Free Martin Marten (9781466843691) by Brian Doyle Page B

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.

 
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    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.
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    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