The White Bone (35 page)

He didn’t expect the calf to do what he said! The calf never did what he said!

No, let him be honest. He knew that Sink Hole would go. Knew he was going, heard him–at the verges of the memory–trotting off, that sour odour thinning to a wisp.

There are footprints and a scent trail heading north. Tall Time follows them. The footprints are so small. What chance will Sink Hole have against the hyenas that are everywhere? He’ll avoid them, as he has done so far. But can he? Avoid every pack, and the lionesses as well? The humans? “Between the two of you, there is but the one tracker,” Tall Time says out loud, to reassure himself. To punish himself.

A master tracker, if he doesn’t want to be pursued by his own kind, won’t be, and after several hundred yards the trails veer east, then south, then they disappear, as if Sink Hole lifted off into the sky.

It is early afternoon. Cones of dust race like a suggestion of manic scrambling Tall Time has the panic for but not the stamina. Where would Sink Hole have gone? Tall Time can’t imagine a calf as proud and self-reliant as Sink Hole returning to his family, but perhaps among Lost Ones there is no shame in a young bull running back to the herd. Should Tall Time go after him, cross the desert a third time for the sake of satisfying himself that Sink Hole is safe? What if he gets there and learns that Sink Hole never turned up? What will the withering I-Flounder have to say to that?

He decides that Sink Hole is headed for the blue hills. And it dawns on him that without Sink Hole he has no hope of finding the blue hills or The Safe Place, and he thinks he will have to return to High Hill after all and plead with the Lost One cows for directions, and the prospect of doing that is so discouraging that he finds himself scanning his surroundings for some counsel.

Not far to his left a marabou stork sits rattling its bill on a log. Tall Time trumpets and the stork takes off, circlingeast once it is level. East, then. He should go east, as he has been going all along, toward Blood Swamp. So says the stork sign. Which cannot be trusted. And therefore he should not go east.

But he does.

The fever trees are uprooted and stripped and covered with hooded vultures, who sit in crammed lines and monitor the shore. The shore is likewise crammed. Wildebeests, hartebeests, topis, zebras, gazelles, impalas, baboons, crocodiles, and more creatures than these, many more than when Tall Time was last here. Queerly still and silent, all of them, like spellbound spectators of Torrent’s dreadful performance.

In the centre of the swamp, or what
was
the swamp, the old bull throws clods of muck and bellows a deranged version of “The Mounting Song"–"Jump on the kind eggs, don’t call quack” instead of “Up on the hindlegs, don’t fall back.” He is the only she-one here.

“The Trunk Bull!” Tall Time trumpets. The bellowing doesn’t let up, but the vultures Tall Time is next to shunt farther along their log, and he kicks out at them and they halfheartedly hobble away.

He descends the bank and clatters over the turmoil of bones. As the throng parts before him, he sees the carcasses–nothing but anonymous hides draped over bones by now. At a water hole guarded by a baboon he lowers his trunk. The baboon hops to one side, grunting and slapping the ground. Tall Time removes the mat of she-one skin thatcovers the hole and drinks. He watches Torrent, who still hasn’t noticed him.

“… When you make that sound! And she’s lean and round… .”

Where does he get the vigour to roar like that? No soft browse is left, he probably isn’t eating at all. From here, Tall Time can see the spine pushing against the hide. He enters a memory of Torrent when they were last together and emerges from it weeping at the defection of so much flesh and knowledge in only forty days.

“The Trunk Bull!” he trumpets again. This time the roaring stops. As he heads into the basin his feet smash through crust to ooze, and then there is only ooze and rotting catfish and submerged crocodiles whose steep, toothy jaws thrash up out of nowhere. Next to Torrent a crocodile executes slow rolls. Just as Tall Time reaches out his trunk in greeting, Torrent’s attention is caught by this disturbance at his knees.

“They do that,” he rumbles, “and then they die.”

“How odd,” Tall Time says, his spirits lifting a little. The old patriarch’s mind is not completely gone.

Torrent turns to him. “What do you want?”

“Torrent, it’s Tall Time.” He touches the bull’s mouth. “Tall Time the Link Bull.”

