The Third Book of the Dun Cow: Peace at the Last (5 page)

Wachanga and Kangi Sapa are resting on a knoll under the bright autumnal sun. The day is clear and very cold, so the sun comforts the Cream Wolf’s coat.

“Tell you what, babe,” says Kangi Sapa, shaking out his feathers. “Black’s better than white for catching rays. Hoo, but I’m hot!”

Wachanga smiles. The Raven exaggerates. It’s his sort of humor.

During these nights ice has begun to snaggle the shores of small lakes. In the morning it melts.

“So, darlin’,” says the Raven, throwing out a topic for conversation. “How’d you come by that scar? Want to talk about it now?”

Wachanga pauses, then says, “Somebody hurt me.”

She does that a lot, closing a good gossip right at the start.

“I’m your sympathetic sort of Bird,” says Kangi Sapa. “A gadabout too, if you believe what the Cottonwoods say. A party Animal,
I
say. But I’m a good listener. So. Who hurt you?”

“My sister.”

“What? It’s not much of a sister that hurts her sister.”

Wachanga has just surprised herself by calling Rutt her sister. The word slipped out, as if a box of mementoes in the back of her mind opened and the word flew out: “Sister.”

Swiftly Wachanga amends the relationship. “Well, not quite a sister. Rutt,” she says. “Rutt was the only other woman in the pack I left behind. A handsome Wolf, Mr. Sapa, and very strong. She wears a lovely dark shawl across her back. She looks always ready to stroll off with a lover in a midnight beauty. I liked the sight of her. I always thought that her eyes … Well, I think there were mysteries in her eyes. Before she…”

Wachanga hasn’t recalled the She-Wolf much since the last winter. But now, at this distance, the pale-eyed Wolf seems to have been more harried than vicious. And now the term “sister” takes on a truer meaning. Deep, deep in their unremembered past there must be
some
experience they shared together. And now the name “Rutt” seems not a name but a deception.

The Raven says, “So, then, this Rutt what-you-call. You say you liked her—but she hurt you? Sorry, babe. I’m not tracking.”

“It’s very confusing.”

“She must have been a double-crosser.”

“Don’t blame her too much, Mr. Sapa. She had a cruel mate.”

“So, why did this beauty hurt
you?”

Wachanga shifts her position.

Kangi Sapa says, “I bet that scar tells a story.”

“I took care of Rutt’s children, like their auntie—”

“Rutt!
Ha ha! Sounds sexual, babe.”

“I did the best I could for them, but … I think that was the beginning, Mr. Sapa. The beginning of, well, of her jealousy. Her mate, the dominant Wolf of the pack, refused to let her mother her sons.
His
sons, is what he called them, not hers. He put them in my care.”

Wachanga falls silent. She is no longer aware of the sun’s warmth or of the day’s kindness. A melancholy expression has settled on her face.

Finally she says, “In the winter, when Rutt came into heat so did I. Her male started to follow me.” Wachanga shivers. “Oh, that Wolf was hateful to her. He wanted to give me what he owed Rutt. So she despised me. She bit my sex. She clawed at my rump and chewed the skin. Is how I got this scar.”

The Raven shakes out his wings. “Where is this Rutt? I’ll pluck her belly-hairs bald! I’ll give
her
a swipe and a scar!”

“She said,” said Wachanga with a kind of wonderment, “she would kill me. So I ran.”

“Kill you? Kill my Wachanga? I’m a high-skyer, girl. Show me the way you came!”

The way I came.

Kangi Sapa meant the way she came
here
. But she is thinking of the way she came to Eurus’s Wolf pack—and suddenly the vision of a cave flashes before her sight, and in its dark recesses, two large, brown, moist and most merciful eyes.

A midnight snow swirls around Pertelote. She lids her eyes against the icy flakes. John Wesley crouches beside her. They are sitting at the edge of a cutbank, while the rest of the Animals huddle below, shivering and trying to sleep.

The bright blue days of autumn have given way to winter, and the last weeks have offered Pertelote’s Animals scant nourishment. Hunger and the freezing temperatures have sapped them of their strength. Her band’s persistent malaise, and her inability to ease them, have darkened the Hen’s mood. In the day the sun has become a small white disk in a distant sky.

The indifference of this season has put Pertelote in mind of the Fimbul-winter that nearly wiped out a continent of Creatures, at the end of which her Lord Chauntecleer perished.

John Wesley says, “Critters is wearisome, Lady Hen.” He sharpens his voice in order to be heard through the wind. “Pooped to the bone.”

Pertelote says nothing.

“Night-nipped and day-blowed,” says John. “And sad, Lady Hen.”

Pertelote knows this as well as the Weasel. She has no response.

“Does Lady Hen hear gossipings? No. Happy chatterings? No. Critters doesn’t talk no more. What’s the what we gots to do?”

