Martin Marten (9781466843691) (21 page)

42

MARIA AND HER PET FINCH
had taken a while to get to know each other, but as spring stretched and yawned and warmed, a certain affection and respect finally cohered, and by May they were the best of friends, attentive and interested in each other’s adventures, each wishing genuine joy and substantive work for the other. The finch listened carefully as Maria explained her homework and various projects for school (among them videotaped interviews with her family, a series of paintings of crawdads, and a sculpture of a falcon made from toothbrush bristles), and Maria listened carefully as the finch tried to teach her the three basic bars of music on which finch languages are based; no matter what kind of finch you are, you can piece out what another kind of finch is singing if you know the basic building blocks. It is interesting to note, as Maria discovered many years later, that the finches, which populate most of the world and have been developing in many different environments for many thousands of years, can, if placed together in the same environment, communicate in rough but understandable terms. How this could be so, and how finch languages might have a common root or even a single masterful original singer, is a mystery that the finches as a genus have not seen fit to share with human animals, yet.

Maria’s finch was, according to the bird books, a Cassin’s finch, a mountain bird, but he, the finch, was startled and not especially pleased to be called Cassin’s finch, as he, the finch, had no knowledge of Mr. Cassin, and no particular interest in Mr. Cassin, either, all due respect. Maria explained to him, the finch, that Mr. Cassin was a man in Pennsylvania who was interested in Western birds and drew and painted them in books, for which service to the study of birds his name was attached to all sorts of birds and even an insect that spent seventeen years underground before emerging to sing for one summer. But the finch remained unconvinced that even such admirable service to basic familiarity with other animals quite deserved your name being placed on other animals in a possessive sense. Because Maria paid close attention to and had come to great respect for the finch, for example, should he, the finch, then be called Maria’s finch? Conversely, if he, the finch, had come to similar respect and attentive reverence for Maria, should she, Maria, be called the finch’s Maria? The whole question of where identification, which is generally a harmless and beneficial step toward understanding, slides infinitesimally into possessiveness, which is a harmful and damaging step toward prison, is a pressing question, they decided, and not one to be easily or immediately solved. It’s more of a question to be asked one Cassin at a time, as Maria said to Dave drowsily one night in the bear’s den.

*   *   *

That same night, the night that Dave told Maria he was sorry for being so grumpy lately but he just was, for reasons he couldn’t figure out, it was like he had the flu in his soul or something, Martin came as close to death as he would come in his first few years. It happened in this way. The night was moonish and bright. The snow was nearly gone even in the deepest shadowed places in the woods and wholly gone in meadows and clearings. Martin was exploring an opening in the woods where a timber company had clear-cut in a hurry, leaving slash piles in which lots of small meat lived. The piles, some of them twenty feet tall, were filled with mice and wood rats and chipmunks and ground squirrels, and Martin patrolled the cut as a rancher managed his herds, culling here and there.

Something about the weather, perhaps, made Martin just a tad careless, a touch off his usual meticulous awareness of danger; it was a warm evening after a bright sunny redolent day, and he’d slept deeply until the afternoon and then spent an hour trying to catch fish in a creek, to no avail, although he remained convinced that he could and would learn to do this well. He had watched raccoons in the water, and mink and otters, and while he could not and would never swim, he could and would, he thought, learn how to trap fish in pools and either snatch them with his teeth or snag them with his claws or even bat them up onto the bank, out of their fitted element. Perhaps he was musing about just such matters as he walked across the moonlit clearing toward the first of the slash piles, because he did not hear or sense the owl who swept in behind him, low and silent, and sank its tremendous talons into his back on either side of his spine.

