The White Bone

by Barbara Gowdy

  “Lost faith?” Torrent says. He sounds puzzled.

  “They have failed us all. No link warned of the slaughters! No link warned of the drought! Dash it all, Torrent, what use are the links if they do not warn of such tragedies?”

  “No link with which you are acquainted warned of such tragedies,” Torrent says.

  Tall Time tugs free a batch of sedge. Wounded, indignant, up in some airless partition of the ether, he flaps his ears.

  Torrent closes his eyes. He seems, briefly, to sleep. Opening his eyes he says, “To forsake all the links because your knowledge of them is wanting is cowardice at best and foolishness at worst. One does not throw away the fruit with the husk.”

  “But how–” Tall Time says. In his frustration he is on the verge of weeping. “How can we know anything absolutely?”

  “We cannot.”

  “How can we have faith?”

  “Faith is not trust in the known.”

  There is a ruckus in the shallows. A zebra, whom Tall Time earlier recognized from a brief sighting when it was a foal spinning in circles at the edge of a Long Rains Massive Gathering, is again spinning, and viciously kicking out its hind legs.

  “Drought crazed,” Torrent observes.

  “Perhaps that is what I am,” Tall Time offers as a show of deference and to redeem himself in Torrent’s good opinion. Of course, he isn’t–his love for Mud predates the drought by a decade–but the longevity and severity of his craziness, if crazy he is, will never have the old bull’s understanding, let alone blessing, that much is now evident.

  Torrent gives a noncommittal grunt and points his trunk toward the She-N’s. Tall Time points his trunk in the same direction although, unlike Torrent, he cannot scent against the breeze.

  Presently, in this atmosphere of companionable despair, Tall Time loses the feeling of being supernaturally tall. He says, “If the that-way bone does not exist, what hope is there for any of us?”

  “It may well exist.”

  “But you said–”

  “Don’t tell me what I said.” His voice is gentle. “I am aware of what I said.” He lets his trunk fall. It hits the water with a loud smack, and Tall Time senses, behind them at the shore, a hundred heads snapping around.

  * Instead of being virtual re-enactments, shadow memories, similar to most human memories, highlight only the more striking aspects.

  Chapter Ten

  It is the matriarchs who keep track of the days–how many since the last rainfall, how many until the black plums ripen, how many since a bull was in musth or a cow in oestrus, and so on. Their method is mysterious, even to them. Anyone can come up with the exact number eventually, by counting backwards or forwards day by day. For the matriarch, the calculation is immediate. It is not a skill she learns. She assumes the family’s leadership and several hours later if somebody mentions, for instance, the evening a certain calf died, she finds herself thinking, “Four years and forty-seven days ago.”

  Of all the gifts that aren’t Date Bed’s, this precise, instantaneous measuring of the passage of time is the one she used to envy the most. As a young calf she tried to train herself to count days at matriarchal speed and when she finally accepted that it couldn’t be done she devised a short-cut (“grouping,” she calls it) for arriving at a close approximation. Instead of tallying the days, grouping tallies the full moons, which occur every thirty days, give or take a day. Two full moons, or twogroups of thirty days, add up to sixty days. Three groups are ninety days. You only have to do the addition once to know forever afterwards how many days or years are in five groups, or thirty-five, or in seventy-three and a half.

  Every morning when she chisels another scratch into her left tusk she wonders if her life’s remaining days will add up to the three and a half groups that would bring her age to exactly thirteen years. She is not very hopeful. The wound above her right eye has scabbed over, but behind the scab is a buzzing sensation that is only slightly relieved by eating cycad bark. Coming to her feet she reels through a dizzy spell, and several times a day she falls into hallucinations–ravishingly strange, and as sharply visible as if she were looking through Mud’s eyes, but disturbing. She is walking in an immense cavern where it is somehow as bright as midday, and on each side of her, in phenomenally straight rows, stacks of strange fruits–sweet-scented and vividly coloured (red, orange, yellow)– glide by; she is on a rise of land and, all around her, tiny white blossoms drift from a frigid sky and sting her skin and settle on the earth like sand.

