The tales of Crosshollow, a mythical medieval village are fables for our time — stories of ordinary people whose everyday lives reveal how the deepest forces in the world actually work. No spells are cast here. No magic is named. And yet readers find in these pages something they recognize: truths about patience, presence, grief, and love that apply to not only magic but everyday life. Told by the Keepers of Magical Tales.
A Tale from Crosshollow
As told by the Keepers of Magical Tales
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By the second autumn, people had started to be afraid of the dogs.
They had been puppies the winter before — half a dozen of them, come into the village within a season of one another, the way litters and luck sometimes arrive together. Now they were grown, or near enough, and they ran. They ran the lane in the mornings and the field edges in the afternoons, a loose dark pack of them at the children’s heels, big and quick and loud — and a grown pack of dogs running is a different thing from puppies tumbling.
It put people in mind of the farmer’s dog.
There had been a farmer’s dog, years back, before most of these children were born. What it had done was the kind of thing a village does not forget, and does not tell the children, and remembers anyway every single time a big dog runs. Nobody spoke of it outright. They didn’t have to. It was in the way the mothers called their little ones in closer when the pack came through, in the way Old Pell watched them pass with his jaw set, in the word that started going quietly from house to house — that those dogs were getting too big, and too many, and that something ought to be done before they were like that one.
The dogs had harmed no one. That was the truth of it, plain as anything, though it would have been a hard truth to say aloud just then. They had knocked over Maren’s cooling racks, chasing each other. They had set the miller’s geese screaming one grey morning. Small things — but a frightened mind does not stop at small things. It goes on to the next one and the one after, until it arrives where it was always going: and what if it is a child, next time. That was the fear. Not what the dogs had done — they had bared a tooth at no one — but what six big dogs running together might one day do, with the farmer’s dog standing behind the thought as proof that it could.
Pip was not afraid of them. But Pip was ten, and nobody asks a ten-year-old what she thinks about a thing the grown people have already decided to fear.
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Her dog was the biggest of them, and the darkest — black all over, the way the old one had been, with the great paws he’d grown into at last and ears that still seemed a size too large. She had named him Shadow when he was small enough to carry, for the way he went where she went and was there when she turned around. He was there now, at the field’s edge, while she and the other children threw a ball of rags for the dogs to fight over in the long grass. The light was going early, the way it does when the year turns. It was cold enough to see your breath.
The wolf came out of the tree line without any sound at all.
That was the thing none of them ever forgot — that it made no sound. One moment the edge of the wood was only the edge of the wood, and the next there was a low grey shape against it, head down, already moving. A child screamed. The children ran, all of them, the way children run when the ground itself seems to tilt — toward the village, toward the houses, toward anywhere that was away.
And the dogs did not run with them.
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The dogs the village had wanted gone — the dogs that were going to be like that one — turned as a single thing and put themselves between the wolf and the children, and there was nothing of play in them now. Shadow came through from behind. Pip would say afterward, when she could say anything at all, that she had felt him go past her — the weight of him at her heel one moment and gone the next, driving forward into the space between her and the grey shape — and that she had not seen him decide it. The pack went low and loud and forward. The wolf, which had counted on soft running things and found instead a wall of teeth, broke and ran, and the dogs ran it — out across the stubble field and into the trees and on, until the sound of them faded into the wood and there was nothing where the wolf had been.
It was over before the children reached the houses. The whole of it had taken less time than it takes to tell.
The village was already coming. The scream had carried, the way a child’s scream does, and they came out of the houses and the lane running — mothers, the men from the near fields, Old Pell with no coat on — running toward the field before they knew what they were running toward. They got there in time to see the last of it: the children white and gasping at the field’s edge, and away across the stubble the small shapes of their own feared dogs, still going, driving the grey thing into the trees.
Then the dogs were gone, and the wood was quiet, and for a long moment nobody knew if they were coming back. The mothers gathered up their children and held them too hard, the way you do, and watched the tree line.
It was a good while before the dogs came trotting back out of the wood, one and then another and then the rest, tongues out and tails going, pleased with themselves, ordinary again — as though they had not just stood at the edge of the world and held it. Shadow came last, unhurried, and went straight to Pip and leaned his whole muddy weight against her legs.
Nobody said the dogs ought to be gotten rid of after that. It would have been a strange thing to say, standing in the cold with your child breathing against your neck and a wet black dog leaning its whole weight against your leg. The cooling racks were forgotten. The geese were forgotten. The farmer’s dog, for the first time in years, was not the thing that came to mind when the pack ran by. By spring the same people who had wanted them gone were keeping scraps back for them, and if you had reminded them of the autumn before — of the word that went house to house, of something ought to be done — they’d have looked at you as though you’d made it up.
Pip kept no scraps back for special. She had always given Shadow what she had. She had loved him when he was a puppy nobody minded and when he was a grown dog the whole village had learned to be afraid of, with exactly the same love, because it had never once occurred to her that the fear had anything to do with him. She had not known he would face down a wolf. She had only known he was hers, and good, and there — and those, it turned out, had never been separate things.
That winter she let him sleep at the foot of her bed, where the old one used to. He took up a great deal more room. She didn’t mind.
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The village had spent a whole year afraid of the dogs. The dogs had spent it learning the children’s voices, so they would know which ones to come running for.
— From the Archives of the Keepers of Magical Tales —
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