Martin Marten (9781466843691) Read Online Free PDF Page B

cars whizzing and the trucks roaring by: log trucks, construction vehicles, delivery trucks on their way to the lodge; hikers and campers, headed into the national forest; fishermen and hunters, scouting territory for when their seasons opened; tourists and vacationers in every sort of car and van and trailer; brightly clad bicyclists laboring slowly up the mountain or flying down at amazing speeds. And the plethora of smells along the highway! Oil and gasoline, burnt rubber and overheated steam—smells the kits caught nowhere else and which became instantly associated in their minds with whirring death. To them, the traffic was a species of monster, a sort of immense roaring steel snake big enough to eat the world, and they were afraid, and they cowered—even Martin and his too-bold brother, which is exactly the fear their mother had wanted them to learn and remember.
    We have not spoken much of her, this remarkable and nameless female being, but in many ways, she was a walking wonder, as mother, as teacher, as leader, as defensive mastermind, as provider of food, as brave survivor of the trapline that had caught and killed her mate. They had been racing through the low canopy along the river, carefree and excited by what we would call a blooming romance in human terms, when her mate was snared by the thinnest wire snare either of them had ever seen, and it was his own liquid speed that killed him, for he hit the snare so hard that it tightened instantly, and he struggled for only a moment before he was strangled to death. His body hung in the air between two young alder trees, all his bristling energy gone, as if he had been instantly emptied of himself, leaving behind only a bag of dense gleaming fur. She walked around him, every fear and caution aflame to its uttermost pitch, sniffing his body, confused and angry and bereft, and then she slipped back into the high canopy and vanished. Inside her were the seeds he had planted for their kits, seeds that would become embryos in the winter and squirming, tiny kits in the spring—the kits he would never see. The trapper sold the skin for eighty dollars and considered that a good price, given that it was an early winter pelt; he might have gotten a hundred dollars or more if the male had been taken later in the winter, but you took what you were given by the woods, in his view, and were grateful. With the money, he bought sixty cans of fruit and vegetables, giving the canned peaches and pears and cherries to his daughter for her pantry and the tomatoes and beans and peas to the food bank at the church in Zigzag.

 
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    THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL this year is three days earlier than usual, because of the state budget shortfall; teachers and students were officially on “furlough,” a word some students looked up in dictionaries and most on the Web and about which they had to write a short final essay. Dave wrote his on how the American word furlough had come from the Dutch word verlof , or permission; and he grinned, sitting in the back of class, at the fact that as soon as he scribbled his final sentence, he had permission to run screaming out the door of the school and sail home on his bike along the river trail. Free! An early summer! No scholastic academic scholarly formal educational duties whatsoever absolutely until cross-country tryouts for high school in August! By which time he planned to be the most amazingly prepared freshman athlete in the history of Zigzag High, home of the Lightning Bolts! So fit and trail-tested would he be that the coaches would blink in amazement as he, Dave, smoothly caught up to and passed the experienced and cocky seniors, who would stare at him in amazement as he went by like mist whipped by winter wind! And the coaches would call him over, Hey, kid! And he would jog toward them, not even breathing hard, Yes, Coach? And they would say with real surprise and maybe even a hint of awe in their voices, Hey, who …?
    And just as he was about