The White Bone

by Barbara Gowdy

  The stench of a vehicle.

  Within seconds everybody has gone still, everybody has caught the sound or smell. Trunks pivot toward She-Scares and She-Demands, either of whom will signal the next move. There is a good chance that the vehicle isn’t headed directly here–vehicles don’t drink at the watering places and nonehave been seen at Blood Swamp in twenty-five years. At this point it would be madness to run out onto the plain and show themselves to the enemy, who are not even the vehicles themselves but the humans riding in their bellies. On their own, vehicles prefer to sleep, but whenever a human burrows inside them they race and roar and discharge a foul odour.

  That odour, even the faintest whiff, burns the insides of Mud’s trunk. It is all she can do to hold herself still, with her scalding trunk and her shaking leg. Her vision is weirdly sharp. She watches the hippos bloat out of the water, the crocodiles slither into it.

  Only the giraffes do not move, and they are the ones who can see the vehicle, if it is visible. Its roar is so close now. The piping of a bird starts up and the stench thickens and finally the giraffes begin to lope away.

  “Now,” She-Demands rumbles, starting for shore.

  By the time they reach the shallows the V formation has already begun, with the two matriarchs at its apex, facing shoreward, flanked by the next biggest cows, who are She-Snorts and She-Scavenges, and then beside and slightly behind each of them, the two next biggest cows, She-Screams and She-Distracts, and so on until Mud and Date Bed, Mud at one tip of the V behind Hail Stones, and Date Bed at the other behind She-Sees, who only yesterday would have been at the apex. Between the arms of the V, the three little calves huddle close to Swamp. He should be part of the formation but nobody says so, not then, everyone is focused on the bank, and except for She-Sees muttering, “Who? Who?” and a trembling whine from She-Screams, everyone is quiet. Even now, there is a possibility that the vehicle may veer off.

  It doesn’t. It bellows over the bank in a swell of dust as though, despite being upwind, it scented them from the plain. Before it fully stops, the humans leap out. She-Scares gives a dreadful roar. She-Screams and the calves start screaming. There is the rattle of gunshot and She-Scares falls onto She-Demands. With hyena-like yells the humans gallop into the swamp, knees capering above the water, guns firing. She-Scavenges rotates and sinks. The V formation crumbles.

  Shoving past the big cows, Mud reaches her adoptive mother. Pink blood froths from She-Scares’ throat, red blood jets from a hole in her trunk. Mud tries to stanch the hole with her foot but She-Scares gives her head a toss, and Mud accidentally kicks her in the jaw. Blood loops through the air. Horrified, Mud sinks to her knees, pushes her tusks under She-Scares’ torso and heaves. It is useless. Mud is too small, her tusks too short. She comes to her feet. Across from her, She-Distracts is trying to lift She-Demands, who somehow got herself out from under She-Scares but cannot seem to stand.

  The little calves squeal and hunker beneath the big cows, who themselves are loath to abandon the fallen matriarchs. More gunshot. The head of She-Distracts flips back, flips forward, a gushing hole between her eyes. Like somebody peering for a closer look, she tips in Mud’s direction, then pitches face-first onto her trumpeting mother.

  Another round of gunshot. She-Scares is hit again, above her left temple, and is instantly dead. Wildly, Mud looks about. She-Demands has been hit in the torso, she is dead. Everyone else, everyone who is still alive, is either on land orheading for it now, fanning out from the two humans. Bent, the smallest calf, is trying to climb the bank. She-Soothes has already reached the top and she roars at him to hurry. When his knees give out she reaches down, grabs his trunk and hoists him up as if he were weightless. “She-Stammers!” she roars, calling now for her daughter, who runs along the edge of the swamp. Behind She-Stammers are She-Scavenges’ newborns, Blue and Flow Sticks. Blue stumbles, and She-Stammers wheels around and takes a shot in the belly. The force of the shot lifts her onto her toes before she drops hard on her side, the sound of impact like the woof of a lion.

