In all of the versions of this story there are dogs. The dogs roam in a pack – fifty, a hundred maybe – wild and unmanageable. The wooded area where the dogs roam is thick with brambles and nobody can get close enough to count. Nobody tries, either. Most of the dogs are big and rough but some are smaller and still rough. They have teeth like shrapnel and tiger eyes. People say the dogs killed an animal control officer once.
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The dogs hunt everything – deer, rabbits, fish, everything. They’d eat the birds if they could catch them and boy do they want to. You can hear them sometimes, yowling at the birds, curled on their haunches, daring the birds to swoop low. Whenever you can hear the dogs you know they’re too close.
The dogs are so ravenous that they’ve denatured the wooded area. Dogs and birds, that’s all there are. When the birds are raucous it’s because the dogs are elsewhere. When the dogs are near, there are no sounds until they find something and commence their bloody clamoring. The river is grassy and befouled. The deer trails and dams are gone. Once the dogs found a foxhole and dug it down into a trench until they caught and ate the poor fox family. The brambles grow high and heavy because the dogs don’t care about thorns.
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People were supposed to keep an eye on a wizened old woman in the town, the mother of the musician, who could no longer remember things like where she lived or who she was or who she had once been – a singer of some reputation – but the people didn’t think that this duty extended into the evening because they expected that in the evening the old woman was the musician’s problem. Everyone has their own problems in the evenings. One night the musician was called away to perform an emergency sonata for a rich family whose children he tutored and while he was gone the old woman left the house. Some people thought she went looking for the musician but that seemed like both an unlikely and a cruel supposition. Whatever the reason, she wound up at the edge of the woods. The musician was on the road home when he heard the baying. Everyone else heard it too.
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People felt it was too dangerous to enter the woods to recover whatever there was left to recover, and in truth there was usually not much to recover anyway. These dogs ate hair and bone and clothes. They ate hearts and eyes. They licked the brambles clean – their tongues felt nothing – and they ate even the dirt if it was flecked with blood.
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The musician went crazy with guilt even though everyone said it was not his fault. People whispered that, as terrible a fate as it was, the old woman might not have fully appreciated it while it was happening. Given the state she was in. She might not have been afraid. They did not, of course, say this to the musician even though they thought it might be a comfort. Of a sort.
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A week after the old woman vanished the musician waited until evening and then took his cello out into the brambles. He was determined to play a dirge for his mother, to honor her memory, and if he wound up suffering the same fate as her well at least he would no longer feel guilty. He found a clearing where the dogs must have wrestled and scuffed but they weren’t there then so the musician sat on a fallen log and played his cello. He had chosen a lovely piece that he had used to play for the old woman, a piece that seemed to connect with her and, as you see sometimes with the ancient and demented, bring her back to herself.
At first, the birds were noisy in the trees but soon they fell silent, which, the musician knew, meant the dogs were close.
The musician was afraid but continued to play. During the pauses, when his bow was pulled back and preparing to slide against the strings, he could hear twigs cracking in the undergrowth. He could feel, rather than hear, the low registers of the dog throats, the huffing of dog snouts in the night air. He had brought a lantern and when his piece was done he looked up and saw dozens of eyes in a semi-circle around him, glowing in the dark. He lowered his bow and thought of his mother.
The dogs pounced but rather than attack the musician they attacked the cello. One large brown shadow leapt through the air and snatched the bow from the musician’s hand. Two others, one black and one roan, snapped at the strings. The musician stood up quickly. He lifted the cello by the neck and swung it at the dogs. It felt like a ridiculous gesture as it was well past time for caring about such things but the musician did it anyway. Something about putting up a fight seemed compelling. Perhaps it would pass the time until he was himself dead.
But there was no fight to put up. The cello broke at the point where the neck met the belly and the belly flew off into the clearing. The dogs set upon it like sharks on a seal, their snarls deep in their chests. Teeth tore at the hollow wood and claws scraped over the jagged neck. Smaller dogs dragged cello strings off into the woods and stretched them like ligaments. A thick-shouldered monster swallowed the bridge whole.
The musician watched the spectacle with horror.
When the dogs had eaten the entire belly of the cello they turned back to the musician. During the delay he had become less sanguine about his fate. He had honored his mother and he did not want to hear his bones snap. He was still holding the neck of the cello and now he threw it at the dogs and turned to run. He knew he couldn’t outrun the dogs but what else was there to do?
The dogs didn’t pursue him. They set upon what was left of the cello and ignored the fleeing musician completely and he was able to run all the way home.
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The next morning, the villagers found the musician on his porch, shoes caked with mud and a vacant look in his eyes. He could not tell them anything and they did not persist in asking – recognizing as they did that he’d had a heck of a week already – but they did note that his cello was gone. The cello was the musician’s primary instrument, though not his only one. It was what he used to make his money. What would he do now? He had other instruments hanging around – a violin and some woodwinds, some baroque horns stashed in corners like umbrellas. Perhaps he could offer horn lessons?
A fellow from the village left some money and a note – “I have four children who need horn lessons, preferably here.”
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But the musician did not want to offer horn lessons. While he was glad to be alive he was not terribly interested in socializing. On the evening after the villagers discovered him, he took one of his horns through the fields to the edge of the woods. It was a French horn, curled in upon itself like a rune, and he had not played it in some time. He held it by the mouthpiece and blew a long, mournful note, then lofted it over the brambles, heard it tumble emptily into a log. From where he stood he could see the thing – the valves and tuning slides, the moon-limned bell – come to rest on the sodden grass. A beautiful instrument. The brambles rustled, dog teeth flashed in the dark and the French horn did not have long to contemplate its fate.
