The White Bone (4 page)

“I don’t spurn you. I didn’t spurn Tall Time.”

“No cow is ever named for how she conducts herself in her delirium. Were that the case, every cow in this family would be called She-Seduces.”

Mud snorts, grudgingly amused.

Date Bed’s expression relaxes. “I can’t imagine calling you anything but Mud. I wonder whose idea She-Spurns was. Not your mother’s, surely.”

“She-Scares isn’t my mother,” Mud thinks sourly. She looks toward the family. “Why don’t you find out?” she thinks, a suggestion that Date Bed listen to the big cows’ minds, which Date Bed has taken a vow never to do on the day of a naming ceremony. Date Bed doesn’t respond, and Mud is faintly ashamed. “It was She-Screams’ idea,” she rumbles. “Who else? She-Screams has always resented me.”

“No,” Date Bed says.

Does she mean no, She-Screams has not always resented her? Or no, She-Screams didn’t come up with the name? Either prospect has Mud almost softening toward the big cow when Date Bed says, “She would have submitted something far more offensive.”

“Ha!” Mud says, startling a pair of Abyssinian groundhornbills, who flap up onto the bank, where they turn and begin to roar like lions. Ears tensed, Date Bed steps toward them.

In all but a few families there is a mind talker, only one. She is either a cow or a cow calf, never a bull, and when she diessome other member of the family assumes her gift, first hearing the thoughts of her own kind and then finding that she not only understands the language of most other creatures (insects, humans and snakes are the exceptions) but is able to converse with them, from her end simply by thinking hard. For three years the She-S mind talker was She-Spoils. As she lay dying she said that she felt her heir would be Mud. She was wrong. The vultures hadn’t even cleaned her bones before Date Bed started hearing voices. Why Date Bed? “Thus spake the She” is why. Ask the big cows to account for any mystery and they will answer, “Thus spake the She.”

“What an irritable pair,” Date Bed says now, rejoining her. She is speaking of the hornbills, who have diverted their booming toward a log on which five hooded vultures perch in a formation (every other one facing backwards) that is an especially sensational omen. But today, like the rest of the She-S’s, Date Bed and Mud are unaware of the omens. Glancing at the vultures, all Date Bed says is, “Mud, don’t you find it curious that trunk-necks refrain from eating each other?”

“You’ll have to start calling me She-Spurns,” Mud says out loud. She thinks how she has always delighted in the sound of her birth name on Date Bed’s tongue, in Date Bed’s antiquated and reverent pronunciation of words such as
mud, dust, rock,
any of the earth-associated words that, generations ago, were held sacred.

“She-Spurns,” Date Bed says. “She-Spurns"–lightly, trying to toss it off. And then she lowers her head, as if conceding the name’s unpleasantness, and pokes her trunk among a pile of stones that throb pink in the waning light.

Mud scents toward the water.

“I’ll come in a minute,”
*
Date Bed rumbles. She has begun to turn the stones and to bring certain ones up to her dim eyes.

“She-Studies,” Mud thinks. “That’s what they should call you.”

For generations it had been the custom of the She-S’s to sojourn near Blood Swamp from the middle of the long dry season until the rains. The swamp is now blood-red in the low sun, but that is not what inspired the name. It was Stay Swamp–and home to three other herds–until humans slaughtered eighteen cows and a newborn here within hours of the newborn’s birth. She-Swaggers was the She-S matriarch then, and five years later she led her family back to the swamp because she alone of the former resident matriarchs sensed that the place was safe again. In the twenty years since, although there have been no further slaughters in the vicinity, other families turn up only if sources of water are scarce elsewhere. That none has arrived this season is good news, Mud supposes, and yet considering the drought it is surprising.

