The White Bone (38 page)

She sleeps standing. When she awakens it is late afternoon, and She-Snorts has moved onto the pan and is scenting to the south. Mud sees the approaching shape and the shadow streaking eastward. “Me-Me!” she exclaims.

The matriarch starts walking back. “I was dreaming about her,” she says in wonderment, vaguely mystified.

“Bent!” The nurse cow is scrambling to her feet. Bent rushes to her. “Be off!” she trumpets over the plain.

“Are you mad?” Mud cries.

“She-Soothes wants to charge!” the nurse cow roars.

Mud slaps the bigger cow, who rears back, stunned. “Youlisten to me,” Mud rages. “I have envisioned The Safe Place and she is going to take us there.”

She-Soothes gapes down at her.

“I will warn her to stay away from Bent,” Mud says.

“She is lame,” the matriarch observes mildly.

Mud whirls around to see. So she is: a buckling of the right foreleg, the result, no doubt, of being kicked by She-Screams. About fifteen yards away she stops and sits. Mud casts a warning glare at the nurse cow and starts forward. The cheetah rises. “I won’t hurt you,” Mud thinks.

Me-Me dangles her foreleg reproachfully.

“Yes,” Mud thinks. “That’s a shame.”

“Where is the one with the warts?” Although she chirps, in Mud’s mind her voice is a peevish sing-song.

“She died,” Mud thinks.

“The bull calf is Me-Me’s.” She twitches her small head, seeking out Bent.

“He is not. He never was. The one with the warts had no right to offer him.”

“That one gave birth.” Staring now at She-Snorts.

“Yesterday. A stillborn.”

Her tail slaps the ground. She looks toward Mud’s hind legs. “You haven’t given birth.”

“Not yet.”

“It’s Me-Me’s.”

Mud’s belly seizes. “That’s the bargain,” she says.

Me-Me gazes west. In her orange eyes are suns. “Me-Me knows where to go,” she says gloatingly but not dishonestly. For the first time Mud appreciates that a claim made in the mind cannot be false. All she hears of cunning is that until the newborn is born the route will be indirect to prevent them from guessing it.

“You’ll lead us there,” Mud thinks, “whether my newborn drops before we arrive or after.”

“This way,” the cheetah says, turning east.

“No, this way,” Mud thinks reluctantly. She nods toward the southwest. “First we must mourn one of our dead.”

“What’s done is done,” Mud thinks.

They encircle and fondle the carcass, stinking and eyeless though it is, smeared with vulture dung and gouted with flies and spilling over with maggots though it is. Behind them, Me Me dozes at the termite mound into which, when they arrived, a horde of mongooses fled.

The tusks have almost fallen out of their sockets. The narrow skull is unrecognizable under its rag of skin. “Afloat upon The Eternal Shoreless Water,” the nurse cow said when they arrived, and Mud’s throat clenched. Poor Date Bed, dying too young to ascend to the family of the She. Mud would have wept had She-Soothes not burst out with, “What’s done is done!” and despite all the times she has bellowed it and the inevitability of her bellowing it now, Mud was struck as if by a transcendent, authorizing truth. “So it is,” she said, seeing the nurse cow in an elevated light.

“What’s done is done. What’s done is done.” Chanting this to herself, Mud wards off memory and therefore grief. It is so simple. The matriarch turns her back to the corpse and starts up a hymn. Mud turns and plants her eyes and trunkon Me-Me, who is their salvation. And whose facile heartlessness Mud suddenly envies. By what misguided arrangement were she-ones made swollen with memory rather than sleek with appetite?

It is dusk when they finish mourning. They browse and drink and then lie close enough to Date Bed to protect what’s left of her from predators. Now that Me-Me is back, Bent has resumed sleeping next to his mother, and She-Soothes has instructed him to wake her if he wants to go to Mud and suckle. As for Me-Me, she hasn’t budged from the termite mound. That the mongooses are trapped is Mud’s last thought before she drops into her first sleep in two days.

A fierce belly cramp wakes her several hours later. She comes to her feet–disturbing only Me-Me, who looks around with shining eyes–and walks to the nearest thorn bush. The stones still hold the heat of the day. The crickets circumscribe the darkness. She suspects she has entered labour but isn’t certain until she urinates. It is not only the unmistakable odour that tells her, it is the great volume. Me-Me slinks forward.

