The White Bone

by Barbara Gowdy

  “I demand to smell you!” he would end up roaring.

  She would either move closer to She-Scares, who would threaten him with her deadly little tusk, or she would run in her awkward fashion, her withered leg kicking out sideways, and he would take pity on her and resort to watching her from a distance while smelling her in memory. Sometimes, when She-Scares was between the two of them, she would tell him to go away. He laughed at her spunk. He was charmed.

  True to his pledge, he had dug her inaugural calf tunnel on the same morning (more than a year and a half ago now) that she came into her first oestrus. His immediate assumption was that from then on she would understand his attachment to her and occasionally indulge it. But the moment her oestrus passed she went back to dodging him, and every time he met with the She-S’s he was more and more vexed by this. There was something so odd about what he felt for her he had come to believe that it must be divine, and that, furthermore, todescribe it was to violate it. At this last Massive Gathering he was driven to try. Across foothills of She-S rumps, he called to her, “We are alike!”

  “We have mated only once,” she called without turning.

  “You are not becoming like me,” he said. “I am trying to tell you that I think of you as I think of myself. Orphaned and selfcontained. But smaller … and female, needless to say–” From under the young bull who was mounting her She-Snorts laughed, and Tall Time stopped, feeling ludicrous. He browsed on white flowers for a spell and then gathered himself up and said with some emotion, “It was ordained. It was ordained that I would have an unnatural attachment to you from the day of our first meeting until the day of your death.” He paused, flustered. “Which is not to say that you will die before me,” he said.

  Mud peered at him from behind She-Scares. “What day will that be?” she said. Her eyes were the green of the visionaries and when they glittered, as they did now, you could see the gleam fifty yards away.

  “What day will what be?” he said, entranced.

  “The day I die.”

  “I dare say I have no idea. You misunderstand.”

  She lowered her trunk.

  “Let me smell you.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Date Bed raised her lean little head. “She is not at all like you,” she said shyly, in the formal timbre.

  He walked away, skimming his trunk over the ground for a whiff of Mud’s urine. He felt pitiable and sickened … andalarmed, more so than seemed called for, as if any second he would collide with a herd of humans.

  It was Torrent he collided with.

  “Cow-bull!” Torrent roared.

  Tall Time bolted to one side. “Forgive me,” he said in the formal timbre.

  “Flat-footed twig-stick,” Torrent muttered.

  Tall Time flattened his ears against his neck. “Quite right,” he said.

  This was not excessive courtesy, this was terror. In musth, Torrent had been known to gore bulls who were careless enough to catch his eye, let alone bump into him, and Torrent was still deep in musth, his temporin glands swollen, the temporin itself pouring down his face, and his enormous green penis dribbling egg-sized drops that smoked as they hit the stubble and discharged an odour so sharp Tall Time couldn’t fathom how the big bull had taken him by surprise. “Very clumsy of me,” he murmured. “Entirely my fault.”

  He turned away but Torrent bellowed, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you!”

  Tall Time looked over his shoulder. The big bull folded his ears and rumbled something menacing and then threw up his great head in which his eyes flew, mad and murderous. Tall Time ran.

  “Stop!” Torrent roared.

  Tall Time slowed down and looked over his shoulder again, past nervous cows trotting away in all directions and a flock of grouse splashing up like muck.

  Torrent rocked from foot to foot. He was evidently makinga terrible effort to calm himself. “Come back here,” he said, “you little … you scrawny little… . Come back here … son.”

  “I haven’t been speaking with She-Snorts,” Tall Time said. In oestrus, She-Snorts was always pursued by a host of young bulls, the bull who was currently mounting her being only the mightiest of the smallest. But she had yet to enter her “radiance,” those few hours during which a cow’s scent is at its most delectable and for which Torrent reserved himself.

  “I know that,” Torrent growled.

  “It was the calf Mud I was speaking with.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. Get over here.”

  Almost certainly, Tall Time could have outrun Torrent, but he was now curious about whatever was obliging Torrent to subdue his musth mood. More than that he felt sorry for the old bull. He knew what it was like to find yourself persecuting a smaller bull whom a thin current of reason proclaimed a friend.

