Fire.
Warthog urine or hyena dung scald the wound, that is their therapeutic function. Why scalding should help, Date Bed doesn’t know, unless, as she used to hypothesize to the nurse cows, it “burns the badness.” Would an ignited stick, then, or a hot stone, not do the same job?
She hurries toward the river of black smoke and low flames. No sticks are there, none that she can see. Plenty of stones and rocks are strewn about, but how can she pick one up without singeing her trunk? If there was a green leaf, a palm frond, she would have a buffer.
Squinting, scenting, she surveys the terrain. A pulse batters her skull, and her thoughts will not align themselves. “Water,” she thinks into the void, and a crew of vultures plummets from the sky and hops behind her squealing, “Water! Water!” and when she turns on them they open their wings and lift with improbable grace.
Tornadoes spin behind her eyes. She teeters a few steps and sinks to her knees at the verge of the rattling flames. She remains like that for how long? A minute? An hour? Elapsed time is apparent to her only in the cramping of her joints. When her mind clears enough for her to distinguish the smoke in her head from the smoke outside it, she curls her trunk under her chin, presses her ears against her skull and positions her face above a scallop of flame.
Perhaps because the pain is expected it is not as awful as expected. It is, at last, the piercing of that bullet–what the bullet should have felt like–and then it is cold and quite bearable. Not until she smells herself burning does she lift her head. She comes to her feet and walks away, and near a place where there are no rocks or bones she lowers herself to the ground again.
The burn gathers into itself all her other discomforts, even her thirst, and incinerates them down to nothing, and although she can’t bring herself to stand, she feels recovered.
She murmurs a song of thanksgiving:
Oh, for a faith that will not shrink,
Though pressed by thirst and fear,
That will not tremble on the brink
Of death, though life is dear.
That will release each care and grief,
Each hurt and doubting call
To Her, the She, the Cow of Cows,
Whose trunk curls round us all.
And then she falls into unconsciousness.
When she awakes she notices, inches from her eyes, a pile of her own dung, the sweet known smell of which is so appetizing she would eat it had she the will to move. Her near vision is superb, and she watches the flies that scramble over the boluses. Wings like slices of blue light. Green gibbous eyes. How nervous they are! They seem to be at their wits’ end, maddened by the loss of some necessity they hope to find in her dung, and despite appearing to take no notice of each other they produce a unified buzz that makes for an impression of a single multi-eyed, multi-winged, overwrought creature.
What does this creature call itself? Mind talkers and insects don’t communicate, so there is no point asking. And yet she does ask … she thinks, “Which breed of speck are you?” and the buzz seems to configure into a sound that says, “Vital.”
“Vital,” she thinks, amused because all creatures go by such vainglorious names, and because (since it is impossible that the flies answered her) she must have thought up this name herself. She decides that the creature is female. “Hello, cow vital,” she thinks.
All the flies rise up and settle back down on the bolus closest to her right eye, and she has the feeling that the entirety of her is too much for them to grasp and that they suppose her eye to be a creature all on its own whom they call the Shine. What is curious is that while it is her mind that is formingthis narrative, she is dependent upon the buzzing for inspiration. She hears no words. She hears an oscillation that seems to enter the hole in her head and within that cavity make itself intelligible to her. “In what respect,” she thinks, “are you vital?”
“I span The Domain.”
“Span The Domain,” she repeats, mystified, and then she begins to picture it. One fly buzzes to another, who buzzes to another, who buzzes to another, and so on, each buzz a thread in a fine mesh, and eventually the mesh is a shimmering hum the length and breadth of the world. “How marvellous,” she thinks, forgetting that she may be talking to herself.
“I span The Domain,” the buzzing says again.
“Yes, I understand.”
“I command the panorama.”
“Of the whole Domain,” she submits.
The flies fail to respond to this, and she is aware again of her tremendous thirst. “Where might I find water?” she thinks.
“That way.”
She lifts her head. “Which way?”
“That way.”