Pertelote sighs. Her sigh is lost in the snow.

With greater force the Weasel says, “We gots to
stop!”

“We are,” says Pertelote, “stopped. We always stop for the night.”

“John Double-U, he don’t wants to mis-agree with his Lady Hen, but she knows. She knows what means John’s ‘Stop.’ Not nights. Not for a night.”

Yes. She knows. But she cannot stop. Her motives have never been clear to her. She hasn’t a goal to which she goes, and that has become a tremendous desolation. Yet she is
driven
forward. Where Pertelote is is never right. Chauntecleer’s corpse lies far behind. But she bears something like his spirit in her soul. Wherever she goes it seems that she carries his name. The earth abroad should remember him. Galaxies should memorialize him.

Or so she justifies her restlessness.

John Wesley says, “Critters, they loves you, Lady Pertelote.”

What’s this? This “Pertelote?” Never before has John called her by her given name.

The Weasel stands and stalks away.

The ground on which he was crouching is dark, snowless. Pertelote notices several pale shadows there. Absently she touches one with a claw. It moves and proves to be a white pebble. Her heart does a double skip.

Oh, Chauntecleer!

The ivory-white toenails of her husband! Above which rose his strong azure legs. And his golden feathers. His black beak and his coral-red comb…

Pertelote has thought she was done with grieving. Yet here it is again, swelling in her breast, choking her, and spilling from her eyes. She can smell her husband’s scent, if only in her memory. She sees the two of them perched together on a Hemlock limb. Chauntecleer’s widow starts to heave huge, gasping sobs.

Boreas the White Wolf is himself a stroke of winter. Trotting over snow he
becomes
the snow. In one bound—white into white—he will vanish from the Animals’ sight.

But a sharp eye might pick him out by the grin of his black lips, by his black nose, and by the rim of his red tongue flicking between his incisors.

When he runs he lays his ears back, narrows his slant eyes, and straightens his tail. His legs clutch and stretch, gather and stretch, gather and reach for the snow before him. His spine is a taut bow.

Standing still, the White Wolf is lofty and alert. His chest is slender, and his ruff imperial. He prefers to walk the high ridges, patrolling the places the Animals go. Boreas, the Watch-Wolf. On flatland, in order to survey the closer territories, he will leap perpendicular ten feet high.

Tonight the White Wolf’s duties have drawn him away from the cutbank. He trots softly on drifts of snow. Boreas has paws like snowshoes, four inches wide. A strange new scent, blowing windward, has piqued his nostrils. He goes to track it down.

Jasper the Hen has grown so fat that grease seeps through the pores of the pink, naked patches on her neck. Her eyes weep oil.

“Damn slickery soup,” she grumbles aloud, “dribbling out my asshole!” Jasper stinks.

There is no love for the Hen that stinks.

Nor would she return love for love. She’d rather drub another Hen down. As for a Rooster? Sex and then a kick in the head to drive the witless idiot away.

Nobody owns Jasper. Not even God.
Jasper
owns Jasper.

But lately she has begun to feel lumps in her abdomen. A sorry state of affairs—until she realizes that the lumps are eggs. Children. Now
this
will mess up her life!

On the other hand, Chicks might make a fine repast. Or! Or what about this? The chicks would be formed in her image! She likes that idea. Little Jaspers outfacing the world. Ha!

So Jasper the fat Hen has broken off the interior twigs of a thicket and scratched the ground beneath. Snow outside and a nest inside. The fat Hen wriggles her corpulence into the nest and sits. Impatiently.

Sooner than she expected she is compelled to cackle, and she lays an egg. She cackles again. Cackles four times altogether: four eggs. Jasper compliments herself on her bulk, for she could have brooded over ten eggs if she’d had to.

Fat she may be, but now she’s growing hungry. Motherhood is its own affliction.

In time she hears tiny scratchings in the nest below. She stands and steps back. A tiny hole appears in one eggshell and in the hole the point of a tiny beak.
Chip-chip-chip,
the shell breaks open, and a yellow Chick struggles out. Soon enough a second shell cracks open and a second Chick wobbles out of his half shells.

Jasper frowns and cocks an eye. She takes the measure of the two children, their fuzzy little skulls, their pinless wings, the yellow balls their bodies make. They look nothing like her. They look like themselves, and they are helpless.

Perhaps it is their very helplessness that causes a twinge in Jasper’s heart. She can’t stop staring. Gazing, actually. Oh, what small beaks and sweet peepings! What pretty questionings they ask of their mother.

But there are two Chicks still unhatched. Jasper sits on them and broods a little longer—patiently.

