Free Martin Marten (9781466843691) by Brian Doyle

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