Piano Hunt
Jan. 27th, 2011 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolI woke my daughter up a little after four in the morning. It was very dark outside and we were both sleepy. I made scrambled eggs and toast, and that perked her up a little. I poured a little bit of my coffee in her milk so she could taste what it’s like, and that perked her up a little too. By a quarter to five she was ready to roll. I was still sleepy. I remember being a kid.
I had her dress in layers: leggings under her jeans; a teeshirt under a flannel shirt under a sweater. She protested when I handed her the camo jacket we’d picked up at Academy. “Dad!” she protested, “I’m going to melt!” I led her to the back door and opened it; it was bitterly cold outside. “Oh,” she said, and she put the jacket on, and the Kamik boots I had bought her along with the jacket.
I had packed the truck the night before. We had our rifles and ammunition, some sandwiches and corn chips and segmented oranges in a cooler, bottles of water, blankets (I had warmed them in the dryer while we were eating breakfast), her book, my tools, gloves and caps, a tarp to sit on. We hopped right in the truck and got on down the road at 5 sharp.
She read her book by the cockpit light while I drove. It was still pitch dark and the roads were empty. The hunting lease was about a half hour out of town. Before we got there she got tired of her reading, stretched her arms in all directions, and gave a tremendous yawn.
“Dad,” she asked, “why did we have to get up so early in the morning?”
I smiled. “You have to get up very early if you want to bag a piano,” I said.
I had been promising I would take her hunting since her birthday. I had gotten her her first rifle. It was a cheap little thing, a Rossi .22 with a pink buttstock and forearm, and with a factory mounted cheap-ass scope. It had the new hand-safeties so there was basically no way she could shoot herself (I was still fair game). I had taken her to a range a few times; once she had gotten used to the noise, she started to enjoy shooting paper targets. The whole thing was about six pounds, so it didn’t hurt her shoulder to fire it, even though she was only just ten years old. It made me proud to watch my daughter sighting on a target, the tip of her tongue peeking out of her mouth as she concentrated. And I loved to watch her face light up when she hit the center circle.
I come from a family of hunters. I was about two years younger than my daughter when I got my first rifle. I would go hunting with my dad and all my uncles practically every weekend during the colder months. I stopped hunting quite so much when I got married, and I stopped hunting entirely when I had kids. But now my daughter was old enough to go out with me, and she was excited about it, so we made a date and we went.
I had my old Remington. It had been my Dad’s rifle, a .308 semi-auto. It was a more serious weapon than the .22, very accurate with my Zeiss scope, very worn-in and familiar, with plenty of stopping power. That was important, because we were after big game. Even a small piano is a heavy and formidable musical instrument, and you need a big hammer to bring one down cleanly.
I told my daughter about hunting pianos. The time was that in this country, before the west had been fully settled, there were plenty of wild instruments roaming the plains. The skies were full of woodwinds, honking and hooting, crossing the land in massive, noisy flocks. The grasslands were roamed by herds of brass: slow, placid tubas grazing on the sawgrass, trombones blaring at each other, and jittery cornets cautiously creeping down to the river to open their spit-valve and drink. And late at night, safe in their log cabins, the pioneers would hear the faraway rumble of a solitary hunting timpani, and they would know what it was to fear.
But those times didn’t last. The great herds of organs were hunted to extinction, slaughtered for their brass and copper pipes and left to rot on the prairie. Ranchers rounded up the wild percussion and shot them or drove them away to spare their herds. The migratory flocks of double-reeds became scarce. As America became settled, the wild music of the frontier slowly faded to a whisper of an echo on the wind.
But that echo still persists in the modern day. The musical instruments are less numerous, but they’re still out there. They have become shy and clever, sticking to the wild places, feeding only when it’s safe and moving on when things get too interesting. I told my daughter: it wasn’t too long ago when there weren’t any instrument stores; when a man needed to get some music for his family, he’d get down his rifle and go out and bring some music back.
And it’s still true, at least as far as I’m concerned, that the only true music is wild music. You can listen to that tame stuff those domestically-raised pianos sing, but they’ve never known anything but the comfort and security of somebody’s parlor. Give me a free piano, that’s known what it is to roam the grasslands under the stars, to fight for a mate and run from a predator. Let me shoot that piano, have it stuffed and mounted and placed in my living room, and let me listen to the music that comes out of its dead hollow shell. That’s the kind of music a man needs to hear.
