The White Bone (16 page)

Before the drought Mud asked Swamp, “Does the prospect of leaving the family frighten you?” and he looked at her, for so long that she thought the question had offended him, but finally he said, “On the contrary, it captivates me.”

“Why don’t you go, in that case?” she asked.

Another long empty look. She guessed that he was wondering whether or not to blame his mother, because She-Screams tells him and everyone else that he is too trusting and dreamy to be on his own yet.

Again Mud was wrong. “I am waiting for the right moment,” he said. And then he said, “The right moment is always as apparent as the sunrise.”

Now, in the moonlight, Mud watches his spiritless kicks and wonders whether the right moment wasn’t the arrival of Hail Stones. Perhaps Swamp was told, by a visionary or in a dream, about a bull calf showing up one day to captivate him. Every few moments he sniffs behind himself as though thenauseating smell that gases out of Hail Stones’ foot is, to him, irresistible.

One of the times that he does this, his trunk is snatched midair by She-Screams, who inserts the end of it into her mouth. He draws it back out. Ignoring this slight, she says in a loud voice, “I am so proud of you. Staying with Hail Stones, putting yourself at risk.”

She-Snorts falls quiet.

She-Screams swells into the void. “There is no bull calf more generous than you are. No bull calf more comely, either. Or well spoken. Everybody says so.”

Swamp sighs.

She-Screams strokes his head. “All I’ve ever wanted is for you to be safe. We could have been on our way to The Safe Place this very day–”

At this, She-Snorts snorts. She-Screams falters–she knows she has overstepped the bounds–and yet on she goes as if she could persuade their incorruptible memories that her foolishness was really an act of doomed heroism. “Well,” she rumbles, “that’s the end of the white bone.”

Another snort from She-Snorts but, surprisingly, nothing more. She-Screams delivers a few fussy huffs. She will be quiet now, Mud thinks. Surely. And it seems that she will–she snaps off a thorn branch, and the darkness itself seems to unloosen … and then she says to Swamp,
“You
are the longsuffering one.”

Mud groans.

She-Screams whirls on her. “What do you know?” she cries. “Always wandering off, snubbing everybody, what do you know about this family?” She turns to Hail Stones. Quavering, brightly courteous, she says, “I don’t wish to offend you, Hail Stones, but it is not by choice that you trail behind the rest of us. Swamp has a choice, and he chooses to watch over you even though your wound is an attraction to the flesh-eaters. For your sake he willingly places himself in danger.”

“I am very grateful to him,” Hail Stones says quietly. “I am grateful to all of you.”

“Mother,” Swamp moans.

She-Screams smacks him. “Who will stand up for you if I don’t?” she trumpets.

There is a hill of boulders to the east, and a high note from her voice rings among them like a particle of reason worth hearing out. When the note dies, She-Snorts rumbles matter-of-factly, “Swamp is a coward.”

“Shame!” She-Screams cries.

She-Snorts looks at Swamp. “You
are,”
she says, as if she couldn’t care less.

“Shame!”

Still addressing Swamp, whom she has never before reproached, not in earnest, She-Snorts says, “You did not join the V formation before the slaughter. You went into the middle with the newborns.”

“I was in the grip of a paralysing terror,” he says complacently.

“Oh, this is insufferable!” She-Screams trumpets. She turns on She-Snorts. “You slander my calf and here I am almost an invalid, and my skin is cracked, I have extremely tender skin, I shouldn’t be out in the sun nearly as much as I am, and by the way"–a swerve of her trunk in She-Soothes’ direction–"I require a poultice for my shins. But I do what I must. I traipse through this wasteland for the sake of finding
your
calf"–whirling back to She-Snorts–"even though she’s… .”

“She’s what?” Mud says.

“Dead,” She-Screams mutters. “We all know she’s dead.”

“No!” She-Soothes trumpets.

“How can she possibly have survived out here on her own?” She-Screams says. “When she’s wounded, what’s more?”

“A few drops of blood, that’s nothing!” She-Soothes roars. “Date Bed is doing fine! You saw her crap heaps! She-Soothes will tell you how she’s surviving. By her wits!”

