You can listen to Louise Erdrich read Mastiff here.
You can read Deborah Treisman and Joyce Carol Oates discuss Mastiff here in This Week in Fiction.
(Spoiler alerts: Please only read these notes after you've read the story.)
What I love about this story is the strange twist and shock of it. The dog's attack on one of the main characters is the catalyst for what will become a complicated love story, of sorts. If you read Oates' Q&A with Deborah Treisman, you will see that Oates is quite cynical, or maybe just practical, about what can set a love story in motion. This is a mature approach to love and long-term relationships.
This is a 15 page story, neatly
divided into three, 5-page, acts.
What is this story about?
-
Story is about
a scary dog (a mastiff--for more information on mastiffs, see below)
-
Story is about
a dog owner allowing his dog to attack someone on a hiking trail
-
Story is about
a dog attacking a man
-
Story is about
a man and a woman, deciding if they can fall in love with each other and forge
a relationship together
-
Story is about
loneliness, intimacy, how we come together as couples, both by desire but also by circumstances and random luck
- Within the story, there are powerful images of
death waiting, echoed by the actual appearance of this dog from hell
Simon and Mariella, are the two
main characters. The dog and the dog's owner are minor nameless characters.
Page 1: First paragraph, stakes raised right away,
fear and anxiety raised:
Earlier, on the
trail, they’d seen it. The massive dog. Tugging at its master’s leash, so that
the young man’s calves 6bulged with muscle as he fought to hold the dog back.
Grunting what sounded like “Damn, Rob-roy! Damn dog!” in a tone of exasperated
affection.
Signs along the trail forbade dogs without
leashes. At least this dog was on a leash.
Page 1: Intense, unnerving
description of dog that looks human (always unnerving when species are merged):
The woman stared at the
animal, not twelve feet away, wheezing and panting. Its head was larger than
hers, with a pronounced black muzzle, bulging glassy eyes. Its jaws were
powerful and slack; its large, long tongue, as rosy-pink as a sexual organ,
dripped slobber. The dog was pale-brindle-furred, with a deep chest, strong
shoulders and legs, a taut tail. It must have weighed at least two hundred
pounds. Its breathing was damply audible, unsettling.
The woman thought, That isn’t a dog. It’s a human
being on its hands and knees!]
Page 2: Story is also about the man and the woman
circling each other, taking each other’s measure, impressing each other,
wondering about each other, contemplating each other, like prey:
The woman said, over her shoulder, with a wild
little laugh, “Yes! Beautiful.”The hike had been the man’s suggestion. Or, rather, in his oblique way, which was perhaps a strategy of shyness, he’d simply told her that he was going hiking this weekend, and asked if she wanted to join him. He had not risked being rejected; he’d made it clear that he would be going, regardless.
Page 3 Woman is unprepared for hike, she is vulnerable. Also, note that they are at the end of the day---writing about the end of the day, or the beginning of the day, is always exciting for the reader, and it is always a good idea to write about bookends:
It was late afternoon. They
had been hiking for several hours, and were now making their way single file
down the mountain. The woman was descending first, then the man. The man, the
more experienced hiker, wanted to watch over the woman, whom he didn’t trust
not to hurt herself. She’d surprised him by wearing lightweight running shoes
on the trail and not, as he was wearing, hiking boots.
She hadn’t thought to bring water either. He
carried a twenty-ounce plastic bottle of water for them both.
Page 3 Note the weather is a character:
It had been an unnaturally
balmy day for late March. At midday, the temperature was perhaps sixty-eight
degrees. But now, as the sun sank like a broken bloody egg, darkness and cold
began to rise from the earth. The day before, the man had suggested to the
woman that she bring a light canvas jacket in her backpack; he knew how quickly
the mountain trail could turn cold in the late afternoon, but she had worn just
a sweater, jeans, and a sun visor. (The woman’s eyes were sensitive to
sunlight, even with sunglasses. She hated how easily they watered, tears
running down her cheeks like an admission of weakness.) And she’d confounded
the man by not bringing a backpack at all, with the excuse that she hated
feeling “burdened.” In the gathering chill, the woman was shivering.