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It went on like that for a week, each night the musician marching to the edge of the woods to throw in one of his instruments. The trumpet followed the French horn, then the oboe, then a cymbal winged like a saucer. Drumsticks and a snare. A cowbell. The dogs devoured them all. By the third night they began waiting for the musician just within the tree-line. They were silent but he could smell them, a musky smell of need and agitation. He would play each instrument once – a short rap on the snare, a breath or two on the winds. Then he would toss and they would pounce.
The musician realized sometime on that third night that he was no longer worried about the dogs coming after him. He felt confident that they would just sit and wait. He didn’t know why. They were right there – there was nothing separating them except the landscape’s shift from forest to field, the veneer of civility. He couldn’t think of a scientific basis that would confine them to the brambles. Perhaps they observed the niceties. Or perhaps they just preferred it in there.
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Eventually, the other villagers saw what the musician was doing and, after some confusion, began to accompany him. One night the man who’d said his four children needed horn lessons came along with a guitar. When he sensed the dogs, low in the heath, he began to panic.
“Play something,” said the musician, calmly, and the man did, not well, although with such an audience who could blame him?
“Sorry,” said the man. “Out of practice.”
His eyes shone slightly.
“I always meant to learn,” he said.
The musician took the guitar from the man and patted him on the shoulder. Then he stepped back and swung the guitar by the neck, letting go when its arc would take it up and over the brambles. The dogs rose to the flying instrument like wolves to a shadow of the moon, leaping and snapping and tumbling with such ferocity that the thing was devoured almost before it hit the ground. Then they were gone.
The man’s shiny eyes widened.
“I know,” said the musician.
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It went on this way until the village was nearly bereft of instruments. Children cried and cried harder still when their parents couldn’t quite explain what was happening or why.
Why must we feed our instruments to the dogs? they asked.
Shush, said parents. You don’t play them anyway.
In truth the parents themselves weren’t sure. They wondered if they were learning something about the dogs or not.
A man brought a trombone.
An older lady wheeled out a harp.
The rich family whose children the musician tutored brought their cellos. The dogs tore them loudly apart. Remarkable, thought the musician, they’ve never sounded better.
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Finally, the only instrument left in the village was the musician’s backup violin. He’d ceased playing violin as a child, moving on to the cello, but his mother had insisted that he keep the small bow around. It would be a sin to give it away, she’d said. All those years of practicing.
The musician brought the violin to the edge of the woods. It was dark and he was alone and the shadows in the trees seemed to breathe. The hairs on his neck stood on end. He brought the violin to his shoulder and tucked it under his chin. The bow felt light in his right hand as the fingers of his left scuttled across the frets. He played a short piece, and then a longer one. The night air was damp and heavy and it muffled the sound but he was surprised how much came back to him, and how forcefully, and how pleased he was with the result. If he’d been a student of his, he’d give himself a word of measured praise.
When he was done, he lowered the bow and looked out into the woods. The chuffs in the low registers, the eager haunches loading. He placed the violin back into its case, slid the bow into its velvet sleeve, and closed the lid. The latches snapped shut in the darkness.
The musician took hold of the handle of the violin case and lifted it. There was limited light available and in it he could see small pinpricks, dozens of them, flicker within the hedges. Rather than tossing the violin into the dark maws of the forest, however, the musician turned on his heels and began to walk home. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it had something to do with the finality of things, the last of his instruments, the last piece the village could play.
Snarls rose from the woods. Paws encroached. Briars dug into fur.
No, he said, without turning around.
He knew he was breaking the rules, whatever they were. He waited for the pack to descend upon him.
A crash and a bark. A leap and another. The snap and clack of jaws. The musician stopped. There was no point in running.
The brambles behind him convulsed with violence. Teeth broke on teeth. Shadows flew at one another. It wasn’t dust but something rose from the woods, a haze of blood and fur, madness, growls that turned into yelps. Where there had been rows of blackberry thorns there was now a tumbling ball of hunger, a ball rolling around and around on itself.
The musician waited and tried not to panic. He felt sure the ball would roll out onto him, that he would meet, finally, the fate he had been tempting for a month.
But he did not. The snarls and yelps grew and grew and then began to quiet and the pack disintegrated into itself – cowards fled, the wounded dragged themselves off to the sides, black blood dripped from pierced dog throats, dog lungs labored and stilled. The musician could hear it all, the terrible sounds and their terrible endings.
The musician willed himself to walk toward the village, toward home. When he had put some distance between himself and the woods, he glanced back and saw one of the larger dogs, a muscular cur, dragging itself behind him. The dog was blue in the moonlight, missing both an ear and its tail; its right back tibia protruded from the skin of its forelock. The musician slowed his pace and allowed the dog to close the distance until only a few yards separated them. The musician walked slowly to his house and went inside. When he came back out, the mangled dog was curled up on his porch. The musician put a small bowl of broth by the dog’s head and sat nearby in one of his porch chairs. He took the violin from its case and played a soft adagio. The dying dog lifted its head and sang to him in the voice of his mother.
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Dave Fromm is the author of a sports memoir entitled Expatriate Games and a novel called The Duration. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and kids.