Splashing through the warm shallows–or what were the shallows when there were still depths–she stumbles from acramp in her withered leg. All these seizures in one afternoon are an omen, another powerful one, and yet she thinks only that her leg is buckling under the weight of her disappointment. When the water touches her belly she turns and faces her family in time to see She-Scares charge a flock of geese. Her resentment eases a little. She-Scares adopted her when no other nursing cow was willing to. Twenty days earlier her own calf had died from a fall and until Mud’s appearance there seemed to be no explanation for the rivers of milk she continued to leak. Right from the start she was ferociously protective. For Mud as a small calf, carnivores were creatures you saw only from the rear as they fled your charging mother, and your mother’s right tusk was like a snake head, all the more deadly for being tiny.

She-Scares’ left tusk never grew at all. Cows who don’t know her will say, “Such a pity,” something to that effect, and when Mud was younger she didn’t understand what they meant. There is nothing pitiable about She-Scares. “I have been spared,” she herself says, as if tusks were a burden. When a stranger tells her that she looks more like an adolescent calf than a grown cow, she preens, and she may then mention that she has borne just the one calf (rather than the three or four any other cow would crave) and that this “blessing” also accounts for her youthful appearance. Carrying a newborn loosens the skin, she maintains, settles the bones, and worse than that it dulls the perceptions, and it is true that she is extraordinarily alert, especially to sounds. The creakings of a newborn in the belly she can hear days before the mother feels movement, and by these creakings she knows the sex.

She heard Mud’s newborn within hours of Mud’s oestrussubsiding. A cow calf, she declared, but Mud insisted, then, that she was mistaken, there was no newborn. Now, apparently, the creakings are ear splitting, and Mud’s breasts and belly are fat, and yet she has no sense of harbouring a life, and she doesn’t cherish what might be inside her any more than she cherishes her intestines. She prays that she has not been “truly dug,” but everybody says that Tall Time is a true digger and She-Scares says that come the rains she will drop a cow calf. The other dug cows, She-Snorts and She-Stammers, will drop bull calves.
They
feel their newborns rolling, and She-Stammers is hearing the dreams of hers.

“B-b-b-bad dreams,” she tells everyone with her usual terrorized fluster. “Loud n-n-n-noises, com-commotion,” and she has taken to standing protectively over her little brother, Bent, as if he were the dreamer.
*

She stands over him now. A hippo tries to enter the water close to her, and she beseeches with her trunk toward She-Scares, who charges it, trumpeting.

But it is the rest of the hippos who suddenly move away. The whole mob swells out of the water and lumbers to the shore, spraying up the geese, whose see-saw honks bore through the air in front of them. Beyond the hippos, clopping down from the plain and setting off explosions of dust, a pair of giraffes appears at the edge of a small group of zebras and wildebeests. The members of this group look starved and unnerved. In some collective dazzlement they stare toward the setting sun (andthat they all face the same way is one more omen that goes unnoticed).

By comparison, the giraffes, who can browse the high foliage–and near the swamp enough of that remains–look indecently hale. They glide through the grazers but suddenly stop a few feet from the shore and rotate their heads so that they, too, are gazing at the sun.

Mud lifts her trunk and swivels it behind herself. Opens her ears. No strange scents that way, no sounds. And still the giraffes continue to stare, and now the oxpeckers that ride the hippos take flight.

Mud turns around.

Above the sun, down through spindles of light, a vulture lounges in silhouette. Mud scans the fever trees. The black shape of a leopard reclines on a limb of the tallest, but it threatens no one, not yet.

Where Mud’s family is, the bank is lower, offering an unobstructed view of whatever has arrested the giraffes. Except for She-Sees, everybody is scenting. She-Scares flaps her ears and rumbles a few inaudible words in Mud’s direction.

“What is it?” Mud calls, but She-Scares is heading for shore now. As she passes She-Sees, She-Scares nudges her to come along, and like a submissive calf She-Sees obeys.

“It is done,” Mud murmurs, surprised. Although she has always known that as the second-biggest and second-oldest cow She-Scares would one day assume command from She-Sees, she is so taken aback by witnessing the actual transition of power that she wades to shore unaware that she is on the verge of a vision. She is in the midst of it, her third eye wide open, before she recovers herself.