Page 4 Note that the spectacular view also manages to say volumes
about their evolving relationship
The trail had looped upward
through pine woods to a spectacular view at the peak, where the man had given
the woman some water to drink. Though she said she wasn’t thirsty, he insisted.
There’s a danger of dehydration when you’ve been exerting yourself, he said.He
spoke sternly, as if he were a parent she could not reasonably oppose. He spoke
with the confidence of one who is rarely challenged. At times, the woman quite
liked his air of authority; other times, she resented it. The man seemed always
to be regarding her with a bemused look, like a scientist confronted with a
curious specimen. She didn’t want to think—yet she thought, compulsively—that
he was comparing her with other women he’d known, and finding her lacking.
Then
the man took photographs with his new camera, while the woman gazed out at the
view. Along the horizon was a rim of luminous blue—the Pacific Ocean, miles
away. In the near distance were small lakes, streams. The hills were strangely
sculpted, like those bald slopes in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton.Absorbed in his photography, the man seemed to forget about the woman. How self-contained he could be, how maddening! The woman had never been so at repose in her self. For nearly an hour, he lingered, taking photographs. During this time, other hikers came and went. The woman spoke briefly with these hikers, while the man appeared oblivious of them. It wasn’t his habit, he’d told her, to strike up conversations with “random” people. “Why not?” she’d asked. And he’d said, with a look that suggested that her question was virtually incomprehensible, “Why not? Because I’ll never see them again.”
Page 4, At end of Act 1, the woman's fear of the memory of the mastiff returns, even though she has only been seeing old nice dogs on the trail. Tension rises, at the end of Act 1, as it should/
At least the bearded young man with the English mastiff hadn’t climbed to the top of Wildcat Peak, though other hikers with dogs had made their way there. A succession of dogs, in fact, of all sizes and breeds, fortunately most of them well behaved and disinclined to bark, several of them trailing their masters, older dogs, looking chastised, winded.
“Nice dog! What’s his name?” the woman would ask. Or, “What breed is he?”
She understood that the man had taken note of her fear of the mastiff at the start of the hike. How she’d tensed at the sight of the ugly wheezing beast. It had to be the largest dog she’d ever seen, as big as a St. Bernard but totally lacking that dog’s benign shaggy aura. And so at the peak the woman made a point of engaging dog owners in conversations, in a bright, airy, friendly way. She even petted the gentler dogs.
Page 5 Tension continues to rise, the woman has bad memory of being attacked by a German Shepherd, similar to Oates’ own memory, which she shares in Q&A with Deborah Treisman. Note: It is fine to borrow from your own life and infuse your character's fears, fantasies, desires and memories with your own.
As a child of nine or ten,
she’d been attacked by a German shepherd. She’d done nothing to provoke the
attack and could only remember screaming and trying to run as the dog barked
furiously at her and snapped at her bare legs. Only the intervention of adults
had saved her.
The woman hadn’t told the
man much about her past. Not yet. And possibly wouldn’t. Her principle
was Never reveal your weakness. Especially
to strangers: this was essential. Technically, the woman and the man were
“lovers,” but they were not yet intimate. You might say—the woman might have
said—that they were still, fundamentally, strangers to each other.
They’d been together in the woman’s house,
upstairs in her bed, but they hadn’t yet spent an entire night together. The
man felt self-conscious in the woman’s house, and the woman hadn’t been able to
fall asleep beside him; the physical fact of him was so distracting. Naked and
horizontal, the man seemed much larger than he did clothed and vertical. He
breathed loudly, wetly, through his open mouth, and though he woke affably when
she nudged him, the woman hadn’t wanted to keep waking him. In truth, the woman
had never been very comfortable with a man at close quarters, unless she’d been
drinking. But this man scarcely drank. And the woman no longer lost herself in
drink; that life was behind her.The woman liked to tell her friends that she wanted not to get married but to be married. She wanted a relationship that seemed mature, if not old and settled, from the start. Newness and rawness did not appeal to her.