Torrent pokes his trunk right into Tall Time’s mouth and grips his molars. Withdrawing, he mutters, “Can’t tell the smell.” His own scent is sickly sweet.

“We are friends,” Tall Time says.

Torrent’s eyes fade into the smoke of his dreams. He looks ancient, the cracked mud on his skin magnifying the ornate web work of wrinkles underneath. Conscious now that hisown skin is unprotected, Tall Time lowers himself to his knees and onto his side and rocks back and forth until he is coated in muck. When he is standing again, he squirts fresh muck on Torrent, who fixes him with a ferocious look and roars, “Where’s the browse?”

“Gone,” Tall Time says carefully, in the formal timbre. “You have to go up onto the bank, but what remains is woody, I’m afraid. Difficult to chew.”

“Difficult to chew!” Torrent roars. He tosses his head, and Tall Time lurches out of the way. “Difficult to spew,” Torrent mutters. He hangs his trunk over his left tusk. “A sheet of heat.”

“I am Tall Time,” Tall Time tries again. “Son of She-Bellows-And-Bellows of the She-B’s-And-B’s. Tall Time the Link Bull.”

“They do that,” Torrent says, “and then they die.”

There is no breeze, not down here, and the odours of rot and mud hover in separate, motionless layers. Tall Time turns in a circle. Hundreds of days of searching to end up in this cursed, familiar place. Not that it makes any difference to him but the signs are neither threatening nor promising. Nothing will happen, the signs say, nothing that isn’t happening already. It is as safe to stay as it is to go.

Go where?

“Have the She-S’s been here?” he asks. “Since I left?”

Torrent looks toward the shore.

“The She-S’s. Did they return?”

Wisps of what smells like fresh sadness vent from Torrent’s hide, and Tall Time notices that where the crocodile was rolling, the muck has smoothed over. He searches with his foot and finds the corpse and shoves it out of the way so thathe can stand there and give Torrent his shade. He is desperate to eat but doesn’t want to leave the old bull’s side, not yet. Later, toward dusk, Torrent may be agreeable to going up onto the bank and even accepting chewed browse, although that’s unlikely because demeaning and a mountain of browse won’t save anybody so sapped of memory. What remains to him? Tall Time wonders. What thoughts and smells, what names? Or are there only sensations and a clutter of incompatible words?

“She-Snorts,” he says, testing.

Torrent looks down at the muck.

“I met the Lost Ones.” Another test, but also he longs to broadcast it–his big news.

Torrent closes his eyes.

“I had a vision,” Tall Time says. “A true vision. I saw the that-way bone.” He waits. “The white bone,” he says loudly.

“The light moan,” Torrent mutters.

“I met the Lost Ones,” Tall Time says again, and tells the whole story, from coming upon the We-F calves to seeing the likenesses on the wall of the Lost Ones’ cave to setting out with the We-F’s and finally parting ways with Sink Hole. Torrent’s eyes stay closed. It isn’t quite like talking to nobody. Even if Torrent is asleep, he hears … the words drift into his skull and roam the scoured cavity of his body, and it would seem to Tall Time that some of them must stick. “There is but one Torrent the Trunk Bull,” he says when there is nothing more to tell, repeating this pronouncement from I-Flounder because if “who you are” is all you take to your death, then perhaps words that flatter stand a chance of being grasped.

Torrent opens his eyes. “Those blue hills,” he says. “I know where they are.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Torrent glances at him, a look of perfect lucidity. “There’s a giant feast tree to the west of them.”

Tall Time nods.

Torrent points his trunk southwest. “Exactly there. A five-day trek.”

Tall Time goes on nodding.

“You doubt me?”

“No, no.” Shaking his head now.

Torrent points again.

“You will accompany me,” Tall Time says.

Torrent looks away.

“I’ll help you,” Tall Time says, not knowing how, but prepared to do whatever he must. Torrent obviously contains more memory than Tall Time had at first thought. He scans the old bull’s flanks, and his optimism dies. Torrent wouldn’t even survive the trek to the blue hills, let alone to The Safe Place; it would be cruel to persuade him to leave. “Of course,” he murmurs, “it is for you to decide.”