*   *   *

What saved Martin’s life? If anything, it was his instant reflexes; as the owl’s razor-sharp talons touched him, he instinctively leapt to the side, and it was perhaps this infinitesimal shift that kept the owl from getting her usual firm and fatal grip. A great horned owl attacks silently, from above or behind, and sinks its enormous talons into its prey, four talons on each foot, closing two on two like dual locks. With a small animal, like a vole, the impact and shock of the attack is often enough to cause death; with a larger animal, like a rabbit, the owl’s talons will sometimes sever the spinal cord on impact, or the owl will do so with her blade of a beak as soon as she has flown up to a safe perch with her catch. But Martin was not small; he was himself a ferocious predator, and his next instinct, after trying to dash aside, was to fight back furiously.

The owl had not expected this. She was six years old, in the fullness of her physical prime, experienced, hungry, and a mother with two chicks gibbering in her nest; taking a young marten was fully in the realm of the possible, and Martin was not at all the first marten she had killed and shredded. He was, however, the first to contort himself in such a way that his back claws raked at her tail, which staggered her flight. This was again an infinitesimal thing, a little hitch in the beat of her wings, but it was enough to bring the owl back down toward the ground; her grip on Martin was already not as firm as she would like, and the interruption in her wing beat caused her to sink back to earth.

But earth was Martin’s domain, and the instant he felt his feet touch ground, he twisted savagely, and he and the owl crashed in a heap. The owl’s talons were planted in Martin’s back, but her grip was not sure, and Martin, enraged by the terrible pain in his shoulders, now had the footing he needed to counterattack. While the owl was much bigger, with a wingspan of almost five feet, she and Martin both weighed about two pounds, and Martin was fighting for his life, whereas the owl was both out of her element and rattled. Martin twisted again, faster than the eye could see, and one set of the owl’s talons were dragged out of his back. The owl tried to leap up and away from the chaos, but she was still hooked into Martin with the other set of talons, and his weight caused her to crash again; but in the instant of open space that her flight had created, Martin slashed at her chest and tore a hole in it. The owl, furious and desperate, hammered him with her wings, but as she did so her other talons lost their remaining grip, and an instant later Martin’s teeth were grinding inexorably through the dense mat of feathers at her neck. She raked his belly with her talons, she battered him terribly with her wings, but seconds later she was dead.

Martin bled from his back. He bled from his belly. He bled from a slash on his head where her beak had cut him to the bone of his skull. He was enraged and exhausted and shocked and shaking and furious. The moon was brighter than ever. The clearing was absolutely silent; every single denizen of the slash piles and the freighted air and the burrows below knew of the battle and huddled waiting for the coast to clear. Martin knew dimly that he needed shelter, needed to clean his wounds, needed to go to ground for a while, for he also knew he was now sentenced to a week of great pain and total inactivity, a week when he would be weak and utterly vulnerable; but the tide of rage rose in him again as he stared at the owl. Grunting with pain, he tore open her chest and ate his fill. When he could eat no more, he limped inside the nearest slash pile and curled up to sleep. He was as weary as he had ever been, but before he closed his eyes he licked clean every wound he could reach, tasting the owl’s blood as well as his own; and then he slept.

43

IT TURNED OUT
that the day Mr. Shapiro the teacher hurt his back shoveling snow was the last day he was an elementary school teacher, for something in his back had broken and didn’t heal, and he had to take leave from teaching, and then he had a small surgery, which didn’t work, and then he had a whopping surgery, which worked some but not much, and by then he had used up all the vacation and disability days he could possibly take from the school district, and he had to accept a severance package that would extend his medical insurance while allowing the district to hire another able-bodied and energetic teacher. By the first days of spring, however, he had adjusted enough to what he called his new friend Tom Pain to sign up as a substitute teacher at the high school level, which is how, in late March, Mr. Shapiro and Dave and Moon found themselves back in a classroom together.

Mr. Shapiro was pleased to see the boys; Dave had been one of his favorite students ever, and Moon had always seemed like a boy who would blossom later in life, probably not in high school but some years later. Moon seemed to be the sort of student who would muddle through high school, work a year or two, tiptoe into community college, wake up amazingly both intellectually and ambitiously, and then soar through a university, and then who knows? Moon would probably end up being governor or god help us all a teacher who would face kids just like himself, if the universe had a sense of humor.

