The Third Book of the Dun Cow: Peace at the Last (7 page)

So, the Snake couldn’t talk any more. Couldn’t even hiss. Dumb as a bump, sly as a stone, and uncunning as a vegetable. The only thing left was vengeance.

The Snake curled himself in a Woodpecker hole in the trunk of a tree. He waited till everyone who slept under the tree would come and fall asleep. Trees and trees make up a forest, and this tree was in the middle of one.

So here came Mice and Weasels and Wolves and Chickens. A whole host of Creatures, tired and ready to rest under the Snake’s tree. And that’s what they did: they fell asleep. And then the forest was as still as the sleepers.

The Snake figured that his time had come. He uncoiled himself and slithered out of the Woodpecker’s hole and slowly surrounded the sleepers with piles of dry leaves and branches and bracken. “Vengeance is mine,” he said to himself.

Then he spat sparks into the dry leaves. He vomited the hot coal out. In a flash the leaves and the branches, and then the trees, and then the forest were in flames. Flames became the furnace that walled the Animals in so there was no way out. Flames became the sky, so there was no way up—

Pertelote cries, “Stop! Stop! Kangi Sapa, stop!”

But the Raven can’t stop ("Shit! Shit!") not here, at any rate. Breathless, he drives on. “Chapter five,” he cries.

So the earth was a lump of char. The wind blew great clouds of ashes into the air. The sun went black…

Wait a minute, wait a minute, let me think…

Okay. Listen. I mean, listen to the cinders on the ground. Listen hard. Do you hear that little whispering sound?

The small bones of a Mouse were starting to stir. They became pebbles. And the pebbles grew big as boulders. Many Mice, many boulders, until they were mountains.

Hens’ feathers became white fluffs of clouds, so the sun began to shine.

Coyote fur turned into red soil.

Otters’ teeth became seeds.

A little Bird flew. Her beak poked holes in the earth and she planted the seed. She flew up the to the sky and poked holes for stars.

A most lovely Wolf wept tears of happiness, and her tears were the small rain down that rained, and they watered the seeds, and the seeds grew.

And two Ground Squirrels harvested the wheat.

And everyone,
everyone
ate a feast.

“I named you,” the yellow-eyed Wolf says to the saddled-backed female. “You are mine.”

Rutt stands with a paw of possession on the unstrung corpse of a Grey Fox, glaring pale-eyed at Eurus, a motor rolling in her throat.

“What I kill,” she growls, “I eat.” Her tail vibrates menace.

The rest of the pack is wary, but watching. Only one Wolf can dominate.

The Grey Fox’s guts steam on the snow. Hence the blood on Rutt’s muzzle.

Eurus steps toward her. He drops his shoulders and wrinkles his snout, revealing his dagger-fangs.

When he is within two feet of Rutt, she begins to clack her teeth together.

Eurus drives his hind paws into the snow and lunges. She rises to meet him. They rise up and grapple chest to chest, then explode into a violent slashing. Blood colors the white snow. The pack creeps backward.

Eurus closes his jaws on Rutt’s windpipe. He tightens the bite. Her tongue is forced out of her mouth, and she begins to mew.

As quickly as the fight began, it’s over.

Eurus releases the She-Wolf. He clamps the Fox corpse in his teeth and carries it ten feet away and slants a yellow eye at the female.

“I named you,” he says, “and I can unname you, bitch.”

Crook and Skoll retreat to the scoops of snow that had been their beds last night.

Only Eurus’s daughter remains standing, Freya, starkly beautiful. She walks to her father and nips his cheek until he places the liver before her, and she eats, glancing at Rutt in a cold superiority. She is what Rutt has never been nor will ever be: the beloved of the dominant Eurus. Freya too wears the dark saddle on her back. But the resemblance mocks Rutt.

Eurus sees the sharp constriction in Rutt’s face.

“A goddess, isn’t she?” he says, referring to Freya, allowing his eyelids to sink in a delicious contentment. “If my daughter should ever lose her father, she will weep tears of golden red.” Eurus shows his contempt by speaking in a manner high-flown, lyrical, and arrogant, something the She-Wolf can never achieve.

Rutt blanks her face.

“If,” he continues, “I ever have to leave to fight some aggressive pack invading my borders, Freya will search for me however harsh the regions until she finds me. Then I will string a necklace of polished shells and clasp it around her neck.”