The vision is of a web of silver twigs. A “Rogue’s web,” it must be. (Mud has never seen one but she knows of them, everyone does–their length and their impregnability, the magically regular pattern of their weave, and their tendency to form closures within which bewildered cattle often find themselves.) Her third eye slides down. She has no idea what she will see, and so for a few seconds it is incomprehensible. An embankment, boulders. No. Carcasses.

Dozens, hundreds, all wildebeests and zebras. Her third eye tracks along the base of the fence, and the debacle goes on and on. And then her eye veers away and she is looking at another debacle.

The remains of her own kind.

All the faces are hacked off, the trunks tossed aside, the tusks gone and some of the feet as well. Marabou storks step daintily among the wreckage, they seem to lean away from her third eye as it races over the bodies. On a certain cow her eye settles, and by the line of the jaw she recognizes She-Doubts-And-Doubts. So these are the She-D’s. Twenty-three bodies she counts before her eye dims.

She starts splashing to shore. Date Bed waits at the water’s edge, but Mud races past her to the bank. Halfway up, her bad leg crumples and she slips down, and Date Bed moves behind her and pushes her hindquarters until she gains the lip.

About a hundred yards away, out on the plain, three wraith-like cows and a bull calf drag themselves through the powdery red light. After every spastic step the bull calf flings his head to one side. The biggest cow carries something between her lower jaw and shoulder. She drops it on theground, producing a high bloom of dust. While she scoops it up with her tusks the others wait.

“What is that?” Date Bed says, sniffing.

“A newborn,” Mud says. “A dead newborn.”

The reek is that of a corpse at least five days old. It masks the scent of the family, but as they come closer Mud recognizes them. “The She-D’s,” she says, hurrying forward.

Date Bed falls in beside her. “No,” she says, incredulous. The She-D’s were one of the largest families.

Mud adds these four to the twenty-three in her vision and says, “Four left out of twenty-seven.”

Their own family has reached the travellers. She-Screams shrieks in alarm and is swatted by her mother, She-Sees, who then trumpets, “Declare yourselves!”

Mud lifts her mouth to She-Sees’ slotted old ear. “It’s the She-D’s,” she says. “The last of them.”

“Oh, dear,” says She-Sees. Her trunk plummets.

Mud moves up beside She-Scares and the nurse cow, She-Soothes.

“It’s bad,” She-Scares says softly.

She-Soothes says, not so softly but toned down from her usual bellow, “A mixture of water-tree bark and grunt piss ought to do it. She-Soothes will need pools of piss.”
*

She-Soothes and She-Scares are consulting about a poultice for the bull calf. He is Hail Stones, Mud realizes after a moment of puzzlement… . It has been two years since she last saw him, at a Massive Gathering, and his odour is masked bythe stench of his right forefoot. Looking closer she sees that above the middle toenail is a hole in which maggots, livid in the twilight, squirm.

“How will you carry it?” She-Scares asks She-Soothes.

“Carry what?”

“The urine.”

“She-Soothes will ask the grunts to piss on the bark itself. She-Soothes will tear off a strip, munch it up, then spit it out, right there where the grunts are.”

“Do what you can,” She-Scares says. So that the warthogs can be appealed to in their own language she adds, “Take Date Bed.”

When the two of them are gone She-Scares approaches the She-D matriarch. “She-Demands,” she says, using the formal timbre.

She-Demands rocks from foot to foot.

“We did not cross paths at last year’s Massive Gathering,” says She-Scares, and as she extends her trunk the air erupts with the gunshot rattle of a flappet lark beating its wings.

The She-D’s rear back in terror.

“It’s a burr fly!” She-Scares trumpets. “It’s only a burr fly!”

The She-D’s calm down quickly, as if panic is so familiar to them that it fails to hold their interest. She-Demands shifts the fetid bundle under her chin and regards She-Scares through half-closed, glistening eyes. The cows on either side of her are her eldest daughters: She-Drawls-And-Drawls and She-Distracts.

“What did you name her?” She-Scares asks. She snakes out her trunk to the dead newborn but She-Demands turns her head away, and She-Scares withdraws the trunk and says, “You have reached the water. It is safe here.”