Martin Marten (9781466843691)

by Doyle, Brian

  In the morning he was again possessed by the urge to ramble widely; it was almost as if some force was steering him through the woods in search of something he did not know. He was restless and annoyed and uncharacteristically testy, and twice he attacked tiny birds he would ordinarily have ignored. All day he slipped through the woods, a shadow in the canopy, a dark rumor among the squirrels, who feared a marten even more than owls and hawks, for raptors could miss a strike and then veer away disgruntled, but martens rarely abandoned a chase. Had the squirrels known it, this relentless pursuit was a mark of the whole mustelid family, who, once launched on a project, rarely gave it up, be it battle or burrow. From the smallest weasel at one end of the clan to the bearlike wolverine at the top, the mustelids were generally musky, intent, ferocious at times, much hunted for their dense fur, and famed in lore and legend for their intelligence, their long memories, and their skill as hunters. Even the anomalous members of the family, like skunks, were noted for their combative temper (as many a whimpering and stinking dog could attest), and those of a more playful mien, like otters, were ferocious underwater when chasing their favorite food and had no particular enemies among the larger predators, except for human animals. Martin had only once in his life seen an otter even attacked by another animal, and that had not gone well for the bobcat, which leapt away in pain and shock after being raked across the face by the otter’s claws. Martin had drawn two lessons from that fight: be even more cautious of otters, who were bigger than he was, and an otter away from water is out of his or her element and thus subject to attack.

  In the afternoon he found himself up near timberline, and he ranged through the thin forest with a fidgety unease, although his senses were sharp. This high and dry on the mountain, it was a sea of different scents than down in the thicker woods of firs and cedars, and he could smell juniper and hemlock, woodrushes and violets, windflowers and rock cress, and even currants and serviceberry. Currants were a favorite fruit of his, and he stopped for a moment to nose through the currant bushes to see how far they were from fruit—and that is when he saw her.

  * * *

  At exactly the same elevation at exactly the same moment at exactly the other side of the mountain, Mr. Douglas reaches up and helps Miss Moss descend from Edwin’s back—which is, as Mr. Douglas has often said, more like the deck of a tall ship than it is the spinal segment of a member of the equine family. Miss Moss then helped unpack the duffel bag that Mr. Douglas had slung over Edwin’s capacious rear parts. From the bag, she drew, as if from an inexhaustible vault of treasures, a bottle of cold wine, two sandwiches, two enormous carrots roughly the size of small baseball bats, and a candy bar so old that the brand name of the bar and the company that made it were utterly obscured.

  How old exactly, said Miss Moss, is this candy bar?

  My grandmother gave it to me when I graduated from high school, said Mr. Douglas. I have been saving it for a special occasion.

  Right about now would be a good time to ask her, thought Edwin, glaring at Mr. Douglas.

  Edwin, my friend, I am going to borrow this blanket from you, if you don’t mind, said Mr. Douglas, sliding the blanket off and snapping it twice before draping it over a fallen log. Don’t glare at me like that. It’s not that cold, and you have plenty of fur.

  It’s not the blanket, thought Edwin. Look at the poor girl. She’s rattled. Either give her some wine or ask the question, for heavens’ sake. The one complaint I have about you after all these years is that sometimes you hesitate a beat too long to do things. Sometimes you have to just jump into the moment and logic be damned. This is one of those moments, my friend. If you don’t do something in the next minute, I will kick you from here to Mount Jefferson.

  Ginny, listen, said Mr. Douglas. I don’t know how to dance around this anymore. I think of you all day and night. I love your honesty and humor and hard work. I love talking to you and listening to you. I trust you. I’d like to be your partner in everything we do. I think I could be the best trustiest lovingest partner you could ever have.

  In the store?

  Ginny, really, listen. I am trying to say that, I, you, could, we could, I think, that we, I don’t know how to say this.

  I am going to kick you past Mount Jefferson, thought Edwin. I am going to kick you all the way to California.