**
We reached the piano lease and parked the truck by the cabin. I’m not a big fan of hunting in piano blinds. I’ve never understood the appeal of squatting in a cramped box for hours on end, freezing your tail off, while you wait for pianos to approach the sheet music you’ve left in a bin. That’s not hunting at all. Besides, a piano that’s gotten fat on sheet music is of no use to me. I want a piano that’s grazed on grass and nibbled leaves, maybe eaten a few acorns, has some bulk to it but not so much that it’s practically tame. I want to find a true, wild piano (I told my daughter) and that means some footwork.
I transferred everything we needed to my pack. I let my daughter get her rifle out and ready it. I slung my own rifle, we drank as much water as we could, and then we set off down the trail. We walked about an hour away from the camp and from any roads. Pianos can smell civilized smells, and they don’t like them.
We cut off laterally away from the trail and into the thick forest. The brush became difficult to navigate in the faint light of the almost-dawn; we were having to cautiously step over bramble or duck under thick branches, and the fire ant piles were a constant menace. All this was good; the pianos like untraveled country. We found a good clearing, laid out the tarp near one edge with a panoramic view, and sat down to wait.
My daughter got bored quickly. “Dad,” she said, “we’re not going to kill any baby pianos, are we?”
“No,” I said. “We don’t want to shoot a spinet. Anyway, our licenses won’t cover that. We’re looking for a good-sized upright or a grand with a full soundboard and nice, attractive keys.”
“Well, what if we don’t see a piano at all? Would you ever shoot at a clarinet?” She chucked a pebble into a small rabbit hole.
“Honey, you have to hush,” I scolded her. “We won’t see anything if you’re not quiet.”
She sulked. The sun came up. Long shadows sprang up from every tree and raked back as the morning sped away. The morning mist, hovering only a few feet off the ground in the grassy clearing, gave up the ghost. The noise of birds filled the air.
I heard a rustling in the trees across the clearing. The magnitude of the noise, and the amplitude of the branches’ movement, was interesting to me. Just then my daughter ran out of patience.
“Dad,” she said. My hand snapped out and covered her mouth. Her eyes opened wide. I waggled my eyebrows, then looked across the clearing. She followed my gaze.
A piano was stepping out into the clearing. I couldn’t see all of it yet, only the front. Its legs were bent as its toplid opened and closed, gently nibbing at the grass near the treeline. I could see the keys that serve a piano for teeth; many wild pianos have uneven or discolored keys crossing over each other, but this one’s were perfectly straight.
I removed my hand from my daughter’s mouth. We had set up behind a large fallen log; only our heads peeked up above it, and we didn’t dare raise up any higher for fear the grass wouldn’t screen us. The piano grazed for some time, then shuffled forward all the way into the clearing.
My God! A full concert grand piano, a Steinway. I hadn’t seen one as far south as Texas since I was a kid. It had a beautiful glossy black mahogany veneer that seemed to ripple as it moved. Its soundboard stood up tall and proud, and its pedal lyre was a shining brass. It had sturdy, muscular legs made for running and jumping the wily piano over fallen trees and streams. The piano delicately paced into the clearing, engrossed in its breakfast.
It stopped and straightened itself, then froze. Something had caught its attention. My daughter and I concentrated on not making a sound. The grand piano looked around its clearing (because it was plain that we were intruding upon *its* turf) for a minute before being satisfied that all was well. It began to play.
The music that welled up out of that piano was like nothing you’ve ever heard from a human performer. It was a little like a rag, but also quite a bit like a violent concerto. Unlike a piece played by a person with only two hands to work with, the Steinway had full use of its entire range. It had no sense of human music’s aesthetic with respect to meter or cadence or key, but its wild music made an internal kind of sense. It sounded like something that belonged in a clearing where the only beings that could hear it were other wild pianos.
I realized that we were only fifty yards away. We might never again in our lives get so close, with so open a shot, against such a lovely quarry. I nudged my daughter and indicated our rifles. We both rolled onto our sides, with one elbow thrown over the log and the other hand gripping our rifles. I wordlessly showed my daughter how to ease her rifle around, as low to the grass as possible, and brace it against the log for a sighting position. I took up position myself, then touched my daughter’s arm to silently tell her: you take the first shot.