  Blue gets to her feet. She rushes to She-Stammers and in her terror presses her throat against the cow’s flank as if gazing up in wonder at the red mist venting from the topmost bullet holes. The human that shot She-Stammers flings a rope over Blue’s head. Where his gun is slung across his back, there is a blinding shine. He yanks on the rope, and Blue thrashes and squalls. Her twin sister, Flow Sticks, rushes back to her. The human jumps astride Blue and kicks her so brutally her forelegs buckle. He goes on kicking until she bolts. Her brief, bird-like screams alternate with her sister’s quivering screams, and the human riding her kicks and whoops and holds one hand high. The other human howls. Alongside Blue and the riding human, Flow Sticks keeps pace, turning this way and that as her sister turns. When Blue slows, the human reaches behind himself, grabs his gun, takes aim at Flow Sticks and shoots. The little calf flies sideways and lands on her back, her legs stiff and skyward.

  Blue stops. The human kicks her. He thumps her between the eyes with the butt of his gun. Finally she reels in a stunnedfashion over to her dead sister. She twines her trunk around one of the upraised legs, and Flow Sticks falls onto her side. The human slides off Blue’s back. He walks away. Keeps walking as he turns and lifts his gun. Points the gun at Blue. Shoots.

  A horrific wail starts up. Mud has never before seen or heard a chain saw but she knows that this is the sound of one. The human that cradles it is racing in Mud’s direction.

  By now her bad leg cannot take her weight, and she runs along the shore at a suicidally slow pace. The human, however, is not chasing her. She stops and looks around. The wail of the chain saw rises in pitch. Guided by the human, the saw slices off the front of She-Demands’ head in the time it would take Mud to bite through a stick, and yet everything seems to have slowed down, and so the slicing is maliciously prolonged.

  “Monster!” Mud trumpets, for this is the real atrocity. Without at least one tusk attached to her skull, even the great She-Demands cannot ascend to the sky herd of the She. “Monster!” She keeps trumpeting it, she cannot help herself. In her ears it sounds as distant and drawn out as if it came from the trunk of She-Drawls-And-Drawls.

  The human that shot the calf twins is now about a hundred feet downshore, heading toward She-Sees. He revolves and aims his gun, and after an incalculable pause there is the stutter of the blasts. Mud senses many tight shafts of wind clawing past her right side. An eternity later she hears the bullets pinging off rock, or shattering it, or penetrating in muted gobbles the earthen bank.

  Her eyesight is once again phenomenally sharp, and as she runs she glances at the red shallows where the chain-sawhuman now bends over She-Scavenges. He straightens, a slender tusk in his hand. He pitches it shoreward and it twirls gracefully, end over end–pointed end, bloodied end, pointed end–twice halting in midair, or so it seems to Mud, before it lands on the heap that is the fallen newborn twins. The human whoops and staggers over to She-Scares as a volley of shots explodes downshore.

  Mud stops. She-Sees has been hit. On her deeply fissured torso, five holes describe a circle. Vapour puffs from the holes, there is no blood, and the ancient cow remains standing. The human strolls over and raises his gun again. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure!” She-Sees trumpets, extending her trunk in the greeting gesture. When the human is close enough she wraps her trunk around the barrel. The human fires, then prances back from the red spray. Still, She-Sees does not fall. The chain-saw human shouts, and Mud looks toward the shallows. The chain-saw human holds the tiny tusk of She-Scares between his legs. He pumps his hips. More shots from downshore, and then a tremendous shuddering underfoot as She-Sees drops to the ground.

  Dimly it occurs to Mud that she should make for the bank. Off she goes, through channels of gunshot, past the corpse of She-Drawls-And-Drawls, whose entire head has been severed … blood still bubbles from the flaming gristle of the neck. She steps on smoking gore and spent shells and parings of skin, and when
she reaches the bank it is slick with blood so that her ascent is dream-like as she slides down, wins the brink, slides down.

