Huckleberry Hound: Thru the Horn

Chapter 2: What's All the Racket?

Soon enough, they could see the ground and gently drifted downward.  As they landed, they looked around to see that they were in what appeared to be a town full of tall buildings that looked like musical instruments.  The streets were lined with staff lines like those found on sheet music, and plants and flowers looked like clefs, accents and dynamic marks.  Even the sky was filled with musical notes that glided like clouds.  Except these notes weren’t flowing and they weren’t bright and puffy.  They were stiff, silent and still, as if they had just stopped moving.

“Fascinating!” Snagglepuss said, glancing around.  “It looks like Carnegie Hall and Broadway exploded inside this place.  Instruments as far as the eye can see!”

“Yeah, but they look kinda…old and dusty,” Huck observed.  He stepped onto the street and tapped his feet along the musical staff line that traveled through it.  “Hmmm, seems a little soft.  Matter’a fact, it’s completely silent!  I can’t even hear the sound of my dancin’ feet.”

He looked up and noticed a funny-looking tree growing on the side of the street nearby.  It had a wavy trunk, white leaves, and what looked like small pieces of black fruit growing on the branches.  The hound’s stomach rumbled.  It had been a while since he’d eaten breakfast, so he decided to go and sample a bite of these strange little fruits.  However, when he came close to the tree, he realized that they weren’t fruits, they were whole notes!

“Huh!” he said.  “Who would’a thunk that musical notes grew on trees!  But I guess anything’s possible in a place like this.”  

He plucked one off of the tree and went to taste it, but the note let out a loud, warbly whine and dissolved into dust right in his paw, right before he could even take a bite.

“Did you see that?” Huck asked Snag. “It disappeared!”

"I certainly did!” Snag replied.  “There’s something peculiar going on here, to say the least.”

“You might call it peculiar, but I call it awful!” a wistful little voice said from nearby.

“Who said that?” Huck asked.

The two friends looked all around until they spotted a small figure peering out at them from behind a bush.  It looked like a little violin, standing upright with its neck up in the air, but the bout had a pretty little face on the front of it and had arms and legs on its sides!  She stared up at the two strangers with bright brown eyes and blinked her large eyelashes in curiosity.

“Heavens to Mozart!” Snag cried.  “A talking violin!  It’s not possible!”

“That sure ain’t another somethin’ you see every day!” Huck agreed, looking quite surprised.

“Who are you?” the little violin asked.  “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“No, we just dropped in here from a horn that appeared in my bedroom,” Huck replied.  “But as long as we’re here, we might as well introduce ourselves.”

“You can call me Viola,” the little violin said in her silky little voice.  “What are your names?  And what musical instruments are you supposed to be?”

“Us? Musical instruments!?” Huck said, laughing. “We’re not musical instruments! We’re live talkin’ animals!  I’m a hound dog, namely, Huckleberry Hound!  But you can call me Huck for short!”

“Ohh,” Viola said.

“Yep, and my best friend here is Snagglepuss!”

“The mighty mountain lion, king of the forest…of the jungle, even!” Snag added, bowing like a gentleman. “Enchanté!”