“Stay away,” Mud thinks.

“It’s Me-Me’s.”

“I’m in pain. I could hurt you without intending to.”

“You could kick Me-Me.” Self-pityingly.

“Go on!” She tosses her head and Me-Me scuttles to the mound. The cramp eases. She lies on her side but another cramp twists through her abdomen, and she hauls herself up to a squat and begins to dribble urine.

“I thought it would be tonight,” says the voice of the matriarch. She awakens the nurse cow, and the two of them and Bent come closer.

She-Soothes tastes the urine. “Clear!” she announces happily.

“Clear,” the matriarch echoes, wistful.

Mud straightens. Teeters. She recalls how in the moments after she was born, her mother teetered, and she plunges deeply into that memory and emerges from it sobbing, to her alarm. Both cows prod their trunks at her mouth. She pulls away. Her urine tasting clear is
not
happy news. A live newborn will be so much harder to surrender, and yet this witless pair obviously hopes for a live one and she realizes that they may try to thwart the bargain with Me-Me. “Go back to sleep,” she says as a stupendous pain brings her up on her toes, and she falls against She-Soothes and loses consciousness.

Opening her eyes, she finds herself supported between the two cows. “Why won’t it drop?” she wails.

“Kneel,” the matriarch says, and she and the nurse cow help lower her. “Strain,” the matriarch says. Mud strains. The matriarch strokes her rump. The nurse cow strokes her vulva.

“It’s not time,” the nurse cow rumbles. “Lie down, She-Spurns.”

Mud lies down. The two cows soar above her, irresistible, suffocating. Under the nurse cow’s belly Bent hunkers. Me-Me paces at the termite mound. The shine of her eyes shafts through to Mud’s belly, to the newborn, piercing it. She-Snorts steps to one side, and now the precise distance between her legs and She-Soothes’ legs draws Mud into another birth memory of looking through those other legs that, during her entrapment, were the bearings of the known world.

Again she sobs. It doesn’t matter. Like a calf she sucks at the matriarch’s trunk. She sleeps. Sleeps for hours, it turns out. When a cramp wakes her, the darkness is lifting but the cowshave not moved. The cramp heaves her to her feet. The cows assist her as she sinks back to the ground. Another cramp, and she is helped up by She-Soothes, whose eye plug drops out and is stepped on by She-Snorts. The matriarch raises her foot. “Leave it be!” She-Soothes bellows. “She-Soothes doesn’t care!” Down comes the foot. Down from the eye socket comes a dreadful stench. Mud vomits. She-Soothes kicks dirt over the gleaming pool. Mud strains and feels her entire birth canal disgorging and sees a blue shimmer she thinks is escort to the agony.

“Lightning,” the matriarch says.

“Here she comes!” She-Soothes bellows.

The force of the expulsion propels Mud onto her rump. Frantic, she scrambles to her feet.

There it is. Alive. Running in slow motion. Female, as predicted. Mud smells the head, which is still encased in the foetal sac. She pulls the sac free and steps aside.

“That was a bolt of lightning,” the matriarch says, looking off.

“Name her Bolt!” the nurse cow trumpets. She nudges the tiny thing with one foot.

“Bolt,” Mud whispers.

“She shall be Bolt!” the nurse cow trumpets.

Mud is aware of the cheetah creeping toward them and yet somehow can’t determine the peril, or who presents it. When Me-Me gets too close, the nurse cow roars and the cheetah runs back to the mound. “Don’t look at her,” Mud tells herself, as if not hearing Me-Me’s mind is the solution.

From Bolt’s mind come faint peeps. She is trying to stand. Finally she does and locates the nipple, and then Mud hears a humming, which must be pleasure although Mud suspects it is also the sound of another kind of satisfaction: that of having an urgent notion confirmed. But from where in that memoryless body could a notion have arisen?

The matriarch points east. “Look,” she says. Along the dawn horizon is a range of pink clouds.

“Jubilation!” the nurse cow trumpets.

