The White Bone (39 page)
“That, that way, way!” They gesture and leap toward the southeast. “That way! That way!”
The pace is slow and not only because of the calves. As always happens before the rains, spears of grass have pushed through the earth, still too fine and short to be properly grazed, but for the bliss of tasting green they walk pecking like birds.
On the second day the matriarch discovers a clod of Tall Time’s dung. It is, she judges, fourteen to sixteen days old.
“He may have taken this same route!” the nurse cow trumpets.
“Perhaps,” She-Snorts says.
Who they will meet at The Safe Place consumes the two big cows. Torrent, certainly–She-Snorts has no doubt that he’ll have found his way. Swamp and Hail Stones … if they linked up with Torrent or another master tracker, there is a chance that they’ll have made it. And Tall Time. Barring disaster, they can’t imagine why the Link Bull wouldn’t be there.
Mud doesn’t tell them about her vision, in which she recognized nobody. She saw, after all, only a small corner of The Safe Place and hardly anyone up close. Neither does she speculate. She nurses her calf, and Bent. She plucks the new grass. She does things delicately, out of contrition and because she is weak with love. At least once an hour she falls into a memory and sometimes, coming out of it, she mistakes the smell of Bolt for whomever the memory featured. Bolt is Date Bed, or Hail Stones. Bolt is Tall Time in musth.
Bolt walks under her, She-Snorts in front of her, She-Soothes and Bent follow. Before them are the blue hills, and directly overhead white wads of cloud speed by, going the other way. If you look back, as Mud keeps doing, you can see the dust raised by their passage rolling out as far as the horizon, and the entire plain washed in light.
| All-throat | Gerenuk (it has a long neck) |
| Away vision | A vision of a distant place in the present moment |
| Bad tree | Euphorbia candelabrum tree (its latex is toxic) |
| Big fly | Ostrich |
| Big grass | Bamboo |
| Bluff odour | A scent disposed to coating itself with whatever other frail and agreeable scents are in the vicinity |
| Burr fly | Flappet lark (it produces a high brrrr, brrrr, brrrr, brrrr sound during its mating display) |
| Carrion plant | A foul-smelling parasitic plant found growing on the roots of acacias |
| Creaker | Cricket |
| Delirium | Oestrus |
| Descent | The advent of human beings |
| Domain | Planet Earth |
| Drought fruit | The dung of other creatures (crude) |
| Early milk | The milk secreted by a cow just before she gives birth |
| Endless song | A song exceeding five hundred verses |
| Eternal Shoreless Water | Oblivion; the place where the spirits of deceased bulls, calves and tuskless cows go |
| Feast tree | Acacia tortilis tree (its bark, buds and flowers are all edible and delicious) |
| Fine scenter | Anybody who possesses exceptional scenting ability (usually only one per family unit) |
| Fire charing | A place where humans smoke the flesh of their kills |
| Fissure | The place of perdition under the Earth where deceased human beings go |
| Flesh-eater | Carnivore |
| Flow-stick | Snake |
| Fly | Bird |
| Fruits | Testicles (crude) |
| Formal timbre | A respectful form of address characterized by exaggerated enunciation |
| Ghastly | Rhinoceros, black or white (it has short unsightly legs, and its "tusks," or horns, are arranged one on top of the other rather than side by side) |
| Green | Musth |
| Grounder | Infrasonic call |
| Grouping | A method of rapidly calculating the passage of time (a group is roughly equivalent to a month) invented by Date Bed |
| Grunt | Warthog |
| Hack | Chain saw |
| Head drool | Temporin |
| Heat deep | Heat stroke |
| Hide-browser | Oxpecker |
| Hindlegger | Human being |
| Hind-trunk | Penis (crude) |
| Honker | Goose |
| Howler | Jackal |
| Hump | Termite mound |
| Jaw-hg | Crocodile |
| Kick fly | Secretary bird (it kicks out backwards as it walks) |
| Later vision | A vision of the future |
| Links | Omens, signs and superstitions |
| Little smoke | Cigarette smoke |
| Longbody | Cheetah |
| Long Rains Massive Gathering | Annual congregation of elephants |
| Lunatic | Wildebeest (it is noisy, chaotic and prone to unpredictable fits of springing and bucking) |
| Master tracker | Anybody who possesses exceptional tracking ability |
| Memory night | A particularly starry night |
| Mind talker | A telepathic cow or cow calf |
| Mock head drool | The black lines on a cheetah’s face |
| Musth | An annual period of heightened sexual and aggressive activity among bulls lasting anywhere from three days to four months (during this time the penis turns green and dribbles urine) |
| Other Domain | The place where the spirits of all deceased creatures except for human beings and elephants go |
| Peak-headed sex | Cows, who have an almost triangular forehead in profile (the forehead of a bull is more rounded) |
| Radiance | Those few hours during oestrus when a cow is most fertile |