The flies all face in different directions.
Defeated, she lowers her head and falls into a waking dream in which she is airborne. The landscape is magnificently detailed but colourless. Round hills, like colossal eggs, skim past on her right and left, and for some reason she can see to her left and right simultaneously. Everything is so big and clear. Underneath her, a creature resembling some giant insect scampers by, and that’s when she realizes she is seeing with the eyes of a fly in order that she may be directed to a source of water.
She had better pay attention. And make allowances. What might be a great distance to a fly will be nothing to her. She notes by the shadows that she is heading away from and a bit to the left of the sun. She zooms past a chain of those round hills, which must be pebbles, and then over a trail of dark mottled discs the size of ponds. Cattle dung? On her left an escarpment swells into view … no, it’s a bone, a femur. A little farther along is a ribcage and skull. Of what? A zebra foal? It is hard to identify things whose size has inflated a thousand times.
Cracks in the earth plunge like gorges, masses of humpbacked insects range like buffalo. A wall of webbed tree trunks is either a bush or a tangled ball of shrubbery. She passes termite mounds as enormous as mountains and then there is bare earth for a spell, each granule of dirt a distinct, shivering pebble. The ground dips and she glides over a honeycomb of mauve boulders at the end of which is a dawn of white sand.
The dream ends.
She gets herself to her feet and stands there acquainting herself with her reawakened agonies. Now that she is up off the ground and can no longer even see the flies, her exchange with them strikes her as inconceivable. Nevertheless, she sets off as the dream instructed, with her back to the sun and veering slightly to her left, and in minutes she comes upon the femur and skull and ribcage of a zebra foal. From there, she races. Past termite mounds, over a bank of mauve stones and onto the bed of a dried-up river where, in a delirium of anticipation, she digs.
* When addressing a species other than her own, a mind talker employs the deferential “bull” or “cow” title (comparable to Mr. or Mrs.) followed by that creature’s name for its own kind.
Chapter Eight
It’s not safe to linger at the swamp. Humans are known to return to their slaughters for any feet and tails they may have overlooked, or simply to wander around gloating. Sometimes they carve the corpse into pieces and carry the pieces off, presumably with the intention of eating them elsewhere, but more often they build a fire right at the scene, and their uproarious feasts can carry on for days.
Tusks they always take away immediately after a slaughter. Where the tusks end up and what the humans want with them (or with the feet and tails, for that matter) nobody knows for certain. Torrent says he has come across two human corpses whose necks and forelegs were encircled by narrow bands of ivory and he speculates that these bands demonstrate nostalgia for the days when humans were she-ones. He thinks, as nearly everyone does, that humans also pulverize tusks and inhale the ivory powder in order to heighten their poor sense of smell.
The humans who waged the slaughter at the swamp took every last bit of ivory, even from the calves, but they left allthe tails and feet behind. One less atrocity, one more cause for alarm. Even if those humans don’t return,
members of their family may. She-Snorts, however, refuses to leave.
“Go, if you want,” she rumbles indifferently to She-Screams that first morning. “I’m waiting for my daughter.”
“If she were coming, she’d be here by now,” She-Screams protests, not without reason. “She won’t come, not Date Bed, she’s too sensible. She won’t imagine that we’re still here.” She casts anxious glances at Swamp. “I’m certain She-Scares wouldn’t have wanted us to risk our hides like this. And my poor mother wouldn’t have wanted it, either, I can tell you that.”
With her hind feet She-Snorts kicks more sand over the headless body of She-Drawls-And-Drawls. The kicks undulate her backside in a way so conspicuously carnal that little Bent attempts to mount her thigh. She shakes him off. “Your poor mother is no longer with us,” she says. “She-Scares is no longer with us. I am your matriarch, and as your matriarch, I advise you"–she waddles around until she is facing She-Screams–"to do whatever you like.”
“Oh, now!” She-Soothes roars, dumbfounded. The two other big cows ignore her.
“Are you banishing me?” She-Screams cries.
