Eric--Part Twenty-Three

Splog # 108

Twenty-Three

   Eric wondered why the animals were staring at him and expected them to flee at the comprehension of a human in their midst. But, after looking at him for a moment, the deer and the frog did something that Eric found even stranger. They turned and regarded each other, eye to eye, as though they were communing together. They didn't just glance and then turn way but maintained eye contact while Eric wondered what could possibly be passing between them. A deer and a frog? From his study of nature, Eric couldn't imagine any way in which a deer's life and a frog's life could be connected. They should have just looked at each other in passing and then returned to their respective pursuits. And yet they were still gazing into each other's eyes.

   And then the music began. When it did, Eric realized with surprise that, though it seemed to be early morning in a forest, he hadn't heard a single bird call that he could remember. He knew that the start of the day was quite an uproarious time wherever there were a lot of trees, with plentiful variety of songs resounding from every direction. But he had opened his eyes onto a silent forest, with no sound that he could call to mind except the minute ones the rabbit was making as it interfered with his knapsack. After that, there had been slight sounds of the deer and the frog approaching the watering place and the deer drinking. Now, with the deer and the frog standing immobile, all sound had ceased, even the rabbit. There was only a hint of music in the air, slowly growing in volume as he tried to imagine what he might be hearing in this wilderness.

  He was beginning to discern a stringed instrument crafting a gentle and soothing melody when the rabbit hopped up onto the rim of the basin beside the frog. The deer and the frog broke eye contact and glanced at the rabbit. The  frog plopped into the water, the deer bent to take another drink and the rabbit looked up and directly into Eric's eyes. It seemed to Eric that the animals in this wood behaved exceedingly strangely. Maybe it was because the wood seemed to serenade them with otherworldly airs played by invisible instruments.

   But as the tune floating through the air gradually increased in volume and changed to a more lively tempo, Eric also noted sounds of movement as though someone were approaching the clearing. The rabbit withdrew its eyes from Eric and looked off to the left. The deer lifted its head and turned in the same direction. And the frog returned to the rim, dripping water onto the stone.

   Eric moved his eyes to the area on which the animals all seemed to be focused. He waited and wondered what strange apparition would be next in this curious journey he was on. But when the apparition appeared, it didn't happen to be so very strange at all. It was simply a rather short man in a long gray coat, a floppy-brimmed hat and boots, playing on a fiddle. He paused as he entered the clearing. He stopped moving but he continued playing. He took in his surroundings at a glance and, although he had had a contented smile on his face when he came into view, as though he were enjoying his musical jaunt through the woods, his smile became brighter at the sight of the three animals by the watering place, as though they were familiar acquaintances. He walked towards them, every once in a while executing a small dance step as he progressed. By the time he had reached them, the tune he was playing had built to a minor crescendo and, with a twirl of his whole body and a flourish in the music, he parted the bow from the fiddle and silence flooded into the clearing, followed almost immediately by the sound of quick breaths as the man took some large draughts of the fresh morning air. He seemed to want to follow this with a different kind of refreshment, as he tucked the fiddle and bow somewhere inside his voluminous coat and then withdrew a battered metal flask and held it down into the water so recently vacated by the frog. After a few moments, he raised it to his lips and, from what Eric could tell, drained the entire contents in one long pull. He then took a deep breath and let it out in a drawn-out sigh of satisfaction. Taking in another breath, he began to speak:

   "Music, air, water, exercise, trees, sky...It could be worse. It definitely could be worse. Now, my friends, I would like to enlist your aid in an endeavor in which we all have a vested interest."