The White Bone (30 page)

Me-Me heads north-northeast. If she can be trusted (and she probably can, at least as far as knowing where it was that she stepped in Date Bed’s dung), she has spared them a futile journey to the other side of The Spill. This alone makes her company worth bearing–even for She-Soothes, who, everytime they stop to give Bent a rest, tolerates her trotting back as though to determine the reason for the delay. But Me-Me’s lust for calf flesh is no less perceptible than her stench, and they are not fooled. Neither is Mud’s newborn. When Me-Me comes close, Mud’s belly goes into an uproar and she gets it into her head that it is
her
newborn, not the matriarch’s, who has been offered in the bargain, and the thought panics her, for all that she has said this prayer: Let mine perish for hers.

While they are on the move Me-Me positions herself out front by some twenty yards. Now and then her torso is visible flowing between the boulders, but her stench is what guides them, and it is an odd and exhausting experience to be drawn by an odour you flinch from. Mud walks behind She-Soothes and Bent, who are behind She-Snorts. She-Screams walks, as previously, abreast of and about twenty yards to the left of the matriarch. But whereas before she whined and slumped, now she is quiet and her trunk is up. She frequently glances around … on the lookout for anything white, Mud imagines, and wonders whether she plans to go on pretending that the rhino rib she found was the white bone. She wonders, jealously, how much sharper She-Screams’ eyesight has become. Can she see, as clearly as Mud can, the spectacle overhead? From horizon to horizon are the thousands of brilliant stars that declare this a “memory night.”

On the ground is an atmosphere that may be some answering deference, it is so silent. Mud’s impression is of moving through the night in innocence, she and Bent and the cows, like first creatures who with their sighs and stomach growls, their soft rumbles, are concocting a repertoire of night noises that will eventually issue from creatures not yetmade. They pass no forage and, apart from those short recesses for Bent’s sake, walk steadily until shortly before sunrise, when She-Screams says that she must fortify herself. She summons Me-Me and breaks into another seizure of gestures and grunts, at the finish of which Me-Me slaps her tail on the ground and points in several directions, and She-Screams turns to them and reports that forage is north of here, a grove of acacias, and that there is water, too, under a ditch.

This translation, like the first, seems impossibly detailed to Mud. She asks the nurse cow to ask She-Screams if she is hearing the cheetah’s mind. A little later, during one of their rests, when the matriarch wanders off to scratch her hide on a termite mound, She-Soothes puts the question to She-Screams. And is assailed with: “Dimwit! Don’t you think I’d tell you if I was? Do you think I’d torture myself hunting for some sign of a calf who no longer even lives!”

It is not a
grove
of acacias, it is four stunted trees in a clearing formed when somebody, it must have been a human, pushed a dozen or so boulders into a pile. Still, the trees
are
acacia, not entirely stripped of bark, and under them is an unfamiliar species of dead grass that She-Soothes eats a blade of and proclaims safe and tasty.

“How would
you
know what is tasty?” She-Screams says, folding a swatch into her mouth. “It is not inedible,” she allows after swallowing. She grabs a second swatch and is chewing this when she spies the matriarch scenting the ditch that runs through the clearing. Shrieking,
“I’ll
find water!” she hurries to the ditch and begins to dig. She excavates five holes before she locates a seepage. “Matriarch first!” she cries happily when the cavity has filled.

She-Snorts sways a little, her bony hips creak like trees. She moves onto a small rise of land in order to transmit her infrasonic calls to Date Bed … or so Mud presumes. But like Mud herself the matriarch appears to have abandoned that chore. What’s the point, if the calls sent by She-Screams–who wasn’t even that far away–failed to get through? Head and trunk lowerered, She-Snorts simply stands there until all of them have taken their drink, and then she comes back and takes hers. At least she
acknowledges
the water hole, which was no certainty considering that a cow who is not supposed to exist located it.

By late morning, the browse is gone. Grass, roots, bark, branches, they have eaten it all. They retire, still famished, to the rim of shade on the west side of the boulder pile. Me-Me lolls on the ground as if the awesome heat and the flies and the black blowing grit were exactly her element. She doesn’t need water, Mud thinks, astonished, but as soon as everyone lies down the cheetah creeps to the hole and has a long drink. She then sits and begins to lick her left paw as if she intends to settle there.

“Too close!” She-Soothes trumpets.

