Martin Marten (9781466843691) (17 page)

But before he even finished speaking, his mom was running through the snow to the cabin.

Why don’t I drive you, Dave? said Emma Jackson Beaton. I have to drive that way anyway, and if we don’t see her on the road, you can cut back up this way along Snag Creek.

Dave was about to say no thanks, but actually this made sense, and he said okay. He slogged back to the cabin to get the pack he and his dad had prepared. He could hear his mother sobbing and his dad trying to be calm and almost getting there. He tapped on the kitchen window and caught his dad’s eye and made a gesture like hands on a steering wheel, and his dad nodded, realizing this meant Emma Jackson Beaton. Dave slogged back up to the milepost, and he and Emma started slowly downhill along the road you couldn’t hardly even see anymore unless you lived there and knew where it used to be before the world went white.

35

I SHOULD HAVE
brought Joel Palmer’s sneakers with me, thought Maria. She is standing under a cedar tree where the snow is thinner. Those are
magic
sneakers. I could have walked on top of the snow and been home by now. The cedar suddenly dropped a load of snow in front of her and she startled and cracked her elbow against the tree trunk. She reached in her pack and got the orange and ate half. Her feet were
freezing
. She was awfully tempted to eat the other candy bar, but she didn’t. I can’t stay here, she thought. I’ll freeze if I stay still.

Dad? she said. Dad?

But she couldn’t hear his voice.

Dad, should I stay here or keep going up the creek?

Far away, she heard a sharp crack; it was the sound of a branch snapping under a load of snow, but she took it as sage advice, and she stepped out from under the aegis of the cedar and set forth up the creek again. By now the snow was so deep she couldn’t see the trail at all, but luckily it wasn’t cold enough to freeze the creek, and she made her way slowly along its edge, slipping here and there but not crying even when she cracked her knees and elbows. Little kids cried when they fell down, and she was not a little kid, and that was that. She had a candy bar and half an orange and Dave’s owl feather, and the owls were watching, and soon the creek would say, hey! see,
there’s
the river! and then she would know exactly where she was, and she would be home with her feet perilously close to a roaring fire, and her mom would drape the biggest red wool blanket ever around her, and there would be soup and hot chocolate, and this would be a funny story. The whole family would tell this story, laughing harder each time. Remember that time when Maria walked home and she was barely six years old, and it snowed like crazy, but she made it? Can you believe that kid? You want to see the sneakers she wore? They’re right there on the mantelpiece next to Joel Palmer’s sneakers. Dad said they were
heroic
sneakers. He said they had carried a being of just as great courage and perseverance as old Joel Palmer, and he cleaned and shined her sneakers and put them right up there with old Joel’s sneakers, see?

*   *   *

But Martin noticed how the red jacket was slower and the light fainter. It was alright for
him
to be abroad in a snowstorm in the dark—he rather liked the snow, the darkness was his natural winter habitat, and it would have taken a snowstorm ten times worse than this to keep him in his den—but the red jacket was probably one of those animals, like rabbits, that ought to hunker down in a storm and take cover and retreat to den or burrow or hole and doze and muse until the snow stopped and day broke. The only animals out in a snowstorm at night were hungry ones big enough to capture smaller weaker ones trapped or hampered by the weather. With great respect for human animals, whom Martin knew for a fact were quite capable of killing any and all animals in the woods, this particular one in the red jacket looked relatively small and weak.

What prompted Martin to do what he now did? Again, we have no words for something—an impulse, a decision, a feeling, a sudden act—and by now we should be getting comfortable with the idea that there are more things we cannot explain with words than those we can; there are more things beyond the reach of our thousands of languages than there are those for which we have even inaccurate and reductive labels or ostensible theories. Perhaps this is why we keep inventing and reinventing languages, to try to explain ever more of the endless things that defy explanation. Perhaps this is the greatness and the foolishness of the human animal in a nutshell.

