Martin Marten (9781466843691) (8 page)

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 their 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.

17

THE TRAPPER’S NAME WAS RICHARD,
although no one had ever once called him by that name—not his mother, not his father, not the teachers he briefly had in elementary school, not the drill instructor he had briefly had in the army, not even the Internal Revenue Service of the United States of America, which was not aware he existed and so did not call him anything at all. He had been called Dickie as a child, and to a few people he still was Dickie, Miss Moss among them; the few other people in the world who called him by name called him Dick. These latter folks were few and far between, however, for Dickie, while not quite a hermit, was awfully close to one—as close to a bona fide, no-kidding, old-style, old-school, quasi-biblical hermit in the woods as you are going to find in this digitous and electricacious day and age, said Dave’s dad.

But those few people who did know him respected him, for he was a good guy, honest in his dealings, unfailingly courteous, and silently helpful when anyone needed help. Ten times every winter or more, he helped haul cars and trucks out of snowy ditches along the highway, materializing suddenly out of blowing snow with a large gray horse named Edwin. Twice every summer, he could be found battling brush fires that got a little out of hand and threatened cabins. Once every other year, he wrangled sandbags when the Zigzag River got a little bumptious and threatened cabins. Twice that Miss Moss remembered, he had quietly risen from a dark corner of the store when a visitor was being rude or vulgar or vaguely threatening, and something about his bulk and silence and clear sense of rooted residency made the rude visitor leave without further ado. Even the time he was bringing in his furs to Miss Moss’s store and a bystander attacked him vehemently for indiscriminate slaughter of innocent animals, he lost neither his temper nor his courtesy, and Miss Moss says she will always remember his coherent and even eloquent remarks on that occasion, which were to the effect that he could not agree more that the animals who had given up their lives for his benefit were innocent of any crimes against
him
, not to mention any other human being of his acquaintance, but the cold fact of the matter is that their selective deaths provided his living, and his living provided a way for him to contribute to this community, and his labor and attentiveness to his neighbors of various species, he felt, was his way of paying taxes, and besides, if the bystander approached the matter from a slightly different perspective, perhaps she would comprehend that he was not so much a trapper as a rancher or even a sort of farmer; his work was to do his best to protect and conserve certain life-forms so that the health of their population in this place would provide him sufficient means to cull a minimal number of individuals in order to provide him with a living, by which living he could in turn protect and conserve certain life-forms.