And the Moon that Mr. Shapiro met again in freshman history was the same Moon as before, although a startling four inches taller and, astonishingly, a basketball player; he was a friendly boy with a quick wit and an admirable kindness to others, if not a particularly diligent or intellectually curious student. Whereas High School Dave was a different Dave altogether than Grade School Dave, it seemed to Mr. Shapiro. The younger Dave was just the sort of student you always envisioned having as a teacher—eager, curious, creative, willing to take suggestions and directions seriously and then run with them. However, the New Dave, as Mr. Shapiro thought of him, was a surly boy who grunted his answers to questions, pointedly refused to participate in class, did only the minimum amount of work required to earn a B, and was consistently last to arrive as class started and first out the door when it ended.

Mr. Shapiro asked the other teachers about the New Dave and was met with a general accounting of a boy who had been by all accounts friendly, curious, hardworking, personable, and engaging from the minute he walked into the school in September until approximately the last day of winter, after which—as the Spanish teacher Ms. Ishimira expressed it—an evil vernal demon occupied the boy formerly known as Dave, creating a lazy, sneering, untrustworthy, rude, vulgar, grumpy, disgruntled, sarcastic, supercilious, crude, offensive, snide young man whom no student wanted to be with, no teacher wanted to teach, and no one except perhaps Jesus or Nelson Mandela could reach, which was a shame, because the Old Dave was a fascinating boy whose thirsty curiosity was often the best part of my day, she said, and then she burst into tears.

I have a cold, she explained, which makes my eyes water profusely, and Mr. Shapiro said he understood perfectly, as he was subject to the same phenomenon, and he found that blueberry tea was an excellent panacea.

*   *   *

One thing you learn as a teacher is never to call out a student in front of the other students; a direct attack sends students diving for cover behind their masks and walls and shields, and those defenses are already so formidable that students sometimes trap themselves behind their walls and cannot easily scale them, and so imprison themselves for years at a time. Nor does a private conversation always pay dividends; to be asked to stay after class, or to be invited to a formal discussion after school, usually prompts a furious period of wall construction, which not even the most brilliant or empathetic teacher can breach. So it was that Mr. Shapiro bided his time and waited for the right moment. He had the time—his substitute assignment, filling in for a maternity leave, was for the rest of the academic year, which did not end until June—and he had been a teacher long enough to learn a preternatural patience, a skill he sometimes thought the most important of all in his beloved profession. In a lot of ways, as he and Mr. Douglas had once discussed, teaching was like hunting: both were disciplines in which preparation and patience were most of the work, and moments of intense action were actually quite rare, and often all your preparation and patience went for naught, anyway, and the quarry slipped away untouched.

But Mr. Shapiro’s moment with Dave did come, finally—a last-period class on a day of incredible rain, epic rain, pelting rain, ferocious rain, inarguable rain, silvery sheets and swells of rain, a day so thoroughly and decidedly and roaringly wet that all after-school practices were canceled, even for the track team, which was inured to bad weather. The official announcement had just come over the sputtering ancient public-address system, and as his class filtered out, Mr. Shapiro asked Dave to stay behind a moment.

Dave sat down, annoyed.

What?

Dave, we need to talk.

I haven’t done anything wrong.

And no one said you did. I just wanted to talk.

What about?

Dave, is something wrong at home?

No.

Health problems in the family? Too many hours working at Miss Moss’s?

No.

You don’t … seem like yourself lately.

I’m fine.

Are you?

I just said I was.

Pause.

Well, Dave, said Mr. Shapiro, this is sort of exactly what I wanted to talk about. Forgive me for being blunt, but you are a lot ruder than you used to be, and it’s no fun. You do your work, your grades are not a problem, but you’re incredibly rude. Why?

No reason, said Dave.

That’s not an answer.

Mr. Shapiro, if I am doing my work and my grades are fine, what business is it of yours?