  None of these complaints are necessarily deadly and they do not frighten her. What does is that her memory is leaking. Six mornings ago, a blue lizard scrambled past her face. She could not identify it, although she knew she had studied that breed and added it to her lizard inventory. Since then, half of her memories have been shadow memories: impeccable in parts, in other parts faded or gone altogether.

  She prays, despite the fact that she has little faith in prayer and no comprehension of it. How can the circumstances of a preordained life be altered by begging? Herprayers, consequently, are modest. When she prays that the remnants of her family are safe, she is thinking especially of Mud and her mother but does not presume to single anybody out. For herself she asks that she suffer no more than she can bear and that if her fate is to survive she not thwart that fate through foolishness or inattentiveness. She may add that she hopes the leaking of her memory will spontaneously stop, as haemorrhaging sometimes does, or that she comes upon a family whose nurse cow knows a remedy. “I would love to see my own family again,” she throws in. Instead of pleading to find the white bone, she describes to herself, in prayer-like phrasing, various aspects of The Safe Place: “… for in that blessed realm are swamps, where grasses sweet and new… .”

  It is at dawn, just after she has come to her feet, that she prays. Such is her ambivalence that she can bring herself to petition the She only when she is reeling with dizziness and not quite herself and therefore the She may pardon her impertinence. When the dizziness stops she finds a sharp stone and chisels another scratch in her tusk. One scratch for every day since the slaughter. This is not yet a necessity, it is a precaution. She has no idea how quickly her memory is leaking, but she has met old cows who couldn’t tell whether it had been an hour or a year since they’d last spoken with her, and she must prepare herself for becoming that addled. She thinks of the scratches as a kind of net. The apprehension of time going by may fall from her body, but here it will be, caught on her tusk.

  On the morning of the twenty-sixth day she fails to find a sharp stone. Every one she picks up feels as smooth as an egg. She is in a croton thicket beside a huge jawbone of rock and is just now appreciating that the face of the rock is abnormally worn, and it strikes her that this must be a sacred vicinity. First it yielded the amazing Thing, and now there is this strange worn rock and these globular stones, which are almost as smooth as the Thing. She was drawn here, she thinks. Yesterday, mid afternoon, she had stopped on the east side of the rock with the intention of having a brief feed and rest before continuing on to the giant water hole that was her destination. But while she was lying down, a cocky genet lounged in the crook of her trunk and told her that there was water under the ditch on the other side of the rock, and so she shook him off and came to her feet. She had dug eight holes and decided that the genet had deceived her when a mucky trickle seeped up. By this time, night had fallen and she was so parched that she got down on her knees and drank, like a calf, with her mouth.

  A hallucination overtook her as she drank. It seemed to her that she was kneeling at the edge of a cliff. Below, luminous in the surrounding darkness, was a looped band upon whose upper surface two lines of bright-eyed creatures skimmed. In one line all the eyes were red and in the other they were white, and the two lines rushed alongside each other but in opposite directions. There was the rank smell of lionesses and this frightened her enough to heave herself up, and the hallucination snuffed out in the vortex of a dizzy spell
near the end of which she realized that the lionesses were not in the hallucination but on the rock.

  She whirled around, lifted her trunk. By the range and thickness of smell she guessed that there were four of them. The moon was almost full, and she could discern a darker shade of night where they were, and the glimmer of an eye.

  “What do you want?” she thought.

  They wanted to eat her, that went without saying, but why did they imagine they might? On the second day following the slaughter she had scared off a pack of hyenas by telling them that her blood was venomous, even to the touch. The carcass of a male lion had been nearby and she’d pointed at the bullet wound above her eye and thought, “As soon as he drew blood, he fell.” The hyenas exchanged looks and nervous giggles. She asked them how they supposed she had survived on her own, when she was so small. And because there she was, alone and small, the pack loped away and they must have spread the word. Three days later she was approached by a delegation of awe-struck gazelles who’d heard she was an avenger sent by the god of her kind to punish any lions, hyenas or wild dogs who dared assault her. Was it true? She told them it was.