Page 5 Note the water bottle as elevated object that continues to repeat through the story:
At last, the man put his
camera, a heavy, complicated instrument, into his backpack, along with the
water bottle, which contained just two or three inches of water now—“We might
need this later.”
Driving to the park
that day, the man and the woman had felt very happy together. It sometimes
happened to them, unpredictably—a sudden flaring up of happiness, even joy, in
each other’s company. The man was unusually talkative. The woman laughed at his
remarks, surprised that he could be so witty. She was touched that, a few days
before, he’d visited the art gallery she ran, and purchased a small soapstone
sculpture.
The woman slid over in the passenger’s seat,
to sit closer to the man, as a young girl might do, impulsively. How natural
this felt—a rehearsal of intimacy!
The car radio was playing a
piano piece by the Czech composer Janáček, “In the Mists.” The woman recognized
it after a few notes. She’d played the piano cycle
as a girl. Her eyes filled
with tears as she remembered. The man continued talking, as if he didn’t hear
the music. Avidly, the woman listened to the sombre, distinctive notes in a
minor—“misty”—key. She didn’t register the man’s words, but his voice was
suffused with the melancholy beauty of the music, and she felt that she loved
him or might love him. He will be
the one. It’s time.
He’d been upset earlier
that year, while visiting one of his protégés at the Salk Institute, whose wife
was also a scientist and who had several children; the young family lived in a
split-level cedar house on three acres of wooded land. In this household, the
man had felt sharply the emptiness of his own existence, in an underfurnished,
rented house near the university, where he’d lived for more than twenty years.
He’d ended the visit shaken. And not long afterward he’d met the woman at a
dinner party.
Page 7 We shift back to the woman’s point of view, and there are two great paragraphs of interior monologue---we begin to know her and sympathize with her and understand her. Importantly, we begin to feel close to her. The woman feels hope when she is with the man, and great stories often give us hope.
The woman was also lonely and dissatisfied—but
primarily with others, not with herself. She’d had several relationships with
men since college, but she hadn’t felt much for any of them. Some she had dated
simultaneously. And yet she was deeply hurt if a man wasn’t exclusively
involved with her. Her father had left the family when she was a child and
rarely visited. All her life she’d yearned for that absent man, even as she’d
resented him. She’d hated her own
vulnerability.
She was an attractive woman. Within her small
circle of friends, she was popular, admired. She dressed stylishly. She was
social. She’d invested wisely in her art gallery. Still, she was preoccupied
with how she appeared in others’ eyes. She could barely force herself to
contemplate her own image in a mirror: her face, she thought, was too small,
her chin too narrow, her eyes too large and deep-set. She hated the fact that she was petite. She’d have preferred to be
five feet ten, to walk with a swagger, with sexual confidence. At five-three,
it seemed she had no choice but to be the recipient, the receptacle, of a man’s
desire.
“She
laughed at herself. A hole in the heart.
Yet it happened, in the new
man’s company, that the woman felt a rare hopefulness. If she couldn’t love the
man, it might be enough for the man to love her; enough for them to have a child together, at least.
(In the woman’s weakest moments, she lamented the fact that she had no
children, that she would soon be too old to have any. Yet children bored her,
even her nieces and nephews, who she conceded were beautiful.)
Now, making her way down
the trail, eager to be out of the park that had seemed so inviting hours ago,
the woman felt disconsolate. The long wait at the peak had enervated her. The
man’s seeming indifference had enervated her. As the sun shifted in the sky, she felt strength leaking from her.
Pages 9-10 This is the heart of
story---an intense, heart-wrenching, anxiety-producing attack of dog on man and
woman. Notice the verbs bark/growl/snarl/strain/bleed:
So absorbed was the woman with the voice
inside her head that she only half realized that she’d been hearing a
familiar sound somewhere close by—a wet chuffing noise, a labored breathing.
