The Third Book of the Dun Cow: Peace at the Last (4 page)

Selkirk, the Marten who escaped Chauntecleer’s insanity after he, Selkirk himself, had killed and eaten Ratatosk the Tree Squirrel, has loathed meat ever since. Loathes as well the yearning which that one bloody meal instilled in him. Despises the Creature he has become.

Unlike the yellow-eyed Eurus, when Selkirk rushed away from the Hemlock it was not to hunt. It was for shame.

The pads of a Marten’s paws are dense with fur. He has, therefore, the ability to detect the slightest vibration in the ground. He knows when Moles come drudging through the earth, and Voles when they burrow under a crust of snow. He could dig and dispatch them both in a twinkling—if he would. He wants to. But he won’t.

Instead he eats the meat he has not killed.

Selkirk has learned the ways of Vultures.

Presently he crouches on the swaying end of a spruce branch. The wind lifts and drops the bough, yet Selkirk shifts his neck in order to keep his small head steady. His grey ears are like dishes turned upward, listening for the thrumming, nearly imperceptible sound that the tip a Vulture’s wing makes when he dives.

The Marten does not know that Chauntecleer has died—only that the Rooster was recruiting Creatures to fight a war under his mad command. It is not impossible that a legion of battle-hardened, wild-eyes Beasts are on his trail too. Therefore Selkirk has lived in the trees, zipping their limbs and launching himself across gaps thirty feet wide and catching the branch of another tree. The air can’t hold his scent. And, unless Chauntecleer has engaged a Hawk, neither will the warriors sniff the tree-crowns he has abandoned.

There!

Selkirk hears the humming of the Vulture’s flight.

He takes off, crashing the branches.

And there! Not one, but a dozen of the great Birds are spiraling down on the spread of their wide, dark wings. There’s food on the ground. Selkirk scrambles down the trunk of an Ash, lickety-cuts across a meadow, then closes in on the object of the Vultures’ keen attention.

It is a Pronghorn lying on her ribs, her head thrown back, her mouth agape, her grey tongue looping to the earth, her eyes already eaten out.

The gentle Creature’s shoulder has been shredded. There is a hollow cavity where once her heart beat and where her liver lay tucked in its home.

The Vultures land on their laughable feet, their wings drooping like canopies. They mass beside the Pronghorn’s corpse. Their heads are rucked and naked and as red as sunburn. Their breath smells of rot. Selkirk gags, but minces forward. If the Vultures don’t make space for him, neither do they reject his presence.

In this one thing the Marten has learned to restrain himself: he will not kill.

He will feed only on the carrion dead.

There is a species of Bot Fly that attacks a Squirrel’s scrotum. If that Fly’s myriad larvae live long enough in his little sac, they will geld him.

Cousin to that Fly is another Bot who deposits her maggots in the nostrils of Sheep. These small, vile worms will chew into the Sheep’s sinuses. Nor do they rest in the warm cavities, but continue chewing until they have penetrated the Sheep’s brain. Soon the poor Ewe has trouble with her balance and begins to suffer the Blind Staggers.

A third Bot will lay five hundred eggs in the fur of a Deer’s pasterns. Though tiny, this parasite can fly at speeds of fifty miles an hour, so fast she makes herself invisible. The Deer can neither see her coming nor, if she could see, outrace the Bot. In the course of a common day the Deer bows and licks her pastern. The saliva warms and incubates the eggs. They hatch and are swallowed down. The Deer’s stomach becomes their feeding trough. They crowd the lining of the stomach and the bowels, and consume the food the Deer requires for her own nourishment. She grows emaciated and loses her love for life.

After the success of their river crossing Pertelote’s company has had a rough go of it.

Feathers have been snapped and fur has been torn as they passed through lowland thickets. Nettles stung the Creatures’ noses, vine branches lashed their faces, thorns raked their flesh. Juniper patches too wide to travel around have scratched their tender parts, raising welts. The late summer rains turned fields into a sinking mud. The Hens plotched belly-down and could not move. Least, the Plain Brown Bird, wove reeds into ropes. Pertelote, Boreas and the Otters pulled the hapless Creatures out again, one by clucking one.

Now it’s Gnats. Clouds of Gnats sip moisture from the Animals’ eyes. And Horseflies buzz in their ears and bite.

Pertelote’s mood darkens.

“Oh, John, we have lived too long.”

And then the Wood Ticks.

Least, whose bill is a needle, has played rapiers with the lumbering Horseflies. But Wood Ticks are another matter. They attach themselves to the Animals’ skins and swill the Animals’ blood until they grow mushroom-white and as fat as the pits of sunflower seeds. As much as it nauseates her, Least probes the fur, punctures the Ticks’ swollen abdomens, then tweezers out the Ticks’ heads. She must kill them. Fifteen Ticks can suck such quantities of blood that a Creature may sicken and grow anemic. She will develop a raging thirst and yearn for salt.

