Specimen Song Read Online Free

never worked so hard at his music in all his life. The recording engineer and producer were competent and relentless.
    “Very nice. Great version. I’d like to maybe try it again in a little while, though. Maybe reach in there for something…darker.”
    The engineer and producer would exchange a meaningful glance.
    “Yeah. Darker. Exactly,” the engineer would say.
    They had an uncanny ability to sense when Du Pré was just about to tell them to go piss up ropes and then stand under them while they dried. Then they’d break and wander out to a nearby saloon had good cheeseburgers.
    Du Pré felt handled, like a cow in a chute. But the joke was on him, so he had to do his best. And maybe the Métis music would stay some alive. His daughter Maria was going off to some tony eastern school on Bart’s money and a little of Du Pré’s, and she would be a little Métis girl from Montana with a good education and the whole world before her. Her kids wouldn’t be Métis, they’d be out in that English world there.
    But the music wouldn’t go on with Maria, anyway. She had a voice when she sang that would take baked enamel off cast iron. Jacqueline sang beautifully, alto, a cappella ballads she had learned here and there.
    So this music maybe live in some vault in Washington, D. C, Du Pré thought. Freeze-dried. Like them college kids come to the fiddling contests can play every note just right but it still don’t work.
    I am sounding like some old fart. I am getting close to being some old fart. Be fifty in three weeks. Shit.
    Du Pré stuffed his fiddle in the case and then remembered his rosin, there on the floor by the chair. He picked it up, opened the case again, and tucked it under the neck.
    I got everything. He looked at his watch. Six o’clock of a July evening. Sun should be down far enough, it won’t hurt my eyes too much when I go out in it. Du Pré had been snow-blinded twice and he couldn’t take too much sun without dark glasses.
    A door opened into the sound room and Paul Chase came through it. He was dressed in the sort of outdoor stuff you got from expensive mail-order houses. The clothes were good and the boots were good; they had been designed by hardworking dilettantes for moneyed novices.
    Du Pré thought of his father, Catfoot, going over the Wolf Mountains in the dead of winter, fifty below, with nothing but a pack on his back, snowshoes, to check that trapline. The trapped animals deserved a quick death, and anyway, it was hard to skin them frozen. Catfoot could cover his line in two days.
    Carried some jerky, salt, and tea, a little chocolate. Find a fir tree and burrow down under the thick branches; the smoke from his little fire would go up through the dark green needles. Carried the same old pocketknife, a few matches.
    “Du Pré!” said Paul Chase, “we thank you.”
    Now he will ask me if I go on his canoe trip, Du Pré thought.
    “Say,” said Chase, “have you given any more thought to perhaps going on this canoe trip with us?”
    Du Pré nodded. Chase deflated a little behind the smile.
    Them fucking boots he got on, they got buttons you press for maybe a beach umbrella or rockets take you up the rising trail. Du Pré thought for a moment why this stuff irritated him. It allowed people who didn’t know the country to go out in it. They could buy these keys that worked till they got in some trouble. Paper keys. Fill this out, send in a check, this stuff comes, the wilderness is yours.
    “Yeah,” said Du Pré, “I will go with you.”
    Chase looked surprised, but he caught himself.
    “Oh, really?”
    Du Pré nodded.
    “Well. Wonderful. We will gather at Lac La Ronge and go by canoe down to York Factory.”
    That’s right, Du Pré thought. He hadn’t known till he’d read a book on the Hudson’s Bay Company that the managers of the little fur-buying outposts were called factors. Then he asked Maria for her dictionary, but she had one in her computer. She punched a few keys and