Me-Me chirps imploringly.

She-Screams comes to her feet. From where she is, she turns in a circle, points and flaps her ears, and Me-Me attends to all this with a cocked head and then moves off to perch on a boulder and scan for prey. Over the course of the afternoon she catches a lizard and two guineafowls. The smell venting from the opened guts is what advertises the nature of the kill, although Mud is able to see the corpses as well. So is She-Screams. In an entertained tone she reportson the capture–"She bit the head off, she’s tossing up the torso. There! That’s the torso!”

Near dusk, just as they are setting out, a raging warthog charges toward them. It trots right by Me-Me, close enough for her to touch it. She watches it sidelong with an attitude of remote curiosity. Squealing at an insanely hysterical pitch, the warthog bolts between She-Screams and She-Snorts and keeps going. Deranged it so obviously is, nobody mentions that. Nobody mentions the other obvious thing, either. They all know the saying: “The three unluckiest things you can come upon: a three-legged she-he, a one-eyed lunatic, a crazy grunt.”

Less than an hour into the trek The Spill starts giving way to populated scrub and night noises–hoots, cackles, barks–and the odour of slaughter and rotting carcasses. Me-Me tries to pick up the pace, but with Bent scarcely able to stand, speed is out of the question. And so she races back to walk between and only a few yards ahead of She-Snorts and She-Screams, and She-Snorts allows this. At such close quarters her smell is a terror to Mud’s newborn, who starts kicking at the belly walls for a way out, that’s how it feels.

Tonight the destination is a pair of baobabs. Me-Me has communicated to She-Screams that the trees were still standing fifteen days ago and that water was in a pool nearby. Because of the mad warthog, Mud has no expectation that they will find either and is surprised when, stamped against the rising sun, she discerns the shapes of the beloved trees. That the pool turns out to be bone dry is the bad warthog luck, so She-Soothes assures everybody, the beginning and end of it.

One tree is completely hollowed out, but the other only partly. They postpone scenting for water and tusk into the pulp, the matriarch and She-Screams going first, Mud and She-Soothes snatching up whatever is dropped and taking quick turns every time the two bigger cows pause to chew. Some pulp is still left in the cavity when She-Snorts begins to search the pool bed for the scent of water. After a quarter of an hour she declares the bed parched. She-Screams then scents and fares no better. She confers with Me-Me and announces that they probably won’t be drinking again until dawn tomorrow, by which time they should have reached a small freshwater basin. “I don’t know how I’ll last until then,” she wails.

How will Bent last? Without water in her belly, She-Soothes is unable to regurgitate any swill. Her milk has dried up, but Bent still tugs at her shrivelled breasts. She feeds him chewed baobab pulp. He coughs it out. He can tolerate nothing except liquids. She dribbles saliva into his mouth, and when her mouth goes dry Mud contributes what saliva she can and sees that his lips foam. To restore her milk She-Soothes needs papyrus or sansevieria. Throughout the afternoon she throws incoherent bellows over the plain as if she could call back the swamps and rivers, and Me-Me, sitting on a crocodile carcass, appears to understand that this fury is not directed at her and stays where she is.

The trek that night takes them along one of the gravel trails favoured by vehicles. They follow it because it is an easy walk, level and empty of rocks, but when She-Screams hears a distant roar they turn west and go in that direction for a mile before resuming their northeasterly course. They meet a smallherd of buffalo too listless to do more than shuffle a few steps out of their way. Passing an old bull, Mud is grazed, shoulder to rump, by the tip of his horn. She feels not transgressed but taken account of: she has a certain shape and length, she moves. She lives.

She sleepwalks and dreams. Or these aren’t dreams, they are visions that exhaustion loosens into dreams. All are of debacles. Carcasses, skeletons. Gunshots, and the cows that have been hit dropping with that almost comical suddenness. She falls into a memory of the slaughter at Blood Swamp. Her trumpets halt the trek. She-Soothes persuades her to eat cold grass ash, and it is immediately effective, securing her for several hours in the desolate present.