Mud reaches her trunk toward She-Screams. “Are you–?” she rumbles. Her heart swings in her ribs. “Are you hearing anybody’s thoughts?”

“No, no.” Irritably. “Nothing like that.”

Tonight the underscents are especially powerful and as Mud sucks them in, her belly goes still. Either her newborn has withered or it is asleep or, more probably, the underscents have lulled it. Like everyone else, Mud is waiting for She-Snorts’ reaction. The matriarch sniffs, deep thirsty breaths, while She-Screams fidgets and sighs and finally rumbles, “I would dearly love to be proven wrong. You all know how fond I am of Date Bed.”

She-Snorts keeps scenting. Starlight slides down her swivelling trunk and pools in the dip of her strong tusk, whose shape and glow are precisely the new moon’s. The sky is overrun with stars. It is a “memory night,” when the sky is recollecting itself, every cow who ever dwelt up there, every shine, retrieved and lit up in a sensational dream. Down here, hares have appeared. Their eyes leap like sparks. Mud’s eyes dim,and she feels a burning between them and knows that her third eye is about to open.

The vision is of a place like here, but it is not here. Dust blows by, and tumble-weed, east to west. Mud’s third eye starts moving in the opposite direction, across stony earth and stubble and onto sand where a skeletal female impala takes high twitchy steps toward a fever tree. From a branch of the tree a male baboon dangles and drops and then scrambles over to a troop of his own kind. There are at least twenty of them, lean and squalid, spread out on the bank, and in the sand at the feet of every big male is a water hole. A mother baboon with a youngster hanging from her belly approaches one of the holes, and the male who guards it bares his teeth. The mother sits. At the next hole a huge male gnaws at the face of a dead impala calf, whom he holds by the neck and swings while he chews, and the limbs of the calf whip like vines. The male squints toward a pool of muck. In the centre of the pool a crocodile spins. When the spinning stops, the crocodile opens its jaws and out spills a gang of hatchling crocodiles. They wriggle to the far side of the pool, where the first of them is scooped up between another pair of jaws, these belonging to a lizard. Before the lizard repositions the hatchling so that it can be gulped down head-first, the hatchling’s miniature jaws snap at a fly.

On Mud’s third eye goes, past a running ostrich and along the base of a hill into the wreckage of fallen acacias. A little beyond the logs, lying on the ground, is a cow.

She-Screams. Her skull is crushed, her torso bloated. Her tusks and feet are still there, although she appears to have been dead for some time. A hyena enters the scene and tearsat the rump, and a torrent of maggots gushes from under a flap of skin. The hyena devours them. When a lappet-faced vulture alights on the trunk, Mud’s eye begins to close. The last thing she sees is the vulture looting gore from the skull.

Tall Time is worried. The persistent itch in his right ear, the oryx arriving at the salt lick, the anonymous she-one skeleton, the circle of vacated human “nests"–all proclaimed that the day would be unlucky. Not calamitous, the links were more indifferent than that, their collective message adding up to: Do as little as possible. Or, as his late aunt She-Balks used to say, “Venture nothing, forfeit nothing.”

Since quitting the vicinity of the escarpment twenty-one days ago, he has drunk only from mucky seepages, even though the links those days were generally favourable. Why, then, on a day when the links are
not
favourable, has he come across a giant water hole where water never used to be? He rounded the thorn trees and saw, downwind, a circular glare. A female Grant’s gazelle stood at the bank, head bent but not drinking. Mesmerized by her reflection, Tall Time thought. Or by the water, its sudden, uncanny arrival.

When she caught Tall Time’s odour she hobbled off snorting and he cautiously approached the hole. That the feathersand swill of previous drinkers were on the skin of the water told him the hole at least had a history. Humans dug it, he guessed, judging by the size. And yet in this vicinity there was no smell of humans. And why was the hole not swarming with other creatures?

He drank and showered, sprayed himself with dirt, ate all the tasty grass roots surrounding the hole, scratched his hide on a stump, had a second shower and a dirt bath (taking his time with each activity, slowed down by wonder and suspicion) and then started to feed on the thorn trees.