So it was that Martin sped along the canopy web above Maria and leapt off a bowing branch into the snowy twilight. And so it was that Maria stopped, startled and frightened, when a small golden brown animal landed with a plop and a puff of snow ten feet away from her. And so it was that Maria met Martin and Martin met Maria. Neither would ever know the sound that others used to indicate them, the particular sound we call a name, but neither would ever forget the moment they met, either. A moment of stunned witness, of caution, of amazement—imagine, on Maria’s part, if an animal you had never seen alive before in your whole life suddenly dropped out of the sky and stood staring at you from ten feet away. And imagine, on Martin’s part, being so dangerously close to exactly the kind of animal that had sawed the skin off his father, sold the skin for fur trimming on a coat, and chopped his father into stew-sized pieces for a dog. Shouldn’t there be fear and trepidation in the air? But there wasn’t. Each was cautious, each absorbed, each startled by such an incredible moment but immediately fascinated by what would happen next. It’s such a wild and amazing moment, actually, that we ought to just leave it for a bit and let them savor such an unbelievable thing by themselves. So there they are, staring at each other, the snow falling silently, the last light ending just as this sentence does.

*   *   *

Maria’s mom knew that she should stay in the cabin in case Maria suddenly staggered out of the snow onto the porch, but she could not help making little forays out into the storm—first to the tiny meadow on a tiny bluff fifty feet up the river where Maria had taken her first steps in this world, and then to the huge red cedar tree that might be a thousand years old, which was one of Maria’s favorite living creatures. She thought about slogging back out toward the highway to the big rock that looks like a hawk, but she knew Dave would look there. Dave would also look in at Miss Moss’s store. He and Emma Jackson Beaton would have four eyes along the highway. Traffic would be slow to nil because of the storm, so that was one less worry. But Maria would not have come along the highway. She would have come through the woods. She should have come up along the creek and then along the river. That was the best way from school to the cabin, and Maria would know. But her husband would search that way thoroughly. And now other people would help. Other people would be out looking as soon as they heard. People were like that. You wouldn’t stay inside if you knew there was a child lost outside. Even people who couldn’t go outside would camp out at their windows and keep their eyes peeled. She called three friends and told them, and they called three more each. She called Miss Moss, and Miss Moss said there was hot fish chowder on, and in about eight minutes Maria would walk in the door, and Miss Moss would bundle her up by the fire and spoon so much hot fish chowder down her throat that she would have gills and scales for weeks. Miss Moss said she would tell Mr. Douglas the trapper, and he knew the woods better than anyone, and if she didn’t walk in the door in eight minutes, Mr. Douglas would find her in nine. Maria’s mom made a fire, and then she made soup, and then she made Maria’s bed, and then she stepped out on the porch and cried so hard she hurt her back.

36

YOU WATCH THAT SIDE,
and I’ll watch this side, said Emma Jackson Beaton. What color was her jacket?

Probably red, said Dave. Probably.

They’ll find her, Dave.

Okay.

She’s smart. She’ll know what to do.

Okay.

Can’t believe it’s snowing like this in September.

Yes.

How’s school?

Good.

You’re running? You made the team?

Yes.

You want me to stop asking questions?

No.

Okay.

And they inched along silently. It was eerily quiet—no other cars, no trucks, no birds, no faraway sounds of saws or engines, no wind filtering through the trees. Emma was thinking of Dave’s mom and the morning waitress and the fuel filter and her useless ratty shredded awful stupid hateful windshield wipers and her oldest brother, who just discovered he had a savage cancer. Dave is thinking of Maria’s face when she is absorbed and thrilled by her homework. Emma is thinking that if
you
were a kid and it started snowing like crazy, wouldn’t you head for the highway where you knew there would somehow be people rather than try to hurry home through the woods? Dave is thinking that Maria of course would have mapped out her adventure and almost certainly would have made a copy for her personal private archive, which was their old toy chest upstairs. Emma thinks she sees a red jacket in the forest fringe, but it is a scrap of orange traffic cone. Dave sees Mr. Douglas looming out of the storm atop old Edwin, and he says could you let me out here, Emma? She slides the car to a halt, and Dave gets out, and she says, Dave, they’ll find her for sure. I absolutely know that for an absolute fact, and he says thanks, Emma, thanks for looking, and she slides away slowly, only one windshield wiper even making a token effort at clearing away the snow.