  Little by little the earth breaks away under her grappling forefeet until a small gorge is created, out of which she is ableto haul herself. She sways inches from the edge, obscurely conscious that she is an easy target for the humans, and takes account of herself. Her palsied leg, her magically keen vision. Her intactness, as if this were a memory, not even her own, into which she has helplessly fallen. Behind her the chain saw brays. To the east, barely visible, is the hump of The She-Hill.

  She will go to The She-Hill, she thinks with hypnotic resolve. She starts walking. The stunted bushes and trees glide out of the dust, a ghostly emergence. As she walks she sends infrasonic alarms to each member of her family who may still be alive, but gets no response. If there are signs of her own kind here, she cannot locate them. She has not the acuteness of scent to penetrate the slaughter and dust, and she is unwilling to deviate from the straight path she has set upon, even when she finds herself treading between the fretted bands that are the tracks of the vehicle.

  Chapter Six

  The landscape that Mud now travels through is known to her, but as a wet season oasis, not as this depleted place. There is nothing green here and nothing in flower and nothing not withered. Almost every tree is black with vultures, the earth a pandemonium of bones poking through drifts of red dust or, where the ground has been burned, through black ash.

  The skeletons belong to the grazers, but it is those zebras and wildebeests and gazelles still standing who seem more dead, less lucky, than their fallen relations. The living haven’t any young among them, and even the carnivores seem to find this hard to believe. The jackals trotting among the Thomson’s gazelles hold their muzzles up and scout over their shoulders as if searching for something more sprightly and delectable than the wretches whose trembling legs they look through.

  With the grass cropped right down, and despite the blowing dust, Mud can spot lion prides early enough to avoidthem. And yet she takes no detours and they, in their glutted stupor, don’t even lift their heads as she goes by. She passes close to the bizarre pairing of a cheetah and a lappet-faced vulture as they rip apart a still-thrashing zebra whose eye finds Mud’s an instant before the vulture plucks it out. Farther along, near a cordia ovalis shrub, a patas monkey shakes her dead infant by the foot. When Mud is within a few yards of her she starts jumping and chittering and striking the infant on the ground and then she tosses it and it lands in a flourish of dust at Mud’s feet.

  Mud halts. The dust funnels off, and Mud takes this to be a manifestation of the spirit flying to that crowded mysterious place (The Other Domain) where all deceased creatures, aside from her own kind and humans, end up. Already, so many flies encase the corpse that it seems alive again. A quivering, nappy-coated, buzzing little horror. Mud snorts a space through the flies, and the odour of newborn, which can be detected through the death fetor, stirs her to kick dirt over the pathetic creature before moving on.

  She has been walking for many hours now. Her shadow pools ahead of her, grit clogs her trunk and cakes the corners of her mouth and eyes, and she is thirsty. All of a sudden she is desperately thirsty.

  She lifts her trunk, and a host of memories return to her, each a particular and different blossoming of this place and each fraught with its own atmosphere of feeling. What remains invariable, from memory to memory, is the smell of water behind the outcrop of rock. She quits her straight course, but not without apprehension. To deviate is to solicit more ill fortune, so she feels, and yet she races around theoutcrop to the depression where water wells up in the fruitful seasons but that smells now only of the powdery impala dung nestled within it.

  She digs at the depression with her right forefoot. The ground is petrified, and her toes soon ache from the powerful kicks required to break the earth down. Beneath its layer of dust her foot is black with the dried blood of the slaughtered, and it seems dismally fitting to her that she does not bleed but wears the blood of her adoptive family, as if this were the mark of her connection with them: the undeniable distance, the inescapable attachment. She should have left the swamp the moment Hail Stones said that She-Demands was uneasy, they all should have left, but at least she should have gone and persuaded Date Bed to go with her. Thinking this, her kicks become savage. Clods tumble into the hole she is making, and she retrieves them with her trunk and hurls them at the outcrop, something humanly barbarous fermenting within her.

  Eventually, too exhausted to go on, she lets her trunk droop to the hole’s bottom. The cool earth down there exhales a wonderful smell that, in her dazed state, takes her a moment to identify. So close is she to the aquifer that she can scrape away the last layer of earth with one final kick.