  “What if one of us touched you?” the largest gazelle asked.

  “I am poisonous only to creatures who would harm me,” she answered, marvelling at how effortlessly she lied, and with what zest.

  After that she began to feel invulnerable, at least to lions, hyenas and wild dogs. But then, last night, the four lionesses had attacked her. They had never heard the avenger legend, and neither did they fall for it. They laughed indulgently, as you would at the outlandish claims of a calf.

  A sluggish feeling overcame her. She thought, “I am going to be killed.”

  “That’s right,” the leader said.

  “It’s painless,” another said.

  The leader said, “Don’t fight us.”

  But she did fight. The suggestion that she shouldn’t was so pernicious that it jolted her awake and she turned and began to run. The lionesses jumped from the rock. They swiped at her hind legs and she spun, trumpeting. Her right foot came down on a stone. She snatched it up. Even in her terror she could feel how unnaturally cold and smooth it was. She swung it, and a pale beam of light flew over the ground. The lionesses stepped back from the beam. She swept the stone again, and the light skimmed their faces.

  “Let’s go,” the leader growled. And while Date Bed continued to trumpet and brandish the stone, her assailants disappeared.

  As soon as she could no longer smell them, she examined her weapon. It was no stone. It was too cold and too symmetrical: flat on one side, curved on the other, about the size of an ostrich egg but heavier than that and more elongated; it was like an elongated egg sliced in half. The curved side shone like slime. The flat side shone like water, and like water she could see herself in it … if she held it at a certain angle, with the moonlight in her eye, and when she did that her image was so unclouded that she gasped. She pivoted the Thing and waved it where the lionesses had been. The beam appeared. She tried waving the Thing in various directions and at various angles until she realized that the beam was moonlight passing through the Thing and coming back out again. Only then did she detect the faint stench of vehicle. She thought that the vehicle who had carried it must have lost it, because whowould deliberately abandon such a treasure? She turned it over and held it up to see her face again.

  “The She is good,” she said. “The She is great.”

  She slept lying on it and in her dreams forgot about it, and she forgot about it when she awoke until, during her dizzy spell, she hurt her foot on the edge between its flat and round sides. Appalled to think that the fact of it could have leaked out of her body even for a moment, she picked it up. In the morning light she could see that its curved side was the unnatural blue of a vehicle’s skin and she realized that it must have been a feature of the vehicle itself–a kind of gall perhaps or extrusion of bone–and she had a moment of disgust and yet she did not let it go. She swept it back and forth and a stunningly bright flash shot onto the rock. By accident she directed the flash at a warthog, who ran off squealing. She blew dust from the Thing’s flat side and held it to her face. Again, she gasped to see her reflection. Look at that–a tick running along a fold under her eye! She couldn’t feel the tick or smell it, but there it was. She examined her eyelashes, the veins in her ears, the puckered landscape of her scabbed-over wound. In no body of water, no matter how placid the surface, had she ever seen herself so distinctly. “Are you my spirit twin?” she asked her reflection. With great care she set the Thing on a termite mound and started looking for a sharp stone.

  She fails to find one, although she makes a wide search. She returns to the Thing and picks it up. Now it is almost too hotto hold. Cradling it in her trunk, she looks at herself. “There is not a single sharp stone in this vicinity,” she says. Her eye blinks. The dark circle in the centre contracts to a dot and her sense is that the reason for the contraction is so that the eye may fetch an idea from within itself. And here it comes, the idea, leaping from the image of her eye into her actual eye and from there into her head where she hears, “Use the Thing.”

  Of course. Use the Thing, its keen edge that hurt her foot. She turns the Thing so that she can draw the edge over her tusk. Back, forth. Just the once and she has her scratch. Day twenty-six.

  She holds the Thing to her eye. The dark circle shrinks and plucks from its abyss another idea. “Oh!” she breathes. The idea is so inspired that her heart starts pounding. She nods and repeats what she hears. Without realizing, she speaks in the formal timbre.

