pleasant surprise for others of his tribe.
The tracks and habits of shrews, marmots, wood rats, porcupine, gophers, birds, snakes, rabbits, even bats—these things Martin studied intently, daily, thoroughly, and the more he paid attention, the more he noticed. Among the snakes, for example, ones with spots were too big and dangerous for him to kill, but ones with stripes could be caught and were best killed by snapping their necks. Lizards were rare and delicious and best caught in the morning as they dozed on logs and rocks. Frogs were also rare and delicious and could be caught only at the edges of lakes and ponds, although tiny tree frogs could be found anywhere. Newts and salamanders were edible but should be approached with caution and eaten only in times of ravenous hunger; Martin had eaten a reddish one which made him sick for two entire days.
He was also a student not only of the animals that could and would eat him, given the opportunity—bear, cougar, fisher, coyote, fox, bobcat, wolverine—but of those who would neither eat him nor suffer him to eat them. Some, like elk and beaver and nutria and eagle, were significantly bigger than Martin and adamant about defense if affronted; others, like otter and mink and weasel, were muscular and violent enough to make an attack inadvisable, and Martin felt some vague cousinish feeling with those creatures in particular. And then there were skunks, which seemed edible but who not only put up a fight when attacked but emitted the most awful detestable foul funk imaginable. Martin himself had not been so foolish as to try to kill a skunk, but his sister had, and the memory of the stench she wore for days was unforgettable. Here and there, when Martin ventured near the terrifying highway, he caught that dense sharp loud smell again, and he vanished back into the woods as fast as he could.
