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

LENGTHENED, Martin and his sister and their mother spent less time together; this was usual and natural and normal, the way of their species for millions of years, but Martin and his sister felt their mother’s attention waning, one bright grain less per day, with some deep sense of … what? Sadness, regret, loss, nostalgia? We don’t have good words yet for what animals feel; we hardly have more than wholly inadequate labels for our own tumultuous and complex emotions and senses. It’s wrong to say that animals do not feel what we feel; indeed, they may feel far more than we do and in far different emotional shades. Given that their senses are often a hundred times more perceptive than ours, could not their emotional equipment be similarly vast?
    Suffice it to say that Martin and his sister felt their mother drawing ever so gently away from them as the days lengthened toward solstice and shrank afterwards. They went their own ways from the new den, exploring different territories and coursing different landscapes, and they came together again only to sleep. Now that Martin and his sister were able enough hunters in their own right to survive and even to flourish, their mother ceased to bring them food and even ceased mostly to share it, although occasionally some deep chord of memory, perhaps, led her to bring home a vole to share and, once, a brush rabbit.
    That was a day for the annals, if martens chronicled their doings. The last salmonberries and the first huckleberries filled the forest; grasshoppers and crickets leapt in the clearings like energetic appetizers; a new crow too young to fly had fallen near the burrow and made a lovely lunch; Martin had discovered and swallowed the contents of a swallow’s nest artfully hidden under the eve of a woodshed near Miss Moss’s store; and to cap it all off with fresh redolent rabbit, without the slightest effort expended in procuring it … well, of such repasts many a tale has been told among men and women and children—and perhaps among the other species, if we only could read their chronicles and annals. And to those who say animals have no chronicles and annals, no literature and sagas, no common memories and master storytellers, I say, are you sure? How would you know? Just because you have never seen them, they do not exist? Are you sure about that? Don’t be. Whatever you are most inarguably sure about, as Miss Moss says, don’t be.
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    Martin had his first fight in the opening days of July. This was with a male marten almost exactly his age and size. The battle was brief and savage. The cause of conflict was most of the left rear leg of a fawn that had been executed and dismantled by a cougar. The cougar had eaten most of the fawn but, in dragging the remains to a cache, lost some leg. The battle was short and intense and a great surprise to both combatants. The other marten had discovered the leg first, but there are no rules of possession and ownership and property and discovery that are inviolate except by adamant defense, and Martin was very hungry. He snatched a shred of the leg and was attacked, and he responded with a surge of swift violence so shocking to him—let alone his opponent—that when the battle was over, Martin found himself shaking with surprise and rage. You would have to call the battle a draw, if you were scoring the battle as regards injuries incurred and inflicted and rewards gained or retained. Both marten lugged shreds of meat away, and both were bruised and startled, and both sustained shoulder wounds that bled briefly and then were sore for days. Curiously, this was the first fight ever for the other marten, as well. We will not have time to delve into his life and story any longer than the end of this paragraph—and in a real sense, that’s a shame, because this other marten has had a most interesting life to date, surviving somehow on his own after his mother was killed by a bobcat and his father was caught in a