She licked her lips, then squinted her eyes and sighted on the piano. She stayed sighted for a long time. I wanted to shake her and scream: NOW, dammit, take the shot now! But this was her first hunt, and her first shot at a live musical instrument, and I didn’t want her memory of that moment to be the snarl of an anxious father. So she took her time, but she finally squared herself, took a deep breath, let it out with a slow hiss, and squeezed the trigger.
My daughter had been used to firing her .22 in an enclosed range, where it sounded like BANG! In the open air of a meadow, it sounded more like CRACK! Watching through my scope, I saw a divot appear midway along its casing, where the swell of its rear curved in concave around to the keyboard. I saw the piano flinch. The shot, I knew, wouldn’t kill it. A .22 can’t kill a full-grown concert grand piano, unless you get a lucky hit square in the pinblock. I knew the piano would bolt. I quickly took my own shot.
The Remington opened a ragged hole the size of a beer bottle neck on the music desk. The piano rumbled a cacophony of low notes, a roar of anger as well as panic. It turned on its legs with a grace you wouldn’t expect in such a massive creature, and with three bounds it was into the cover of the trees and running hard. I got to my feet and hauled my daughter up by the back of her jacket. “C’mon,” I said, jogging after the Steinway.
“Did we hit it?!” gasped my daughter, flushed with excitement.
“We sure did,” I said. “Two good shots. It’s hurt now but it’s not dead. We need to chase it, run it to ground, finish it if we can.”
“It’s so huge!” my daughter practically screamed, running next to me. “How are we ever going to get it back home?”
“I got a piano dolly in the truck bed. Let’s go!”
We dove into the treeline. The passage of a wounded grand piano wasn’t hard to follow. Pianos don’t bleed, but they break and displace branches when they run. Also, they sing when they’re hurt. We could hear it grumbling and sobbing far ahead, a series of arching arpeggios. I knew my daughter and I would have to be careful; there’s nothing more dangerous than a wounded piano.
We ran through the brush. Here we could see chunks of turf tossed up by the Steinway’s churning legs; there, a trench in the ground where it stumbled and tripped over its pedals. Ahead the piano’s song had turned rolling and dark with lots of sustain, like the stormy parts of a Wagner opera. It was louder too. We slowed down.
We found the piano in a thick patch of brush. It had run headlong into the bushes and was now wedged, seesawing back and forth as it tried to decide it if made more sense to push deeper into the gap or try to back out. But the piano was in pain and in a panic, and it wasn’t thinking clearly. It might eventually calm down and struggle its way loose, but for now it wasn’t going anywhere. It was only thirty feet away.
“Get in your stance,” I instructed my daughter, and I aimed the Remington. The piano’s soundboard was open and I had a decent shot at the exposed innards. Before I pulled the trigger I realized my daughter wasn’t shooting.
“I don’t want to shoot the piano,” she said quietly.
“What? C’mon now, we…” I looked down. My daughter was standing with shoulders slumped and the muzzle of her rifle dragging in the dirt. She looked at the struggling piano with wide eyes.
“I don’t want to shoot the piano,” she repeated, even more quietly, and tears leaked out of her eyes. She began to quietly sob.
“Oh, baby,” I breathed. Glancing briefly at the dangerous wounded instrument only a few paces away, I put my rifle down and hugged her. She cried on my shoulder.
“Darling,” I whispered, “the piano’s hurt very badly. It may not survive. We can’t leave it like this. We need to put it out of its misery.” Her body was racked with sobbing. I could feel her shake her head against my shoulder.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I said. I looked at the stuck piano. Its defiant song was shot through with strains of tragedy. This might be the deathsong of a magnificent instrument, I thought. My daughter held me close.
Perhaps, piano, I thought, you might get to give an encore performance.
**
We walked back to the truck in silence. The piano, I knew, might even now be dying. But it also might not. I figured I would never know.
I put my arm around my daughter’s shoulder. “We’ll just keep shooting at targets for now,” I said.
My daughter sniffed. “I think I could probably shoot a trombone,” she mumbled.
