The White Bone

by Barbara Gowdy

  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.

  * An exaggeration. There have been humans since the Descent, which took place ten thousand years ago, during the first long drought, when a starving bull and cow killed and ate a gazelle and in so doing broke the first and most sacred law: “You shall eat no creature, living or dead.” Even before the two miscreants had finished their meal they began to shrink. As their bodies grew smaller and thinner, their trunks receded to stubs, their ears contracted, and fur sprouted on top of their heads. They rose up on their hind legs
to protest but only a weak howl came from their throats. Furious and defiant they declared themselves carnivores, free to prey on any creature who did not walk upright (as they, in their ceaseless rage, now did).

  * They can also weep silently and without tears. Sometimes they do so wilfully but more often “weeping to oneself” is an involuntary reaction dictated by circumstances, such as the need for quiet.

  * Visionaries experience two kinds of visions: visions of the future (occasionally referred to as “later visions”) and visions of things more or less current in time but far away in space (“away visions”).

  * This is what they say when they are upwind of an odour. When they are downwind and can catch the odour they say, “The air is ours.”

  Chapter Three

  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.”

  “I don’t spurn you. I didn’t spurn Tall Time.”

  “No cow is ever named for how she conducts herself in her delirium. Were that the case, every cow in this family would be called She-Seduces.”

  Mud snorts, grudgingly amused.

  Date Bed’s expression relaxes. “I can’t imagine calling you anything but Mud. I wonder whose idea She-Spurns was. Not your mother’s, surely.”

  “She-Scares isn’t my mother,” Mud thinks sourly. She looks toward the family. “Why don’t you find out?” she thinks, a suggestion that Date Bed listen to the big cows’ minds, which Date Bed has taken a vow never to do on the day of a naming ceremony. Date Bed doesn’t respond, and Mud is faintly ashamed. “It was She-Screams’ idea,” she rumbles. “Who else? She-Screams has always resented me.”

  “No,” Date Bed says.

  Does she mean no, She-Screams has not always resented her? Or no, She-Screams didn’t come up with the name? Either prospect has Mud almost softening toward the big cow when Date Bed says, “She would have submitted something far more offensive.”

  “Ha!” Mud says, startling a pair of Abyssinian groundhornbills, who flap up onto the bank, where they turn and begin to roar like lions. Ears tensed, Date Bed steps toward them.

  In all but a few families there is a mind talker, only one. She is either a cow or a cow calf, never a bull, and when she diessome other member of the family assumes her gift, first hearing the thoughts of her own kind and then finding that she not only understands the language of most other creatures (insects, humans and snakes are the exceptions) but is able to converse with them, from her end simply by thinking hard. For three years the She-S mind talker was She-Spoils. As she lay dying she said that she felt her heir would be Mud. She was wrong. The vultures hadn’t even cleaned her bones before Date Bed started hearing voices. Why Date Bed? “Thus spake the She” is why. Ask the big cows to account for any mystery and they will answer, “Thus spake the She.”

  “What an irritable pair,” Date Bed says now, rejoining her. She is speaking of the hornbills, who have diverted their booming toward a log on which five hooded vultures perch in a formation (every other one facing backwards) that is an especially sensational omen. But today, like the rest of the She-S’s, Date Bed and Mud are unaware of the omens. Glancing at the vultures, all Date Bed says is, “Mud, don’t you find it curious that trunk-necks refrain from eating each other?”

  “You’ll have to start calling me She-Spurns,” Mud says out loud. She thinks how she has always delighted in the sound of her birth name on Date Bed’s tongue, in Date Bed’s antiquated and reverent pronunciation of words such as mud, dust, rock, any of the earth-associated words that, generations ago, were held sacred.

  “She-Spurns,” Date Bed says. “She-Spurns"–lightly, trying to toss it off. And then she lowers her head, as if conceding the name’s unpleasantness, and pokes her trunk among a pile of stones that throb pink in the waning light.

  Mud scents toward the water.

  “I’ll come in a minute,”* Date Bed rumbles. She has begun to turn the stones and to bring certain ones up to her dim eyes.

  “She-Studies,” Mud thinks. “That’s what they should call you.”

  For generations it had been the custom of the She-S’s to sojourn near Blood Swamp from the middle of the long dry se
ason until the rains. The swamp is now blood-red in the low sun, but that is not what inspired the name. It was Stay Swamp–and home to three other herds–until humans slaughtered eighteen cows and a newborn here within hours of the newborn’s birth. She-Swaggers was the She-S matriarch then, and five years later she led her family back to the swamp because she alone of the former resident matriarchs sensed that the place was safe again. In the twenty years since, although there have been no further slaughters in the vicinity, other families turn up only if sources of water are scarce elsewhere. That none has arrived this season is good news, Mud supposes, and yet considering the drought it is surprising.

  Splashing through the warm shallows–or what were the shallows when there were still depths–she stumbles from acramp in her withered leg. All these seizures in one afternoon are an omen, another powerful one, and yet she thinks only that her leg is buckling under the weight of her disappointment. When the water touches her belly she turns and faces her family in time to see She-Scares charge a flock of geese. Her resentment eases a little. She-Scares adopted her when no other nursing cow was willing to. Twenty days earlier her own calf had died from a fall and until Mud’s appearance there seemed to be no explanation for the rivers of milk she continued to leak. Right from the start she was ferociously protective. For Mud as a small calf, carnivores were creatures you saw only from the rear as they fled your charging mother, and your mother’s right tusk was like a snake head, all the more deadly for being tiny.

  She-Scares’ left tusk never grew at all. Cows who don’t know her will say, “Such a pity,” something to that effect, and when Mud was younger she didn’t understand what they meant. There is nothing pitiable about She-Scares. “I have been spared,” she herself says, as if tusks were a burden. When a stranger tells her that she looks more like an adolescent calf than a grown cow, she preens, and she may then mention that she has borne just the one calf (rather than the three or four any other cow would crave) and that this “blessing” also accounts for her youthful appearance. Carrying a newborn loosens the skin, she maintains, settles the bones, and worse than that it dulls the perceptions, and it is true that she is extraordinarily alert, especially to sounds. The creakings of a newborn in the belly she can hear days before the mother feels movement, and by these creakings she knows the sex.