| Ribs | Zebra (in an earlier incarnation its skeleton covered its flesh) |
| Roar fly | Helicopter or airplane |
| Rogue | Son of the She; creator of all creatures except human beings and elephants |
| Rogue’s night | A night when the moon is full |
| Rogue’s web | Wire fence |
| Shadow memory | An imperfect memory (similar to a human memory) |
| The She | The first elephant and the mother of all elephants |
| The She-eye | Sun |
| She-he | Spotted hyena (both sexes appear to have male genitalia) |
| She-ones | Elephants of either sex (comparable to "mankind") |
| Skin | Paint on vehicles |
| Sky-diver | Eagle or hawk |
| Slider | Vehicle, specifically truck or jeep |
| Small time | High noon (shadows are short) |
| Speck | Insect |
| Spike weed | Castor oil plant (it has spiky flowers) |
| Sting | Bullet |
| Stink tree | Sausage tree (its flowers smell unpleasant) |
| Strong tusk | The favoured tusk (one tusk is always favoured over another, in the same way that people are either right- or left-handed) |
| Tail grass | Papyrus |
| Tall time | Dawn or dusk (shadows are long) |
| Temporin | A viscous secretion that oozes from a gland behind the eye during states of excitation |
| Third eye | Visionary capacity (metaphoric) |
| Trunk | Soulfulness; depth of spirit |
| Trunk-neck | Vulture, most species (it is believed that sections of a dead elephant’s trunk, when incubated by a vulture, become the necks from which the rest of the baby vultures generate) |
| Underscents | The powerful, ponderous odours heaved up by the earth at night |
| Visionary | A cow or cow calf who is capable of seeing both the future and the distant present |
| Water-boulder | Hippopotamus |
| Water-ghry | Water lily |
| Water tree | Fever tree (it grows along the shores of rivers and lakes) |
| Wattle | Cow bell |
| Zeal | A cow’s lascivious babble during oestrus |
Many books proved helpful to me during my research. Among these are:
The Eye of the Elephant
by Delia and Mark Owens,
The Last Elephant
by Jeremy Gavron,
Green Hills of Africa
by Ernest Hemingway,
I Dreamed of Africa
by Kuki Gallmann,
In the Presence of Elephants
by Peter Beagle and Pat Derby,
Elephants: Majestic Creatures of the Wild
edited by Jeheskel Shoshani,
Elephants: The Deciding Decade
edited by Ronald Orenstein,
Elephants
by S.K. Eltringham,
Safari: Experiencing the Wild
by Neil Leifer and Lance Morrow,
Elephants
by Reinhard Künkel, and
The Natural History of the African Elephant
by Sylvia K. Sikes, this last a rather chilling text for how often the author shot in the head “a fine and healthy specimen” so that she might study its corpse. Various field guides, especially those published by Collins and by the National Audubon Society, were constantly consulted, as was a remarkably comprehensive and fascinating treasure called
The Behavior Guide to African Mammals
by Richard Despard Estes.
In addition to the above are three books I could not have done without, all written by people who have spent the better part of theiradult lives in Africa studying the elephant and tirelessly fighting for its safety. The fight is an uphill one because of the pressures of the ivory trade, which encourages poaching, and the disappearance of habitat. These books are:
Echo of the Elephants
by Cynthia Moss and Martyn Colbeck,
Coming of Age with Elephants
by Joyce Poole, and
Among the Elephants
by Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton.
I am indebted as well to Christopher Dewdney and Jan Whitford for commenting on an early version of the manuscript, and I am forever grateful to Beth Kirkwood not only for her editorial suggestions but for helping me find my way to the Masai Mara so that I might see the African elephant in its natural home.
Thanks to the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council for financial support. And a special thanks to my editors: Iris Tupholme at HarperCollins Canada for her foresight and unwavering faith, and Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan Books in New York for her acuity and devotion.
BARBARA GOWDY is the award-winning author of
Helpless, The Romantic, Mister Sandman, Falling Angels
and
We So Seldom Look on Love.
Her books have appeared on bestseller lists throughout the world. The recipient of the Marian Engel Award and the Trillium Book Award, Gowdy has been a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and a repeat finalist for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She lives in Toronto.
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The White Bone
“Brave… . Gowdy has embarked on the creation of an extremely distinct, invented world, with its own social and linguistic structures, its own myths and totems.”
–Newsday
“Readers … will never think the same of elephants and their ‘appalling resilience.'”
–USA Today
“Fascinating… . Through the course of
The White Bone
we come to care about the elephants as much as we would humans.”