Presently John Wesley is drinking from a clear, cold stream. So is the rest of the band left and right of him, lapping water, slurping it. The Hens, ever prissy, dip their beaks into the stream, grab a mouthful, then raise their heads to the sky as if to gargle, but rather to work their throats and swallow. Their feathers are curling at the tip-edges.

Their nomadic life has been very difficult. De La Coeur’s eyelashes are crusted. Ferric’s are rheumy. The Brothers Mice have lost chatter. Least can do only so much. Things are getting out of hand. Boreas the White Wolf has been able to maintain his quiet nobility, but Pertelote has a look of downright despair.

“Oh, John, we have lived too long.”

The Weasel himself is plain angry. As he drinks his eyes focus on the stones on the streambed. He snaps back his head and squints at threadlike things attached to the stones: colonies of dark larvae whose slender bodies wave in the water’s flow. They look like hairs on a bald head combed all in one direction.

By Gaw, this is the last straw!

John leaps into the stream. He scratches at the larvae. He squashes them. He picks up a river rock and grinds them.

“Do and do and do for
you
!”

The whole company of Animals forgets thirst and watches the angry Weasel.

For all his frantic action and the churning of the water, John is unaware of the changes occurring in the larvae. Swiftly they are becoming swimming pupae. Even the pupal stage passes quickly. They seem intent on speed. Come night and they will swarm in thick clouds of Black Flies.

Petertelote says, “John,” and the Weasel deflates.

She’s standing on the stream bank. John Wesley crawls ashore. He lies down, and Pertelote drapes a wing over his exhausted body.

Night finds the two of them sleeping in the same position.

As were Eurus and Selkirk the Marten, so was Jasper the fat Hen once infested with the maggots that fell from Chauntecleer’s nostrils. These destroyed her moral soul. She laid claim to the meat of a murdered Ewe, but Pertelote meddled and made her run. Run she did. In a violent huff Jasper too left the Hemlock.

Had Pertelote tried to damage her? Well, Sheep-shit on Pertelote!

Traveling in her own right, now, Jasper has been able to maintain her girth by expanding her diet beyond mere seeds and the tiny gravel by which she grinds the food in her gizzard.

Last summer the Cicadas woke from their seventeen-year sleep underground and tunneled up through the soil. These Insects have faces like a grillwork and bodies like dumdums. They climbed tree trunks and fastened themselves to the bark, then performed an extraordinary transformation. Off with the old, on with the new. The Cicadas split open their brown backs like dry shells. Fresh legs fiddled through the crack in the hard carapace of their past. The windows of their old eyes became empty bubbles. They pulled themselves
out
of themselves. Green, tender bodies emerged and stood up on the dead exoskeleton. They began to vibrate their packs of untried wings. The wings unfolded, transparent and veined. The veins contained a green blood, and the blood stiffened the Cicadas’ cellophane wings.

Ree-err,
they sang.
Ree-err,
ree-err,
they announced themselves to the world. The volume of their song increased until it became a buzz saw chorus so loud that the forest itself seemed to have given voice to destiny.

“Demon-screams! Look out for me, you crackerjacks!” screamed Jasper. “I’m the pecker who’s going to peck the poo out of you!”

She drove her beak at one dumdum Cicada, breaking the network of veins in his wing. The blood wept down inside the cellophane sack until it became an emerald jewel in the bottom.

Jasper gave no heed to beauty. She ripped the wing and drank the drop and smiled. “Tasty.”

She swallowed the Cicada whole.

Then she gorged herself on Cicadas, glad for the food, gladder for the slaughter.

Since then the fat Hen has been feeding on Ants and Caterpillars and baby Snakes and the eggs of small Birds.

In the false dawn of the morning, the Hens begin to raise an anguished cackling. They scratch savagely at their necks and shoulders. At the same time the Doe De La Coeur scrambles to her feet and drives her flank across the harsh bark of a walnut tree. The Brothers Mice and both the Cobbs burrow down as fast as they can throw dirt. The Otters dash for water.

John Wesley Weasel leaps and twirls as if to escape his own hide. He is suffering sharp stings in the skin of his bunghole. Stings in his earholes, stings on his eyeballs. Even blinking can’t wash them away.

Sunrise reveals huge, dark clouds of Black Flies.

Can’t beat a cloud with a stick. Can’t threaten it. Can’t spit at it—beg, bargain, or run from it. And since every Animal is afflicted, no one can help the other one.

All day long the poor Creatures roll on the ground, run in circles, dash into the stream, whimper, chitter, yip, bark, weep, and moan most wretchedly.

Night falls. Pertelote perches in a gum tree above her poor band of Animals. Her spirit breaks. Hearing their muted, restless wailings, the Hen suffers their distress more than she suffers the stings beneath her feathers. The stars themselves look like stings in the sky, and the moon is a welt.

