The White Bone (33 page)

“In a moment,” she thinks. Weeping, she wedges the dung into a crevice of the mound.

He rocks from foot to foot, one eye on the Thing.

“How many in the family?” she thinks.

“Four.”

“How many calves?”

“Four cows.”

“Ah,” she says, breathless with grief. Not a calf left. Her wound buzzes, and she presses it with the knuckle of her trunk. “How did the cows seem to you? Were any sickly?”

“Bony.” He tips his head to look at her.

“Did you speak with the mind talker?” Before the drought that would have been She-Scoffs.

A jerk of the head to one side.

“Why not?”

“They have no mind talker.”

No mind talker. How odd … another family who has become separated from its mind talker. “Where are they?”

He looks southwest.

“How long did it take you to get here?”

He sweeps a wing at the sky, indicating the movement of the sun from mid morning to now.

“Did you fly fast?”

He flaps his wings, as if to demonstrate. “Show me,” he says.

She forces him to wait a little longer. She wants to know exactly where the She-S’s-And-S’s are, in what kind of place. In a riverbed, he says, among trees. Standing trees? A nod. What breed? Yellow bark. How many? Many.

She decides to make the journey. She can’t imagine anybody quitting fever-tree browse in a hurry. A distance that took him five hours to fly, with the wind at his back, will take her three full nights to walk, at least that. She will set off at dusk. Maintaining a straight course will not be as easy for her as it is for him and she asks for geographical markers, although she risks either forgetting them or not seeing them. Another bargain is struck: in exchange for two more daily glimpses of himself, he will track her and correct any deviations. Tomorrow while she rests, just in case the She-S’s-And-S’s do decide to move elsewhere, he will fly ahead to confirm their location.

So much promised work earns him a lengthy look at himself. When he finally soars away, Stench shows up for his look, and by the time he leaves there are only a few hours to go before dusk. She covers herself in water and dirt and begins to forage. Apparently there is a baobab a third of the way to the riverbed. If she maintains a brisk pace, she should be feeding from that tree by sunrise. There is, moreover, a range of hills east of here, close enough that Sour was surprised when she admitted she couldn’t see them. All this time, then, shehas been in a vicinity where the white bone is likely to be dropped, even though Sour said that on this side of the hills he has come across no circular formations of termite mounds or boulders. Still, as she walks she will keep an eye out.

The mongooses return and she tells them that she is leaving for at least six days, perhaps longer, perhaps forever, and they clasp her legs and each other and screech, “Danger! Danger! Danger! Peril! Peril! Danger! Danger!” Over the din she tries to reassure them: the eagles have reported that the land is almost free of carnivores and, anyway, a rumour is afoot that she is inedible, poisonous. She swings the Thing and skims a beam of light over the ground and tells them of how the beam scared off the lionesses. They hiss and bristle. They themselves are frightened of the Thing. “Sing, sing, sing, sing,” they twitter, and she gives them a few verses of “Oft in Danger, Oft in Woe.” Soothed, they start disappearing into their den, the last of them, a muscular female, lingering long enough to twitter, “Big’s, Big’s scent, Big’s scent, scent is, is, is different, is different, different.”

It is true, then. All day she has been telling herself that her symptoms aren’t really there, that her ungovernable mind has taken it upon itself to delude her. She is too sickly to enter her inaugural oestrus. Too small, too skeletal. She picks up the Thing and looks at her good left eye. “But Tall Time is gone,” she says, and tears distort her reflection. She takes it for granted that if she really is in oestrus, then staring at her spirit twin explains how her body gathered the strength to bring the oestrus on. Why, though? Why go into oestrus? Tall Time died at the big water hole, and even if she wanted the attentions of another bull, there aren’t any close enough to smell her, muchless hear her calling. Thinking of Tall Time as he was when he mounted Mud, she begins to rumble “zeal,” that lascivious babble she had assumed, before now, was voluntary.

She walks in circles, rumbling, and so transported that she loses all sense of where she is until swatted in the face by a light. She stops and squints around and spies a big bird flying low over the plain, weighted down by what he carries.

The lingering scent is Sour’s. “You have cursed yourself!” she thinks to the dissolving blur of him. He keeps flying. She trumpets, and the mongooses re-emerge. Learning what has happened, they hiss, “These flawlesses, these flawlesses will, will rip, rip the stinkard’s, the stinkard’s wings, wings, wings off, off, claw, claw the stinkard’s, the stinkard’s guts, the stinkard’s guts, guts, guts out, out,” and she is touched and pretends to believe that they will stand by their threats and makes them promise not to do anything rash.

Once they are back in the den she takes a long drink. She can’t not go. After hours of imagining what it would be like to touch and smell the She-S-And-S cows, the thought of staying is intolerable. She determines precisely where southwest is and sets off, chanting the directions rhythmically, and then working them into rhymes, adding a melody.

So far the trick has worked. Here is the streambed, here is the stony bank, here she is alive and unmolested. But feeling the absence of the Thing more severely by the hour. The Thing steadied her. Without it she is anxious. The reek of lionesses clings to these stones. Could she defend herself? She is far weaker than she had counted on, having lost the habit of walking, and being driven, during voluptuous states of mind, to strut and to peer coquettishly over her shoulder.

