The White Bone (34 page)

She falls into memories.

When she resurfaces, the sun is overhead. She is on her feet, and the mongooses forage nearby. Squinting, she discerns them scurrying beneath the scrub. Everything shimmers in the heat. No wind, the insects sending out their long lines of sound. She chews bark. She is light-headed, but the stench of her shin wound has diluted and for that she credits the bark. She sings a hymn of thanksgiving: “Blessed be the trees we uproot at our will,” and the mongooses come trotting back and are assembling around her ankles when one of them, the lookout, screams, “Wings!” and they all race to the termite mound.

Date Bed cocks her head at the sky. The bird must still be way up there. Or perhaps it is an airplane, she can hear an airplane’s roar. She closes her eyes to scent hard, and something drops on the ground behind her.

She turns. Even from this distance, even though dust shrouds it, she sees the sheen, and it is not a light. It is not the Thing.

The mongooses are already there, twittering, “White! White! White!”

She picks it up. It smells faintly of Sour and nothing else. She holds it to her eye.

“Whose, whose is, is, is that bone, that bone, bone, bone?”

She fondles and tastes it. She weeps. The mongooses scream and throw themselves up in the air and against her legs. “Whose, whose is, is that, that, that bone, bone?”

“The white bone,” she says out loud. They don’t understand and keep screaming. “It is a newborn’s rib,” she finally thinks. “From one of my kind. It is magical.” She curls it under her chin, twists her head around, then jerks forward, flinging her trunk open.

Its landing is obscured by dust. She hurries to it and in sudden exhaustion lowers herself to her knees. The tapered end points southeast. “That way!” she says, amazed, but any direction would have amazed her. The mongooses hop and twitter, wanting to know what she’s doing. She gets herself standing, and the mongooses spring from her feet as she toddles through a dizzy spell. When her head has cleared she picks up the bone and throws it a second time and staggers over to the sprouting of dust. Southeast.

She cherishes the bone against her throat. “Goodbye,” she thinks ecstatically to the mongooses, and starts walking off. “Danger! Danger! Peril! Peril! Peril!” they scream. Their voices and the heat and her breathlessness and all the places on her body that hurt drift out into the passing landscape, no concern of hers. Even as she falls, she believes herself to be walking, and on either side of her the brutal plain slides by.

She is lying under the tree. In the strong breeze the weaver-bird nests sway and disassemble and bits of yellow grass flockdown. Behind her the mongooses forage. She cannot move her legs or her torso, but at the same time every part of her twitches in agony. She waves her trunk across the ground. Lifts her head and squints about, drops her head back down. If the white bone is anywhere nearby, she can’t see it.

She thinks, “I am dying.”

The acacia smells unusually strong. “Tree,” she thinks in a kind of last inventory. “Dung,” she thinks, “wound, poison,” each of these scents seeming to burst up, to offer itself as a phenomenon no less sublime and yearned for than the white bone itself. She arches her neck and squints toward the plain. “Dust,” she thinks, “bush,” and as her vision closes into herself–"stone, dirt, me, Date Bed.”

She can’t remember (perhaps she never knew) but she suspects that you don’t become a sky cow unless you have been designated a She. Twisting her head so that she is looking at the sun, she says, “From this day forward and forevermore, Date Bed shall be She-Soothes-And-Soothes.”

Nothing happens. There is no change in the strength of the breeze, no branch falls from the tree. The big cows would now say, “The She approves.”

Date Bed says, “So be it,” and closes her eyes.

Only hours after promising I-Flounder that he will be able to lead the We-F’s to the spot where the white bone was thrown, Tall Time is forced to confess that he has never been anywhere near that region. By now he has fallen into a memory of the blue hills he saw, just once, ten years earlier; he has studied their profile and compared them to the profile of the hills in his vision, and even making allowances for perspective and distance, there is no pretending they are the same range.

“We shall find them” is I-Flounder’s response.

“How?”

“From your descriptions of the landscape it was immediately apparent to us where they were.”

He is dumbfounded. Humiliated. “Where?”

“Our method of calibrating location would not be comprehensible to you.”

“I’d be interested in hearing it, all the same.”

“You are ashamed,” she says crisply. “Don’t be. You cannot be expected to know what is beyond your capacity to know.”

Once the trek is under way, his shame is not so crushing. The Lost Ones outmatch him when it comes to scenting water and hazards and moving rapidly through the darkness, which they do grasping tails and thundering song, rods of green light sweeping from their eyes like celestial antennae. But all of them except for the melancholy Sink Hole are jittery, too easily alarmed. At the smell of lions they run. At the sound of aircraft they stop dead. They don’t have his endurance either, or his tolerance for heat. Most of the day, under a coating of sand, he sleeps. Not them. Almost buried in sand they pant and burn and drift in and out of visions, none of which they tell. At the end of the second day the skin of the calves is so severely blistered that I-Flounder makes the decision to return to the cave and await the rains. Without consulting him, it is decided that Sink Hole, whose skin remained relatively unscorched, will remain behind as his guide and his charge. Once the two of them arrive at the blue hills, Tall Time will retrace the route revealed to him in his vision and Sink Hole will “correct any blunders.”

“Between the two of you,” I-Flounder says, “there is but the one tracker.”