  “I must tell you something,” Torrent rumbled. “Several things. Vital … vital things. The first of them is, do not imagine that your grasp of the links is infallible. There are links you know nothing of.”

  “Which links are these?” Tall Time said, affronted. Unconsciously he had dropped the formal timbre.

  Torrent jerked his head toward the She-S’s. Trunk up, he took a long inhalation. “Any number of them,” he rumbled.

  “Indeed?” Tall Time said coolly.

  Torrent turned back around. “I have only recently come to appreciate, as a result of a remarkable meeting, that the links may well be infinite.”

  “I know every link there is.”

  Torrent glowered over the rim of one of his splendid tusks. Frightened afresh, Tall Time took small steps backwards.

  “Would that were true,” Torrent said.

  Tall Time hesitated, struck by something beaten in Torrent’s tone. Torrent flapped his torn ears and yanked at the grass. Suddenly he snapped his head around. He closed his eyes, an indication that any moment now She-Snorts would enter her radiance. Torrent’s sense of smell being what it was, he would pick up the tell-tale odour even before the bull who was mounting her did. That bull had better be fast on his feet, Tall Time thought.

  “I don’t suppose you are interested in learning whom I met,” Torrent said, still sniffing.

  “On the contrary,” Tall Time said, “I am exceedingly interested.”

  Torrent looked at him, the expression in his bloodshot eyes at once percipient and deranged. He curled his trunk around a swatch of grass, cut the swatch with his forefoot but instead of eating it he pitched it over his hide, a pointless, calf-like thing to do. “The Lost Ones,” he said.

  “The Lost Ones?” Tall Time said, astounded.

  “You heard me.”

  Nobody Tall Time knew had ever actually sighted, smelled or caught rumblings of–let alone spoken to–the Lost Ones, or the Forest Dwellers, as they were sometimes called. Always it was a distant acquaintance of a distant acquaintance who was rumoured to have had dealings with them. Despite which, descriptions of them never varied. The abnormally long narrow tusks, the small ears, sleek skin, luminous green eyes. A strong race, though diminutive, beautiful despite their size. And gifted. All of them visionaries, all of them nimble and capable of scenting seven-day-old dung from twenty miles away. They were glorious singers, what’s more. Moving in single file through the forest, trunks grasping tails, they roared like hurricanes, but in melodious harmonies and complex rhythms. “You possess Lost blood,” it is said of anyone who sings often and pleasingly, as Tall Time does, but to his thinking that has always been a mere figure of speech. “Lost ears” for tiny ears, “Lost-footed” for sure-footed, “Lost green eyes"– all figures of speech, unless you believed, and many did, that the Lost Ones existed.

  Torrent believed. He had never come across any sign of them (until, if he was speaking the truth, recently) but he had always believed. He had even claimed a blood connection. It was Torrent who had originally told Tall Time how the Lost Ones were no different from other she-ones before being driven by humans into an immense forest where they disappeared for centur
ies and the She Herself declared them vanished while, beneath the thick canopy that denied them the watch and warmth of Her eye, they continued to worship Her. When at last they were found (either by a She-V or a She-G matriarch, members of the two families argue the point to this day), the She was so moved by their steadfast devotion to Her that She granted each of them, and all of their descendants of both sexes, the third eye. As for their stealth and keen trunks, these are attributed to the clear forest water. The reason for their marvellous voices is not so easily explained, although Torrent leans to the theory that they eat the eggs of songbirds. They are capable, he admits, of heartless conduct, such as slaying their deranged elders.

  “You met them?” Tall Time asked now.

  “I did,” Torrent said. His tone was conjectural, as if questioning the event himself.

  “When?”

  “At the outset of the drought, those first torrid days. I had a sense that the short rains weren’t going to arrive, and I was looking for fresh sources of water. Where the big burn is, to the west of it, I came upon a Rogue’s web and had to detour north, fifty miles out of my way. I continued to walk north-northwest, in and out of two riverbeds. Then came a cluster of hindlegger nests, and then a desert, a four-day trek that was. At the end of it all were hills. East and west and north, range upon range, and at the base of the hills were forests.” His voice rose in a kind of indignation. “Huge feast trees. The leaves still green! I ate until my gut groaned. By the She, I did!”

