The White Bone (23 page)

“Don’t be brash!” She-Soothes roars.

Bent starts to wail. She-Soothes positions herself over him and he tugs at her left breast, her right, her left again, and then falls to his knees and squeals, “Where’s my milk?”

Mud weeps, too, not to herself but producing tears, although it is foolish to waste fluids. Her newborn seethes. It is like digestion, and she feels a reluctant gratitude that at least
something
stirs in her belly. She-Snorts no longer speaks of her condition, and Mud wonders whether this is because she fears the worst. The matriarch has already suffered two stillbirths, one eight years ago and another three years later. “Let mine perish for hers,” Mud thinks, shocking herself a little. “Should a choice be necessary,” she appends, and as if in retribution for that unholy prayer her left ear is stabbed by She-Screams screaming, “What do we do now?”

Silence, except for the bleating of Bent.

“Well?” She-Screams cries, looking from She-Snorts to She-Soothes so that you would think a response was her incontestable due. “Find water, I suppose,” she finally mutters. “But where? Look at all these useless pits,” and she indicates the long line of holes that were presumably dug by Date Bed.

The family is on the floor of a departed river–Jaw-Log River, so called for the crocodiles that once milled in dense packs just under the surface. All that’s left of them are coils of rib and racks of teeth tossed into heaps. Up on the banks among the fallen trees, bleached bones bristle out of the earth like some miserable species of thicket.

The trees are giant ebony and Phoenix palms. Most have been knocked down and stripped of bark. The bit of bark that remains is the only decent forage in the vicinity. To the west is a land of black boulders known as The Spill, on the far side of which is Feed Swamp. Getting to the swamp takes five days according to Torrent, who is the only living she-one known to have made the journey. With the water gone from Jaw-Log River, nobody would have cause to come here.

And yet Date Bed came.

“Why?” She-Screams asks. While everyone digs for water, She-Screams carries on a bitter conversation with herself: “I’ll tell you why. Some lunatic told her to!” (Date Bed’s reliance on other creatures to guide her to food and water is taken for granted.) “Some lunatic said, ‘There is still plenty of water at Jaw-Log River!’ and Date Bed believed it! Either that, or she was … well… .” She waves her trunk. “Never mind,” she mutters.

Either that or Date Bed was suffering from “heat sleep.” Who among them hasn’t entertained the awful prospect of Date Bed wandering in a stupor?

“Smell this,” She-Snorts rumbles from downstream, or what was downstream before the river departed.

“Water!” She-Screams cries, shoving into the lead.

Yes, water, bubbling out of the sand. What the matriarch is pointing out, however, is a plug of compacted brush and dirt and dung. “This was in here,” she says, holding out the plug.

“Date Bed!” Mud exclaims. The dung is Date Bed’s.

“What’s it doing in the hole?” Bent asks.

“Date Bed stuck it there!” his mother bellows. “What has She-Soothes been saying all along! Date Bed’s mind is as sharp as a thorn. You dig a water hole, you plug it up so that the water is still there when you return!”

“But why would she return?” Mud asks.

“Why? Why? Because… .” Confusion plays over the nurse cow’s face.

“Because she dug the hole?” From Bent.

“Because she dug the damn hole!” She-Soothes roars.

The matriarch is looking thoughtfully at She-Screams, who is taking advantage of the preoccupation over the plug to drink before her turn. (Or taking advantage of her banishment–if she does not exist, how can she be reprimanded?) “Perhaps Date Bed knew we would come here,” She-Snorts rumbles at last.

“How could she know that?” Mud says.

“I have no idea. But she could have made a plug with only saliva and dirt. And yet she rolled a bit of her dung into it.”

“To preserve it from scavengers!” She-Soothes bellows.

“To let us know she was here,” Mud says. Her throat seizes.

“The urge to leave a trail is at the root of all inventiveness,” Swamp declares languidly.

“Matriarch, may I speak?” It is Hail Stones, using, as he does when addressing She-Snorts, the formal timbre.

“Of course.”

