The White Bone (36 page)

“Why did she do that?” he asks now as She-Soothes, Mud and She-Snorts scan his hide for injuries. They don’t answer, thus revealing to each other that they suspect the same thing: She-Screams lured him to Me-Me and then had a calamitous attack of remorse.

“Not a single gash,” She-Soothes says, surprised.

“Why
did
she?” Bent persists.

“Because–” She-Soothes sighs, and Mud thinks she is about to tell him the truth but the sigh is because she is about to deceive him. “She had heat sleep,” she says. “She thought she could float. Cows suffering from heat sleep often walk over cliffs. It is not a bad way to die.”

He is too young to pick up the tinge of deviousness in her scent. “She kicked Me-Me,” he says, awed.

“Yes, she saved you.”

“What about the white–What about the white prize?” he says, worried again.

“She didn’t really see it. Heat sleep plays tricks with your vision.” She nudges Mud to lift her leg so that he can suckle.

They remain at the brink of the escarpment, and while Bent sleeps they forage on the roots that loop out of the ground like the half-buried ribs of small animals. Although they are exhausted from having eaten the fire grass, there is noquestion of them closing their eyes. Every once in a while the wind throws up a waft of She-Screams’ cow scent entwined with her death fetor. The scent of Me-Me is gone. It is a cold night and Mud sees an orange ring around the moon. When she tells the others, She-Snorts observes that the She and Rogue must have been battling.

“You had that feeling behind your eyes,” Mud says, “before you fell asleep.”

“What feeling?” She-Soothes wants to know.

“That feeling that something terrible was going to happen,” She-Snorts answers.

“And so it did,” She-Soothes says.

“But I still have that feeling,” She-Snorts says.

“Is it about Bent?” She-Soothes roars.

“No,” She-Snorts says weakly. “I don’t know. Don’t wake him.”

“Well,” She-Soothes rumbles. A little later she mutters, “She told She-Soothes not to worry,” referring to the assurance She-Screams gave her, only yesterday, that Bent wouldn’t be bargained with.

The wind dies. In the grey dawn light, Mud looks over the escarpment. Mist, and the sheer, mauve cliff face. She and the matriarch search for a way down and finally settle on a zigzagging breach about thirty yards along the crest. A wedge of geese comes flying and honking across the canyon, and Bent wakes up. Mud suckles him and then the four of them set off. It is a slow descent, what with Bent’s feeble knees and her bad leg. When they are halfway down, a troop of baboons tumbles past them and they have a moment of panic before they realize that the baboons aren’t boulders.

At the bottom is a ditch and the wreckage of the fallen acacias Mud saw in her vision. The body is visible from here, and as they get closer to it Mud is surprised by sadness. Last night there was only incomprehension and horror and an older sensation of relief, which she finally felt entitled to. The skull is clearly smaller, not only because it is smashed, and they guess that the faculties She-Screams inherited from the She-A’s-And-A’s must have slipped out through the fractures.

“That damn head is what undid her,” She-Soothes growls. “She wasn’t fit to lug around such a big head.”

There are no scavengers, not yet, and no signs of Me-Me. How will they get to The Safe Place without the cheetah? Mud feels unprepared to ask this question, even of herself. She passes one hind foot over the body and urges all her thoughts toward releasing the spirit. Only Bent weeps obviously, but when She-Snorts starts up the hymn (“Joy Abounding,” an odd selection for such an occasion), She-Soothes begins to blubber. Both Mud and She-Snorts look at her in astonishment–you would think she’d be the least forgiving–and she shakes her head, helpless in her grief until the end of the hymn. Then she blinks and sniffs the air and rumbles, “She-Soothes is parched.”

They drink at the water holes Mud saw in her vision. As they enter the pool of muck, the resident crocodile thrashes to the opposite shore and poses sidelong, steam rising in curls from her checkered back. Thorny grass grows in the ditch, and after their wallow they forage on that. She-Soothes also eats impala dung and drinks Bent’s urine, which she declares much tastier now that Mud is nursing him. By the time they head out onto the plain the dust is spinning.

For three days they plod northeast on a filament of hope that Date Bed set off from the pan in that direction. Early afternoon on that first day they arrive at a range of blue hills running north-south several miles to their left.

The matriarch halts.

“We are on the wrong side of those!” the nurse cow roars.

If they are to find the white bone they should be west of any hills they come across, but it is not a white flash that has arrested She-Snorts, it is an odour. She lifts her trunk and points it toward the hills and shuts her eyes to scent hard, and Mud and She-Soothes lift their trunks likewise but smell nothing. Presently She-Snorts drops her trunk and resumes walking.

“What was it?” the nurse cow roars.

“I’m not certain,” She-Snorts murmurs.

“Do you still have that feeling behind your eyes?” Mud asks her.

“Yes.”

“The terrible thing hasn’t happened,” Mud prompts.

“Not yet.”

“What do you think it might be?”

She-Snorts shakes her head. She doesn’t know.

Bent is stronger and can walk on his own provided that he suckles every few hours and that the pace is moderate. They expect the terrain to become sandier–they are supposedly heading toward a desert–but it remains much the same as it has been since the escarpment: flat, stony, the difference being the profusion of wire fences. Of the fences that bar their way they are able to trample only two. The rest are too powerful, or they burn, and to get past them they have to travel along their length until a gap is found or the fence veers off in another direction. Once through, they cut forward at an angle that eventually brings them back on course, moving more quickly than they want to because human and vehicle tracks are usually somewhere in the vicinity. Hearing the clanging “wattles” of the Masai cattle near noon on the second day, they start to run. Although black grazing humans are said to be harmless, there was a time several generations ago when they weren’t.