But no new peckings happen. Instead, Jasper feels that the two eggs are growing cold. She begins to worry. This is a new emotion. She scarcely knows what to do with it. All at once, franticly, she starts to peck the shells herself. She cracks an egg and claws it open and suffers another new emotion. Sadness. For the Chick she pulls out is floppy, its closed eyes bulging but sightless. Stillborn. The other egg also proves to be a little tomb. Jasper has delivered two Chicks alive and two Chicks dead. She is suddenly overcome with unhappiness.

She carries each dead Chick outside the thicket and lays them on the snow. What did Chauntecleer and Pertelote do with their three Chicks when they’d been killed by the Basilisks? And what did the Animals do with Russel’s body?

Jasper walks some little distance away and begins to dig into the snow. When she strikes the frozen ground she scratches furiously, trying to make a grave.

The intensity of her action conceals the sounds of another Creature creeping down the trunk of an alder tree. In a flurry the Creature drops to the dead Chicks and seizes them. The living Chicks cheep loudly. Jasper pulls her head from her snow hole and sees the Marten Selkirk just as he dashes up the trunk again.

Jasper stands mute, astonished by grief.

Daybreak. The sun breaches the eastern horizon. The sun! Its red-golden rays skim the snow past Pertelote to the snow-field on the far side of the cutbank which glisters in the light. Last night Pertelote’s band huddled at the bottom of the cutbank for shelter against the wind. Now the Amimals begin to rustle.

Far off a Wolf howls. Pertelote’s stands. Her nerves go taut. Where’s John Wesley when she needs him? Where is
Boreas?

But the Wolf howls again—not in threat, in a kind of proclamation—and this time Pertelote recognizes the voice.

It’s Boreas himself! Somewhere in the east.

Down the side of the cutbank is a washout which has formed a rocky stairway down to up. John Wesley comes climbing up and takes a position beside Pertelote.

“Lady Pertelote?” he says. “Might-be sun-shiningnesses makes a good day?”

“Did you hear Boreas howl?”

The Weasel squints toward the northeastern sky. “What is?” he asks.

He points. Pertelotes follows his aim, and there in the vermillion sky is a black dot careering crazily.

Pertelote watches as the black dot grows.

“I think it’s a Bird,” she says.

“Birdy, Birdy, is a Birdy. But lookee! Is a rum-pot of a Birdy.”

The Animals come wandering up the rock-stairs.

“A slatternly Bird,” Pertelote agrees. “I think he’s losing feathers.”

The Bird yells, “Quork!”

John Wesley bounces up on his hind legs. “By Gaw, is a boogaloo mess! By Gaw! Is flap-happy Crow!”

In spite of her dolor last night, Pertelote is amused. What an awful trash of a Bird! But a Raven, not a Crow.

Finally the Raven crash-lands on the edge of the cutbank, clambers backward, then rights himself on long black claws.

He clacks his outsized beak. “Hey ho, brother Weasel. Kangi Sapa here.”

John Wesley ramps himself up to full height. Kangi Sapa’s head is level with John’s so long as the Weasel can keep his narrow body straight.

“Is a John Double-U of the Double-U’s
here,”
says John. “What’s the what, Boogaloo?”

“What’s the … Oh!” says the Raven, “I get it. You’re a mush-mouth! Uneducated fellow. Ask me, your mother never taught you proper speech. Well, that’s okay, brother. I can dig it.”

“Does Boogaloo Crow wants a mush in
his
mouth? John Double-U, he’s got a sock what can clog a Birdie’s beak!”

“At ease, Double-whatever-you-call-yourself. I’ve come to scout you out. Checking the premises, you see, before my friend arrives. I must say, Sir Cranky Weasel, you make me a little nervous.”

Pertelote says, “Your friend?”

“Wachanga. A bit of sweet honey and soft on the eyes.”

“Well, Kangi Sapa,” says Pertelote, “Wachanga will be safe with us. Don’t mind the Weasel. He may talk like a brute, but he’s got a big heart.”

John Wesley glares at the Raven, exactly
like
a brute.

But before the Weasel can make good on his glare, Boreas the White Wolf appears, walking as always with his noble mien, but clearing his throat and coughing in mild embarrassment. He has the queer aspect of puppyhood in his eyes.

He doesn’t come alone. Boreas is leading another Wolf, somewhat smaller than he. Where his manner is courtly, hers is delicate. His eyes are white. Her eyes are grey and lined with an antimony black. His coat is pure white. Hers has the richness of cream. And she moves with grace and modesty. Pertelote finds her an altogether elegant Creature and loves the Wolf immediately.

“Ah,” says Boreas. “Um,” he says. And he says, “Her name is Wachanga. Yes. Wachanga.”

When Pertelote steps forward to welcome the Cream-Colored Wolf, and when she touches Wachanga’s muzzle with the tip of a feather, something like an electrified cord binds the two women together.