“I would only like to suggest that she may be on the trail of the white prize.”

“The white bone?” cries She-Screams, water spraying from her trunk.

“She said white bone!” Bent squeals. “You’re not supposed to say it!”

“Since there is no other reason for her to have come here,” Hail Stones says, “it could be that she learned from some creature that the white prize might be found on The Spill.”

She-Snorts looks toward the black boulders, and everyone except She-Screams does the same. In the mid-afternoon light each boulder is the precise size of its shadow. Here and there, on the highest, vultures perch, backs humped to the wind. “How I would love to think that she has gone to The Safe Place,” She-Snorts says.

She-Screams sprays herself with water. “If she has, I would expect her to turn right around and start searching for us for a change. When I think of everything we’ve suffered for
her
sake.”

“I’m thirsty,” Bent whispers. She-Soothes nudges him, and he drops to his knees and sips with his mouth.

“Matriarch,” Hail Stones says, “may I presume that it is your intention to cross The Spill?” He knows, as they all do from Torrent, that to the north lies a barren plain and then a desert, and to the south is a mighty wire fence beyond which is a large aggregation of humans.

She-Snorts looks at him.

“At the very least,” he says, “you may find that not all the water has migrated from Feed Swamp.”

“Take your drink now,” she says.

“Ahead of the matriarch?” She-Screams trumpets.

“I am content to wait,” Hail Stones says.

“Go on,” She-Snorts says. “Take your drink.”

So he does.

She-Screams expels her breath in exasperated blasts.

For her part, Mud moves away. She rumbles her litany of infrasonic calls and while waiting for the responses that never come pulls a tangled ball of dead shrubbery and tucks it into her mouth. How will they survive a five-day trek across those boulders? she wonders. How will her leg hold up? And what will they eat out there? She-Soothes is not producing enough milk, and Hail Stones … his wound has scabbed over but he limps badly and is so emaciated that it hurts him to lie down. When he sleeps he remains standing and leans against Swamp, who, for his friend’s sake, sleeps standing as well.

Night finds the She-S’s still on the riverbed. They have cleared a lying-down place, the bones that were in the way now deposited in a stack against the bank. Every once in a while the stack creaks or snaps … the bones settling, Mud assumes, but a little later she decides that a snake or a lizard has entered the stack and is wondering what monstrosity once claimed such a skeleton–the mess of ribcages, the multiple jaws.

Sleep, for Mud, has become the brink of a trap. As soon as she starts drifting off, she jolts awake from a feeling that something terrible is about to happen, and so she takes this as a sign and tries to keep her eyes open. Her writhing newborn feels asif it had scales. What if she is carrying a crocodile? A fish? These are ruthless times, and perverse. Everything seems to have fled for good: water, food, reason. Why should the laws of procreation be excluded from the exodus?

“Please,” she thinks. In the face of so much to pray for, her prayers have dwindled to the one word. The darkness deepens but not by much. It is a bright, cold night. A three-quarter moon in the northern sky, in the south a gauze of stars. “None of those dull shines belongs to anyone from the slaughter” is Mud’s bleak thought. She-Sees, She-Scares, She-Demands and all the rest, instead of living in bliss among the sky cows, float oblivious and tuskless upon The Eternal Shoreless Water.

And no fear, either, Mud thinks after the last line of the verse has run through her mind, no fear afflicts their sleep. It is such a peaceful prospect that she closes her eyes. When she opens them, it is near dawn. She lifts her head, alarmed to have let down her guard. She hears a soft clatter and twists around.

Swamp and Hail Stones. They are walking away.

She pulls herself to her knees. They have reached the bank. Hail Stones goes first as Swamp nudges him up the incline. At the top, Swamp takes the lead, and Hail Stones starts to follow but then he stops and looks around.

Mud lifts her trunk. Hail Stones does the same, and in that small moment before he turns again she knows he is imaginingwhat she is: their mating. So vivid is the image that she almost has the sensation of falling into a memory, and she is struck by the thought that what could have happened one day–but won’t now (strangely, she is certain of this)–was somehow substantial enough for the very possibility of it to generate a memory.

