The Second Book of the Dun Cow: Lamentations

by Walter Wangerin Jr.

  They beg you Crow and you safekeep

  Them each.”

  [Thirty-Three] Warriors! Armies! Death to Surt on her Island!

  At the first flush of the dawn a mighty Lauds, a brassy reveille went far and wide across the land.

  The Animals gaped into wakefulness.

  Lord Chauntecleer was crowing from the topmost crown of the Hemlock tree.

  “Get up!” he crowed.” We have a war to wage!”

  Even the Wolves and the Marten Selkirk responded, so absolute was the command.

  Chauntecleer’s substance had swelled. His hackles, his cape, the feathers on his back showed muscles rolling underneath.

  “My Creatures! Gather as armies before me!”

  Pertinax Cobb stiffened.

  “Pack up, Mrs. Cobb.”

  “Why, Mr. Cobb?”

  “I am a peaceful Squirrel.”

  “None more peaceful than you.”

  “Armies, Mrs. Cobb. Warfare. I don’t like warfare.”

  Still as a golden flag above the, Chauntecleer the Rooster thrashed his wings. “We cannot wait. Wickedness blows abroad. Once more, one last time more, we must assault the pernicious presence.”

  Pertelote was blindsided. Chauntecleer had returned to his old power. But there was no joy in it. His dominance quivered with something like wrath. And the amber worms? She saw none of them. On the other hand, she did see something like smoke blasting from his throat. It was as if his words were visible.

  The Animals dithered in confusion.

  “There is an island in the sea to the south. Flames dance its surface. Fire that turns the ocean and he sky above it lurid. And Surt is that fire! But Surt, I swear, is the fire! And Surt is the off-scourings of the body of Wyrm! Therefore, Surt is wickedness of Wickedness, and the hatreds of Hate. It is a crusade! It shall be a holy war! Armies upon armies, who will go with me?”

  Apparently, no one. Animals heard Lord Chauntecleer’s commanding voice and were troubled—both by the fear of slaughter and by the ineluctable manner of the Rooster on his pinnacle. They had loved him. But this was an iron Bird, a Vulture with talons.

  Chauntecleer trebled his volume. “What?” he roared. “Have all your spirits withered? Have you become a weak-kneed rabble? Tick-Tock, reveal yourself.”

  The Black Ant appeared. “Sir!” He snapped both feelers to attention. His polished eye gleamed.

  “Rouse your battalions.”

  Tick-Tock was by nature a warrior. He pivoted with a military kick. “Battalions! We defeated Wyrm once before. Are you keen to have at him again?”

  Regiments of Black Ants massed the ground before their Commander. “Yes sir!”

  Tick-Tock bellowed, “I can’t hear you.”

  The troops boomed, “Sir! Yes Sir!”

  Chauntecleer left his perch and sailed above Tick-Tock’s regiments, reviewing the thousand boot-black Ants.

  “Even so!” he crowed with satisfaction. “Who is next? Who will set their store by me? Rise up, my armies, and march!”

  March? Away from the high tower and security?

  Pertelote was as transfixed as the rest of the Animals, but more disquieted than they. She had ceased to believe in her husband. March? He was suicidal.

  Chauntecleer alighted beside her. “Hen, stir up these mollycoddles! I am boldness itself. If they are not mine they must be yours. “

  No, it wasn’t smoke that blew from his throat. Specks. A horde of Midges. And less than Midges, they were pinpoint-Insects on the wing.

  And what was the Rooster doing now? Heaping mountains onto mountains until their summits breached the heavens.

  He flew up and circled, brass-banging the multitude with his crowing. “Those not with me are against me.”

  The sheer menace in Chauntecleer’s threat knocked Ratotosk Bore-Tooth, the Grey Squirrel from his nest. But a Squirrel lands belly-down. He dashed for a root hole at the base of the Hemlock.

  Chauntecleer swooped to the woods. He strutted to the three Wolves there.

  “Your kind can kill,” he declared. “It was one of your grandfathers raped my mother. He killed her, and I killed him. I had that right then, and I have it now. Join me and you shall know my mercy. I want you for my shock troops.”

