The White Bone (3 page)

It was a long hymn, three hundred and ninety verses, and at the second-to-last verse She-Measures turned and walked out onto the plain and the rest of the family followed, none of them looking at Mud, none of them lingering. Having envisioned their retreat, Mud knew that they would disappear within a nebula of red dust. She screamed, and one of the larger bull calves came running back to charge the vultures. At a trumpet from She-Measures, however, he wheeled around and raced off again.

The vultures dropped back to the ground. Hissing and shrieking, wings slapping the back of Mud’s head, they jumped onto the corpse.

There was the pop of gas, the slosh of innards tumbling out. Rock-sized chunks of gore swilled down Mud’s face and intoher eyes. She vomited, and the smaller of two birds who were trolling the intestines across the ground hobbled closer and lapped up the pool and then began to pluck at Mud’s trunk. In a seizure of panic Mud drummed her forelegs, catching her left heel on a root unearthed during last night’s downpour. The rain had loosened the muck that trapped her legs so that this time, when she strained to pull herself free, she succeeded.

She jerked herself to her feet. Considering all the hours that her legs had been under the corpse, she should have collapsed a dozen times before standing, if she stood at all, but after two attempts she was up. She made a wobbly charge at her tormentor, who hopped back onto the carcass.

Her mother’s gore had glued her left eye shut, but out of her right she discerned, a quarter of a mile in the distance, a pearly flash. The river. She staggered toward it in what for her was a great migration. Every few steps she fell, and less than twenty yards from her destination she sank into a stupor. When she opened her eyes it was dusk. She worked herself upright and started off again.

The bank of the river was cool and soft underfoot. She dropped onto her left side with the tip of her trunk in the water, her good eye taking in an eagle as it rocked down through laminations of colour in the darkening sky.

She was startled awake by a hippo cow and calf as they emerged from the water not ten feet away. She got to her feet and approached the silvery, strange-scented mounds, knowing only that they were the contour of safety. They moveddownriver. She started to follow but they picked up their pace. Confused, she stopped. They retreated farther into the night noises: the chirping of crickets, the hoots that incited all the bruises on her legs. Now and then a barking sound clawed down her body, and there was a faraway roar she imagined came from the depression of muck where she had been trapped. She pointed her trunk in that direction and inhaled the death fetor, which still contained flecks of her mother’s living scent. In a trance of need, she started to go back.

A Goliath heron glided by in ghostly whispers, and terrified afresh she fell and lay panting as a panorama of barks, grunts, howls, whoops and cackles reared up around her. Out of her right eye she gazed at the perfect circle that was the full moon. She slept, awakening near dawn to her hindquarters being snuffled and nudged. Before she could bring herself to her feet the first nip caught her under her tail. She kicked out with her right hind leg and stumbled to her knees but was quickly up again and whirling to face this new misery.

It was half her size. Four-legged. Hide spiked out in the shape of a scream, backside sloping down. Mouth a crescent banded to the snout, and shining eyes like holes shot through the head, offering a peep of the river. Now that she was standing, it trotted around her and marked a ring in the centre of which she revolved.

A lassitude started to overtake her as a shuddering in the earth drew her attention downward. She could lie here. She lurched a few steps to the side and saw the blossom that her feet had made in the wet sand. Every place of pain lifted off her body in a white flock.

The hyena grunted. She peered at it through her gummedup left eye. The percussion in the earth intensified, and the hyena growled. Seeing now the teats that trembled from its belly, she tottered forward to suckle but was startled to a standstill when it giggled.

It was staring downriver in the direction of the booming. She twisted her head to look there with her good eye.

Right away she knew what she was seeing, except that she mistook them for her birth family coming back. The sight of those massive grey boulders tumbling out of the vaporous brink of night snapped her out of her langour, and bawling so furiously that her trunk and tail shot out, she swaggered past the hyena and tripped over her feet and fell head-first into the water.

She got up and made it to shore and took a few more steps and fell again.

The herd caught sight of her, eased its pace. She straightened her front legs, but her hind legs folded and she collapsed in a puddle of muck.

“Who is this?” the lead cow said. She wrapped her trunk around Mud’s chest and pulled her to her feet.

“Smell how new she is,” a second cow said in a flat, insinuating voice that, because it was so unperturbed, Mud found tremendously alluring.

“Where is your mother, my dear?” the lead cow said.

Mud sniffed the leg belonging to this voice. The odour was familiar but not known.

“I smell corpse,” the alluring voice said.

A stutter of gasps, and all the trunks lifting.

“The air is theirs,”
*
a fierce voice said.

The lead cow pointed. “That way,” she said. “A she-he.”

Through the palisade of legs Mud saw the hyena skulk through the mist.

“Is it a massacre?” a shrill, quavering voice asked.

The alluring voice said, “I’m picking up only one death fetor. It’s from a cow, I believe.”

More gasps, and weeping now.

“She-Snorts,” the lead cow said, “can you smell hindleggers?”

“The faintest stink,” the alluring voice said. “They are no longer in the vicinity.”

“We’d better leave, anyway,” the shrill voice said. Nut-sized tears dripped from her trunk. “They may come back and slaughter us all. If you ask me, and of course nobody will, but in my opinion the best thing to do is to leave this newborn here. That cow may not be related to her at all, and if her family comes searching, they won’t know where to look.”