Suddenly Pertelote hears a series of infinitesimal
beeps
and swift
pingings
beyond the gum tree. Something—some
one
—is striking through the night. It whirls up, and she’s able to see a winged somebody blotting out small clutches of stars. Down it careers again, a quick shadow, a Creature the size of a Mouse—flying! It flits past her. Light wings shiver the air. A fan of slender bones gives the wings their spread. Quick as a windblown leaf the Creature corners, dodges, swoops—and Pertelote comes to the conviction that he works with a purpose.

Indeed! He’s catching Black Flies!—and these so fast he seems to be carving holes through their dark cloud!

In a wink he flits to the gum, snatches a twig on Pertelote’s branch, and hangs by his hind claws upside down.

“Harassed?” he twitters.

Pertelote says, “Who are you?”

“Bat,” he answers.

The Hen loops her neck in order to get a close look at him. His snout is pushed back into his face. He has wrapped his hairless, leathery wings around himself so that he looks like a package wrapped.

“Bat,” he says, “1052 of the Bats Multitudinous. Here to ease discomfort.”

All at once Bat 1052 drops and returns to business.

Whoa! Suddenly here is a fusillade of small shadows,
beeping
and
pinging
after Black Flies. The entire company of the Bats Multitudinous has arrived. They whiz the crowded air, picking and eating Flies, one hundred in a single plunge, yet never so much as bumping into one another or hitting an obstacle. Wizards of the air!

Oh, what a wonderful sunrise follows! Not a Fly to be seen. Not a Bat either, all of them having gone home to hang upside down and sleep.

In the weeks thereafter, through nights of good dreams and mornings refreshed by autumn breezes, Pertelote becomes aware that she is listening to a music, a melodic line composed of the lowest notes of an organ.

The Animals travel west, always westward with the sun. Imperceptibly they’ve begun to ascend from the prairies to the high plains. Though the days are shortening, life is sunny. No one’s in a hurry. Everyone loves the company.

As always, the White Wolf trots ahead to reconnoiter. On a particular evening Pertelote attends him, flying overhead, sometimes soaring aloft for the pure pleasure of the flight.

It is at the zenith of one of one such flight that the deep music blooms into words. It is as if the setting sun itself were singing to her, to her directly:

Before the morning, midnight.

Before the sun, the storms.

Before the last age, sacrifice,

Apocalyptic wars.

Arise, arise and go,

Arise and come by roads

Unknown.

Eurus has been leading his pack in ever-widening circles. Through summer and into the fall he’s been intent on claiming new territory for himself. He dribbles urine where he goes. He drops scats and scratches the ground to keep and release the scent as a warning to any who would dare cross his increasing borders. There are glands under his tail. He sits and scoots forward, dragging the glands’ oils over the soil. The scent says more than “Beware.” It contains information. It announces what he has eaten. It trumpets his size, his force, and his health. The scent fairly shouts the kind of mood that drives him.

Eurus’s pack has grown to five: Crook, Rutt, Hati, himself, and the daughter born to him last spring. At seven months the child has gained her mature height and has already begun to reveal her nascent temperament. She may never hunt. She would rather preen than lunge. She has her mother’s pale eyes, but not their penetration.
Her
eyes merely skim the Creatures around her. Often they gaze at the grey sky as if it were a mirror of her own eyes. She has her father’s arrogance but not his force. She has no care nor need for force. She can dominate in other ways.

Eurus named his daughter “Freya.” Lady. Royalty.

Since she was but a female, he let Rutt raise her. But as soon as she shed puppyhood, Freya shed her mother’s training as well. She took to raising herself.

The Wolf-pack’s travel has taken them in round rim west by southwest through ever-diminishing forests, southwest into the tall grass of the prairies. Eurus has been marking a very broad territory, yet is no less hungry than when he began. He strides on long legs like an emperor.

There comes the morning when Rutt wakes to find frost on the ground and the blades of grass around her. Some memory deep in her soul is thrilled by the sensation. Something, something long ago, when she was young and delighted in sweet experiences.

The sun melts the frost, and Eurus is again on the move.

Suddenly he stops and stands stock-still. He drops his nose to the root of a juniper, then claws at it furiously, throwing up clots of earth. A growl starts its motor in his throat.

He recognizes the scent of Coyote, the sort of Beast he despises. Would kill it, but would not eat it. He detects the scent of Deer. At this his stomach rumbles.

Still clawing the duff at the juniper root, Eurus barks. He leans back on his haunches. His yellow eye narrows to a slant of malice.

“I know this one,” he hisses. “I know his name! The upright! The righteous! The God-
damn
ably sanctimonious bastard! The White Wolf! Boreas,” he spits, “has passed this way.”

Now Eurus raises his snout to a heaven of hatred and howls.