Tonight they produce as much noise as any other creatures. Bent whimpers, and She-Screams is back to her old practice of wailing grievances. She claims to be having her spells, but her stride is strong, her head and trunk up. Twice she rushes off to investigate circular boulder formations barely visible to Mud’s eyes, and miles before even the matriarch appears to have caught the scent she announces the proximity of lions and hyenas. Lions she scents almost simultaneously with Me-Me, who fears them above all other carnivores. “We’ll protect you!” She-Screams cries as if Me-Me were their comrade rather than a murderous exploiter. She warns that their slow pace may provoke Me-Me into giving up on them, but when She-Soothes begins to stumble from exhaustion Mud is the one who offers to take over nudging Bent along. She has to curl her trunk between his hind legs and half-push him, halflift him. It is the most strenuous thing she has ever done. She can’t imagine how even stalwart She-Soothes kept it up overso many miles. This is love, she thinks, She-Soothes’ sensible brand: ferocious while it is required, abandoned the moment it stops serving any purpose. As the hours pass and she and Bent are still paired, she begins to believe that the choice between ferocious attachment and abandonment is the essential choice. You haul the calf or you abandon it. You stay with your dead sister’s newborn under the gutted baobab, or you suckle it one last time and run.

It occurs to her that it is madness for four cows and a calf to be risking themselves in an almost hopeless search for a single calf. The thought comes and goes in an instant. But it comes.

Just before dawn She-Soothes relieves her of Bent. By now Mud has lost all sensation in her trunk and it remains curled for several moments and then floats up on its own like something airborne. Her bad leg is past feeling and past straightening. “We are almost there,” she tells herself. They aren’t. They keep going, continuing on from the miniature basin at which they were supposed to drink. It isn’t that Me-Me deceived them. Water was there only days ago, they smell the vestige of it and see it in the wilted frill of new grass whiskering the basin’s lip. And yet the holes they dig are dry.

The sun climbs. Egrets appear and alight on the raw skin of their spines. Every movement of those little feet feels like stabbing thorns. The wind awakens and sucks the dust into coils that crash into their legs as if with malignant intent. Where the heat has opened the earth, down in several of the widest seams, are heaps of bones, and She-Snorts stops and rummages in one of the seams and lifts out a tiny monkey skull whose odour, like Date Bed’s, is frail and pleasant and ambiguous. She-Snorts fondles the skull. She hangs it on the end ofone tusk and studies it from that angle. Then she smashes it against a boulder.

The sun is almost overhead by the time they arrive at the place where Me-Me stepped in Date Bed’s dung–a small pan surrounded by bleached logs. In the centre of the pan are five Grant’s gazelles who come snorting to their feet. A cheetah wouldn’t ordinarily frighten them but they are little more than the bones of their ordinary selves, and when Me-Me sinks to her stalking crouch they turn and bound away. Now, where they were, can be seen the fly-swaddled corpse of a newborn fawn.

“I smell water!” She-Screams cries. She hurries past the corpse, which Me-Me is already starting to drag to the logs.

Passing cheetah and fawn, She-Snorts growls but keeps walking. She is scenting hard. She goes to the other side of the pan and out onto the plain, and Mud, She-Soothes and Bent follow. At a deserted ostrich scrape she stops and picks something up.

A hard, blackened morsel of dung.

“How old is it?” Mud says.

“Thirty-five days,” She-Snorts murmurs. “Perhaps more.”

They smell the morsel in dumb wonder. It is so precious and so paltry. She-Screams, who has already excavated a seepage, comes over and pokes her trunk in among everybody else’s. “Thirty-seven days exactly” is her exasperated judgement.

She-Snorts brings the morsel up to her eye. Puts it in her mouth. She declines to drink and begins scenting the terrain for a clue to where Date Bed went from here.

“I’ll do that later!” She-Screams yells. “I can do that!”

Me-Me is the one who turns around.

“I’m not talking to you!” She-Screams yells, sounding almost fond.

With a jerk of her head Me-Me fixes on Bent.

“What are you gawking at!” She-Soothes roars.

Me-Me resumes ripping apart the fawn. Out on the plain the gazelles watch.

“Thirty-seven days!” She-Screams cries, as all of them except She-Snorts head back to the centre of the pan. “I wish somebody would explain to me what use we will be to Date Bed if we are corpses by the time we find her!” She glances at the matriarch and lowers her voice.
“If
we find her. We have been searching for forty-two days. Do you realize that? Forty-two days, wandering like lost newborns.” At the hole she has a long drink and then says, “I don’t know why you stand for it, She-Soothes. Watching Bent suffer.”