Martin Marten (9781466843691)

by Doyle, Brian

Also, when Miss Moss went to the key rack to find the backup key for the deep freeze, she found the keys to Mr. and Mrs. Robinson’s repaired Falcon hanging there, with a note from Cosmas saying, from Mr. and Mrs. R. to the Happy Couple, and she had to go sit on the front steps and stare for a while at the proud animals carved long ago into the old wooden railing posts.

  * * *

  And the dancing and drinking and eating. O sweet Jesus, the sausages and grilled trout and last corn roasted in its husk in the fire. The fire redolent with juniper and cherry and sage someone carried up the trail just for the brief pleasure of the scent of the smoke. Mr. Douglas dancing with Maria. Fiddle and pennywhistle and a clarinet. Miss Moss peers into the sifting dusk to see who is playing that lovely whirling clarinet, and to her surprise it is Dave’s cross-country coach with his eyes closed and his knees bent. On the whistle is the morning waitress, trying not to laugh at how egregiously poorly she is playing the thing, and on the fiddle is one of Moon’s basketball teammates, a pale boy with pimples all up the west side of his face. The first stars peering out of the sky going blue to black. How very many scatters of stars are named for animals, thinks Miss Moss. Eagle, swan, crab, bull, bear, fish, lion, goat, scorpion, horse. We see animals everywhere. We are animals. Or we used to be animals, and mostly now we forget how to be animals, which is why we look for them everywhere.

  Speaking of which, she says to Edwin, are you enjoying yourself?

  Very much so, thinks Edwin, although the prospect of picking our way down the trail again in the dark is not something I relish.

  Mr. Douglas is suddenly there beside Edwin, smiling.

  May I cut in?

  It would be a pleasure, says Miss Moss.

  I understand congratulations are in order, Miss.

  This makes her laugh aloud. I suppose so, she says, although it seems to me I have probably simply volunteered for a much deeper wilderness.

  It seems to me he is a very lucky man, says Mr. Douglas. I would guess that he too is a little rattled but thrilled at the possibilities for … depth.

  Just kiss her, for heaven’s sake, thinks Edwin. You two are always talking when you should be kissing and fencing when you should be wrestling. How human animals ever manage to reproduce is a mystery to me sometimes. So much chatter and jabber.

  I’ll convey your regards to, says Miss Moss, but she does not finish her sentence, because Mr. Douglas is kissing her with all his might in the flickering firelight, with Edwin behind them like a warm brown wall, and Miss Moss is kissing him deep and wild and thrilled, the kind of kiss where you just pour yourself into it without any thought or agenda or target or message, just complete furious trust and affection and joy, there’s so much of that in you for this one soul in the world that you cannot speak except with your lips and your tongue and your arms and being pressed together like hands in prayer, and for a few seconds, almost a minute, you are lost and found. And you break apart, startled and electrified, and only then do you dimly hear everyone applauding, their faces flitting from light to dark to light as the fire fluctuates; and you bow, laughing, and somehow, that is the crescendo, the apex, the conclusion, the beginning of the end of your best day ever.

  * * *

  Can something be sad and happy at the same time? An event? A moment? Sure, thinks Dave, sitting on a log by the fire with Cadence and Moon. He likes Cadence and she likes him, but she does not love him and he does not love her, but they like each other in some other heartfelt, entertaining way. Why does it have to be love or not? Isn’t like a form of love? Isn’t like actually the crucial ingredient of love? It’s easy to fall in love but not as easy to stay in love, and the only way to stay in love is to like, isn’t that so? Because if you just depend on love, then when things change or people change, will you love the new person she is rather than just the person she used to be, the one you fell in love with?

  You’re losing me here, says Moon, and Dave almost falls off the log.

  What?

  You said before that this is a happy event, but it’s also sort of sad. Why?

  Because they’re not actually married? says Cadence.

  No, no, says Dave. That actually seems cool. It’s their decision, and Miss Moss is real firm about how no other authority gets to tell them how they are related or committed or defined or whatever, and Dickie doesn’t care what their status is called; he just wants to be with her. No, it’s not that.

  What then?

  I don’t know. Don’t you guys feel it? An event like this is so great because it brings everything into focus; it’s like a prism that bends all the light in one way. But after today, it’ll be everything back to usual. Back to regular time, you know? Today is like an island where time doesn’t apply. Today doesn’t even end until we say so. But today also changes things. What if she sells the store and they move to Utah or something?

  She’d never sell the store, says Moon. Where would the Lutheran dawn hikers eat? They’d starve, and that would be the end of the faith in America.

  I know, says Dave. I just feel … weird. We hardly ever are a town, I guess, and it feels great to be one for a while, and then tomorrow, it’s back to regular life where everyone lives apart, and here comes the snow, and soon we’ll be in college or working or whatever, and I like living upstairs in our house with Maria, and soon I’ll have to go away, and I don’t want to. I love smelling bacon downstairs and running in the woods and talking to you guys and my dad making dumb jokes and then laughing for twenty minutes to himself. I like stepping in bear scat once a year. It’s sad that it all changes so fast. Will we even be friends in a few years? Will we?