Freya hums a sardonic tune. None of Rutt’s children has ever been able to form words. Nevertheless, Rutt knows the meaning of Freya’s humming.

Eurus persists in that highborn poetry that divides the mother from his daughter.

“When the Creator changes noonday into night, he will elevate Freya to shine as the brightest star in heaven. For your daughter is more willful than you. Every male will bow down before her charms, and she will bed them one by one at her good pleasure.”

Even so: there shall be enmity between these women as long as they both shall live.

Underneath Rutt’s black anger is the sense that things did not have to be the way they are. There was a time…

There was another humming…

But she must have repressed the memory so that the present outrages would not be worse for the contrast. Or else memory might weaken her hardness of heart. Or perhaps there’s been no repression at all. Perhaps a child’s memory is lost in her maturity.

But there
was
a time, there
must
have been a time, when humming communicated nothing so much as mercy. Nor was it the half snarl of her daughter. It was a lowing as lovely as the spheres.

Shit! Do not go there!

And there was…

There was a sister!

And they played and did not fight. And their nourishment was milk.

Innocence.

Innocence is pliable and unprepared It is to be reviled in this world and in these days.

Innocence was dismayed. Innocence was helpless before the shocks of wickedness. And its only response was to match hatred for hatred.

No, goddammit!

Reject memory!

Enough of this! Enough of humiliation. Rutt refuses to suffer the taunts and the constant hostilities of the yellow-eyed, the
piss
-eyed Eurus, nor the bitch-mockeries of her daughter. Rutt’s willfulness dominates, and hatred sets her free.

She lowers her body and streaks away, an arrow parallel the to ground. If Eurus is savage, she shall double his savagery. If Eurus commands others, she shall command a host!

The land in front of Pertelote’s band of Animals has begun to rise more steeply than before. Their going is slower. No one plays on the river-ice.

Here and there the snow lacks depth. There are patches of bare earth.

It is late in the afternoon. The western sun burnishes the clouds ahead. The Cream-Colored Wolf has never lost the scent she follows. Pertelote flies overhead. Every furlong increases her agitation.

Once her beauty shone most beguilingly in the scarlet feathers at her throat. Now they’ve withered into a drab sepia, and her comb has almost collapsed.

Below her, Wachanga stops midstep and tips her head as if questioning something in the distance. She glances up at Pertelote, again questioning. So Pertelote spirals down and alights beside her sister and trains her eye forward.

The clouds are lifting! What they hid is coming visible!

Foothills, the foundation of a mountain range.

Both the Wolf and the Hen watch the slow unveiling, and when the Animals gather behind them everyone is lost in awe.

Not only do the clouds lift. They are also dissipating. And then the mountains themselves appear, their heights mighty, their summits snowcapped. Their snowy crowns glow golden in the setting sun. Long, rugged crags score their faces. They wear skirts of green forest.

Jasper has lost fat. This is due partly to the wintry lack of food, for which the Hen has been scavenging westward.

It is also partly due to the amount of time she spends with her two small Chicks. Jasper knows the dangers of the world, has met them, has
been
them. If she has anything to do about it, therefore, her children shall not go unprotected. Care and anxiety have sapped her substance. Such changes in the Hen!

The points of Jasper’s vestigial comb and her wattles have been pinched black by the subzero cold. Her neck seems to have grown too long, her legs and her eyes too big.

As Lord Chauntecleer once named and numbered his three children the “Pins,” so Jasper has named hers: One-Pick and Two-Pick.

They know their names. They come when she calls, though they themselves, as hard as their mother has tried to teach them, cannot shape their own first words.

Oh, but Jasper loves motherhood! At night she gathers her Picks under her breast and sings them to sleep with lullabies in her unpretty voice: “Lu-lay.”

Soon she thinks she hears responses to her singing. But when she stops singing, all is silent. When she sings again other words follow immediately upon her verses so swiftly and so softly that she can scarcely make them out.

Perhaps it is the souls of her stillborn Chicks that echo her lullabies. Those that lay dead in their shells with their dark, bulging eyes closed under transparent lids—these too Jasper has never ceased to love.

“Lu-lay, lu-lay—

And
Lu-lay

Little children mine

Mother shrine

Lie and rest a while.

A while.