The following morning, soon after setting off, they arrive at the carcass of an airplane. Smashed snout, broken wings, cracked eyes, shiny impervious guts strewn everywhere, and gathered in and around the torso a pack of wild dogs. As She-Snorts leads them through the scene, two of the dogs, a male and female, urinate right in front of them, the male up on his forefeet, and She-Snorts charges but the damage is done. Farther on, Mud’s leg begins to seize. Another bad omen.

Late afternoon finds them on a road banded with the shadows of denuded cycad trees. They smell lions and hyenas and a few moments later hear fighting. About ten yards up the road a large male hyena reels out of the trees. She-Snorts hesitates. She-Soothes moves up beside her. Mud steps back. Blood flies from the hyena’s belly as he whirls in a circle, snapping at himself, and when he finally stops it is to begin jerking out his own intestines and devouring them.

They avert their trunks going by. He snarls as if they would rob him of his feast. He is not a bad omen, unless an obscureone, but he is hardly an encouraging spectacle, especially in light of Mud’s seizures and the wild dog urinating up on his forefeet, and they continue on in silence. Placing her feet in the footprints of the matriarch, Mud feels a dread that is almost thrilling for being insuperable. They stride hypnotically toward some doom is her impression, and when they halt for the day and She-Snorts rumbles dully, “It’s not here,” her first thought is that the doom has eluded them.

They are at a streambed among black thorns that fan out of the ground like petrified spray. An outcrop is some fifteen yards to the west and in its shadow they crowd together. “Before,” She-Snorts says, “even when there was no sign of her, I never entirely despaired because there was always something in the atmosphere, a quivering… .”

“A scent!” the nurse cow booms.

“Not a scent. An urging onward.”

The nurse cow nods, uncomprehending. “If She-Soothes knows Date Bed–”

“You don’t. You can’t, not any longer. None of us are who we were.”

This She-Soothes appears to understand, and to lament. She releases a gusty sigh. “Where do we go next, then?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know!” The nurse cow’s face bursts into perplexed alarm and stays like that an instant before squirming for the ray of hope. Mud thinks, She-Soothes is not who she was. In that she used to have an eye where a stinking plug of hyena dung now lodges, in that she used to be sturdy and was never one to sigh, no, she isn’t who she was. Otherwise, she seemsthe same. As for the matriarch, she was once fat and nonchalant and now she is cadaverous and grave, though still clever and a fine scenter and even occasionally droll. The possibility occurs to Mud that, being an outsider, she herself may never have known either cow in the first place. So whatever essential thing about them has changed would not be evident to her.

In which case she never knew Date Bed, either.

It offers itself, this prospect, like an escape route. Her deliverance. If Date Bed is somebody she never really knew, then Date Bed can be lost and the loss will be no more painful than all the other losses have been.

Her next thought startles her, since it isn’t hers. But she assumes it is, she takes it for a sudden memory of the matriarch saying, “You’re not scenting hard enough, you’re too distracted, what about over there?” And yet the words evoke nothing and their ring is strange. As they keep coming–"… perhaps we should go back to the pan …"–and are reflected in the matriarch’s face and the motion of her trunk, Mud feels the truth break over her and she says, with light astonishment, “I hear your mind.”

She feels nothing of the rupturing misery she thought she would. Once the surprise has passed, what she writhes with is anxiety. All this time searching for a doomed calf when they could have been searching for the white bone.

It is the middle of the night, and she and the nurse cow browse on the thorn bushes. For an hour or so She-Soothessobbed on her knees and hurled every stone in the vicinity. Now she appears completely recovered, although concerned about the matriarch, who hasn’t budged or spoken since Mud’s revelation. The scent that pulses from She-Snorts is not only grief, it is shame and something porous. Surrender? More likely she languishes in memories. She seems stunned. Twice she has allowed She-Soothes to squirt water into her mouth, and a few moments ago, when She-Soothes bellowed, “You’re frightening She-Soothes,” her struggling thought was simply, “She-Soothes.”

It somehow leaked out, that thought. Both cows are blocking their thoughts as cows will do when they are especially distressed. All Mud picks up from either of them is a low moan. Beneath her, Bent sleeps between bouts of suckling, and
his
thoughts are as distinct as if she had her ear to his throat. Milk, Mud, sore, dead, there, She-Screams, cold, itch, sand … he thinks in single panted words except when he is remembering. “Me-Me licked Bent’s ear,” he thinks once, talking about himself–in the way his mother talks about herself–as if he were somebody else.

Not until mid-morning does the matriarch emerge from her daze. “Perhaps a drink,” she rumbles in a sociable tone and commences excavating a hole. A little later a small group of impalas arrives to avail themselves of the water, and She-Soothes wants to chase them off because the streambed is short and shallow. But She-Snorts won’t let her. “Be kind,” she says, a surprising instruction from her, and unfair considering that She-Soothes has been the kinder one all their lives.

Day becomes night becomes the next day. “What are we still doing here?” Mud complains to She-Soothes.

“She-Soothes will talk to her,” the nurse cow says and goes and leans against the matriarch and roars, “Time to think of setting off!”

“Where to?” She-Snorts asks with a lilt of curiosity.