“Oh, I hate trombones!” I laughed. “WAH-oo WAH-oo… We should bag one someday when we have shotguns!”
She laughed a little then, but not much for the rest of the week.
I had her dress in layers: leggings under her jeans; a teeshirt under a flannel shirt under a sweater. She protested when I handed her the camo jacket we’d picked up at Academy. “Dad!” she protested, “I’m going to melt!” I led her to the back door and opened it; it was bitterly cold outside. “Oh,” she said, and she put the jacket on, and the Kamik boots I had bought her along with the jacket.
I had packed the truck the night before. We had our rifles and ammunition, some sandwiches and corn chips and segmented oranges in a cooler, bottles of water, blankets (I had warmed them in the dryer while we were eating breakfast), her book, my tools, gloves and caps, a tarp to sit on. We hopped right in the truck and got on down the road at 5 sharp.
She read her book by the cockpit light while I drove. It was still pitch dark and the roads were empty. The hunting lease was about a half hour out of town. Before we got there she got tired of her reading, stretched her arms in all directions, and gave a tremendous yawn.
“Dad,” she asked, “why did we have to get up so early in the morning?”
I smiled. “You have to get up very early if you want to bag a piano,” I said.
I had been promising I would take her hunting since her birthday. I had gotten her her first rifle. It was a cheap little thing, a Rossi .22 with a pink buttstock and forearm, and with a factory mounted cheap-ass scope. It had the new hand-safeties so there was basically no way she could shoot herself (I was still fair game). I had taken her to a range a few times; once she had gotten used to the noise, she started to enjoy shooting paper targets. The whole thing was about six pounds, so it didn’t hurt her shoulder to fire it, even though she was only just ten years old. It made me proud to watch my daughter sighting on a target, the tip of her tongue peeking out of her mouth as she concentrated. And I loved to watch her face light up when she hit the center circle.
I come from a family of hunters. I was about two years younger than my daughter when I got my first rifle. I would go hunting with my dad and all my uncles practically every weekend during the colder months. I stopped hunting quite so much when I got married, and I stopped hunting entirely when I had kids. But now my daughter was old enough to go out with me, and she was excited about it, so we made a date and we went.
I had my old Remington. It had been my Dad’s rifle, a .308 semi-auto. It was a more serious weapon than the .22, very accurate with my Zeiss scope, very worn-in and familiar, with plenty of stopping power. That was important, because we were after big game. Even a small piano is a heavy and formidable musical instrument, and you need a big hammer to bring one down cleanly.
I told my daughter about hunting pianos. The time was that in this country, before the west had been fully settled, there were plenty of wild instruments roaming the plains. The skies were full of woodwinds, honking and hooting, crossing the land in massive, noisy flocks. The grasslands were roamed by herds of brass: slow, placid tubas grazing on the sawgrass, trombones blaring at each other, and jittery cornets cautiously creeping down to the river to open their spit-valve and drink. And late at night, safe in their log cabins, the pioneers would hear the faraway rumble of a solitary hunting timpani, and they would know what it was to fear.
But those times didn’t last. The great herds of organs were hunted to extinction, slaughtered for their brass and copper pipes and left to rot on the prairie. Ranchers rounded up the wild percussion and shot them or drove them away to spare their herds. The migratory flocks of double-reeds became scarce. As America became settled, the wild music of the frontier slowly faded to a whisper of an echo on the wind.
But that echo still persists in the modern day. The musical instruments are less numerous, but they’re still out there. They have become shy and clever, sticking to the wild places, feeding only when it’s safe and moving on when things get too interesting. I told my daughter: it wasn’t too long ago when there weren’t any instrument stores; when a man needed to get some music for his family, he’d get down his rifle and go out and bring some music back.
And it’s still true, at least as far as I’m concerned, that the only true music is wild music. You can listen to that tame stuff those domestically-raised pianos sing, but they’ve never known anything but the comfort and security of somebody’s parlor. Give me a free piano, that’s known what it is to roam the grasslands under the stars, to fight for a mate and run from a predator. Let me shoot that piano, have it stuffed and mounted and placed in my living room, and let me listen to the music that comes out of its dead hollow shell. That’s the kind of music a man needs to hear.