She-Snorts blew out a derisive breath.

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t mourn the cow,” the shrill voice said. “But we don’t have to do that right this moment. I’m short of breath. Where’s Swamp? Swamp!”

“Calm yourself,” the lead cow rumbled. “Wave your ears.”

“Wave my ears. Yes, all right, Mother. Swamp. Stay by me, son. I’m having one of my spells.”

“I would like to go to the corpse,” the fierce voice said.

“No, She-Scares,” the lead cow rumbled. “It’s not safe. She-Screams is right, the hindleggers may not be far. Poor cow. I wonder who she was.”

“The newborn has a She-M odour,” She-Snorts said.

A throng of trunks descended to Mud. When one slipped into her mouth she sucked the tip, although she anticipated the disappointment of drawing no milk from that source. And yet she smelled milk. Where? She turned in a circle and spotted full breasts under She-Snorts and rushed toward her. A tiny calf was in her way. She thought that the calf was herself, and she halted to be investigated by her own trunk and to gulp in her own milk perfume until, reminded by that smell of where she was headed, she pulled away and tried to go between the forelegs of She-Snorts.

She-Snorts’ foot gently nudged her away.

Mud tried again. The foot nudged more forcefully. Mud shrieked.

“Silence,” growled the lead cow in a penetrating tone that gonged through the earth.

“One of the She-M’s!” She-Screams wailed. “I am especially fond of that family. But I still don’t think–”

“Silence!”

Mud leaned against a leg, and its pleated skin was her weariness, its knee her frustration. The trunks all rose again, and by that sudden and unified movement Mud presumed the dawn was raised and the night sounds banished, both.

In another hour the eye of the She will close, and Her son, Rogue, will assume the watch.
*

He is already climbing the sky. A third of the way to the summit He will halt and stare at His mother’s Domain with the wide-open eye that should make the carnivores wary but in these calamitous times will make them reckless. They are His beloved creations, the carnivores. The lions, as the most beloved of the beloved, will have their pick of the starving zebras, wildebeests and Thomson’s gazelles grazing on the stubble above Blood Swamp. When the lions are so bloated that their stomachs brush the ground, they will collapse, moaning tunes of self-infatuation that, after several more nights, will weary Rogue, and His eye will start its long shutting.

Now, in the lull before the slaughter, Mud holds her trunk aloft and scents her adoptive family, who bathe alongside the hippos in the shallows. The naming ceremony has been overfor more than an hour but if she goes back the screams will start up again–"She-Spurns! She-Spurns!"–and it will be not a welcoming but a battering. What the big cows do (she knows from when Echo became She-Scavenges) is assail you with your cow name until you accept it.

She lowers her trunk, pinches a wad of sand and throws it over her back. From across the swamp comes the liquid call of doves. Over there, the vegetation is long gone, but on this side the papyrus and sedge grasses still grow and up on the bank are eight standing fever trees. Beyond the swamp is scorched plain, for hundreds of miles and in all directions. It is the worst drought in the matriarch’s memory; the worst, therefore, in at least sixtyfive years. Just after sunrise, before the wind starts kicking up the dust, Mud will sometimes climb the bank and look around and be astonished by the bleakness: the scattered grazers, their angular wavering shapes … the rocks and stumps, the blasted acacia bush to which her family retires each evening.

“Perhaps I’ll spend the night here” is her bitter thought now as she watches coils of steam ignite along the swamp’s surface.

“Mud,” says a voice behind her in a tone of gentle reproach.

Only Date Bed can suddenly appear like that.
*
Her step is as silent as a master tracker’s and she has that rarity known asa “bluff odour,” which is a scent disposed to coating itself with whatever other frail and agreeable scents are in the vicinity. She leans into Mud’s flank and, when Mud turns around, reaches out her little trunk. Like Mud, she is in her twelfth year, but she is small … so small she has yet to go into oestrus.

“Did you have any idea?” Mud thinks. (With Date Bed it is her habit to think, rather than speak, most of her end of a conversation.)

Date Bed gives her narrow head the quick nod that those who don’t know her mistake for a twitch. “I was fairly sure,” she says, “that it would have to do with your aloofness.”

“I am not aloof!” Mud thinks, wounded and outraged, and uncertain.

“I have been devoting some thought to how the big cows arrive at a name,” Date Bed says earnestly, “and it seems to me that unless they regard you as a future nurse cow, they choose a name that will antagonize you.”

“Antagonize?”

Date Bed blinks. “Irritate,” she says.

“I know what the word means,” Mud says out loud.

“Provoke,” Date Bed says anyway. “They hope that by provoking you, you’ll eventually prove them wrong. A misguided strategy, in my opinion. More often than not, cows surrender to their names.”

“What about names like She-Sees? She-Measures? Those names flatter.”

“Yes,” Date Bed says, unfazed. “There are certain exceptions. When my day comes I am hoping for She-Soothes-And-Soothes. Whereas I suspect they will call me She-Squints.”

“You
do
squint.”

“You spurn,” Date Bed says as if it were a harmless fact.

“I don’t.”

“But you do. At least, you give the impression of spurning, which amounts to the same thing.”