The White Bone (29 page)

It was dark by the time She-Screams had finished mourning the She-A’s-And-A’s and she was so tired and distraught that she began to have a series of her spells. “I was ten heartbeats from death,” she declares. When the spells passed she made a fruitless search for water and then returned to the scene of the carnage, where she dozed on her feet. Every so often she roused herself to send infrasonic rumbles to Swamp,but there was no response. All night she remained in the one spot, and when the light arrived so did the conviction that, while she had stood there, her skull had grown to accommodate an expanded intellect. Why had this happened? Because (the answer leapt into her big head right away), as a reward for her brave, lengthy vigil among the She-A’s-And-A’s, the She had bequeathed her a measure of that family’s cleverness. Her second thought was that even if she found the bulls–and with her big new head she was bound to–they would flee again. And where would that leave her, a cow on her own, a cow who, for all her increased powers of mind, was nearly an invalid? She must give up the chase.

She searched again for water and quickly located a seepage under a ditch. After drinking and showering she set off into The Spill, heading west. The entire way she rumbled infrasonically to both She-Soothes and She-Snorts. “Why didn’t you respond?” she demands.

From She-Soothes’ expression it is obvious that she longs to blurt out a host of things, among them that they never heard the rumbles. Behind her, She-Snorts has stopped feeding, and Mud bends her trunk the matriarch’s way (to make it plain that she is not answering She-Screams) and mentions Date Bed’s postulation about hard earth blocking infrasonic messages.

She-Snorts lifts her head, she appears to be considering this, but before she can speak, She-Screams says, “Well, I’m here now. It’s going to be a sore trial for me, with Swamp gone. You can’t imagine what I’ve suffered.” She whirls at She-Snorts, who, Mud now notices, is scenting urgently, trunk straight out, ears open. “Is it Swamp?” She-Screams cries, raising her own trunk.

Mud spies the hump of dust on the horizon.

“It smells like a longbody!” She-Screams cries.

Me-Me, then. Mud still hasn’t detected the cheetah’s odour. That She-Screams has astounds her, and she glances at She-Screams’ head and this time it definitely does seem larger.

“Me-Me!” She-Soothes trumpets as the scent reaches her. She hustles Bent under her belly. “What is that sack of crap coming back for?”

“Me-Me?” She-Screams shrieks. By now, Me-Me is easy to see, trotting between the boulders. She-Screams cries, “Did she tell you where The Safe Place is?” She answers the question herself. “How could she have, when there is no mind talker? Let’s all keep calm. Everybody keep calm.” A severe look at the nurse cow. “If we drive this Me-Me creature away, we’ll never find out anything.”

“How do we communicate with her?” Mud says helplessly, and gets a warning snort from the matriarch. But She-Screams’ big smart head is too extraordinary to ignore. Mud wants to say, “Matriarch, this is not the cow you banished.”

“Oh, look!” She-Screams cries. “She sat down. She’s pointing! What’s she pointing to?” She scents behind herself. “She’s standing! Here she comes!”

She-Soothes growls.

“No,” She-Snorts murmurs, and she leans into the nurse cow to arrest her charge.

The cheetah moves cautiously now. Her spots ride the roll of her shoulders. Her head makes slow sweeps back and forth.

“There it is,” She-Snorts murmurs, “that other scent.”

“I smell it!” She-Screams cries. “What is it?”

Me-Me sits and extends her right paw and begins to chirp.

“Shut your stinking hole!” She-Soothes roars.

“Let her be,” She-Snorts says.

For several moments they are all silent, Me-Me as well. And then this impatient observation from She-Screams: “She wants us to sniff the paw. It couldn’t be more obvious. That scent is on her paw.”

“Let her sniff She-Soothes’ hind hole!” She-Soothes bellows and goes into a flustered shuffle over having responded to She-Screams. But She-Snorts, by the agitated twirling of her trunk, is also responding to the banished cow. Mud, too… . Mud breathes, “Of course.”