**
We reached the piano lease and parked the truck by the cabin. I’m not a big fan of hunting in piano blinds. I’ve never understood the appeal of squatting in a cramped box for hours on end, freezing your tail off, while you wait for pianos to approach the sheet music you’ve left in a bin. That’s not hunting at all. Besides, a piano that’s gotten fat on sheet music is of no use to me. I want a piano that’s grazed on grass and nibbled leaves, maybe eaten a few acorns, has some bulk to it but not so much that it’s practically tame. I want to find a true, wild piano (I told my daughter) and that means some footwork.
I transferred everything we needed to my pack. I let my daughter get her rifle out and ready it. I slung my own rifle, we drank as much water as we could, and then we set off down the trail. We walked about an hour away from the camp and from any roads. Pianos can smell civilized smells, and they don’t like them.
We cut off laterally away from the trail and into the thick forest. The brush became difficult to navigate in the faint light of the almost-dawn; we were having to cautiously step over bramble or duck under thick branches, and the fire ant piles were a constant menace. All this was good; the pianos like untraveled country. We found a good clearing, laid out the tarp near one edge with a panoramic view, and sat down to wait.
My daughter got bored quickly. “Dad,” she said, “we’re not going to kill any baby pianos, are we?”
“No,” I said. “We don’t want to shoot a spinet. Anyway, our licenses won’t cover that. We’re looking for a good-sized upright or a grand with a full soundboard and nice, attractive keys.”
“Well, what if we don’t see a piano at all? Would you ever shoot at a clarinet?” She chucked a pebble into a small rabbit hole.
“Honey, you have to hush,” I scolded her. “We won’t see anything if you’re not quiet.”
She sulked. The sun came up. Long shadows sprang up from every tree and raked back as the morning sped away. The morning mist, hovering only a few feet off the ground in the grassy clearing, gave up the ghost. The noise of birds filled the air.
I heard a rustling in the trees across the clearing. The magnitude of the noise, and the amplitude of the branches’ movement, was interesting to me. Just then my daughter ran out of patience.
“Dad,” she said. My hand snapped out and covered her mouth. Her eyes opened wide. I waggled my eyebrows, then looked across the clearing. She followed my gaze.
A piano was stepping out into the clearing. I couldn’t see all of it yet, only the front. Its legs were bent as its toplid opened and closed, gently nibbing at the grass near the treeline. I could see the keys that serve a piano for teeth; many wild pianos have uneven or discolored keys crossing over each other, but this one’s were perfectly straight.
I removed my hand from my daughter’s mouth. We had set up behind a large fallen log; only our heads peeked up above it, and we didn’t dare raise up any higher for fear the grass wouldn’t screen us. The piano grazed for some time, then shuffled forward all the way into the clearing.
My God! A full concert grand piano, a Steinway. I hadn’t seen one as far south as Texas since I was a kid. It had a beautiful glossy black mahogany veneer that seemed to ripple as it moved. Its soundboard stood up tall and proud, and its pedal lyre was a shining brass. It had sturdy, muscular legs made for running and jumping the wily piano over fallen trees and streams. The piano delicately paced into the clearing, engrossed in its breakfast.
It stopped and straightened itself, then froze. Something had caught its attention. My daughter and I concentrated on not making a sound. The grand piano looked around its clearing (because it was plain that we were intruding upon *its* turf) for a minute before being satisfied that all was well. It began to play.
The music that welled up out of that piano was like nothing you’ve ever heard from a human performer. It was a little like a rag, but also quite a bit like a violent concerto. Unlike a piece played by a person with only two hands to work with, the Steinway had full use of its entire range. It had no sense of human music’s aesthetic with respect to meter or cadence or key, but its wild music made an internal kind of sense. It sounded like something that belonged in a clearing where the only beings that could hear it were other wild pianos.
I realized that we were only fifty yards away. We might never again in our lives get so close, with so open a shot, against such a lovely quarry. I nudged my daughter and indicated our rifles. We both rolled onto our sides, with one elbow thrown over the log and the other hand gripping our rifles. I wordlessly showed my daughter how to ease her rifle around, as low to the grass as possible, and brace it against the log for a sighting position. I took up position myself, then touched my daughter’s arm to silently tell her: you take the first shot.