Torrent squints at him. “Where did you come from?”

“Most recently?” Tall Time asks, confused.

The old bull glares sidelong, showing the whites of his eyes.

“Most recently, from High Hill. The We-F’s cave. Truthfully, Torrent. I crossed the desert–”

“Lunatic!” Torrent roars. Temporin slides down his face. His penis dribbles urine. He seems, suddenly, to have gone into musth. “Twig-tusk!”

Tall Time starts stepping backwards, not far enough. Torrent charges him. He chases him all the way to the bank and then returns in a tusk-thrashing, hip-swinging saunter to the centre of the swamp and starts throwing clods of muck and bellowing his mad rendition of “The Mounting Song"– “when you skin your shank, and you’re pink and rank"–and Tall Time finds himself laughing at how marvellous it is that the old bull can still muster so much power and lust. But as the singing persists, the same tune, the preposterous lyrics, it isn’t funny. It isn’t even tragic. It’s a marvel of a different order–an old bull dying the way the old bulls are meant to die, as they died before the drought and slaughters.

He has decided to leave. Tusking for roots on the bank, out of sight of the patriarch, he feels an urgency to go to the blue hills. Date Bed will no longer be there, of course (he imagines her fattening up in The Safe Place), but it is not unlikely that the She-S’s will have tracked her, either to the hills or beyond. If he discovers no sign of them he will continue on to The Safe Place with the hope of finding that they have arrived ahead of him. At the very least Date Bed may know something of Mud’s fate. And one day, when this dark era has passed, he will return and properly mourn Torrent’s bones.

He eats enough to sustain him until morning and then descends the bank for a drink. The bellowing has ebbed to a passionate groaning, but Torrent himself, in the moonlight, looks like his former huge, forbidding self. Tall Time is grateful that this–and not the mud-slinging cadaver–should be his last sight of the old bull. “Goodbye!” he trumpets and is ignored.

He walks up the bank and out onto the plain, where he is surprised by a feeling of euphoria having to do with his own strength and escape. The farther he goes the wider the feeling. The world is before him, infinity drops away at his back. For all that he is following the directions of a deranged bull, he has no doubt that he is going exactly the right way. Not once, in thirty years of being guided by the speechless messages of his surroundings, did he ever feel this certain. There is a membrane of moonlight on the ground, bats flare up, terrible omens he strides through as if in defiance of a natural law.

He hears the helicopter but keeps walking until a cone of white light drops from the helicopter’s belly. He halts. The light finds him. He runs, the light keeping pace. Gunshot pits the earth at his feet, and he spins around into the fog of his own dust.

The shots that pelt his hide feel as light as rain. It is bewildering to be brought down under their little weight.

From what Bent tells them, and from what they can gather, it seems that when he opened his eyes She-Screams was above him, whispering that she thought she had spotted the white bone but wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to disturb the cows until she was sure. Would he come take a look?

She lifted him to his feet and tucked her trunk between his hinds legs as they hurried away. He had been having a dream about She-Snorts saying that the white bone was a bird, and now he asked, “Did it have wings?” No answer. He smelled Me-Me and said that the cheetah was following them, and she said, “You shouldn’t have to die slowly. I won’t let you die slowly.” This frightened him. So did her nervous scent and Me-Me’s odour and he told her he wanted to go back to his mother. “Your mother can’t help you,” she said. Whereas she could, he took her to mean. They had reached the edge of the escarpment. “Is it down there?” he asked, peering over. “Don’t move,” she said and rushed off, and he supposed she was dealing with Me-Me. But the smell of the cheetah grew thickernot thinner and when he looked around, Me-Me was behind him. He started to run. Me-Me caught him and grasped him around the neck. He was unable to scream. She licked his ear. The next thing he knew, She-Screams was there. She kicked out and Me-Me flew off his back and raced away bleating. She-Screams walked past him. “Where are you going?” he cried. At the edge of the escarpment she didn’t even pause.