“Go back a ways,” She-Snorts tells She-Soothes. “You and Bent.” The nurse cow hesitates. “Go on!” She-Snorts snaps, and She-Soothes tucks her trunk under Bent and hauls him five, six paces. With small jogs of her head Me-Me tracks his retreat but otherwise doesn’t move.

“Everybody else keep still,” She-Snorts rumbles. By everybody, she means She-Screams, who has taken a step forward. Ears flattened, trunk drooped, She-Snorts strolls toward the cheetah. “That’s right, Me-Me,” she calls in the alluring rumble she last used with Hail Stones, “I won’t harm you. You stay right there.” Me-Me’s tail whacks the ground.

When She-Snorts is about two feet away, Me-Me offers her paw. The matriarch sniffs and instantly whips her trunk back under her chin. “It’s Date Bed,” she says with tight matter-offactness. “The smell of her dung.”

“Let me scent!” She-Screams cries, and she rushes past She-Snorts to Me-Me, who straightens alertly. “Your paw, your right paw!” She indicates with her trunk. Me-Me extends the paw. She-Screams sniffs. “It’s Date Bed, all right!” she cries.

“But what does it mean?” Mud asks. She feels light-headed.

“She stepped in Date Bed’s crap!” She-Soothes trumpets, and the cheetah slinks backwards several yards. “At Jaw-Log River!”

“No, she had the scent before then,” She-Snorts rumbles.

“How did she know it was Date Bed’s?” Mud says desperately. “And why did she want us to know? How did she know we’d
want
to know?”

“Date Bed has the She-S odour!” She-Soothes points out.

“Of course she does,” She-Screams says.
“Date Bed
is a She-S.” (As opposed, the emphasis suggests, to Mud, who isn’t.) “The moment Me-Me picked up our scent, she realized that Date Bed was a member of our family and had become separated from us.”

“But how would she know to preserve Date Bed’s scent in the first place?” Mud asks. “How could she know she’d eventually come across us?”

She-Screams won’t answer. She looks at She-Soothes, as if to say,
“You
tell her,” but the nurse cow only roars, “Good question!”

“What question is that?” She-Screams asks politely.

She-Soothes can’t repeat it, not in front of the matriarch. It is Bent who ends the deadlock by offering, “Perhaps she’s clever.”

“She
didn’t
know!” She-Screams cries. “She couldn’t have! Some of Date Bed’s dung got lodged in her pads, and not long after that it so happened she picked up our scent!”

“She wants to eat Bent,” Mud mentions in case She-Screams hasn’t already figured this out and because the doomed cow’s slights have no power to wound her and because the various banishments and grudges require a dexterity of mind she hasn’t the capacity for right now.

Me-Me is standing. She stares at Bent a moment and then looks to her left. They all scent that way. Nothing is there. She starts creeping forward, muscle by muscle in small halting increments more suggestive of stillness than motion. They allow her to go past She-Screams, to come abreast of She-Snorts. But when she passes She-Snorts, Bent squeals and She-Soothes charges and Me-Me spins around and lopes about forty yards out, then turns and sits, the low morning sun drafting her in a gold mist.

“That was not called for!” She-Screams cries as the nurse cow comes ambling back. “Do you really think she was going to try to bring Bent down with us all gawking at her?”

She-Soothes casts troubled glances at She-Snorts, who looks at Me-Me and reveals nothing.

“Me-Me may know where The Safe Place is,” She-Screams reminds them in a lofty, lecturing tone (she must fancy herself a sermonizer now, what with her new sermonizer-size head). “For wretches like ourselves,
may
is good enough. Undoubtedly she has chatted with enough mind talkers to understand how badly we all want to go there. Well, here she is, the famous guide. Who, naturally, has her price. That’s all she was trying to tell us just now: that she has her price. A rumble would have been sufficient to discourage her from getting closer.”

The nurse cow grunts.