She licked her lips, then squinted her eyes and sighted on the piano. She stayed sighted for a long time. I wanted to shake her and scream: NOW, dammit, take the shot now! But this was her first hunt, and her first shot at a live musical instrument, and I didn’t want her memory of that moment to be the snarl of an anxious father. So she took her time, but she finally squared herself, took a deep breath, let it out with a slow hiss, and squeezed the trigger.
My daughter had been used to firing her .22 in an enclosed range, where it sounded like BANG! In the open air of a meadow, it sounded more like CRACK! Watching through my scope, I saw a divot appear midway along its casing, where the swell of its rear curved in concave around to the keyboard. I saw the piano flinch. The shot, I knew, wouldn’t kill it. A .22 can’t kill a full-grown concert grand piano, unless you get a lucky hit square in the pinblock. I knew the piano would bolt. I quickly took my own shot.
The Remington opened a ragged hole the size of a beer bottle neck on the music desk. The piano rumbled a cacophony of low notes, a roar of anger as well as panic. It turned on its legs with a grace you wouldn’t expect in such a massive creature, and with three bounds it was into the cover of the trees and running hard. I got to my feet and hauled my daughter up by the back of her jacket. “C’mon,” I said, jogging after the Steinway.
“Did we hit it?!” gasped my daughter, flushed with excitement.
“We sure did,” I said. “Two good shots. It’s hurt now but it’s not dead. We need to chase it, run it to ground, finish it if we can.”
“It’s so huge!” my daughter practically screamed, running next to me. “How are we ever going to get it back home?”
“I got a piano dolly in the truck bed. Let’s go!”
We dove into the treeline. The passage of a wounded grand piano wasn’t hard to follow. Pianos don’t bleed, but they break and displace branches when they run. Also, they sing when they’re hurt. We could hear it grumbling and sobbing far ahead, a series of arching arpeggios. I knew my daughter and I would have to be careful; there’s nothing more dangerous than a wounded piano.
We ran through the brush. Here we could see chunks of turf tossed up by the Steinway’s churning legs; there, a trench in the ground where it stumbled and tripped over its pedals. Ahead the piano’s song had turned rolling and dark with lots of sustain, like the stormy parts of a Wagner opera. It was louder too. We slowed down.
We found the piano in a thick patch of brush. It had run headlong into the bushes and was now wedged, seesawing back and forth as it tried to decide it if made more sense to push deeper into the gap or try to back out. But the piano was in pain and in a panic, and it wasn’t thinking clearly. It might eventually calm down and struggle its way loose, but for now it wasn’t going anywhere. It was only thirty feet away.
“Get in your stance,” I instructed my daughter, and I aimed the Remington. The piano’s soundboard was open and I had a decent shot at the exposed innards. Before I pulled the trigger I realized my daughter wasn’t shooting.
“I don’t want to shoot the piano,” she said quietly.
“What? C’mon now, we…” I looked down. My daughter was standing with shoulders slumped and the muzzle of her rifle dragging in the dirt. She looked at the struggling piano with wide eyes.
“I don’t want to shoot the piano,” she repeated, even more quietly, and tears leaked out of her eyes. She began to quietly sob.
“Oh, baby,” I breathed. Glancing briefly at the dangerous wounded instrument only a few paces away, I put my rifle down and hugged her. She cried on my shoulder.
“Darling,” I whispered, “the piano’s hurt very badly. It may not survive. We can’t leave it like this. We need to put it out of its misery.” Her body was racked with sobbing. I could feel her shake her head against my shoulder.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I said. I looked at the stuck piano. Its defiant song was shot through with strains of tragedy. This might be the deathsong of a magnificent instrument, I thought. My daughter held me close.
Perhaps, piano, I thought, you might get to give an encore performance.
**
We walked back to the truck in silence. The piano, I knew, might even now be dying. But it also might not. I figured I would never know.
I put my arm around my daughter’s shoulder. “We’ll just keep shooting at targets for now,” I said.
My daughter sniffed. “I think I could probably shoot a trombone,” she mumbled.
“Oh, I hate trombones!” I laughed. “WAH-oo WAH-oo… We should bag one someday when we have shotguns!”
She laughed a little then, but not much for the rest of the week.
