for Jack Sheedy

“Never chase the dog when she jumps the fence,” Richard’s father always said. “Don’t get attached. They’re for work, not for friends.”

Richard rarely listened.

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When the dog escaped the enclosure that morning, Richard followed, trailing her through old growth pine, the forest growing thick farther from home. Richard loved the dog, loved her from the moment he saw her as a puppy sprawled amongst barn hay with the rest of the litter, one brown ear, one white, eyes yellower than the sun. The mother was a shepherd, a spitz, some mix of unknown ancestry. 

No one knew the breed of the father. 

Their family only kept females.

The dog slept at the foot of Richard’s bed. Each morning he would tell the pup his dreams and recount his nightmares. Some mornings he pretended the pup spoke back, comforting his worries where his father refused. Some mornings he was content with silence.

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The same morning the dog escaped, Richard’s father was hunting wolves with neighboring farmers. Too many chickens died in the night, feathers and blood still hot in the field. 

At the end, skulls and skins would be brought to town hall, a price leveled for the communal good, herds sustained, farms supposedly safe. Four dollars a skull, one dollar a cub. 

“Can’t let our meals go to other mouths,” the mayor said.

The town clerk draped the hides over Main Street fences, all those gray skins luffing in the wind, an entire pack on a single split-rail.

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The forest was quiet as Richard sank deeper. There should have been birdsong and the skitter of squirrels in the branches, but the forest was silent. Only the sound of Richard’s feet and the dog’s paws cut the air. Richard dreaded his father mistaking her for his quarry. A single second and the pull of a trigger would tear so much from Richard’s world, so he ran on, calling to her the best he could.

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A distance off, the sound of men slipped through the trees, boots tromping undergrowth, part drunk, part uncaring who might hear. They’d never learned the proper way to hunt. Richard knew this from watching the dog stalk mice in the barn. The silent approach. The necessity of surprise. They just wanted their four dollars and to leave their fences unmended, no care for the stewardship of their lands or the health of their flock.

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Richard tripped over a downed oak, falling face first into the leaf litter, blood on his tongue. Looking up, the dog sat before him, brown and white ears pulled back, a yellowed smile showing pink gums. Another mouth to his left opened between cedars, a pink throat sprawling to his right. A wolf pack a hundred thick emerged from the foliage, baring their teeth in the shade of the choking canopy. Richard looked for a way out, but they were so close, so numerous. His vision was nothing but open jaws.

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The sounds of the men grew closer. They sang, their voices out of tune, a number more fitting for night than day, syllables slurred with the whiskey Richard knew they carried. 

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The wolves didn’t lunge and the dog didn’t flee. Richard laid in the leaves, waiting for fang to meet bone. 

Some are kind, some are not, a voice came from the pack. Which are you? 

The voice swelled from all around, from the trees and the earth and the sky. But it was also close and familiar, a voice heard during early morning dreams.

Which are you? the voice repeated.

“I am kind,” Richard replied. “You know that.”

“I do,” the voice answered.

The dog nodded and turned from Richard. The wolves followed, heading in the direction of the hunters’ song, a sea of gray bleeding into the trees, lithe forms drifting into shadow.

There were only two men with his father. Three muzzleloaders between them. Richard counted a hundred wolves, a hundred sets of teeth. Who knew how much larger their number had been before the bounties, before nature was upended and gray pelts hung in the breeze.

Richard wondered if they’d ask his father the same question.

Richard knew his father couldn’t give the same answer.

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Corey Farrenkopf lives on Cape Cod and works as a librarian. His work has been published in Electric Literature, Nightmare, The Deadlands, SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. His debut novel, Living in Cemeteries, was released from JournalStone in April of 2024 and his first short story collection, Haunted Ecologies, will be published by them in February of 2025. He is the Fiction Editor for The Cape Cod Poetry Review. To learn more, follow him on twitter @CoreyFarrenkopf, Instagram @Farrenkopf451, or on the web at CoreyFarrenkopf.com