The White Bone (37 page)

“We’ve got to find Date Bed! We’ve got to mourn her bones!”

“How do we find her?”

“We search!”

“In which direction?”

She-Soothes blinks. Don’t ask
her,
exclaims her face.
She
isn’t the fine scenter.

As their water holes empty they move down the streambed and dig others, and they eat the bordering black thorn. More impalas arrive to drink, also giraffes and oryxes. Today, whenever they look at her, Mud can hear their thoughts. They are apprehensive and thirsty, weary, suffering … and grateful, at least the oryxes and impalas are. The giraffes are haughty. “We have every right,” they think. They call Mud and her kind snouts, whereas the impalas and oryxes call them fats. What they call themselves Mud doesn’t know, she never bothered to ask Date Bed, and not knowing, she can’t conceive of addressing them. Besides, why would she?

She asks herself this because they fascinate the matriarch, who frequently sniffs in their direction and several times walks around them and studies them from various vantages. If She-Snorts is not who she was before the slaughter, neither is she who she was before yesterday. She peers at insects and stones, as Date Bed herself did. Without coaxing, she joins She-Soothes in eating oryx dung. She eats dirt. She has no plans.

As an example to her, or from a core of deathless optimism, She-Soothes continues trying to pick up Date Bed’s fetor. While she’s at it she hunts for the white bone. Even though there are no termite mounds or boulders in the vicinity, Mud hunts as well and can determine at a glance whether the whiteness that has caught She-Soothes’ eye is worth investigating. Always it isn’t, and yet She-Soothes strolls off and collects the stick or stone anyway. “Close enough!” she roars, seemingly heartened by what aren’t even near misses.

The next day dawns. Instead of browsing, She-Snorts occupies herself scraping out a perfect bed on the northwest side of the outcrop. She removes every stick and pebble and she tamps the earth with her feet. The task seems like lunacy to Mud. It is forbidden to listen to the mind of the matriarch but Mud nevertheless tries, and hears only the low moan. Finally she says, “Matriarch, how much longer–”

She-Snorts gives her a blinking, interested look.

“–until we set off?” Mud finishes, jarred. That look is Date Bed’s. “Shouldn’t we be searching for the white prize?” she presses on. “There’s always the possibility that while we’re searching we will stumble on … on Date Bed’s… .”

“Carcass,” She-Snorts furnishes.

“Yes.” She feels upbraided and resents it. She has not wept, not even to herself, she has displayed no grief and she knows she must appear hardhearted. Well, what if she is? One of them had better be. They are starving. There is a place where they won’t starve or be slaughtered, and either they find that place and live, or they die. How will grieving and loitering, how will kindness to impalas, help them? She feels a hundredyears older than these two cows, one perpetually baffled, the other sinking into some soft-headed delusion of herself.

“She-Spurns,” the matriarch says, in her new, tender voice, “even were I agreeable to wandering aimlessly, we can’t leave yet.”

“Why?”

She begins to dribble urine. Twisting around to smell it, she says, “Because I am about to drop my newborn.”

In two days Mud has not once thought about her own newborn, let alone the matriarch’s. The commotion in her belly, which used to be the ceaseless reminder, is gone, and suckling Bent requires so little of her that she has stopped thinking about why she produces the milk. She sniffs the matriarch’s urine and smells the birth aroma and is horrified at the prospect of the search for the white bone being impaired by a newborn.

The labour drags on. She-Snorts squats, straightens, browses and throws stones until assaulted by another pain, squats again, sometimes rolling onto her side. Meanwhile She-Soothes rumbles encouragement and, when She-Snorts is standing, herds her into the shade and leans against her to take her weight. She tastes the urine but says nothing. If the urine was clear she would bellow that news, clear urine indicating no complications.