“I’m telling you that you are free to go.”
But, of course, She-Screams isn’t free, and it is a scandal that She-Snorts would suggest such a thing. “She is out of her mind with grief,” Mud thinks to account for it. And yet she also thinks that She-Snorts and She-Screams are aunt and niece, not sisters, and aunts and nieces sometimes do separate, each taking along her own calves and perhaps her youngersisters to start a new family. Except that this family is so reduced already, and if She-Screams left, there would only be Swamp to go with her because who else, given the choice, would choose She-Screams? And even Swamp–Mud looks at him where he stands in the blood-brown shallows with Hail Stones, whose side he has not left since last night–even he might abandon his mother.
For the first time that Mud knows of, She-Screams is speechless. She flails her ugly head, the clapping of her ears disturbingly like the approach of a helicopter.
She-Snorts begins to saunter away.
“You are a glutton!” She-Screams finally shrieks.
She-Snorts keeps walking.
“If I were the glutton you are,” She-Screams cries, “I’d be the biggest cow!” She whirls around and struts off in the opposite direction. Both of them sway their hips, She-Snorts giving an impression of exquisite nonchalance, She-Screams of digestive trauma.
The day hauls itself along. The sun, as it will do whenever a spell of torment or waiting must be endured, enters a heightened state of watchfulness and moves more slowly across the sky, so that what would normally be dusk is only early afternoon, and Mud feels drained from singing hymns and weeping, from pouring sand over the slaughtered and from the pointless, infuriating work of chasing the vultures. She stands in the shade of She-Screams, who leans wheezing against the bank. Throughout the morning She-Screams complained of shortness of breath, although she seemed no more winded than any of them. “I am having a spell!” she kept screeching at Swamp. Now she really does appear to beailing, but as if to prove to She-Snorts that she is the more heroic one she does not enter the water until She-Soothes roars that she risks heat sleep. It is so hot you can see the stench rising in wavering red streams from the corpses. Every gash, every spill of blood is black with the kind of stinging flies that are an incarnation of ash, and this means either that humans are firing flesh somewhere, beyond scent, or that there are grass fires up on the plain.
Despite the stench and danger, the swamp is not theirs alone. Wildebeests, gazelles, buffalo, hippos, zebras and troops of baboons mill near the shore and bump against the crocodiles, who leap up to snatch ankles and heads and swooping-down birds. Only she-ones and hippos are safe from these attacks, and the hippos show off their immunity by gnawing on the crocodiles’ toothy spines. The crocodiles slip beneath the water. There is no sign of their feasting on the carcasses except for a slight rocking of the legs, which stick out of the water like tree stumps. Vultures perch on the legs and some sit in the face cavities, as in nests. Far down into the bellies the vultures poke their blood-coloured skulls and emerge tugging thongs of gore that they tear free with a twist of their beaks.
Turned away from that impossible sight, out in the centre of the swamp, Mud and She-Snorts browse on either side of a clump of sedge. They have the deepest voices, so every few hours one of them wades back to land and sends an infrasonic rumble, first to Date Bed and then to Torrent, and then to Tall Time and finally to the three matriarchs who have been known to bring their families to the swamp. After each call everybody stops feeding and listens for a response. None comes.
The family is unnaturally scattered. She-Soothes and Bent stay in the shallows, and whenever vultures alight on the bodies of the little calves She-Soothes splashes to shore and chases them off. She-Screams feeds alone at the swamp’s south end and from there wails at Swamp. At one point she tries to pull him out into the deeper water but he violently jerks himself free, trumpeting, “I am not a newborn!” which is so unlike him–the animation, let alone the anger–that she backs away whimpering.