  Let me try to say it, then, said Miss Moss. The woman is always supposed to wait patiently and sweetly, but I am neither patient nor sweet. I love you too, Richard David Douglas. I love your company, and I trust your heart. But I don’t want to get married. Every marriage I have ever seen was a sort of gentle or awful jail bound by expectations and assumptions. It seems silly at best and cruel at worst. The wedding is performance art, the honeymoon is a pretense of dewy intimacy, and the only real benefit is a tax break. I don’t want a tax break. I want you. Why can’t we be married without being married?

  Maybe I will kick her to California, thought Edwin.

  Even the birds in the clearing paused to hear what was coming next.

  Well, said Mr. Douglas slowly, because I don’t want to be married without being married. I want to be married to you and only you the rest of my life, if at all possible. It matters a great deal to me to be married. There’s something about saying yes to each other boldly and publicly that seems wild and brave to me. I would invite the whole world to our wedding if I could—animal, vegetable, and mineral.

  Mineral? thought Edwin. There’ll be rocks at the wedding? Where would they sit?

  Would you like a sandwich? asked Miss Moss.

  I would not like a sandwich, said Mr. Douglas, and both Edwin and Miss Moss saw something in his face they had never seen before, some complex wrangle of pain and humor and anger and affection and respect and sadness that washed over his face like wind shivers a lake. I would not like a sandwich, he said again, and he held out his hand to help Miss Moss up off the log, and she took his hand and stepped toward him, perhaps to kiss him, but he bent and picked up the blanket and put it back on Edwin. She stepped back, her face a mask, and they packed up the duffel bag again and rode home.

  47

  FOR NEARLY THE ENTIRE academic year now, Dave had tried and tried and tried to talk easily and naturally and comfortably and unconcernedly to girls, to no avail. He tried to be casual. He tried to be flippant. He tried to just engage them in normal conversation as if they were actual human beings. He tried to pretend they were guys and therefore not alluring and causing him to mumble and stammer. He tried being dismissive. He tried being mysterious. He tried being attentive and solicitous. He tried ignoring them altogether. But none of this worked, and every single day, every single class, every single minute in the tidal surge in the hallways as he was carried upstream and down by the crowd, he was entranced and awkward and bumbling and a complete idiot with girls—and not just the girls he found attractive, either, but with girls he was not attracted to at all. He was a total stammering idiot with them too, which was just dispiriting, as he said to Moon.

  Plus this whole thing with girls made you a grump, said Moon helpfully.

  You’re not helping, said Dave.

  Just because you can’t talk to girls didn’t mean you had to be a total butthead all the time. Even your sister says so.

  Moon …

  And she’s a girl. You can talk to her—what’s the problem with other girls? Just pretend they are Maria plus ten years.

  I wish I could, said Dave. But I can’t. I just want to be normal. Why can’t I be normal? You’re normal, almost.

  I don’t want to go out with any of them, which means I don’t get nervous, said Moon. They are just people, you know. They’re just like us.

  No, they’re not. They’re beautiful, and we’re, well, look at you.

  I am a god, said Moon. I am a member of the B team. Sure, I don’t get to play much in games, but I didn’t get cut from the team, and I am not failing any courses yet. The secret is to reduce your expectations. My only goal this year was to not flunk
out. My only goal was to not give my parents a chance to send me to an expensive prestigious famous boarding school where everyone wears polo pants. The whole basketball thing was a bonus, and my attitude is that the coach could come to his senses tomorrow and cut me like he was supposed to in the fall. He’s clearly deluded, but I am not going to bring that to his attention.

  You are so weird, said Dave. Were you this weird when we met? When did we meet?

  Kindergarten, remember? We were both four years old when kindergarten started, and everyone else was older than us. We held hands at nap time, remember?

  I didn’t mean to be surly, you know. I just felt so … discombobulated. You hate to use the word hormone, but I guess sometimes it’s real. I just want to be normal. I used to be normal, and now normal is like a foreign country.

  I know, said Moon. Let’s eat.

  Eating is not the answer to all problems, you know.

  It is when you have stuff for great sandwiches, said Moon. Come on, let’s eat, and then I’ll go for a run with you. Running always cools you out. I think running is insane, myself, but I’ll start out with you, and then you can keep going, and I will quit like an intelligent guy and come home. I have to clean the house later. My folks are coming home.

  At the same time?

  Yeah, weird, huh? I’ll make name tags for us to wear around the house.