Mid-morning, unannounced by a pain, the newborn shoots out and lands rump-first in the bed She-Snorts prepared. She-Soothes quickly tusks open the foetal sac andpulls at the cord wrapped around the newborn’s chest. Mud comes closer. It’s a male, as She-Scares predicted. He doesn’t move. Mud swallows to push down an ache in her throat. “Up you get,” She-Soothes rumbles savagely and nudges the tiny brown body with her foot. She-Snorts sniffs his skull, withdraws her trunk, makes a graceful pivot and walks to the other side of the outcrop. She-Soothes thrashes her head. The slap of her ears wakes up Bent, who squeals, “Is it here?” and shunts on his knees toward the corpse, but before he reaches it She-Soothes snatches him by the tail and hauls him back. She-Snorts emerges from the other side of the outcrop. “He shall be Drought,” she says as if she only went away to think of a name. Looking off, she sprays him with dirt. She-Soothes and Mud add more dirt, also sticks, and when he is covered, She-Snorts stands over him. Vultures pour down from the empty sky. Hour after hour She-Soothes charges them. Finally She-Snorts says with dreamy unconcern, “Let them be,” and then the nurse cow seems suddenly to apprehend her own exhaustion and, with a look of puzzlement, sinks to the ground. The vultures take position on a single thorn bush whose branches bow back like an opening flower.

Mud stands apart from the two cows, upwind to be out of scent. Bent doesn’t matter, he wouldn’t recognize the relief she vents. To give way to sorrow would be easy, but to be glad–for Drought’s sake as much as anyone’s–requires a tightening of the mind and breath and blood. When Bent comes up on his knees and suckles, she can’t quite believe that anything still flows out of her. She forages on roots and watches the vultures. If one of them should glance in herdirection, eyeing Bent, she is able to hear snatches of its gory thoughts, and against these she tests her invincibility. Eventually they begin to sicken her, and she is about to turn her back when one of a pair who is looking at Bent thinks, “Smells like the carcass beyond the blue hills,” and its neighbour thinks, “Sweeter.”

For a dizzying moment Mud perceives that carcass as they first did: at sunset from above. The purple scent cloud, the particulate clarity, the body in its tensed death pose, head thrown back. The flash of the tusks. That the tusks are there pierces her tempered heart. She goes to the cows and tells them.

“It’s Date Bed,” she says, and She-Snorts says placidly, “I
thought
I smelled something at those hills.”

“She is under a very large feast tree. I can’t imagine that we would fail to find her.”

“I suppose we could set off at dusk,” She-Snorts says.

“Why not now?” Mud says.

She-Snorts cocks her head.

“The sooner we get to her,” Mud says bluntly, “the more of her there will be to mourn.” She doesn’t add, although it is her foremost thought, that the sooner they get to the west of those hills the better their chances of finding the white bone.

“What about this one?” She-Soothes bellows. She touches her trunk to Drought.

The matriarch glances down, glances away. “Forever in oblivion,” she sings softly, “ ‘tis immortality,” and the three of them surround the corpse in the outward-facing mourning formation and sing all one hundred and three verses and then take a last drink and leave. Behind them, the vultures shriek. To Mud that sound is outrage and repossession, as if whatshould never have slipped into the world were being snatched back. Only Bent turns to look.

They hardly make a bee-line. Anything that captures the matriarch’s attention–an ostrich nest, a bit of blown fur–she wanders over to and sniffs. She stops at a teclea bush and breaks off a twig, holds it to her eye. “All the tiny furrows,” she murmurs, and She-Soothes seizes a stick and holds it to
her
eye and roars, “Look at them all!”

Once they are walking again, Mud moves up beside the nurse cow and mutters, “You had better take the lead.”

She-Soothes recoils.

“We haven’t even travelled a mile,” Mud says.

“She’s searching for the white–”

“Nothing she has picked up is white,” Mud snaps.

“You never know,” She-Soothes rumbles unhappily.

“I do,” Mud says. “I know.”

She-Soothes looks at her. “Has your head grown?” she asks.

The question brings Mud to a stop. “What nonsense,” she says as the implication dawns. She stomps away … and there goes the matriarch to investigate a wildebeest skeleton, so she stomps past her as well.