“But we are different from other families,” She-Screams continues. “We have become separated from a cow calf, andfinding her is more important to us than finding The Safe Place.” Her voice leaps to a sarcastic screech. “It is no secret how greatly we all prize our
cow
calves!”

A crew of vultures waddles with outspread wings to boulders farther flung, and She-Screams pauses to collect herself–which she does, as she could never have done before her head expanded, almost instantly. “Me-Me,” she goes on, “stepped in the dung of our precious cow calf. She can lead us to the dung. Or at least to where the dung was. What she asks in return is that we
indulge
her. We tolerate her mingling with us. And then we let down our guard for a moment so she can kill Bent.”

“What?” She-Soothes roars.

“Kill
me?”
Bent squeals.

“Of course she could simply wait for him to collapse,” She-Screams says. “That’s the other possibility. One way or another, she has the advantage of being fit. While we all wither away to vines.”

“Kill Bent?” She-Soothes bellows, clearly past realizing that she shouldn’t be responding.

She-Screams sighs. “I’m not proposing that we let that happen. We
indulge
her, as She-Measures told us to. We indulge her not only until we find Date Bed, either, but until we find out how to get to The Safe Place.”

There is a dissenting rumble. It comes from She-Snorts, whose trunk and eyes remain on Me-Me. “We cannot let her think that we will give her Bent,” she says quietly. “It is too dangerous.”

“Why else would she help us?” She-Screams cries.

“When I drop my newborn"–her gaze swings to She-Soothes, as if she were the one who had asked the question–"she can have it.”

“No!” the nurse cow roars.

“Now
that’s
an idea,” She-Screams says, evidently surprised neither at the dreadful proposal nor at the matriarch’s appearing to have a conversation with her, however oblique. “There remains the question of
putting
it to her.”

“We let her
think
she can have the newborn!” She-Soothes bellows. “We only let her
think
so. Is that it, She-Spurns?” She nudges Mud, and Mud nods uncertainly and the nurse cow brightens. “We throw the longbody a hollow pod!”
*
she bellows. “Is that it?”

She-Screams uproots a tuft of grass. “All this mind work takes a lot out of me,” she says. “If I’m to be doing all the thinking, I’ll need at least twice as much browse as I’ve been getting.”

After an hour or so of grazing, She-Screams says, “Time to find out,” and struts toward Me-Me. The cheetah runs. “Stay where you are!” She-Screams orders. Me-Me halts, glances over her shoulder. “Stay! Stay! Stay!” She-Screams squawks. Me-Me sits. When She-Screams is close enough, Me-Me holds out her paw. Directly above this scene, against florid ribbings of sunlight, vultures loop in anticipation of disaster.

“No, none of that!” She-Screams pushes away the paw. “Now pay attention!” And she launches into a succession of gestures and noises so explicit and spirited that Bent bleats, “Who is she?” Who, indeed? She touches her stomach, groans,points to She-Snorts, squats, grunts, squeals like a calf, taps the cheetah’s right paw, points at the four horizons, stamps her foot, points again at She-Snorts and then repeats the sequence. If they doubted her story about inheriting the talent of the She-A’s-And-A’s they can do so no longer, because it was with such performances that certain non-telepathic members of that family established rudimentary communication with other creatures. In a virtuoso exhibition of her own, Me-Me instantly tracks the gestures. When they end she comes to her feet, shakes her paw three times, makes a staccato churring noise and begins trotting away.

“Stop!” She-Screams cries.

Me-Me stops.

She-Screams turns around. “She accepts the bargain!” she calls. “The place she wants to take us to is a pan three days from here. When should I tell her we’ll be setting off?”

And even now, from what reserve of toughness or wrath Mud can’t imagine, the matriarch won’t answer.

“Well?” She-Screams demands.

The matriarch glances westward.

“At dusk,” She-Screams calls, as definitely as if She-Snorts had rumbled the words. “That suits
me.
It’s a fire plain out here!”