  Boreas the White Wolf stood on a rise. Eurus and Nota stood directly in front of the Rooster, Nota glaring with her red eyes. She lowered her head and retracted her lips. This was not submission. Her tail sprang up like a flag.

  She growled, “I don’t know you. You have no authority over me.”

  Eurus circled around the Rooster. Each Wolf was thrice his size. These two formed a pincer at his back and his breast.

  Chauntecleer dilated his body. “You have no choice,” he said in a silk-smooth voice. He bent the knee of one blue leg and with the point of one spur cut a line across the ice. “Submit or I will slash you one by one.”

  Nota and Eurus answered with rumbling growls.

  Chauntecleer crowed, “Behold!” The crow blew a dust of Insects from his throat. He jumped and cut Nota’s ear, then whirled and scarred Eurus in the lip. Their tails dropped. They began to rub their eyes, red and yellow. They sneezed and sneezed.

  Chauntecleer said, “There they are, my shock troops bowed before me now.”

  He swung away from the Wolves and flew to the top of a nearby pine.

  “Selkirk,” he crowed. “I see you. I know where you nest.”

  The Marten leaped from that pine to another. Chauntecleer was as nimble as he. The instant the Marten caught a new branch, there was a spur full in is face. “Try that once more, and Gaff will scour your skull.”

  Selkirk froze.

  Chauntecleer hissed, “You are my scout. You are my outrider.”

  He left the Marten, who twisted and bit at the irritations in his anus.

  The Rooster dropped and strutted toward the Hemlock. He stopped before the moribund Weasel.

  “So,” he said. “The bone thief.”

  John Wesley stood and glowered and said, “Bones is bones. Is a Rooster what steals a Rooster.”

  Chauntecleer flew to the hive of the Family Swarm, “Queen,” he demanded. “Honey Bees all! I want you to be my Killer Bees. Fly south with me.”

  Then he bore down on the House of Otter. “I need water horses.” He thrust his head into their hapless faces. “I want distance swimmers, wet coats and stone slayers.” Those infinitesimal Insects blew like wisps to the moisture in the Otters’ nostrils and eyes.

  Once again, Chauntecleer ascended to his topmost spire. This Cock was nothing like a weather vane. He was the weather. And who could endure his eye-beam? His right eye sent forth the torch of a refiner’s fire.

  “Black Ants, henceforth Army Ants! Neither hills nor bodies will obstruct your going. March lockstep south to the sea. At the coastline make mats of yourself. Assemble rafts by which to float to the bonfires on the Island of Surt.”

  This was a Rooster Pertelote had never seen before. No! She had seen one: the reptilian Cockatrice that once had attacked the true Chauntecleer!

  “As for the rest of you puling, self-serving varmints,” Chauntecleer crowed. “Oh, how I detest betrayal!”

  And, on mighty wings, he flew away.

  Chauntecleer never again removed his weapons, not until the day he died.

  [Thirty-Four] To Do What Must Be Done

  “Bones is bones,” John Wesley said.

  The Weasel’s sadness had resolved itself into a desolation of spirit.

  Chauntecleer had berated Pertelote no less than he had the other Animals. His crow had stupefied her. She’d sunk down and covered her head with the feathers of one wing. And so she had stayed for the rest of the day.

  And the Rooster had absolutely no call to chide him, John Wesley Weasel!

  By evening John’s emptiness was filled with pity. And pity sent him to Pertelote.

  “Lady Hen? Is Lady Hen asleeping?
”

  “Hush, John. Let the Animals rest.”

  “Is awake, then?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well. Okay. So: wants a Lady Hen, might-be, talk with a Double-u?”

  “I am here.”

  John coughed. It was difficult, this thing he had to say. “Is a puzzlement: a Rooster what is not a Rooster.”

  Pertelote raised her wing back and looked at the Weasel.

  John said, “Listen, Lady Hen. Is a Rooster what is not the Rooster. Is a monstrous sad truth John gots a need to tell. Worser and worser and worser.”

  “What can be worse than what we have already witnessed?”

  Before he lost his nerve, the Weasel hurried into his story.

  “Rooster, he is hate. Is Wickedness. Is damn Hell on Critters!”

  “Not damned, John!”

  “Him what is the Not-Rooster. That Rooster. Lady: Was his hatefulness what murdered little Coyote Benoni. Murdered his mama too.”