Swamp is rapt by Hail Stones, who is rapt by the carcass of his aunt, She-Demands. Hail Stones doesn’t unduly harass the vultures or crocodiles, it’s not that he is devoted to guarding the remains. He drinks and showers, and he suffers Swamp to stroke his hide and to swish the flies from his face, but when anybody urges him to feed, he says he isn’t hungry. Twice Mud brings him a swatch of grass only to have him give it to Swamp, who says, “If you’re sure,” and eats it in his resigned way. The second time she makes her offering, toward the end of the afternoon, she ventures to say, “There must be a reason you were spared.”
Hail Stones looks at her. Between them, shadows strain across the swamp. “I expect you are right,” he says courteously. “And yet I can’t imagine what it might be.”
“Not yet you can’t. But you will.” Although she believes this, she can hear how feeble it sounds.
Swamp sighs. “Only in moments of bliss,” he says, “does it become apparent to us why terrible things happen.”
Another of his groundless pronouncements, and Mud, in her turn, sighs.
Hail Stones looks toward the shore. Everyone else is there now, standing among the dead. Mud studies Hail Stones’gaunt young face, and what she feels is the prospect of pity, that eventually she will pity him. Now everything she feels must be conserved and directed toward keeping Date Bed safe. For Hail Stones she can only call up something ungraspable, like a half-formed thought. “If I should be killed,” Date Bed had said, “who would you talk to?” Him, Mud thinks, but she is unable to imagine it. Hail Stones is not Date Bed, just as She-Scares was not Mud’s birth mother, and Mud was not She-Scares’ dead newborn.
They don’t travel in a line with the matriarch at the front and the second-biggest cow bringing up the rear. She-Snorts is the one setting the course, but only She-Soothes and Bent follow her. She-Screams, who should be the hindmost cow, pointedly keeps abreast of She-Snorts, twenty or so yards to her left, as if to give the impression that she is equally in charge or that only by coincidence does she happen to be going in the same direction. Every once in a while she turns to scent Swamp and Hail Stones. The two young bulls trail behind, and whenever they go out of sight or smell altogether She-Screams cries, “Stop!” and She-Snorts does but only for the sake of Hail Stones (who is still distressingly thin and whose wound continues to fester). In this way the pace is determined, as is the frequency of infrasonic rumbles because every time there is a halt She-Snorts or Mud calls out to Date Bed. If anything edible is nearby, the stops also allow for a quick feed.
Mud walks alongside She-Soothes and Bent, as far to the right of them as She-Screams is to their left, which is abouttwice as far away as she would normally position herself. The family has gone back to using her cow name, She-Spurns, and even though she understands that this is inevitable, she feels abolished every time she is addressed.
She-Snorts and She-Screams, when they start in on each other, are no less irritating, She-Screams especially, but shouldn’t She-Snorts know better? Much as Mud resents She-Screams for resenting her, she doesn’t gloat when She-Snorts mocks or otherwise offends the ridiculous cow. Had Mud any authority she would ask She-Snorts to pretend to indulge She-Screams, as She-Sees used to.
It stuns Mud how many matriarchal skills She-Snorts lacks. “Do whatever you want” is her most commonly issued command, and except for Hail Stones she spares little conversation for any of them. Hail Stones she sweet-talks. At Blood Swamp she sweet-talked him into abandoning his vigil at the corpse of She-Demands. This was on the fifth morning afterthe slaughter. On the fourteenth morning, by which time she had finally accepted that Date Bed was not returning, she sweet-talked him into joining the search, since she feared that, left on his own, he would starve himself. Now, at the end of every day, while She-Soothes is replacing his poultice, she praises him for having kept up with the trek and she tells him stories about his dead relations, stories that celebrate them. She sounds like a mother comforting her calf and a bull seducing a nervous oestrus cow, both, which in itself is strange, but the flattery, from the most vain of cows, is stranger still. Flattery inclines toward She-Snorts, that is its principle. To hear it flow the other way is like seeing water stream uphill. Eventually all of them go quiet, listening. For his part Hail Stones rumbles, “Thank you, Matriarch,” or “I am honoured, Matriarch,” some modest acknowledgement in his gorgeous voice and in the formal timbre.
The White Bone Page 10