  They home for a while?

  A week. Amazing, huh?

  Are they … together?

  Dad says an illness is now on its way to healing, with sufficient attention and light.

  What does that mean?

  I haven’t the faintest idea. I think she did something, and he was hurt, but they like each other enough to try to reboot the system. He talks like that when he wants to tell me something he can’t figure out how to say. He says this is why God invented metaphors.

  When was the last time they were both home for a whole week?

  I can’t remember. Probably when they hatched me.

  Maybe it’ll actually be fun, Moon. You know? To be together.

  I guess. Maybe. It could be. I guess.

  * * *

  There was a church in the Zag, sure there was; what self-respecting hamlet does not feature a church of some flavor? Churches being such an ancient habit among all beings, of course. Did you think that human animals were the only animals with sacred places and haunts? There are many chapels and prayer rooms and shivering places where beings go to meditate or be shriven or observe the timeless rituals or to try to crack open doors in their hearts. Mountaintops and benches along rivers, huts and hermit cells, groves and copses, altars of stone and wind, old airplane hangars, moist wooden cabins, clearings in the woods where many feet have flattened the eager grass and many voices are raised in prayer and supplication …

  But the Zag, populated by only a few human animals, has had to toss all its religions together into one former state highway repair building, long used for the storage of sand and gravel and plows and cement mixers and shovels and a small, relentless tractor named Frank. After more than fifty years of steady use by the state, the building and Frank were sold to the village for a nominal fee (one dollar for the building, eighty for Frank, who was a very fine tractor), and now the building, and sometimes Frank, were used by men and women and children of every conceivable faith tradition, from Christian to Jewish to Hindu to Buddhist to Pantheist to Wiccan to Druid to Muslim to Zoroastrian. Even Lutherans were welcome, though hardly any came; occasionally one would wander by and poke his head in and see, say, Cosmas in his orange jumpsuit singing Van Morrison songs, and he, the Lutheran, would withdraw quietly and return to his car and drive away slightly too fast.

  For a while after the state sold the building to the village, the faith traditions took turns holding court, as it were—Hindus one week, Zoroastrians the next—but soon it became evident that all the traditions wished to have some sort of weekly service, just to stay in rhythm (“to stay in practice, get it?” said Dave’s dad. “Religious practice, get it? Does anyone get it? Anyone?”), so they slowly learned to share a weekly event. The first few weeks were awkward, as people sang and knelt at different times, but slowly they got the hang of it and lost their prickliness about identity and heritage and individual charism and ownership of the Truth and what words to use for the things they all had in common but called by different names. After a year or so, to be honest, if you polled or questioned the congregation anonymously after church service, you would find that in general they quietly enjoyed the new color and jazz of the event and found it sweeter and deeper than their own home ritual in which most of them had swum half-conscious for many years, perhaps more for nostalgic than spiritual reasons. Indeed, the new service, as Cosmas would have said had he been asked, was not unlike an estuary into which all manners of water pour—fresh and salt, muddy and clear, sun warmed and storm whipped—and do estuaries not produce more life and nutrition than any other aspect of landscape we know? Well, then.

  48

  AND JUST BEFORE THAT DAY WAS DONE, Louis led his herd, his clan, his tribe, his companions, his cabal, his extended family of wives and aunts and children male and female, uphill another few hundred yards to a high meadow he knew, where there was excellent browse, fairly open forest fringe in case of the need for sudden escape, and a tireless little creek of water, so recently ice from the glaciers above that even the elk, a hardy race, were careful to sip rather than gulp.

  Here they pitched camp for the night, Louis standing first watch—cougars were fond of attacking in the first dim moments of dusk, before moon and stars emerged and allowed shadows. He watched as his companions chose their sleeping places and settled down. He noted the yearlings in particular, for he knew, as they did not, that these were their last days with their mothers. Soon the mothers would give birth to new calves, and there would be a sea change in affections, and the yearlings would be banished and exiled, the spike bucks to try to survive on their own another year until they were strong enough to challenge such chieftains as Louis, and the young female calves to survive and grow until they too could mate and mother at age two.

