A LOT OF NIGHT MUSIC

Deep in the silent dark of last night I awoke to the sound of a loud, eerie music. I knew I wasn't in heaven, since it wasn't the top ten; nor was I in hell: it wasn't the bottom ten either. What was playing was something from another place, a random medley I'd never heard the likes of before, that probably no one has ever heard-- it was as though the skeleton of King Kong was running its fingerbones over a giant marimba.

It was three o'clock, that strange time of the soul, in which although not fully awake I was fully alert to the puzzling melody that was coming from the garden. I lay there listening for a moment, then got up and fumbled for the flashlight I keep near the bed. In my mental fog I shined the light through the window into the garden and blinded myself, also causing the music to stop. When I got my sight back I opened the window all the way, shined the light out into the garden this time, and there under the cherry tree was the bright white tail of the Baron-- and beyond that a large rack of antlers above a dark wary eye, ready to hightail it. Then I figured out what the music had been.

The Baron had been browsing my garden, the only remaining meadow of wild grasses around here, since his major meadow hangout had been landscaped for sale. I let a good variety of hardy grasses and herbs grow wild out there; only a portion is my vegetable/herb garden. Under the cherry tree is where I keep my shiitake logs, propped up against a long thin cedar log leaned through the low fork in the cherry tree. The grasses are least trimmed there. The cedar log protrudes from the other side of the cherry fork for a good distance; against that I stand various lengths of big bamboo, for my many uses in the garden.

The Baron had been enjoying the especially succulent grasses beneath the cherry tree, and every time he moved his browsing head the tips of his multi-tined antlers had swept across the bamboo, raking out the random glissandos that had bonged me out of sleep; interestingly, this strange alien sound, right at his ear in the silence of the night, had not alarmed him at all. But when the light beam hit him and played upon the scene, that was a different matter. In only a moment he was gone, taking with him an ethereal night music never heard before and likely never again, leaving behind him all the night silence there is.