The White Bone (28 page)

From where they are, against the relatively cooler south bank of the river, Me-Me is in their sights. Far more tolerant ofthe heat than they are, she lolls and stretches. Mid-afternoon she takes off north and returns dragging a still-living warthog. She eats it languorously and playfully, pretending to catch it anew, lunging at it, throwing the trotters into the air and batting them down, all this while barely using her right paw. She-Snorts speculates that the paw is injured.

As if hearing her, Me-Me points the paw toward them, and She-Soothes bellows, “Damned if she doesn’t want She-Soothes to attend to it,” and She-Snorts rumbles, “I’ve caught the second odour again, what is it?” and she snorts, frustrated.

The sunset that day is particularly vivid and symmetrical. Three straight bands of equal width and brilliance–purple on top, then red, then orange–across the whole of the western horizon.

“She-Soothes wonders who she was,” She-Soothes bellows. (You get a sunset like that only when a matriarch has been slaughtered.)

She-Measures, Mud thinks because of the symmetry, but she doesn’t say so. She doesn’t want the thought confirmed.

They have already set off. Normally Mud would place herself abreast of She-Soothes, but to travel in a line is easier through this maze of boulders and she walks behind the big cow. To their left, Me-Me’s small head, lit up in the low sun, sails between the rocks like a moon. Whenever she begins to veer closer, She-Soothes trumpets and she angles back to where she was.

Despite the impossibility of holding to a straight path, they manage a brisk enough pace with She-Soothes nudging Bentalong ahead of her. Scents are scarce. There is the ashy smell of the boulders themselves, the blood-sweet smell of Me-Me, the stench of vultures and the prickly fragrances of smaller creatures: of jackal, barbet, lizard. Each of these odours hovers in discrete ribbons above the underscents, which, as She-Snorts predicted, scarcely arrive.

The moon arrives not at all. Aside from the winking of fireflies the night is black. Mud nevertheless scans for the white bone because it is possible that the bone’s fabled gleam defies darkness and because who can tell which boulders, among so many, form part of a larger circle? She is alert to the shape of what she steps on. A stick is not a rib. She moves silently. They all do, Me-Me as well. The five of them are a grim thought moving through an immense mind–so Mud imagines. Or she imagines that she is alone, the odour of the others being merely what lingers of them. She herself, in all her booming pain, feels conspicuous. Her withered leg throbs. It doesn’t seize, though … there is that blessing. Her belly is what seizes, from hunger or the newborn, and she strokes the rungs of her ribs and wonders whether the newborn feels it. She feels the newborn’s heart pulsing two beats to her one. She counts the heartbeats, her footsteps–she is able to count up to three things at once. After some ten thousand steps She-Snorts says, “Stop.”

They have come to a teclea thicket, and since it would be mad to pass up anything digestible in this wilderness, they begin to forage. South of them, Me-Me paces and yelps.

“Shut your stinking hole!” She-Soothes trumpets, and Me-Me does, but only for a moment. Twice she darts closer and She-Soothes charges her.

Both times She-Snorts smells that elusive odour but fails toidentify it. She says to She-Soothes, “Don’t chase her off next time. I want to get a better whiff of her.”

Before resuming the trek, while She-Soothes is eating gazelle dung (a brand of her so-called drought fruit), She-Snorts and Mud move to a slight rise of land and from there transmit a series of infrasonic rumbles, to Date Bed, Torrent, Tall Time and then to Hail Stones and Swamp. When no responses come, Mud says, “I was hoping that at least Hail Stones or Swamp would answer.”

“They are being assailed by somebody else’s grounders,” She-Snorts says.

By She-Screams, in other words. “I had a vision of She-Screams dead,” Mud says.

She-Snorts expels a slow breath.

“She was alone.” Already Mud knows that she has made a bad mistake, mentioning the banished cow. “She was at the bottom of a hill,” she says quickly, hoping that the details will somehow absolve her. In her anxiety she uses the formal timbre. “Near a pool of muck. Nothing of the place was familiar.”

Silence.

“Her hide was clean.” She is weeping now. “There weren’t any sting holes. She looked as though she had been lying there for several days.”

Silence.

“I think it was the near future,” she says in a final pitch of anguish.

“Did she have her tusks?” She-Snorts asks. Her voice is without inflection.

“Yes! Yes, she had her tusks!”

She-Snorts turns and ambles back to the thicket.

They have been walking about an hour when a large pack of spotted hyenas shows up and cavorts close behind them. Mud moves beside She-Soothes and fights hard not to fall into her memory of the hyena that stalked her on the night of her birth. “Ignore them,” She-Snorts tells She-Soothes, whose bellows of “Be off!” only provoke manic cackles. Are we so reduced that they think they can get to Bent? Mud wonders. Or perhaps it’s Me-Me they want. Mud has never heard of hyenas bringing down a grown cheetah, but in this devious landscape no behaviour seems fantastic. When the hyenas cackle, Me-Me hisses and discharges a bitter odour like bullets. Toward morning she runs away south, and the hyenas give up their pursuit and fall back out of scent.

“She’ll return,” She-Snorts says.

The sun rises. They are nowhere near water and so they keep walking and after several hours arrive at a salt lick. A little beyond the lick She-Snorts finds a cavity she has only to prod with her foot before a small fountain gushes up. “Jubilation!” she trumpets. They all twine trunks and defecate and then they drink and spray each other, exhilarated not only because the digger might have been Date Bed (although there aren’t any signs of her) but because their expectations of locating clear water on The Spill had been so dismal.