  “Oh, John, John, don’t say so.”

  “ Sad papa. Sad little daughters. Is a Not-Rooster. Might-be is a true Rooster too.”

  Pertelote was weeping.

  “Something is smoldering inside him, John. I’ve seen the smoke—”

  “No! Not smoke! John knows that Lady Hen, she knows same as John. But she don’t wants to be knowing.”

  Pertelote had begun to rock like a child in fear of punishment.

  If a Weasel can tame his voice to soothe another, John lowered his and strove for gentleness. “This Double-u,” he said. “This Double-u, he loves his Chauntecleer.”

  Pertelote suffered an explosive sob.

  “John goes now, John does the do what he can still do.”

  When Coyotes howl long, plaintive wailings in the dead of night; when they round their mouths to the sky and utter shrill notes, this is what they are saying:

  Son of my sorrow, what has heaven done to you?

  They are the Voice, these Coyotes. They are themselves lamentation and bitter weeping. They are weeping for their children. And they cannot be comforted, for their children are not.

  This is the way of the world.

  Children die.

  And when the Hen Pertelote cries in the night, this is what she is saying:

  “That summer’s courtship’s long gone by,

  Those evenings when my Lord and I

  Were young.

  Oh, take my tears on faith and I

  Will stroke your neck—my lullabies

  Unsung.”

  [Thirty-Five] Comes Savagery

  The eggs had been laid. The incubation of the wispy Insect’s maggots lasted but one cryptic hour. And then violence seized the land.

  String Jack hop-bounded to Pertelote under the Hemlock, yipping frantically.

  “Lady-Lady! Lady-Lady!” His ears popped up (Bang! Bang!), and his round eyes stared in two directions

  “Slow down, String Jack. What’s the matter?”

  “Yep yep.” But the Hare sat, perpetually startled.

  “Is it too much to say? Say it.”

  “Yep. Nope nope.”

  Under other circumstances Perlelote would have read the Hare’s hesitation as shyness. But this was anguish. “When you are able, Jack, tell it to me.”

  “We saw his head!” the Hare cried, nipping his words. “We” must mean himself and his relations. “Dead,” he cried.

  “Jack! Who is dead?”

  “Dead. All his bones picked clean.”

  Again Pertelote said, “Slow down.” And again, “Who is dead?”

  “Ratotosk. Boring Tooth. Him. Blood spots under a tree. In the woods, blood spots. We found the head bone.” The Hare pointed toward the forest.

  Pertelote said, “Show me.”

  So the Hare led the Hen to a particular pine, and Pertelote whispered, “No.”

  It was the tree that Selkirk the Marten had made his own. Caught in the fork of a limb was Ratotosk’s tail, the bushy fur intact, but the tail itself bitten from its base.

  High above her Pertelote heard a swish of branches. Selkirk was leaped from pine to pine, farther and farther away, but Pertelote had glimpsed blood on the Marten’s snout.

  Suddenly Pertelote’s heart turned. She loathed the Hares for their round-eyed timidity. These passive Animals! Docile and witless—a dead weight on her back!

  Then to the north she heard a terrified bleating.

  Pertelote forgot herself. She flew in the direction of the terror.

  Sheep! She saw one Ewe on an eastern hillside, running, stumbling, falling—and the Black Wolf Nota after the Sheep, her eyes inflamed.

  With a sixteen-foot bound crashed into the Sheep. He locked his fangs on her windpipe.

  Pertelote screamed, “Nota! Let her go!”

  But the Black Wolf paid no attention. She held the Ewe’s throat until the Creature went limp. Then he shook the body savagely. Blood splattered the earth. The Black Wolf threw her prey aside.

  Pertelote was horrified. The Sheep that the Wolf had murdered was Baby Blue.

  Now Nota drove her muzzle into Blue’s abdomen and began to gorge herself.

  Pertelote was transfixed. She whispered, “Oh, Nota, what a Wolf can do.”

  And how sharp are a Wolf’s ears. Black Nota whirled, saw the Hen, lowered her head, and glared at her through manic, blood-red eyes. Foam dripped from the Wolf’s jowls. Amber maggots squirmed in the saliva.