“Jubilation,” the matriarch says thoughtfully. She and She-Soothes and Bent walk about twenty yards onto the plain. In this burnt light, from Mud’s vantage point, their thinness is accentuated and yet they seem not diminished but refined to a more intricate and essential anatomy. Behind Mud, the cheetah creeps closer. There is no sound, there is only the thickening of her nauseating stench. It is all Mud can do not to fall into a birth memory of the hyena. “I could lie down,” she thought that night, and she thinks it now, the impossible decision being, should she lie beside her newborn or on top of her? She looks over her shoulder.

Me-Me is not three yards away. “Tell them it’s Me-Me’s,” she is thinking.

Mud thinks nothing.

“You are the leader.”

“I’m not.”

“Me-Me knows where to go.”

“The Safe Place,” Mud thinks stupidly. The cleverness she inherited from She-Screams has deserted her.

“Walk over there.” Me-Me points to the termite mound.

“No.”

“It’s Me-Me’s. It’s Me-Me’s.”

As if won over by such conviction, Bolt starts toddling toward the cheetah. Twice she falls but gets herself back up and keeps going. She is crumpled, tiny, hairy and, to Mud’s eyes, alien, belonging to nobody. Nothing could be more inevitable than her woebegone little journey. Me-Me creeps closer. She is reaching out one paw when the matriarch’s foot catches her under the chin and stretches her up on her hind feet. Bolt rushes back to Mud. The second kick gets the cheetah in the ribs. The third, in the side of the skull, throws her limply against the tree. Immediately the vultures hop down to the lower branches.

“You killed Me-Me,” says Bent. He gapes at the matriarch, at her murderous foot.

“Good riddance,” the nurse cow growls, but she, too, is astounded.

She-Snorts strolls to the tree and picks up bits of straw that have fallen from the weaver bird’s nest and scatters these on the cheetah. She goes to where Mud and Bolt are and inserts her trunk into the newborn’s mouth. “You’d have done the same to save mine,” she says as if Mud had thanked her. Her voice is impassive, but temporin slides down her face and her odour of wrath still fumes.

Mud begins to sob. “Date Bed,” she says, this beloved name a requiem for every loss of her life, from her birth mother to her birth name to Date Bed to the brief, dream-like loss of herself. Bolt screams to nurse, and Mud nuzzles her and is suddenly terror-stricken and thrashes her head around, searching for the perils that could be anywhere.

“Stop that,” She-Snorts says quietly. She pulls on Mud’s trunk, and after a moment Mud goes still.

“Lift your leg,” the nurse cow says.

Mud does. Almost immediately Bolt finds the nipple, and Bent rushes over and latches onto Mud’s other breast, and the two calves root her to the spot so that although she sways she doesn’t fall.

And now, from out of the termite mound, the mongooses emerge. There are dozens of them. They growl and hiss. They gallop over to the cheetah. Some lunge at her and some bounce on the spot, spectacular leaps as high as Bent. All at once they stop and sit on their haunches and regard their audience.

“Big, Big, Big, Big,” Mud hears from their minds. She rubs her eyes with the knuckle of her trunk. “What is big?” she thinks.

A swivelling of every head in her direction. “Big, Big, Big killed, killed, killed the, the stinker, killed the stinker,” they twitter out loud. They look from Mud to She-Soothes to She-Snorts, back to Mud.

“Ask them if they mind talked with Date Bed,” the matriarch rumbles.

There go the heads, all turning to her now. “Sing, sing, sing the song, song about, the song about the hot, the hot, hot, hot fight, fight, fight,” they twitter.

“Did the dead she-one sing?” Mud thinks, and they start screeching and jumping and falling on their backs.

“What’s the matter with them?” the nurse cow bellows.

“I don’t know,” Mud says. She can’t decipher the screeches. She pulls away from the calves and walks toward the mongooses, who suddenly sit up on their haunches. She points at Date Bed. “We came to mourn her.”

“Dead! Dead! Dead!” the mongooses twitter with great distress.

“Do they know how she died?” the matriarch asks. Her voice is steady.

“Poison, poison bite, bite, poison bite,” the mongooses twitter, as if they heard.

“She was struck by a flow stick,” Mud tells the cows and begins again to weep. Her birth mother and Date Bed both killed by snakes. For the third time that day she falls into her birth memory, and when she comes out of it the mongooses are gathered around her feet, twittering urgently about the white bone.