Her surprise when she hears the two cows falling in behind her soon stiffens to resentment. She has no illusions that she is the new matriarch. Being the one in front is simply another burden on her shoulders, and a danger, what’s more. She keeps an eye out for hyenas, also for termite mounds and boulders despite the unlikelihood of finding the white bone on this side of the hills. She urges a fast pace, which still must be torturously slow to accommodate Bent. Mid-afternoon the wind rises and dust crashes across the plain in swirling pillars and Bent drops to his knees, screaming he can’t, he can’t. She-Soothes charges over, but Mud already has her trunk between his hind legs.

“I’ve got him,” she says.

“You’re not strong enough!” the nurse cow roars.

“I’m not?” Mud rages and starts to shove the whimpering calf forward.
“I’m
not strong enough?”

Dimly she knows she isn’t. Her withered leg cramps, every breath scalds. She would leave her body behind, if she could. Like this ruined family and the newborn within her ribs, her body is what she lugs, out of no choice. She feels the pounding in her temples as her mind clamouring to escape, and she entertains the prospect that she really did inherit the cleverness that leaked out of She-Screams. She touches her head to feel whether it’s bigger. Hard to tell.

By sunset, with the wind down, Bent can walk on his own. Since the matriarch is no longer trying to detect Date Bed’s dung, the underscents are no longer a concern, and Mud decides that they should keep going until dawn. In the middle of the night a gang of hyenas attends them on all sides, and neither She-Soothes nor She-Snorts care. But Mud, annoyed at the hyenas’ presumption and thrilling at her own absence of fear, drives them off.

“Ten couldn’t bring down a she-one,” she crows to Bent.

“I know,” he says.

“Well,” she says, brusquely. Of course he knew, even Bent knew. “I didn’t.”

Dawn arrives, the sun climbs. Mud wants to press on until at least noon but the matriarch begins to stagger and she herself is limping badly and fighting the treacherous descent intomemories of Date Bed, treacherous for how they may unbrace her, and she calls a halt on the shore of a pan. That her head is indeed bigger seems confirmed when she is the first to excavate a water hole. After drinking and showering she lies apart from the cows, whose grief she finds stifling. Behind her a pair of plovers calls in that loud irritating way they have that is like two stones being knocked together, and she is on the verge of getting up and charging them when she feels her third eye opening.

It is a vision of the near future. Dawn. A smoky yellow light. Transecting hippo paths, all muck, tiny green leaves on the thorn bushes. Five hippos walk in a line. Their backs bristle with oxpeckers. The screech of queleas, thousands of them … and here they are, rising from a swamp as if sucked by a funnel of wind. In the air they form a square mat that shifts this way, that way. The hippos arrive at the swamp. Sighing, they slip into the papyrus. The crocodiles sink down. The separate cries of the queleas attenuate to a single, rapidly fading creak. Mud doesn’t recognize this place. She doesn’t recognize the voice. “I envisioned the lilies,” it says and sounds like a bull calf but can’t be, bulls don’t have visions. It is, though. A little bull calf. Outlandishly long tusks, small ears. With the certainty visions provide, she knows that he is a Lost One. Behind him are two big cows of her kind and behind them is a newborn whose tail is in the grip of its mother’s trunk. The cows are strangers to Mud. Her eye lifts and sweeps over more of them–cows, calves, newborns. From this height they are like stepping stones. The plain glints with the green of new grass. On her eye goes, along a road pocked with water pools, off the road to a resting vehicle. Perched in the vehicle’s back cavity is a human. It stares toward the swamp. If humans feel emotions she would say that this one feels amusement. When its head turns in her direction, her third eye closes.

She comes to her feet. “Let’s go,” she says.

“Where?” Bent says.

To The Safe Place … but the words don’t reach her mouth. Where? she thinks.

“What’s the matter?” Bent says.

“Quiet. It’s all right. I had a vision.”

“Oh.” He goes still and reverent.

“I don’t know the way,” she says miserably.

“Was it a bad vision?”

She glances down. What a doomed little creature he seems. “No,” she says. “It had rained.”

“Here?”

“There.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”