  Peretelote muted the cry, My God.

  Nota returned to the Ewe. She sank her fangs in the flesh and dragged out the long rope of intestine, then ran her snout in the steaming carcass, and probed, and pulled out the slick liver, and ate it. She ate as much as twenty pounds, then the wandered into a leafless thicket, slumped, and went to sleep.

  Night fell. Pertlote became a pale splash in the moonlight. She crouched right where she was, emptied of all thought.

  After she’d spent an hour in the darkness, she chose to believe that her immobility was a midnight vigil.

  Someone should sit vigil for the slaughtered Baby Blue.

  [Thirty-Six] A Rachel-Story

  When she is tired, the plain Brown Bird rides Ferric Coyote’s rump.

  He noses the scent of the Weasel, wherefrom he maps their traveling, his and Twill’s and Hopsacking’s and the Bird herself. No longer does the Coyote hide. It has done no good in the past. It can do no good in the future.

  Moreover, he is bolder than he has been. Though Rachel has passed away, her spirit comforts him. He has become the mother of h is daughters.

  When the Brown Bird has rested, she leaves Ferric. She cannot sing. She says, “Zicküt,” and dances on the wind to keep the grils entertained and to quiet their aching hungers.

  At night the Coyotes curl into one another, and Ferric tells them Rachel-stories.

  For example:

  There is a certain Eagle whose name is Aquila. In time Aquila grows very old. His wings grow slow and heavy. His eyes grow dim in mists of senility. And his whole body becomes infirm and like as not to die. But the Eagle need not die.

  For he knows of an oasis in the middle of a desert, a palmy acre, green and good. In the middle of the oasis is a bright, bracing pool. In the middle of the pool a wonderful fountain shoots up, the top of which falls open like the plume of a lily..

  Aquila drinks from the pool and gains strength for a final flight.

  He points his beak to heaven and soars as straight as a plumb line from the oasis to the circle of the sun. Higher and at his heighest the sun’s rays evaporate the mists in his eyes. Higher still, the sun’s flames scorch his feathers to cinders.

  So then there is no help for it. He plunges headfirst down from the sun, and down until he falls into the white blossom of the fountain. In that sweet water Aquila

  is washed as if by honey and wine. Among the green palms he sprouts new feathers that flash in the daylight, and his y
outh is renewed.

  Now Ferric finishes the tale as did his wife before him.

  “Rest, my children. God will bless you, and I’ll be here in the morning.”

  [Thirty-Seven] Sweet Baby Blue and the Fawn De La Coeur

  Mr. and Mrs. Cobb decided to make their departure in stages. Pertinax had excellent reasons to leave, and his wife did not disagree. They were a peace-loving folk.

  But when two somebodies have lived all their lives in one place, then every other place is strange. Generations of Cobbs had been born here under the Hemlock, had worked here, bore children here, slept their winters here, and died here. And Pertinax’s duty had always been to love his wife and to serve her and, upon her love, to bring the next generation onto this same small plot.

  How, then, could they go away?

  But however could they stay?

  They left. They planned to make the emigration in stages. Travel half a day, then sit and test the place. What’s the weather? How is the ground? Where are the seeds? Can a new next house and sustain them? Or will the angry Animals spread their wars this far?

  If the soil is poor and seeds unplenty, and if warfare creeps too close, they would up and travel another half-day farther.

  “Mrs. Cobb?”

  “Yes, Mr. Cobb?”

  “Are you tired yet?”

  “Side by side with you, Mr. Cobb. Side by side wherever we go.”

  “Well then what do you say? Is this a place to homestead?”

  Half a day’s travel, at their cautious rate, is half one hundred yards.

  And the night, of course, is for sleeping.

  When the two of them woke in the morning, Pertinax combed his whiskers, picked food from between his teeth with a twig, and gargled. All this while Mrs. Cobb went off into the bushes to do her business. They had come east, and east she went. Pertinax tried to break ground but the ice prevented him.

  “Mr. Cobb,” she said, returning, rubbing her nose. “Mr. Cobb, I smell a terrible odor.”

  “Well,” he said, and because they had a stick-to-your-guns sort of marriage, they walked forward, but mincingly.

  Indeed. Something before them was rank.