She digs three holes that come up dry. Not wanting to waste any more time, she points herself southwest (verifying her position by the moon and the prevailing west wind, now fallen to a light breeze) and starts walking.

She reaches the baobab after sunrise. It is so thoroughly gutted she wonders how it can still be standing–her last thought before she falls asleep on her feet. When she opens her eyes the sun is past its meridian. She kicks loose a mound of dirt, throws it over her back. Aside from the tree’s smell, the odours here are thin: jackals, and a cobra, but they are old smells. She sniffs for a source of water and in the endexcavates enough tubers to slake her thirst and allow her to eat the bit of pulp she is able to prise from the baobab’s cavity. She finds a sharp stone and chisels a mark into her tusk. Day fifty-six.

She sleeps again and awakens into darkness. How many hours has she lost? At least five. Anxious, staggering, she hurries away. “Thorn scrub,” she sings, “all trampled and ruined, a raised path, a pan, egg-shaped… .”

Then what? Something that rhymes with “ruined.” Nothing does. But here, underfoot, is the thorn scrub, trampled and ruined. “A pan, egg-shaped… .”

It’s no good. The rest of that verse is lost. “Southwest,” she tells herself. That’s all she needs to know. Southwest.

The other verses are similarly butchered. She sings what she can remember and hums what she can’t. She fights the fall into hallucinations and memories. Alertness is essential. Somewhere in this vicinity there are human dwellings: “… hindlegger nests on a circular ridge… .”

Midway through in the night her right hind leg develops a wobble. It may be from the strain of all that carnal hip-swaying, but it’s possible she has been bitten by a snake and, if so, she needs sausage-tree fruit or palm fruit, the antidotes. A little farther on, as she is threading through a colony of termite mounds, she hears a snort. Terrified, she stops and scents. It is a giraffe. Two giraffes, a female and a calf. “Masters!” she thinks joyfully. They will tell her where she is, where water is! She moves blindly toward them. They gallop off. Through the pall of dust she smells palm hearts. But it is a memory of smell.

The madness starts there. For the next three days she is lost in memories. They aren’t even shadow memories, they are amixture of the remaining fragments, a corrupt redisposition. She is wading in a pond and surely it should be Mud who is with her, not Swamp, and Swamp says something that was said, yes, but never by him. A helpless part of her
knows.

When she emerges into the present–and she does, briefly, every few hours–she discovers that she is otherwise behaving rationally. Lying in the shade. Drinking. While her mind was looping through its shambles she must have sniffed out water and dug a hole! She wonders if her practical mind operates more cunningly when she is unaware of it. She has obviously decided she should return to the acacia. Every time she finds herself on the move, she is labouring along (no longer strutting, her oestrus has passed) in a northeasterly direction.

On the second night, there she is having an apparently cordial conversation with five wild dogs.

“Or is it only yourself?” a big male is asking.

She blinks at him, trying to imagine the question and finally answering, “Not only myself,” because of safety in numbers.

He backs away. “The smell is evil,” he growls, and she guesses that he is referring to her leg and that his question concerned the rumour that she is poisonous.

On her right hind shin is a putrid sore. If she was, after all, bitten by a snake, no snake she has ever heard of would leave such a mark and provoke the kind of derangement she is suffering. She tells herself that once she is back at the tree she will start to heal. She is not without hope that Sour will feel cursed by his thievery and return the Thing and she will be able to look into her eye again and locate her sanity.

She is lying under the acacia, breathing in its ancient, elaborate odour, and the mongooses are scuttling up and down her body and twittering, “Reek, reek, reek.”

She touches her trunk to the ones she can reach, their quivering little bodies, and in the bliss of being among them again she urinates and streams temporin, and the mongooses near her skull dab at the exudant and twitter, “Sticky, sticky.”

“Flow-stick bite,” she thinks to explain the foul smell, and they growl and spit and say how, if they’d been there, they’d have “chewed, chewed the, the stinkard’s, stinkard’s, stinkard’s head, head, head” and beaten the stinkard against a rock and so on.

“How long was I away?” she asks.

“Four, four, four days, days, four days.”

“Get off me now,” she thinks, all of a sudden conscious of her enormous thirst.

In the riverbed she digs a water hole at a spot they recommend. As she waits for the hole to fill, and then as she drinks, they are strangely quiet. It isn’t until she begins to shower that they chorus that yesterday a lone female cheetah showed up and ate two of their young (“that new flawless and that new flawless”). Date Bed staggers and they dash away from her feet. She can’t believe how hideous she feels, as if the infants belonged to her own family. She begins to weep. The mongooses don’t. They become enraged, remembering. They slam their hips into each other and describe how they lunged at the cheetah and tried to bite her. They perform a re-enactment, finishing with a chorus of “Killed! Killed! Killed!” and then they abruptly calm down and advise her to feed herself. Still weeping, she dislodges a length of bark from the acacia. Whileshe eats they tell her that on the morning after her departure, the martial eagle (they continue to believe there is only the one) returned many times and perched on the termite mound. Did he have the Thing? she asks. “No, no, no, no!” they screech, alarmed because of their fear of it, but then they swear that had they seen it they would have retrieved it for her by “biting, biting, biting the, the, the stinkard’s, the stinkard’s wings, wings” and various other tactics.