  “I dare say,” Tall Time rumbled.

  “By the She!” Torrent bellowed. He made another test of the air. Shut his eyes. But he stayed where he was.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t remain,” Tall Time said.

  “Are you, son?” An insane shine in his eyes.

  “With all that lush food–”

  “On the seventh day,” Torrent roared, “I heard the singing of the Lost Ones! And do you know what they were singing?”

  Tall Time carefully shook his head.

  “It was not a glad song,” Torrent said, infuriated, sarcastic. “It was not a welcoming song.” And in his tuneless bass he thundered:

  We, survivors of the slaughter,

  Mourning sister, son and daughter,

  Warn all Lost Ones close by High Hill,

  Hide at once or end up gut swill.

  Brutal hindleggers seek big feet,

  Tusks and tails; your flesh they then eat.

  Heed us, Lost Ones, of your own will

  Hide at once or end up gut swill.

  “Gut swill!” Tall Time said, appalled by the butchery, of course, but also that a song would contain such uncouth lyrics.

  “You doubt me?” Torrent trumpeted.

  “No, no, not at all!” Which wasn’t quite sincere. Yet even with the gut swill there was nothing addled or suspect about the story, and Tall Time was beginning to entertain the staggering notion that Torrent had indeed met the Lost Ones.

  “I found them in a big-grass grove,” Torrent said. “A family of eight, which is large by their standards, but they had been near to twice that number before hindleggers massacred seven of them in a pit. A dreadful way to go is a pit slaughter. Dreadful. Have you ever witnessed it?”

  “I’ve heard stories–”

  “Not the same thing. Cows dropping out of sight ahead of you. They’re running on the path and then they’re gone, you think they’ve dropped over the edge of The Domain. You stop just in time, at the very brink, you almost fall in yourself, you don’t see because … because… .” He broke off, agog.

  “The hindleggers camouflage the pits with branches and leaves,” Tall Time offered softly.

  “You’re all running, your mother in the lead. She falls in first. Your newborn sister falls on top of her. Your mother screams. You see that one of the sticks has pierced her through the neck. Those sticks that they plant in the bottom of the pit, the sharp ends pointing upwards. Do you know about them?”

  Tall Time nodded.

  Torrent nodded. “She is still alive,” he said in wonder. “Your mother. Pierced through but still alive. She screams. Your sister"–he started to weep–"screams. Blood shoots up. You have to save them. How? Nobody knows what to do. Your mother is the matriarch, she’s the one who knows what to do but she’s down in the pit, and the hindleggers, you can hear them, they’re right behind you.”

  Tall Time was now weeping, all of his uncertainty about Torrent’s having met the Lost Ones transformed into wrath and grief that seven of them perished in the same way that Torrent’s mother did. “I didn’t know you had a sister,” he sobbed.

  Torrent blinked.

  “Did she also die?” Tall Time sobbed.

  “Quit your blubbering!” Torrent bellowed. He tossed his head, and Tall Time cringed–here came the tusking–but Torrent threw his trunk behind himself and went still. He shut his eyes, inhaled with rapturous concentration. His penis flung urine, which in this late-afternoon light twinkled orange, and then his trunk swung to the front and took on a gentle undulation while he regarded Tall Time with a demented look of friendly interest. “It is true what you’ve heard,” he said conversationally. “The Lost Ones are calf-like, except for the length of their tusks. A bull your age wouldhave tusks twice as long as yours, that’s no exaggeration. Not nearly as thick, though. And they all have those green eyes but brighter than our visionaries’ eyes by a hundred times. Like little green suns, they are, beaming light.”

  “Extraordinary.”

  “So they are. So they are. They call themselves We’s, as you’ve no doubt heard. We-B’s, We-S’s. Individuals prefix their names with ‘I.’ ”

  He hadn’t heard this. “Why?” he said.

  “Well, for one thing, cow calves choose their own cow names. Out of a number of names offered by the big cows.”