  As far as she knows, her kind have never doubted that who they see when they see themselves in water is themselves. Monkeys don’t doubt it either, nor do cats. Of the other creatures who are able to see themselves (plenty aren’t; wildebeests, buffalo, warthogs, rhinos, hippos and zebras look into an unruffled pond and see nothing but water) most think that they’re catching a glimpse of the spirit of somebody who drowned or was killed at that very spot. With birds, it’s hard to know what they think. Some of the bigger birds–hornbills, spoonbills, storks–reportedly laugh or take umbrage if you say, “That’s you.” They say it’s a fish, obviously, or a shadow. The smaller flocking birds can scarcely be talked to at all, they’re so high-strung and scatterbrained. Solitary gliders–the eagles, the hawks–have a reputation for being thoughtfuland articulate but they’re aloof. In the three years that Date Bed has been a mind talker she has spoken with only two hawks and a single martial eagle, or “eminence” as that breed calls itself. This one was sickly and earthbound, and when Date Bed asked if there was anything she could do for him, his startling answer was that she could keep him company.

  Perhaps because he was doomed he was unusually forthcoming. He advised her that if her kind were to eat flesh, curb their appetites and flap their ears they might stand a chance of becoming airborne. He then told her about guardians, or spirit twins.

  At the hatching of every martial eagle there is the hatching of a spirit twin whose fate determines the eagle’s fate. The twin lives underwater and feeds on fish and carcasses, but otherwise the events of his life are identical to the eagle’s. When the twin ails, the eagle ails. When the twin mates, the eagle mates, and so on. When the twin dies, the eagle dies. The spirit twin can be heard calling during high winds and storms and can be seen in hundreds of bodies of water, since he moves from lake to river to pond by way of underground aquifers. Frequent sightings of the spirit twin are essential. Without these contacts the twin loses faith in his own existence and begins to wane and act carelessly, and if he should deteriorate, so will the eagle. The clearer the sighting, the more the twin is reassured, the more vigorous he is, and viceversa. So it is that in high winds, when the surfaces of water are turbulent, or during the dry season, when the water isn’t there, the eagle’s life is imperilled. “I haven’t seen my guardian in four days” was how the eagle Date Bed met accounted for his condition.

  It never
occurred to Date Bed to suggest that his reflection was merely himself. That would have been tactless and pompous and, besides, she was far from certain that his reflection wasn’t a guardian. Or even that her reflection isn’t a guardian. After her talk with him she would sometimes peer at her face in Blood Swamp, just in case. To tell the truth, it has crossed her mind that she owes her survival, in some measure anyway, to the fact that a few hours before the slaughter she had studied herself in the flat water within the sedge-grass beds.

  And now that she has the Thing to see herself in, she must admit that she feels … not recovered, far from that, but pluckier.

  She looks at herself again, at her liquid eye, which alerts her to her thirst, and she sets the Thing down and kneels at the pit she dug last night and tusks the bottom until water seeps up. She drinks, comes to her feet, has a dizzy spell, tosses dirt over her back, then feeds on the thicket and the tufts of dead grass between the bushes. She would prefer to continue to feed and then, a little later, to sleep, to always feed and sleep during the day and travel by night, out of the sun. But since the slaughter she has a terror of night, every blurry shape transfiguring into a human, and she never moves from a safe spot after dark. Today, before setting off, she climbs onto the rock and sends her infrasonic rumbles. There is no response, there is never a response. She curls the Thing into her trunk and rumbles, “The She is nigh,”* and starts walking.

  The inspired idea depends on her attracting the attention of a martial eagle. She will try to do that while she walks, buther priority is to get to the giant water hole she was on her way to yesterday, before this place enticed her to stop. She heard about the hole from a gerenuk who claimed to have seen fresh she-one boluses in the water hole’s vicinity. It was news Date Bed wept to hear. In twenty-five days, twenty-six now, she hasn’t once come across the dung of her own kind. Their bones are what she comes across, their carcasses. Even though there is little likelihood that the she-ones are still at the water hole (the gerenuk disparaged the nearby forage and said that the hole itself, while it yielded fresh water, was eerily deserted) she would make the trip ten times over simply for the dung. For evidence that she is not the last of her kind.