Martin Marten (9781466843691) Read Online Free PDF

facilities somehow. Also, he suspected that the rabbit would reek by the time the bin was ready to be emptied, and this made him feel even lower; so he bought a small bag of the fig cookies that Maria loved and everyone else hated. Miss Moss, handing him his change, stared at him over the edge of her spectacles for a moment but said nothing, and he rode home feeling small.

 
    6
    MARTEN ARE GENERALLY MORE ACTIVE by night than day, but summer, with its long days and lovely weather, was not only an attractive time to be out and about but provided a veritable grocery store of savory opportunities for eating, and Martin and his brothers and sister had the most delicious education during June and July. They tried to eat everything they could catch and anything stationary that smelled good. This led to some delicious adventures, like catching and eating moles, shrews, mice, voles, robins, jays, thrushes, towhees, warblers, woodpeckers of various sizes, snakes, and every sort of egg; but it also led to painful misadventures, like bees, wasps, hornets, skunk, porcupine, and what seemed like a house cat but which turned out to be a bobcat, which is a whole different order of cat than a house cat, and which slashed and tore at Martin and his oldest brother until their mother entered the fray in such a fury that even the bobcat, fully a match for an adult marten, quailed before such maternal rage. Martin was nicked and sliced in several places, the worst a cut on his shoulder so serious that his skin flapped open, but his brother, face-first into trouble as usual, was hurt so badly that Martin and his mother had to haul him back up to the den, where it took him days to recover.
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    As summer went along, the kits’ education continued, and their various characters and personalities became more pronounced. The oldest brother, now nearly as big as Martin, continued to be either incredibly brave or astonishingly foolish, which are sometimes the same thing. The second brother, graced with preternatural patience, learned to hunt on his own, but only prey that did not flee and entail pursuit; he could catch mice and voles by waiting calmly along their avenues and byways, but he could not muster the energy to dash after squirrels, for example, like the others. This second kit was intelligent, certainly—not for him the constant stings his oldest brother endured, snapping after bees and wasps, the oldest brother never seeming to see the lurid stripes on wasps as flags of danger—but curiously weary, as if his reserves of energy, no matter how much he ate, were easily depleted by the briefest burst and flurry of activity.
    Martin’s sister, however, changed the most that summer, from the tiniest of the kits to the deftest; it was she alone who could decapitate an egg with the daintiest of blows, losing not a drop of the elixir within, and she who one day followed a young weasel into its burrow and killed and removed it so quickly that the furious mother weasel could do nothing but stare in a towering rage as her own kit was dismembered and eaten in a tree far above the burrow. Martin’s sister also, like Martin, turned an interesting color that summer—if Martin was a dark golden bronze, she was such a deep glowing brown that she sometimes appeared to be black in certain lights. She did not grow large, but she grew muscled and sleek by the end of July; she and her second brother were by far the quietest of the four young marten—the brother seemingly from lassitude, but on her part almost a studied silence, as if sounds were dangerous and should be used only in the direst emergencies and situations.
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    And the kits learned about the most dangerous other beings on the mountain—bears, cougars, bobcats, foxes, dogs, coyotes, and most of all, people and their machines. Three times their mother brought them to within a hundred yards of the highway, huddled safely high in a towering fir, and made them watch the