The trail continued to drop, turning back on itself; another, lower trail ran
parallel to it now, and would join it within a few yards, and on this trail two
figures were hurrying, one of them, in the lead, a large beast running on all fours.Appalled, the woman saw the enormous mastiff stop at the junction of the two trails, unavoidable. The dog’s damp, shining eyes were fixed on her, sharply focussed. With a kind of indignation quickly shifting to fury, it barked at the woman, straining at its leash as the bearded young man yelled at it to sit_._
The woman knew better than to succumb to panic; certainly she knew better than to provoke the dog. But she couldn’t help herself—she screamed and shrank away. It was the worst possible reaction to the dog, which, maddened by her terror, leaped at her, barking and growling, wrenching the leash out of its master’s hands.
In an instant, the mastiff was on the woman, snarling and biting, nearly knocking her to the ground. Even in her horror, the woman was thinking, My face. I must protect my face.
Her companion quickly intervened, pushing himself between her and the dog, even as the dog, on its hind legs, continued to attack. Futilely, the dog’s master shouted, “Rob-roy! Rob-roy!” The dog paid not the slightest attention.
The frantic struggle couldn’t have lasted more than a minute or two. Fiercely, the man struck at the dog with his bare fists and kicked it. The young man yanked at the dog’s collar, cursing. With great effort, he finally managed to pull the animal away from the man, who was bleeding badly now from lacerations on his hands and arms and face.
The woman, terrified, was cringing behind him. She felt something wet on her face. Not blood but the dog’s slobber. She called out, “Help him! Get help for him! He’ll bleed to death.”
The dog was still barking hysterically, lunging and leaping with bared fangs, while the young man struggled to hold it down, apologizing profusely, claiming that the dog had never done anything like this before—not ever. “Jesus! I’ll get help.” There was a ranger station a half mile down the trail, the young man said. He’d run.
Alone with the injured man, the woman cradled him in her arms as he moaned in pain. He appeared to be dazed, stupefied. Was he in shock? His skin felt cold to the woman’s touch. She could barely comprehend what had happened, and so swiftly.
The dog had bitten and scratched her hands, too. She was bleeding. But her fear was for the man. She fumbled in her pocket for her cell phone, tried to call 911, but the call failed to go through. She wondered whether she should make a tourniquet to stanch the flow of blood from the man’s forearm. Years ago, in high school, she’d taken a course in first aid, but could she remember now? For a tourniquet, you had to use a stick? Her eyes darted about, searching for—what? Like a foolish trapped bird, her heart beat erratically in her chest.
Page 10: Note that the story shifts. Both characters have been attacked, and the woman now has to comfort and take care of her man. He is vulnerable, they are afraid, shaken, together, and this attack ends up bringing them together.
Page 10 Note that the weather reappears as a character:
By this time, the sun had
sunk below the tree line. It was dusk, and the air was cold and wet, as if
after a rain. They began to hear calls—two rangers were running up the shadowy
trail with flashlights, shouting.
At the brightly lit clinic, the woman hurried
inside as the man was carried into the E.R. on a stretcher. He seemed to be
only partly conscious now, unaware of his surroundings. She asked one of the
medical workers what was wrong and was told that the man had had a kind of seizure
in the ambulance; he’d lost consciousness, his blood pressure had risen
alarmingly, and his heartbeat had accelerated, in fibrillation.
Page 12 Elevation of object (the sweater) is a reminder of how bad
things are
She saw that her
coarse-knit Scottish sweater—it had been one of her favorites—had been torn
beyond repair.
Page 12 The woman has a moment of
epiphany, the man had tried to save her
In a fluorescent-lit rest
room, her face in the mirror was blurred, like those faces on TV that are
pixelated in order to disguise their identity. She was thinking of how the
massive dog had thrown itself at her and how, astonishingly, the man had
protected her. Did the man love her, then? What a coward she’d been, ducking
behind him to save herself, grabbing at him desperately, cringing, crouching,
whimpering like a terrified child. The man had thrust himself forward to be
attacked in her place. A man who was virtually a stranger had risked his life
for her.
