Somewhere in the distant evening, the train sounded, long and low and lonesome, and the sound intensified the dim blueness of the trees, the pale mist rising from the salt marsh, the graininess of the light the sun had left behind.
Then the train sounded again, and again. And again. And in that repetition there was panic. A sudden noise rose up from the distant forest: the sound of a pack of dogs barking and yelping, but above that frightened, injured yowling, a sound indistinguishable in its horror. Perhaps dog, perhaps human, perhaps neither.
We stopped still on the boardwalk, staring at the trees, trying to find the source of the clamour.
“What’s that?”
Taylor squinted away into the distance.
“That would be somewhere around the Canning place, I guess.”
The train sounded again, further on round the bend towards us, apologetic.
“Canning?” We had been coming here every summer since I was small and I had never heard the name.
“They have dogs?” asked Dad.
“Whole pack of them,” said Taylor.
“Think maybe the train caught one?”
“Sounds like it,” Taylor shook his head and absent-mindedly scratched his dog, Blue, between the ears.
“Who are the Cannings?”
“You wouldn’t know ‘em,” said Taylor, starting off back along the boardwalk, “They don’t come into town much, never in tourist season, They’re an old family, though, really old, if you believe what some people say, even older than the town, maybe.”
“Old family, then,” said Dad, and I could tell he was smiling.
“Old,” agreed Taylor, with a nod. We were back on the paved road now and the birds were loud in the still evening.
“They’ve got a big, well, not house, as such, more a whole collection of buildings, you know, all sort of collided up against each other – some little more than shacks.
“The doctor said he reckoned that there were maybe four or five families living up there, but I don’t know about that. Last time I was up that way I didn’t see no more than four or five people about the place and no sign of any more. Apart from all the dogs, that is. I dunno, maybe the doctor was including all them dogs in the head count.”
Taylor smiled to himself and the train wailed again and ahead of us we could hear the bells on the railroad crossing calling, calling through the evening.
So, the way I heard it later, Taylor went into the woods with Blue and came back out of the woods with a wife and not everyone was sure it was a fair exchange.
Blue was a faithful dog: Taylor’s best friend, Dad said, on account they had so many interests in common and so much to talk about. But his new wife, Belle, the last of the Cannings so far as anyone knew, was sullen and silent and angry. She would stay back in the shadows when visitors came, glaring at them with her sharp, foxy eyes and, when in town with Taylor, she would follow in his footsteps doggedly, petulantly, her thick, untidy hair down over her face.
No one was quite sure of the details but it began the previous fall, with people having all kinds of problems with wild dogs: pets being attacked, livestock being worried, one old lady even being trapped in her stalled car for an hour.
Taylor guessed that the dogs might be Canning animals, that maybe the old leader of the pack was injured or killed by the train that summer evening and maybe a young, inexperienced dog had taken charge and was leading the rest astray.
Taylor figured he ought to go up there and talk to the Cannings, get them to control their dogs. What actually happened, god only knows. The best guess is that Taylor found Belle up there alone and unable to control the dogs, and he decided to sort the situation out himself.
As to Blue, maybe he had a fight with the Canning dogs, maybe he was just old. All anyone knew was that now Taylor had a whole pack instead of his faithful hound and that they seemed just as in thrall to him as Belle was.
So Taylor seemed to settle into straightening out the Canning spread and their dogs and his wife, but he never seemed to get himself straightened out after that. My father said he never got over losing Blue and that a bad wife was a small recompense for a good dog. My mother slapped him then, playfully, but you could tell she was sorry about Taylor, too.
We stopped by his new house once, the next summer, but Taylor didn’t invite us in, just halloed us from the porch and we drove away without us kids even getting out of the car.
After that we lost touch with him and it became just stories: how Belle seemed to get pregnant but how she must have lost the baby, because there never were any children around. How they stopped coming into town pretty much at all, how, as if to make up for there being no kids, the dog pack just getting bigger and bigger, how the dogs started getting out of control again and how people started talking about how they ought to start talking to Taylor about sorting it all out.
Then, one night in late summer, when the tide was out and the salt marshes stunk in the still dark, a sound came echoing out of the trees and across the town: the sound of many dogs baying, a full throated sound beneath a fat, orange moon.
The next day the Doctor took Bud to swing by the Canning place to check that everything was ok. They found the dogs there alright, and Belle, but no Taylor. Not a trace of him. Instead, there was a young man they had never seen before, new but not unrecognisable: a Canning, no doubt about it, with the low hair line, the wispy beard and the sharp little canines, but with something of Taylor maybe, about the eyes, perhaps, about his manner and the way he stood.
Anyway, Belle promised them that the young fellow would keep the pack under control now, and that left the Doctor and Bud with little to say about it. Taylor had gone away, she said, but Blue was here now.
Yep, said the Doctor, later, that was the strangest thing. That’s what she called the new young male, the new leader of the pack, she called him Blue.