Lu-lay, lu-lay

Lu-lay

Both boy and girl

Ma pearl

There is no Wolf so wild

So wild

That I will not

Will not

Keep both your hearts

Ma star

Safe and mild

Mother of smiles

From the first to the last of your lives.

Mother lullabies.”

John Wesley Weasel has a bad feeling.

He darts among the sleeping Animals, rousing them, counting them. It’s just as he thought. One is missing.

He repeats the count.

“Lady Hen! Lady Hen! Is a White Wolfie gone!”

Pertelote shakes sleep from her brains.

“What?”

“White Wolfie! He’s up and gone!”

“No need to worry, John. Boreas is often gone. It has always been his habit to run ahead and survey the land of our going.”

“No, Lady Hen. Is
backwards
gone.”

“How do you know this?”

“John, he dreams it, does John.”

“Don’t trust your dreams.”

“You
does when you dreams, Pertelote.”

There it is again, her given name in the Weasel’s mouth. He’s changing. Or he’s truly troubled. And he is right. She carries her dreams into the daylight and acts upon them.

“Exactly what did you dream?”

“Buzzardies! Black Buzzardies, one, two, fifteen, wing-flying that-a-way!” John gestures to the east whence the Animals have come. “White Wolfie ups and trots where Buzzardies go.”

At that moment Wachanga passes the Hen and the Weasel, her nose to the ground, her nostrils flaring.

John says, “Pretty She-Wolfie! What’s the what?”

She says nothing. The Cream-Wolf has caught the White Wolf’s scent. Suddenly she bounds twenty feet, also toward the east.

John Wesley throws himself into a warrior’s posture. “Do,” he murmurs to himself, and scrambles down the bank of the frozen river, and skims high-speed after the Wolves both white and cream.

A dozen Vultures are circling. In order to find the object of their interest, Boreas the Watch-Wolf trots toward the center of the morticians’ flight.

If Death is lurking apace behind the band of Animals, then Death might be trailing them, seeking a slaughter.

The Marten Selkirk likewise has spied the Vultures. Ever ashamed of his yearnings, he gauges the distance between himself and the corruption the Vultures mean to feed on.

Winter has reduced the number of beastial Creatures prowling the earth. Therefore the opportunities to find carrion have also been reduced—except for those whom winter has killed.

Selkirk’s natural haunts have always been the forests. But hunger has driven him out onto the naked plains, into foreign regions which distress him and where he is himself vulnerable to a violent attack.

Why couldn’t he simply lie down and die? He would welcome the punishment. His loathing of his own compulsions would finally be over. But compulsion overcomes death.

Pertelote is torn in two directions. Everything within her wants to follow John Wesley. But the band of the Meek requires her to stay with them.

Statim.

Oh, that constraining lowing! Fly from her Animals after John and Boreas and Wachanga. Or fly toward the mountains and the organ-call ahead of her.

Statim, statim, Gallina.

Te insequitur perfidia.

Make haste,
Gallina!

The merciless age rages

At your back.

Come hither!

Pertelote lies on a shelf of air, her heart and her mind tearing in two.

The Vultures, smooth on their wide, motionless wings, wheel the sky above their carrion, but hesitate to descend. A Creature greater than they stands next to it, pawing small bones and a feathered carcass, and gazing at a decapitated Hen.

A powerful scent rides the steam of recent Wolf-scats. Boreas knows the stink. Boreas knows who slaughtered this Hen. He deeply, deeply despises him.

Moreover, a trail of blood-drops confirms the fact that Eurus still bears warm meat in his jaws.

The White Wolf pricks his ears. He’s heard a twitter of fear under a scrub oak.

Just then John Wesley, racing down the river ice, rams his claws down in order to stop, but whips on past Boreas, spinning away: “Gaw, Gaw, Gaw, G
aw!”

Boreas raises his head. He watches the Weasel come mincing back along the riverbank.

When John sees the victim at the White Wolf’s feet and the detached head of a Hen, he pauses. So uncharacteristic of the Weasel! He reaches out his paw and touches the Hen’s beak with one nail.

“Was a bad Cackle. Was a cussingest Cackle, what picked on sister Cackles, then was a Cackle of sinfulnesses. But John, he don’t think Jasper, she deserves…”

It seems that John Wesley is mourning.