Pag
12 Note that wallets can reveal all and sneaking around through your lover's belongings sometimes yields secrets you'd rather not know---but wallets offer great opportunities for "discovery" in writing: The woman
had the man’s backpack, with his camera and his wallet. In a state of nervous
dread, she looked through the wallet, a leather billfold of good quality but
badly worn. Credit cards, university I.D., library card, driver’s license. A
miniature photo of a tensely smiling middle-aged man with a furrowed forehead
and thinning shoulder-length hair, whom she would have claimed she’d never seen
before. She discovered that he was born in 1956—he was fifty-seven years old! A
decade older than she’d guessed, and sixteen years older than she was.
Pages
14-15 The woman he begins to cry and softens towards the man; she remembers his heavy night breathing
(breath---the man’s and the dog’s---are a thread and theme in the story)
In his cranked-up bed, the man drifted into
sleep. They’d given him a sedative, the woman supposed. His mouth eased open,
and he breathed heavily, wetly. This was the night-breathing the woman
recalled, and now felt comforted to hear. She practiced pronouncing his name:
“Simon.” It seemed to her suddenly a beautiful name. A name new to her, in her
life, for she’d never before known anyone named Simon.
Now tears spilled from the woman’s eyes and ran
in rivulets down her face. She was crying as she had not cried in memory. She
was too old for such emotion; there was something ridiculous and demeaning
about it. But she was remembering how at the top of the steep trail the man had
insisted that she drink from his plastic water bottle. She hadn’t wanted to
drink the lukewarm water, yet had drunk it as the man watched, acquiescing, if
with resistance, resentment. In their relationship, the man would always be the
stronger; she would resent his superior strength, yet she would be protected by
it. She might defy it, but she would not oppose it. She was thinking of the two
or three occasions when she’d kissed the man in a pretense of an emotion she
hadn’t yet felt.
Page 15: Lovely and disturbing last paragraph---the woman closeness and
love, yes, but is aware that death and heavy breathing wait for us all
Like the man, the woman was
exhausted. She laid her head against the headrest of the chair beside the bed.
Her eyelids closed. Vividly, she saw him at the peak of the Wildcat Canyon
trail, holding his complicated camera aloft, peering through the viewfinder.
The wind stirred his thinning silvery-copper hair—she hadn’t noticed that before.
She would go to him, she thought. She would stand close beside him, slide her
arm around his waist to steady him. This was her task, her duty. He was
stronger than she, but a man’s strength can drain from him. A man’s courage can
be torn from him, can bleed away. But it was she who was afraid of
something—wasn’t she? The pale-blue rim of the Pacific Ocean. The bald-sculpted
hills and exquisite little lakes that seemed as unreal as papier-mâché that you
could poke your fingers through. To her horror, she realized she was hearing a
panting sound, a wet-chuffing breath, somewhere beside her, or below her on the
trail, in the gathering dusk, waiting.
Note on mastiffs: Mastiffs are guard dogs,
war dogs, herding dogs ancient dogs, 5000 years old
- Courageous, Dignified, Good-Natured
- AKC
Breed Popularity: Ranks 29 of 193
- Height: 30
inches & up (male), 27.5 inches & up (female)
- Weight: 160-230
pounds (male), 120-170 pounds (female)
- Life
Expectancy: 6-10 years
- Group: Working Group
· For the uninitiated, a
face-to-face encounter with these black-masked giants can be startling. A male
stands at least 30 inches at the shoulder and can outweigh many a full-grown
man. The rectangular body is deep and thickly muscled, covered by a short
double coat of fawn, apricot, or brindle stripes. The head is broad and
massive, and a wrinkled forehead accentuates an alert, kindly expression.
Mastiffs are patient, lovable companions and guardians who take best to gentle
training. Eternally loyal Mastiffs are protective of family, and a natural
wariness of strangers makes early training and socialization essential.
Mastiffs are magnificent pets, but acquiring a powerful giant-breed dog is
commitment not to be taken lightly.
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