  Louis’s group was the only one of its kind on Wy’east; the custom of elk on the mountain from time immemorial was for the males to range alone all year until the battles for primacy among them in the fall, and then the joy of sex for the winners, and then ranging alone again until the next battles began. But Louis had changed this pattern for his tribe, and while none of the other bulls of his class and heft had done so, several had noticed; and who knew when a second chieftain would also decide to keep a family of wives and aunts and progeny together through the hard winter and the melting spring and through a bright summer before having to defend against the brash young challengers of autumn? Who knew? And perhaps that is how all things change; one decides to try this, and another notices and decides to try also, and then there is a new idea loose in the world, from which even newer ideas might someday hatch. And there is time and time enough for such ideas to flower, over the course of millions of years and ideas, and while some beings do not change—having found the idea in which they wish to stay forever, like the ancient ideas in which crabs and crocodiles and dragonflies live—other beings do change, some constantly, like the human beings, who were once animals who snarled and hooted and hunted and were hunted, animals little different from their omnivore mammalian cousins. But ideas bred easily among the human beings, and their snarls and hoots became songs and poems, and their solitary pursuits became plans and plots, and their slabs of split stone became swords and rifles, and so they commandeered the world, or tried to. But once they were dominant, their ideas began to wither, their success being poison to their dreams, and there were those among them who wondered if some subtle wildness had been the food of their greatest creativity, and if their salvation as a species, and their dwindling chance to clean and balance the world they had fouled and rattled, depended on something in them that yearned for trees and ice, waters and animals
, mountains and caves, mystery and attentiveness, the humility before wonder that once they had thought merely their lot and fate, but was instead perhaps their greatest gift and grace.

  * * *

  Louis was often called the king of the mountain by human beings on the mountain and by hunters who came from below to try to kill him for his annually gargantuan antlers, a few inches longer every year than the year before. But while he certainly was chieftain of his own tribe and conqueror of the grim brawny challengers who fought him every fall, he was not at all chieftain of any other beings than his family. Indeed, there were many chiefs among the elk, and not all male, either, which would confound the human scientists, if only they knew. Down by Badger Lake, for example, there was a tribe of elk who chose a female elk among them for wisdom and direction and tolerated the series of males who assumed their ostensible leadership; the Badger Lake clan understood that a powerful male was not only a reproductive necessity but a good defense against predation, and in general they humored him—although one year the winner of the autumnal battles was a cruel male, whom they endured for only a month before driving him away one night in a roaring thunderstorm.

  And there were chiefs and visionaries and prophets and mayors and teachers and singers and hermits and sages and thieves and liars and healers among all the beings on the mountain, of course—among the owls, the newts, the worms, the grouse, the beetles, the toads, the crawdads, the wasps, the moths, the bears, the gyrfalcons, the hawthorn maggots, among every clan and tribe that flew and ran and leapt and slid and swam, and among the stationary beings also. Did you think that among the trees and sedges there are not more distinctions and differences and nuances than we know? Did you think they were not each one its own self, individual and inimitable, like but unlike every other of its kind? There are famous cedars among the cedars, for example, famous not just for age and girth and height and weight and sprawl but for many other reasons beyond our ken. Did you think that the other beings were not like us, each one alike as a species and each one utterly unalike as an individual? Yet this is so. And just as among us there are threads of light and dark in each one of us, and in every group and in every place and in every time since we first stood uncertainly and began to walk, there are similar threads among all the other beings. Did we think we knew the world so well that we knew this could not be so? Yet it is so. And among the weasels there have been some who would not draw blood, and among the deer there have been killers, and among the quiet kestrels there have been exuberant singers, and among the grasshoppers there have been some who remembered much and shared their memories and imparted their tales to beings of other shapes (including, famously, a grasshopper who told a dragonfly such a riveting story that the dragonfly returned the grasshopper to earth alive), and among the salamanders there was one who could heal with a touch of her tail—though that was many years ago now, and only the oldest cedars and pines and sturgeon and turtles remember hearing about that one, the turtles remembering best, as they are moist cousins and neighbors of the salamanders, and several among them had been released from illness in that way at that time. Illness is a form of prison, and being freed suddenly from prison is an unforgettable story not just for one but for everyone.