Specimen Song Read Online Free Page A

said it was someone who acted for someone else.
    Du Pré had nodded and decided that he was glad his daughter liked this computer and the twentieth century, but Du Pré, him, he didn’t much care for either of them.
    “We won’t be working as hard as the voyageurs,” said Chase cheerily.
    Du Pré looked at his space-age boots and the well-cut shirt with all the pockets and little epaulets to hold maybe the camera strap.
    “Halfway through the trip, we will stop for a few days and stay at a hotel, rest up,” said Chase. “But it should be interesting.”
    Du Pré was very tired and he wanted to go next door to the saloon and get a good drink and a cheeseburger, maybe drive partway home tonight, or just sleep for a few hours and then go on so he was in his own country early in the morning.
    “What made you change your mind?” said Chase.
    Du Pré shrugged. I am a cowboy; we shrug when we don’t want to say nothing. It is not that we don’t have anything to say.
    Benetsee had changed Du Pré’s mind for him.
    “Something very bad going on up there,” said Benetsee one summer evening just before Du Pré had to drive over to Kalispell to make this recording. Benetsee had drawn a map in some detail of Hudson Bay. He had quickly sketched in some rivers on the great jutting peninsula on the east side of it.
    “These people down here be killing this,” said Benetsee, putting a hasty X roughly where New York and New England were. “And this is where some of the great songs come from.”
    “Killing how?” said Du Pré.
    “These people want to build many dams on these rivers up here,” said Benetsee, “and that will poison the waters and kill the fish and everything else that lives on them. Some Cree and some Chippewa, you know, they still live the old ways. But there are not very many of them, and these people they want that electricity.”
    Benetsee stabbed at the X.
    “So this man ask you go along on that canoe trip, you ought to go,” said Benetsee.
    “I don’t want to be slapping those blackflies and mosquitoes for six weeks, have to play my fiddle each night for these people like I am some tape recorder or something. Why I want to go across that country with a bunch of people don’t belong there anyway, want to think that they know what it was like back then couple hundred years ago; huh?”
    “Some of the people are coming from here,” said Benetsee, “to go on this trip which is here.” He sketched a route on the west side of the bay. “But they will bring couple bâteau gros ventre . They from over there on the other side.”
    “Why I want to leave Madelaine for six weeks, huh?” said Du Pré.
    Benetsee looked at Du Pré with patience and contempt.
    “There are these people come along with you there are our people,” he said. “They got a whole bunch of songs—you know, songs you never heard.”
    “Okay,” said Du Pré. “I still will not go.”
    Benetsee drank some more wine. He had his eyelids patiently down; he was nodding and his lips moved.
    Du Pré looked over at the tag alder on the far side of the little stream that ran through his horse pasture.
    There was a coyote sitting there, in the daylight. Du Pré had never seen a coyote this close or in the daylight.
    The coyote had something in its mouth. The animal leapt over the little stream, came trotting up to Benetsee, dropped what he was carrying, ran back, and jumped the creek again, and he was gone.
    Benetsee opened his eyes. He reached down and lifted the little black thing that the coyote had brought him.
    It was an amulet, a carving in a black stone with rust red streaks in it. Du Pré looked at it. The carving was of a dog or a wolf, one just rising from the ground. The carver had used the rust lines for the animal’s outline, the shape of the bones underneath the skin. It was perfect; there was nothing there that did not need to be and everything that had to be. A dog or a wolf getting up from the ground.
    “Them coyote