Late afternoon he is still feeding, still wary, but allowing himself to fall in and out of a memory of yesterday so that he can look for the powerful link he must have missed. He can’t find it. Or perhaps what he can’t do is identify it. Suppose Torrent was right about the links being infinite? Suppose everything is a link? High above him he hears the creaking of a big bird’s wings, and he thinks, “That could be a link,” and he reels within the sickening prospect that everything exists for the purpose of pointing to something else.

In his search for the white bone he has travelled long distances without reaching the horizon, and the misgiving has grown in him that even were it possible to hold a perfectly straight course you could walk a hundred years and never arrive at the brink of the world. “Domain without end,” he often finds himself thinking, and it sounds like a lyric, an old truth, but it is blasphemous. Thinking it now, he worries that he is cursing himself and he twirls his trunk three times to the left, three times to the right, drops to his foreknees and bellows:

Thus transported he is oblivious to the upwind approach of the She-B’s-And-B’s. They are directly behind him when the new matriarch, She-Brags, trumpets, “I
told
you he wouldn’t hear us!”

The greetings are far more passionate than they normally are between a bull and his kin. Not since the last Long Rains Massive Gathering has Tall Time run across any member of his birth family, and not since early in the drought has he had news of them. He tells them of coming upon the carcass of She-Bores-And-Bores and they tell him, weeping, that it was a single human with a miniature gun that killed her. He sings “Where Do the Tusks Go?” and, as the last line is fairly optimistic (“And there to float serene, past care, upon The Shoreless Water”), the greetings erupt again, and the evacuations of dung. “You are the same,” he gloats. They are not, hecan see that. To a cow they are angular, and the calves smell sickly. What he means is, they are not dead.

When the greetings are over, She-Brags rumbles, “Let us drink in proper order.” The big cows go first while the younger ones keep the calves–the three who are small enough to risk falling down the water hole–from approaching the perimeter. And then the adolescents drink while the big cows guard the calves, and after the adolescents have had their turn, the big cows fill their trunks again and pour water into the calves’ throats and over their bodies. Tall Time resumes browsing on the thorn trees. He waits until the family joins him before asking his adoptive mother, She-Bluffs, in whose sly, glittery eyes he detects a plea that he single her out, “What brings you to this place?”

“What brings
you?”
she says cagily.

“The big water hole,” She-Brags answers him. “Naturally.”

The trunk of the large tree he has been butting snaps and the tree falls, throwing up a stack of dust. “You have been here before,” he says.

“Not at all,” She-Brags says. She breaks off one of the tree’s branches.

“How did you know that the hole was even here?”

The matriarch wags her ears. All the other occasions on which she has preened in this fashion flutter through his mind, and he prepares for a self-glorifying response, but she says only, “We were told.”

“By whom?”

“Me-Me.”

“Me-Me?”

“Me-Me the longbody,” she says, watching him closely, “told She-Booms.”

She-Booms is the family’s mind talker and his former calf-hood playmate. She has only one tusk and was consequently timid and virtually silent until the first day of her inaugural oestrus. On the morning of that day her squeal swelled into a roar so powerful as to eventually produce in the ears of all the She-B-And-B cows an incessant ringing. Tall Time turns to her and finds her peering at him.

“YOU HAVE NEVER MET A LONGBODY NAMED ME-ME?”
she thunders.

“No.”

“HE IS TELLING THE TRUTH,”
she informs She-Brags.

“Me-Me is a notorious liar,” declares She-Brags. “I knew she was the instant I smelled her.”

“SHE DIDN’T DECEIVE US ABOUT THIS WATER HOLE.”

“About its being where she said it would be,” She-Broods mutters. “But is it safe? Why are we the only creatures here?”

“If this were a hindlegger’s trap,” says the stern young nurse cow, She-Betters, “bones and carcasses would be everywhere.”

“Hindleggers have been known to remove the evidence,” She-Broods says darkly.

The reedy voice of She-Begs, who is a fine scenter, says, “There is no stench of hindlegger in the vicinity. And no ominous signs either, or the Link Bull wouldn’t be here.” She moves into Tall Time’s line of vision and fixes him with her supplicating eyes. “Would he?”