Then, quietly, he says to Boreas, “Wolfie. We gots fightings to do.”

Apparently the Weasel’s river-speed outdistanced Wachanga’s ground speed by a lick, for now she too arrives.

There are three.

Wachanga turns questioning eyes to the White Wolf.

He says, “Aye.”

The scrub oak says, “Peep.”

“See to the Chicks,” Boreas says to Wachanga. “Take care of them.” And to the Weasel, “Yes. Fightings. Let’s go.”

The Vulture has a nude head, red and wrinkled from his black earholes to the base of is beak. There is a reason for such stupendous ugliness. The maggots that flourish in his putrefying dinners cannot attach to a face with no feathers.

The Vulture may be graceful in the sky. On the ground he is merely a fat foul on weak feet.

When, therefore, the dozen Vultures spiral slowly down to the dead and meal of warm corpse, Wachanga allows them to land, then dashes at them, bowling them over, one, six, twelve.

Boreas, trotting with John Wesley, had not expected a pack of seven.

As the scent warmed before his approach he calculated that he was closing in on Eurus. His martial instincts did not wait on the Weasel. Now he howls and bounds forward.

But the yellow-eyed Wolf stands on stiff legs at the point of a pack: four more males and two females. Only one Wolf hangs back, a female of pale and impassive eyes.

“Boreas,” Eurus growls. “You keen to join my pack?”

The White Wolf ignores the taunt. He is measuring the enemy, seeking weakness.

“No? You’d rather run with the
Meek?
Not a good decision.”

Eurus addresses his pack: “Mine!”

Suddenly he hurls himself at Boreas.

Boreas skips aside.

Eurus whirls and lunges at the White Wolf. So does Boreas lunge. They rear up on their hind legs, baring their teeth, slashing at one another’s throats. They do not bark. They fight in a violent silence.

Boreas hooks a fang in his enemy’s jowl and rips the skin into two flaps. Blood spatters the White Wolf’s face and chest.

Both back off and lower their heads, grimly eyeing one another. At some undetectable signal, they leap again and slam together, clashing jaws. Eurus’s blood reddens both their snouts.

Boreas has always been the larger of the two. But Eurus has the greater hatred. He throws a shoulder at Boreas, who huffs and thumps the ground.

Eurus drives at the White Wolf’s loins.

Boreas rolls. Momentum pitches Eurus past Boreas, who claws Eurus’s left eye. The ball erupts from its socket.

Now
Eurus
is down. Boreas stands over him.

Suddenly Skoll takes up where his father left off. Fresh, young, and well-muscled, he has the advantage.

Almost as if in a dream, Boreas watches Skoll’s streamlined flight. He feels the blow his body takes, then feels as if he’s sinking in a warm, green sea.

Like the blaring of a distant trumpet, a raucous voice yells, “Do and do and do for you!”

How nice, Boreas thinks. The Weasel is here.

Skoll barks. John snarls. “Gots a pizzle?” All at once the force that knocked Boreas down releases him.

The Weasel cries, “Up, Woflie! Wolfie gots to get up!”

Boreas is amazed to find that he is actually getting up, is standing. The Weasel’s determination is worth the strength of ten Wolves.

Boreas shakes his head. His vision clears. John Wesley is dashing in circles around him. “Gots to go, Wolfie. John, he can fight three, maybe four, not six.”

There, at the head of the pack, her pale eyes flat with anger, is a third female.

Another Wolf with a dark scar from his eye to his jowl lays back his ears and retracts his cheeks. So do the two other males.

“Wolfie! We lickety splits!”

The female snaps at the three males: “Mine!” They back off.

“Rutt,” the one-eyed, yellow eyed Eurus mutters with relief. “It’s you.”

Once more the female cries, “Mine!” and throws herself powerfully forward.

The Weasel is beside himself. The White Wolf can manage only a few steps on his trembling legs.

The female lands not on Boreas, but on Eurus, her claws on his chest.

“Look at me,” she says. “Look at me.”

Eurus turns his remaining eye toward her and blows words through the flaps of his jowls, “Thank you.”

“I,” says the She-Wolf, “am vengeance.”

Slowly she opens her jaws and closes them on the wounded Wolf’s bloody muzzle, slowly crushes it, then holds on while Eurus thrashes, holds on until he suffocates and dies.