A tracker who, it turns out, is every bit as masterful as I-Flounder herself. He steers the course away from ominous scents and sounds, if there is browse he finds it. More than I-Flounder appeared to, he takes account of omens and signs. Should Tall Time mention what a feature of the terrain signifies according to
his
prognosticators–and out of some despairing urge to instruct, he often does–Sink Hole snorts or ignores him, which wounds Tall Time only a little. Let Sink Hole snort at the old lore, it’s not as if Tall Time hasn’t. Forthe record (Tall Time can’t help keeping one) both varieties of signs have so far been accurate. Proof of nothing. Proof of coincidence.

They travel, the pair of them, with Sink Hole out front, silent and not singing. There is no hint that Tall Time should hold the bull calf’s tail. As soon as they were alone together Tall Time awaited the twitch that would say, “Grasp.” He felt obliged in those first moments to make conversation: “Just you and I, a bachelor herd of two.” “When I first set off on my own, I was scarcely ten years old, which is younger than you are, I’ll warrant.” Sink Hole moved father away from him. Now when they are on the move Tall Time talks under his breath. Occasionally he sings … hymns, prayers for Mud’s safety and songs about being astonished–"Well, I’ll Be!” or “Incredible, Inedible.” Here he is, trotting blindly behind a calf he hardly knows, who himself blindly obeys what can hardly be known, since the omens are infinite and contradictory. The calf turns, Tall Time turns. The calf stops, Tall Time stops.

The stops are frequent because Sink Hole needs to catch his breath. The Lost One cows also took plenty of rests. To Tall Time’s suggestion that they walk more slowly, I-Flounder said, “There is but the one pace.” This was in the desert. Here in the plain–which he and Sink Hole entered on their second day together–he can forage during the halts. He tusks for grass roots and devours the bitter shrub. Sink Hole, who eats remarkably little, pants and watches him, and under those molten eyes Tall Time snaps into his instructor’s role and cracks into the earth as he believes you should, with many sharp pokes rather than with the steady prising that risks breaking off the tip of the tusk.

They are heading southeast into flat, rocky terrain. It is no use asking Sink Hole where they are going, or even when they will be stopping for the day, such questions invariably being met with an odour of disapproval so powerful it burns the inside of Tall Time’s trunk. When they make a rest stop, Sink Hole lies down at least ten feet away from Tall Time, and he refuses to drink at the seepages Tall Time excavates. He digs his own … slow, tiring work for somebody so small. As Tall Time fills his trunk and throws water over his back he watches this pointless enterprise with pity and irritation and bafflement.

Several hours before dusk on their fourth day together they stop at a grove of dead cordia ovalis trees. A herd of impalas loiters nearby, probably because the smell of water vents from a nearby ditch. It takes Tall Time almost an hour of tusking through layers of shale, however, before he hits the aquifer. Sink Hole carries on digging for another quarter of an hour or so, then gives up and goes over to the trees.

“You must drink,” Tall Time says.

Sink Hole lies down. “I will continue digging after I sleep.”

Tall Time tosses his trunk toward the impalas. “If you don’t drain this hole, they will.”

“They are welcome to it,” Sink Hole says and closes his eyes.

Tall Time moves between the two tallest trees and starts scraping away the top layers of dirt and then decides to doze on his feet. While he waits for sleep he scents toward Sink Hole and wonders how anyone so young can be so proud and uncivil. Well, it is not as though Sink Hole is an oddity among the We-F’s, Tall Time has to allow the bull calf that much. I-Flounder is scarcely an exemplar of courtesy. And I-Fix … her antagonism veers on derangement.

He remembers Torrent saying that the Lost Ones are vain, and that this is why they prefix their individual names with “I” and their family names with “We.” But as Tall Time starts nodding off he wonders whether it isn’t the other way around: they are vain
because
of their names. It strikes him as not improbable that cows who constantly hear themselves being called I, in families who know themselves as We, may form the impression that beyond their own skin the worth of the world dwindles.

He wakes up at dawn. Sink Hole is still asleep. Since the sun will soon be hot, Tall Time walks over to the bull and sprays him with dirt. Sink Hole opens his eyes. Their green blaze is so strong that Tall Time takes a step back.

“I had a vision of your birth family,” Sink Hole says.

“Just now?”

“Before you arrived at High Hill.”

“Yes?”

“They were at a big water hole. You had been there earlier in the day and had told them to leave the place.”

Tall Time’s heart starts booming. “That’s right,” he says.

“The big cows were arguing about whether or not to take your advice. The matriarch wanted to go, but another cow, your mother, wanted to stay.”

“My adoptive mother,” Tall Time says softly.

Sink Hole comes to his feet. “They spoke of that longbody, Me-Me.”

Tall Time only now hears how strange Sink Hole’s voice sounds. Moodless and far away, almost identical, in fact, to an infrasonic rumble.

“She had told them about green browse to the north,” Sink Hole says.

“What did the cows decide?”

Sink Hole looks at him, looks away. “As soon as they started talking about the longbody,” he says, “I felt a foreboding, and the next instant I heard the shots. Three very quickly. The matriarch fell. After that, there were many shots. I didn’t see the hindleggers. My third eye stayed with the family. I saw everybody fall. They all fell.”

Tall Time looks out over the plain. The upper ridges of every bush and termite mound are rimmed orange. A myriad horizons. A myriad infinities. He says, “Why do you tell me this now?”

“I was instructed to in a dream.”

“Instructed by whom?”

“That is not for you to ask.”

Tall Time walks back to the two tall trees. “Go away,” he says.

“I was ordered to stay with you.”

“Go away. Leave me alone.” He lies down, his rump to the calf. He should have warned She-Brags. He
did
warn her! But he should have been more forceful, more frightened. He should have known what was coming. He falls into a memory.