She lowers her trunk, suddenly shy. Swamp emits a low rumble and Hail Stones turns. Off they go eastward, back over the plain.

At the point when Mud can no longer smell them, She-Snorts comes to her feet. Mud stands as well, and the matriarch hears her and swivels her trunk behind herself and then goes to the bank, moving over the bones as quietly as the bulls did.

Mud joins her. “Did they tell you they were leaving, Matriarch?” she murmurs.

She-Snorts doesn’t answer. She is scenting, she can still smell them. Presently she drops her trunk and rumbles, “No, but I knew. Hail Stones wouldn’t have been able to manage even half a day on The Spill.”

“Where do you think they are headed?”

“One of the hill ranges, perhaps.” She lowers her head.

She is weeping, Mud guesses. Weeping not for Swamp, who is her blood relation, but for Hail Stones. Mud begins to weep as well, tearlessly and in silence.

“Hail Stones has trunk,” the matriarch says.

Yes, Mud thinks. He does. What other bull calf ever mourned the death of his matriarch so deeply and reverently? Or walked over a thousand miles, without complaint–without flinching!–on a septic foot? Hail Stones has trunk. He is soulful and valorous. Whereas Swamp is anything but. Still, Swamp recognizes trunk and is drawn to it, unlike many who are threatened by trunk in other bulls of their approximate age and size.

“Have you envisioned the death of either of them?” She-Snorts asks.

“No,” Mud says, startled. Her thoughts go to She-Screams, who sleeps in innocence of her own doom and her son’s departure. She says, “She-Screams will be frantic when she wakes up and finds–” She stops, realizing that she has spoken the banished cow’s name.

She-Snorts doesn’t seem to be listening. She is scenting toward The Spill. Mud lifts her trunk. Vulture dung, carrion … Mud picks up nothing worth lingering over.

“A longbody is out there,” She-Snorts says.

Mud still can’t detect it.

“It has been following us for two days, staying just out of scent.” She gives a self-congratulatory snort. “Or so it thinks.”

“How very odd,” Mud says. Cheetahs have limited ranges, none as large as a two-day trek.

“I suspect it is Me-Me,” She-Snorts says.

Instantly Mud’s mind is back at Blood Swamp on the day of the slaughter … She-Demands saying that Me-Me may know where The Safe Place is. “Why do you think so?” she asks.

“Because longbodies don’t track she-ones.”

“What does she want?” Mud asks.

The matriarch shakes her head.

“She knows where The Safe Place is,” Mud says.

“She
may
know.”

“Or may not,” Mud concedes. How weary she is of ambiguities. She says, “I wonder if she was here when Date Bed was. Date Bed could have mind talked with her.”

“I’ve thought of that.”

“Do you suppose Hail Stones was right? That Date Bed came here looking for the white prize?”

“It is possible. It is possible she came here aimlessly. Hail Stones is a good bull. He says the comforting thing.”

“I shall miss him,” Mud says, and the image–the memory?–of the two of them mating returns to her and she waves her ears, abashed.

She-Snorts is quiet. Presently she says, “I have been mounted by all of the living She-D bulls and four who are now dead, and except for Torrent there isn’t a bull in any other family to compare with them.
I
know what Hail Stones might have been had he not been lamed.”

“He won’t lose the limp?” This hadn’t occurred to Mud.

“She-Soothes says there is no hope of that.”

“He’ll be like me,” Mud says pityingly, but in some abysmal part of herself she is comforted.

“Fortunately he has Swamp to take care of him.”

“Swamp,” Mud says doubtfully.

“Swamp is fit, and more resourceful than he lets on.”

Mud tries to picture somnolent Swamp felling trees, scenting danger. She guesses that as far as water goes, the two of them will avail themselves of the holes She-Snorts excavated.

She-Snorts lets out a rueful chuckle. “Swamp the heart-breaker,” she says in her old deadpan, “impervious to my charms.”