  “That is a terrible responsibility to place upon a young mind.”

  “It panders to the calf’s vanity. They think very highly of themselves, the Lost Ones do, every one of them, even the newborns. The family I am speaking of now, the We-F’s, they may be exceptional, but I got the sense that self-importance is a trait common to the whole breed. It tried my patience, as you might imagine, all that preening and talking-down. As if I were a suckling calf! But the matriarch, I-Flounder, she was cordial enough, despite her sorrow and my being so gigantic, compared to them especially, and here I was a bull, sneaking up on them in the middle of nowhere, the first of our kind they’d ever encountered. Naturally, one of them had had a vision of me. It’s hard to surprise that lot.” His expression became one of amused remembrance. “I said to I-Flounder, ‘With a name like that I don’t hold out much hope of your finding what you’re searching for, not straight away, anyhow.’ But she has her talents.” As if reminded of She-Snorts he lifted his trunk her way and his penis elongated and shot urine everywhere, and then he backed into a termite mound and gave his rump a vicious scratching.

  “What were they searching for?” Tall Time asked.

  “The white bone,” Torrent said agreeably.

  “Whose white bone?”

  “Let me ask you this. Have you ever heard of a race of white she-ones? By which I mean all white.”

  “No. Never.”

  “Nor had I. But according to the We-F’s such a race lived on The Domain up until twenty generations ago.”

  “Is that so?” Tall Time murmured, becoming doubtful again.

  “The White Ones, they were called,” Torrent said.

  Tall Time waited.

  “At any rate,” the old bull continued, “they are long gone. Long gone.” He sighed. He might have been weeping. “Their bones, too,” he said. “Their bones are dust. Except–”

  The pause continued until Tall Time realized that he was supposed to speak. “Except what?”

  “Except for one bone. The magical white bone.”

  “It survived,” Tall Time ventured.

  “Perfectly intact, not a mark on it after all this time, not a hole.
And it never dulled. On the contrary, it bleaches whiter all the time. By now it would be the whitest thing you’ve ever seen. That’s how you’ll know it. It’s not big, mind you. It’s only a rib, and a newborn’s, what’s more.”

  “Have the We-F’s seen it?”

  “No, not them. Their ancestors.” He twined his trunk around a clump of grass and pulled it out by its mucky roots. Absently he knocked the clump against his leg, a wistful look on his face.

  “When you say magical–” Tall Time prompted.

  Torrent peered at him sidelong. “The Link Bull perks up when magic is mentioned,” he said. “The Link Bull is greedy for magic.”

  Tall Time braced himself.

  “The Link Bull!” Torrent roared. He stopped. Shook his head as if struck by an extraordinary notion. He turned in circles, rumbling incoherently. Sniffed the ground, the air, uprooted a poisonous angel’s trumpet shrub and hurled it over his head, wove back and forth twirling his trunk, and at last collected himself and in a measured voice said, “The white bone has the power to direct you to The Safe Place. The Safe Place is a paradise. No droughts there, ever. No perils. To be accurate, it is The Second Safe Place, but as I’ve never known a First Safe Place, I’m thinking of it as The Safe Place. At any rate, you throw the white bone, and when it lands it points you in the right direction. For two nights and two days, which is how long the newborn lived, it is in your possession. After that, it disappears, gets scooped up by a sky-diver or a trunkneck who takes it somewhere else and drops it in order to lead others to The Safe Place. So you’d better have figured out your route in those two days and nights.” He blew out a contemptuous breath. “By the She,” he bellowed, “if you can’t hold to a true course by then you don’t deserve to find The Safe Place to begin with!”

  “I dare say,” Tall Time rumbled. He was being won over again by Torrent’s conviction.

  Scowling, the old bull kicked at the earth. “This very bone is what saved the Lost Ones from the hindleggers generations ago. It was not by accident that the Lost Ones disappeared. Theywere directed into that forest, The First Safe Place, as they call it, which accounts for all this first and second business. As soon as they arrived there, the white bone disappeared, but they weren’t too distressed, not then, because they thought that there were no hindleggers in their new territory. And there weren’t for centuries, not until a hundred and eighty days ago.”