*   *   *

Martin turned and bounded a few feet away through the snow and stopped to look back. Maria stood transfixed. Was this a marten? Was this the marten Dave saw in the beech tree? What did it want? Was it dangerous? Martin bounded back once to Maria and then back away again. She took a step forward. He bounded away again. She took a step forward. He leapt onto a tree trunk and turned to look at her. She took one step back. He leapt down again, this time vanishing into a snowdrift for an instant. She took a step forward to see where he had gone, and he leapt onto the tree trunk again. She stepped back. He leapt down on the other side of the tree and turned to look at her. She walked around the tree. There was a space of about eight feet between them that they both felt comfortable with, and for the next minute Martin bounded ahead through the snow and Maria followed. She noticed that his tail left a print but his feet sinking beneath the surface of the dry snow did not. She noticed that he was leading her slightly away from the creek, which worried her, but then he leapt onto the lowest branch of an enormous cedar tree and stared at her. For a moment she stood silently and stared back, and then her feet hurt so suddenly that she wanted to cry but didn’t. Martin skittered down to the base of the trunk and then back up again to the low branch, all in two seconds, and she noticed a long crack in the trunk. When she walked around the base, she saw that the whole bottom of the trunk was hollow and dry; some combination of the massive overhanging branches, a ridge or brow of bark just above the doorway, and the angle of the entrance had protected the hollow not only from snow but apparently from rain and dew, for the space was dry as bone, though ribbed by spiderwebs and musty with wood rot and what looked like red sawdust. It was also remarkably roomy, easily five feet by six, with space enough for Maria to almost stand up comfortably, and she began to wonder if she had been led here on purpose. But when she backed out of the hollow to look for the marten, it had vanished. The snow was still falling heavily. Maria stood for a moment and watched the fat flakes descend silently. The creek was perhaps twenty yards away; she could hear it faintly, perhaps a tiny bit louder than usual. She undid her backpack and found the owl feather and poked it into the trunk in such a way that someone who walked past would notice it, and then she crawled inside the hollow and took off her socks and sneakers and rubbed her feet for a long time. For a while her feet were stinging and icy, but after a while they warmed up and she made a mound of sawdust over them and propped her socks and sneakers up to dry. She ate the other half of the orange and one bite of the candy bar and talked to her mom and dad and Dave for a while and then wrapped herself tightly in her jacket and heaped more sawdust on any exposed Marianess, and then she fell asleep.

Along about midnight, a bobcat emerged from the white whirl and was about to poke into the hollow to see if there were mice or bats to eat, but a sudden furious attack by some animal in the low branches sent him retreating hurriedly back into the storm. At about four in the morning the snow stopped and when dawn finally inched around the mountain from the east side at about seven in the morning, you never saw such clear placid innocent blue skies in your whole life. You wouldn’t believe that a crisp clean beaming summer sky like that had just delivered such a whopper of a storm, but it had.

*   *   *

Maria’s mom finally sat down in front of the fireplace and tried to pray. She wasn’t much for prayers and religions and churches and all that theater and ritual and pomp and that sort of thing, but she was bone dry and at the bottom of her hope and at the top of her fear, and finally in complete and total desperation, she tried to pray. First she tried to remember the shapes of the prayers she had heard as a child, but as soon as they came back to her memory she knew them to be empty and lifeless, mere shells and jackets. Then she tried to aim her thoughts at some sort of divine being, but the very idea of the force that sparked the universe to life looking anything like a human being at all let alone a shaggy grandfatherly guy was so silly as to be cruel. Then she remembered her grandmother telling her once that the urge to pray
was
the prayer, so she spoke aloud to the firelight and the sifting snow and the uncountable beings on this the ancient holy mountain and asked that they bend their beneficent dreams toward her daughter, that she be safe and warm, that she be huddled and protected, that she soon be found and carried home, that she be unbroken and unafraid, that she be wrapped sooner than soon in the arms of her mother from whom she had come, smiling even at birth, mere moments ago in the larger scheme of things. In this way did Maria’s mother pray all night long by the fire until dawn.