Martin Marten (9781466843691) by Brian Doyle Read Free Book Online Page B

clan and tribal lines, and the rare battles between and among them were all occasioned by flouting of the lines; and every bear knew the ancient stories of arrogant young muscled bears who went deep into a forbidden territory and did not return, their bones scattered across the mountainside for all to see. And there were darker old stories too of wars between bears and cougars, for example, an enmity nearly as old as the mountain itself, or between bears and wolverines, despite the eerie similarity of their furious strengths, their capacities for a sort of grim rage few other animals knew or desired. Indeed, among the marten and the other members of the mustelid clan, there was at most a cold respect for the biggest of their tribe and no affection whatsoever. While the fisher, for example, could lose its temper when its kits were threatened or attacked, it did not and would not muster the savage, utter destruction of a bear or wolverine in full and uncontrolled rampage; the fisher preferred a sudden, swift violence and then a swifter disappearance so that there were hunting dogs, for example, who leapt after a hissing fisher and never knew the manner or incredible rapidity of the blow that caused their death, a terribly fast slicing of the jugular and instant retreat so that the dog found itself suddenly gushing out its life in the snow, a great weariness arriving like a tide.
    But the marten, like the otter, fought rarely if at all, seeing no need for it except to assert territory or fend off danger to its kits, and the tools of battle rusted all the more because the marten was graced and given such astounding physical tools. It was the fastest and surest of all animals in trees and canopies, able and thrilled to rocket through the branches faster and more accurately than even the wood hawks who could arrow like small feathered jets through thickets, spinning and turning as necessary with an exquisite timing no human athlete could even imagine. And they were a muscular race, the marten—for all that they weighed less than ten pounds; they had steel chests and a boundless endurance that together spelled doom for all but the luckiest headlong squirrel or sprinting rabbit. Claws of razor wire, teeth like tiny daggers, the ability to hear a snapped twig from a thousand feet away, vision equally sharp day or night, and a coat of the thickest warmest glossiest waterproof fur, it was as if Time, who designs all beings and whittles them to their absolute essence, had decided to build the most perfect small mammalian hunting machine, mixing a bit of bear and lynx and hawk together into a small dose of cheerful, efficient predation, giving it the wildest wilderness for home and making its enemies few, relentless though they be—the hawk and eagle to pluck up wriggling kits, the coyote and lynx and fox to cull the old and slow adults, and most of all man, who did not even eat those he killed but stole their skins to make coats for himself, because he did not have his own fur or enough hair to keep him warm against the wind.
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    It was a brilliant summer. Day after day, the mist inherent on a mountain with glaciers and a permanent snowpack burned off by noon, the afternoons stretched as long and languid as napping cougars. The rivers and creeks burled along furiously right through the summer, when usually they slowed by August, as the last of the melt finished leaving the peak on its way to the ocean. The rains from the west that usually dropped their last loads on the mountain in June and July before petering out, exhausted, in the high sage desert beyond were scattered and confused this year and lost their way and ended up drenching British Columbia to the moist spluttering puzzlement of the British Columbians. The woods stayed wet enough from winter to fend off the late-summer fires that sometimes raged after lightning strikes, and the ferocious thunderstorms that sometimes roared along the mountain’s shoulders were