They eat the desiccated brush and shreds of grass surrounding the lick, and when that is gone they tusk the ground for roots. When there are no more roots, they eat salt and earth and then they lie in the shade of giant termite mounds, andwhile everyone else sleeps, Mud worries about having divulged her vision … although how could she have guessed that even
it
would not penetrate the banishment? She prays her one-word prayer–"Please"–and shapes her thoughts into a Date Bed spirit. (She has come to believe that provided it is perfectly imagined–that as long as it is
capable
of being perfectly imagined–the spirit not only sustains Date Bed, it is the proof that she lives.) She keeps her eyes open, watches the shade ebbing from the bodies of the others and falls into memories of shade sliding off skin, of sun-grilled corpses. At intervals she says, “We’d better move out of the She-eye,” and they all get up and drink and spray themselves with water and dirt and scratch their hides on the mounds before lying down again. Every few hours She-Snorts sends infrasonic calls and Mud makes a careful scan of the horizon, especially to the north, which is directly upwind and on which dust tornadoes sit like the smoke from a line of fires. Wavering shapes that could be Me-Me turn out to be ostriches, oryxes. No shape as big as a she-one materializes, and nothing, certainly no bone, is blinding white.

Mid-afternoon She-Soothes wanders off to collect hyena dung for her eye wad, and Mud says to She-Snorts, “I am sorry, Matriarch.”

She-Snorts glances at her. “It matters less that you spoke about a banished cow, She-Spurns, than that you spoke of your vision. A death vision is the burden of the visionary alone. Never again tell me about such a vision.”

“I won’t,” Mud vows in the formal timbre.

“Unless,” She-Snorts says, “it is of Date Bed.”

They travel through another black night, this one uneventful and quiet. Just after dawn they arrive at a parched streambed in which they dig six holes before striking a seepage of muddy water. It will have to do. Long, dry thatch grass crackles in narrow rows along the banks. So much untouched grazing, while it is a find, is not good news–no one has been here since before the drought.

“There’s more than one way to peel a tree!” declares She-Soothes. In other words, Date Bed might have veered north or south of this place and still held a course leading to Feed Swamp.

She-Snorts breathes in short puffs that blow the dust from the grass. “I am so tired,” she says finally, and her scent plummets to bleakness.

“Take a whiff at all the browse!” roars She-Soothes, as if they have only this moment arrived.

She-Snorts suddenly raises her trunk. She points it behind herself.

Mud, She-Soothes and Bent do the same.

“What?” She-Soothes bellows.

All of them turn around. Perk their ears.

“Is it that stinking longbody?” She-Soothes bellows.

No answer. Presently Mud sees the huge disturbance of dust on the eastern horizon. A she-one, it must be.

“Well, what do you know,” She-Snorts murmurs, dropping her trunk.

From her tone–scornful, disappointed–Mud guesses who it is. A moment later she catches the odour.

“Jubilation!” She-Soothes trumpets. Wheezing and weeping, she dashes up to She-Screams and the two big cows twine trunks and clang tusks, and then She-Screams tries to go after Bent, but he quails under She-Soothes’ belly. Mud is utterly ignored, although she lifts her trunk toward She-Screams in a hesitant salute.

“She-Soothes knew you would return!” She-Soothes hollers. “Matriarch–” She looks over her shoulder and only now appears to grasp that the matriarch isn’t taking part in the greeting, and she steps back from She-Screams and shakes her head, flummoxed, or protesting the matriarch’s behaviour, probably both.

She-Screams, meanwhile, has rushed past all of them to the water hole. She lowers herself to her knees and drinks. Drinks until the seepage goes dry. “I’ll dig another!” she cries, hauling herself to her feet. “No, no!” she cries, as if one of them had demurred. “I’ll dig it. All my scents are sharper. I have been blessed with a tremendous bloating of my intellect. I don’t suppose anybody has noticed how much larger my skull is.”

They look at her, even She-Snorts throws her a glance. Her head does seem a bit bigger, but that may be because her body, like theirs, is shrunken from hunger. In her self-adoring way, eyes fluttering, rump swaying, she sprays her rutted hide with muck, after which she returns to the bank and pulls up a hank of grass by the roots and stuffs it into her mouth, dirt and all, and says, “You won’t believe what I’ve been through since … was it only yesterday that I left? So much has happened to me. I don’t suppose anybody cares to hear what.”

Nevertheless she tells them.

Late morning she lost the trail of the bulls, who, ten miles or so east of Jaw-Log River, headed southwest into a terrain of flat rock that she suspects was once a She-D thoroughfare, familiar to Hail Stones. She also suspects that at this point the bulls began to eat their dung and bury their urine in order to vanquish their scent (“Hail Stones’ idea, I have no doubt”). She decided to veer west, but there was no sign of them that way, either, so she roamed aimlessly for a while, moving in and out of The Spill. A wire fence obliged her to head north again and almost straight into a cluster of inhabited human dwellings. She raced northwest and, just as she was feeling relatively safe, came upon a shambles: the tuskless skeletons of the She-A’s-And-A’s, nine bodies and therefore the last of the line. She weeps out loud as she describes her solitary mourning of that notoriously clever family of riddle solvers and philosophers, how she sang all seventy-five verses of “The She Is My Matriarch,” all three hundred of “Oblivion! Oblivion!” and in so doing attracted vultures, “packs of them, and they were very quiet, I could tell they were deeply touched by the expression and gravity I bring to a hymn.” (Mud wonders, Is she altogether deluded? And yet Mud weeps out loud, too, as does She-Soothes, notwithstanding that if She-Screams is banished, they aren’t supposed to have heard the tragic news.)