  * * *

  Sometimes we forget that we were all teenagers once, and we forget that teenagers are enormously sensitive, and for all their masks and disguises and japes and adopted personas and fear of being uncool and fear of being found out as only themselves, they are as sharply alert to the right time not to speak as any older seasoned bruised listener; and this was one of those times. So they sat there, the two boys and the girl, in the flicker of the fire, and not one of them spoke for a very long time.

  The fire burned down as the stars lit up.

  Here are Miss Moss and Mr. Douglas and Edwin at the far edge of the firelight, Miss Moss and Mr. Douglas with their heads together and Edwin behind them like a part of the forest himself; he is looking at them with some sort of spice in his eye—affection, surely, but isn’t there something very like amusement? Yes?

  The Unabled Lady wrapped in a shawl, laughing as Moon’s coach and teammates prepare to lift chair and Lady and all and carry her down the trail to where Moon’s mom and dad rented a van to carry her home. Emma Jackson and Maria dancing one last dance, each swirling in place at the very edge of the meadow, and for an instant Maria vanishes into the oceanic dark under the trees but then pops out again laughing. Cosmas and Dave’s dad and Dave’s coach folding tables and chairs and carrying what little extra food there is to a spot under the trees to leave for the other Citizens & Residents, as Cosmas says. Dave’s mom and the morning waitress in their autumn jackets waiting for the convoy to start down the trail. Mr. Shapiro and the dog and the finch leaning against trees at the edge of the clearing watching all this with mixed and complicated emotions. Nighthawks flit past and one small owl. The fire burns lower. Dave and Cadence and Moon stand and stretch, and Dave offers Cadence his jacket, and she declines courteously but smiles as she says no thanks, and Mr. Douglas says gently, I guess we’d better put out the fire, gentlemen. Miss Moss boards Edwin and everyone else starts down the trail slowly, carefully shuffling a bit, each and every one thankful for the rope banister set up by Dave’s teammates for just this hour and purpose. Penultimate is Cosmas, who kneels to be absolutely sure of the fire’s doused embers, and while he is on his knees he speaks very quietly to Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, and then he rises and says, Richard?

  Mr. Douglas says right behind you, but as Cosmas vanishes into the dark, Mr. Douglas stands there and takes it all
in—the broad circle of the sky stammering with stars; the dim soaring vault of the trees; the faint last scent of the bonfire; the fragrant bruised grass; the sharp faint call and whir of nighthawks. This was our chapel, he thinks. I’ll always remember this. We’ll always come here. Maybe when things are confusing, this will be the best place to be. It’ll be all snow soon. We could build an igloo and visit in the winter. I’m scared. I’m thrilled. This is crazy. She’s my kind of crazy, though. I don’t believe it happened. It did happen, though, didn’t it? It did. Didn’t it? It certainly by god did, and he smiles and turns and vanishes into the trees, and there is the night meadow as it has been for a thousand years, as round and open as a mouth in song.

  69

  MARTIN SAW ALL THIS. Sure he did. He saw the whole thing from noon to moon. He saw the first arrivals in the meadow and the unpacking and the laying out of food and the building of the fire. He watched with interest. He saw the mice and voles scurrying out of the way of the feet of people and a horse. He saw the ouzel in the creek move disgruntled downhill to a lower pool. He explored the canopy along the trail and watched Edwin and Miss Moss have a meeting of the minds, and then she climbed onto the horse, and he carried her up to the meadow. He saw Dave climbing up, and he watched the boy he knew, holding hands with the girl who had been lost in the snow and took refuge in the hollow tree that the bobcat was going to poke into. That was long ago when Martin was young. Now he is seventeen months old and very nearly fully grown, and he has a companion, a mate, a partner who is with child. Two kits will be born in late April next year, two weeks after Martin is two years old. One will be female and the other male. The female will become a legend, but that is the story for another book. The male will very nearly drown but be saved from drowning by an amazing coincidence, but that is also the story for another book. We are still in this book, even though we are very nearly at the end of it.

  Martin conducts his martenesque business all during the day of the Unwedding, but he returns again and again to the meadow, fascinated by the activity and curious about these animals in their riotous caperings. Once in the afternoon, he brings his companion, and they sit high in a fir tree on the uphill side of the meadow and watch. He sees Dave dancing with Miss Moss and with his mother and with Maria and once carefully, painfully, with Cadence. He sees the finch sitting on the piano as the Unabled Lady plays “A Tarantella for Eleven Dancers, One of Whom May Be Equine.” He hears Cosmas explain his plans for a bicycle ramp an eighth of a mile long down a clear-cut with the exit point being thirty yards out over a small lake. What an attraction that would be for children from the city and environs!