  The water is silty and cold. She bores more deeply until a clear seepage gurgles up. She drinks, showers and dusts herself, then stands there feeling strangely consoled by the wobble of her withered leg, which is at least a known and reliable thing.

  “Date Bed!” she trumpets, although trumpeting is useless if nobody has heard her infrasonic calls. Nevertheless she listens, eyes downcast, ears spread, waiting for the shudderunderfoot that heralds a far-off rumble. What finally reaches her are the screams of the calves, and by the time she understands that the screams come from memory, she is reliving the slaughter.

  She trumpets and runs in circles. At the part where she climbed up and slid down the bank, she climbs up and slides down the rocks and scrapes her leg badly enough to arouse her to the present.

  She finds herself on her knees at the bottom of the outcrop. From overhead comes the roar of a plane, and she sinks onto her right side and weeps, for how long she has no idea, but when she is breathing evenly again the shadow of the outcrop leans over her, and an impala drinks at the hole she dug. Inches from her eyes, balanced magically on its end, a flat blue stone holds its colour against the falling light. The stone puts her in mind of one of Tall Time’s link songs:

  Except in the cases of berries and specks

  Blue blesses calves and the peak-headed sex.

  Eat a blue stone and for two days and nights

  Those who would harm you are thwarted, by rights.

  And so she swallows the stone, gathers up her limbs and sets off back the way she came.

  Her mind is suddenly clear, out of its thrall. She knows now that the purpose of her pilgrimage wasn’t to go to The She-Hill, it was to stumble upon the blue stone. In the stone’s safekeeping she can return to Blood Swamp and mourn the slaughtered members of her family, as it is her sacred obligation to do. The vehicle and its humans will have retreated,and (this didn’t dawn on her until now) the She-S survivors will either be at the swamp already or arriving there before morning. Date Bed will be there, if she is still alive. “Let her be alive,” Mud prays out loud. She is certain that she saw the bodies of everybody who died at the swamp, both during the slaughter and during her reliving of it, but she didn’t see who, if anyone, was wounded, and she didn’t see whether the survivors all fled in the same direction once they were up on the plain. Had she been in her right mind she would have immediately searched for dung and drops of blood and gone where they led her, but had she been in her right mind she wouldn’t have been granted the blue stone’s protection.

  It is her own tracks she now follows, placing her feet in any depression that has not been obliterated by dust. The dust has died down with the dying of the wind and even though her bad leg wobbles she moves fast and is soon upon the sad little mess of hide and bone and vulture droppings that was the infant monkey. She keeps walking, into the summits of the plunging shadows and straight down their lengths. As it always is following the death of a matriarch–and if you include She-Sees, three matriarchs died this day–the sunset is gory. Mud cannot look at it, its ecstatic red streams. She fixes her eyes on the ground, where occasionally she tusks out a root stock to eat. She counts her steps, a thing she is able to do while her thou
ghts are elsewhere, and after every two hundred lets out infrasonic rumbles. Twice, mistakenly, she believes herself to be on the verge of a vision. Her bad leg aches. Her skin, sensing the exhalation of shadows,* twitches uneasily. For all thatshe is protected by the blue stone from the perils around her, she is not protected from her own mind, and every once in a while she has to shake her head, both to stave off another wholesale reliving of the butchery and to grasp the fact of it. When she passes the remains of the zebra who looked at her before its eye was plucked out, she wonders how far down the vulture’s gullet the zebra’s eyeball preserved her image.

  She has come across no she-one dung other than her own from when she set out, and she hasn’t heard a single rumble. But this doesn’t mean anything one way or another. If her family retreated in another direction, as they clearly did, their dung would be elsewhere, and if they aren’t calling it may well be that they have already entered silent mourning. She herself stopped sending calls hours ago out of an unreasonable fear that she would attract hyenas. It isn’t until she sees the hyenas prowling the bank of the swamp that she knows she can’t be the first to arrive. For so many hyenas to be on the plain when there are corpses all over the shore means that at least two big cows must be down there.