  Martin’s companion returns to their den for a nap before the evening hunt, but Martin remains above the clearing and watches. He is there when the bonfire begins to burn down. He is there when the first meteorites whip through the sky so fast that before anyone can say o my god shooting stars! they are memories sharp against the sky. He is there when Cosmas says, Richard? and slips away into the darkness, and he is there when Mr. Douglas pauses at the edge of the meadow and thinks this was our chapel, and he is there watching when Mr. Douglas too slips into the darkness under the fringe of the trees, and nothing remains of the day but the gentle swaying of fir and fern where Mr. Douglas passed. For a long moment, Martin remains on the branch, high above the meadow, listening, aware of every rustle and thrum. And then, quicker than the eye could follow and quieter than any ear could catch, he vanishes; and you will have to dream the rest of his story yourself, perhaps as you walk in the woods or sprawl in a mountain meadow or lie abed early in the morning and stare out the window, sure that you just saw, just for an instant, a flash of golden brown against the long green splash of the trees.

  THANKS & STUFF

  My particular thanks to two attentive students of life in the Northwest woods: Sue Livingston of the U.S. Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service in Oregon and Alan Dyck of the U.S. Forest Service in Oregon. Generous souls, open to any number of foolish questions, in my experience. You know, everyone wails and moans about The Government, but hardly ever do we stop and say, boy, are there a lot of expert, generous, brilliant people working for us. I say so here, now, and I mean it.

  Also it seems to me that writers ought to admit here and there that many books and writers have seeped into their unconscious over the years and swirled and seethed mysteriously in their heads and hearts (“macerate your subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look in—and there your stuff is, good or bad,” as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote) and surely influenced and shaped their own work, and that is certainly true of me and Martin Marten; so I here thank and laud Jim Kjelgaard and Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles George Douglas Roberts and Barry Lopez and Cameron Langford and Henry Williamson and Marguerite Henry, whose Cinnabar, the One O’Clock Fox I must have read a hundred times when I was a small boy.

  Also I have spent many hours with the wonderful series of books published by Arthur Robert Harding in the opening decades of the twentieth century, books I love dearly for their odd mixture of declarative fact and salty story. Harding, who started trapping for fox and mink at age nine, eventually started Hunter-Trader-Trapper and Fur-Fish-Game magazines (the latter still in print, with more than one hundred thousand subscribers), and among the many books he published are Mink Trapping, Fox Trapping, Fifty Years a Hunter and Trapper, and Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit. Me, personally, I think Arthur Harding did a great deal to save and celebrate the beings he wrote and published books about, as he was an early and articulate voice for conservation.

  Also I thank my family, who long ago concluded with a collective grin and sigh that I was a total nutcase about the mustelid family in North America (marten, fisher, otter, wolverine, badger, skunk, ferret, mink, and weasel), and especially our canine friend Ringo, a hunting hound who has taught me a great deal about attentiveness and patience and predation and alluring scent and angles of attack and how to dismember a mole in twelve seconds or less. You wouldn’t believe how fast you can dismember a mole, even if you only have one fang, the other having been lost somewhere over the years, reportedly in a forest called the Dark Divide in Washington State, but that is a story for another day and a second glass.

  My thanks also to the gracious souls at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, who have allowed me to wander widely in and around what amounts to the coolest old wooden mountain lodge in America, and especially to the McPhee family of Oregon, who lent me their mountain cabin on Wy’east, experiences which surely sparked this book; it is their cabin in which Dave and his family live. And finally a particular thanks to my son Joe, who one day, when he was fifteen, picked Cameron Langford’s lovely The Winter of the Fisher off our bookshelf and read it with such pleasure, such empathy, such absorption, such amazement that there were such extraordinary beings in the world that something awoke again in me; and so let the final words in this book be gratitude to the late Cameron Langford, who was paralyzed in a car crash at age twenty-four but then threw himself into the study of the beings of his beloved northern Canadian woods and wrote his one great book before he died. Poor boy, trapped in his broken body, and dead even before his book was published—but what a spirit, what reverence and love for life, what courage to sing beautifully and humbly against the descending darkness!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the author of seventeen books of essays, fiction, poems, and nonfiction, among them the novels Mink River and The Plover. Honors for his work include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He lives in Portland, Oregon. You can sign up for email updates here.

  ALSO BY BRIAN DOYLE

  Fiction

  The Plover

  Mink River

  Cat’s Foot

  Bin Laden’s Bald Spot & Other Stories

  Nonfiction

  The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart

  T
he Grail: A year ambling and shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir wine in the whole wild world

  Essays

  A Book of Uncommon Prayer

  Children & Other Wild Animals

  The Thorny Grace of It

  Leaping

  Grace Notes

  Two Voices (with Jim Doyle)

  Credo

  Saints Passionate & Peculiar

  Poetry

  A Shimmer of Something

  Thirsty for the Joy

  Epiphanies & Elegies

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  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  MARTIN MARTEN. Copyright © 2015 by Brian Doyle. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Cover design by Steve Snider

  Cover photographs: marten © PaulReevesPhotography / iStockphoto.com; boy in woods © SSokolov / Shutterstock.com; back cover © Lerche&Johnson / Shutterstock.com

  Illustrations by Katrina Van Dusen

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