The White Bone

by Barbara Gowdy

  The land she walks through is one great burn. Black ground, scorched black thorn trees, black boulders, black ash that she flings over her back and between her legs. Without slowing her pace she sends the Thing’s light into the sky where, as she had anticipated, it attracts birds. Not an eagle, unfortunately, but kites, who swoop down and scream, “What is that?” and flare up before she can answer. Hooded vultures drop hissing from the trees and jump in front of her and bob their obscene heads.

  She follows a course she remembers from when this was all new grass and She-Sees was leading the family to a soda lake. She and Mud were calves then. They were so devoted to each other that they walked with Date Bed grasping Mud’s tail, and they said “we” instead of “I"–"we are tired,” “we want,” “we can’t"–as if they were a single calf. When She-Screams slapped Mud, it was Date Bed who squealed.

  The burn ends at the lake, which is now an arid pan. Date Bed puts down the Thing and kicks loose a chunk of salt, crushes the chunk to granules and grasps these with the tips of her trunk. As she drops them into her mouth she falls into a clear memory of the shine of the water that was here and the thousands of flamingos, her first acquaintance with them. Because she took for granted that no large creature could be that spectral colour, she saw the blur of birds as an exotic reed bed and thought that their twanging call must be some deployment of the air.

  Why is it, she asks herself now, coming out of the memory, that she recalls some things perfectly while others are hazy or lost to her entirely? By what criteria is the selection made? To relive a moment from seven years ago, lovely as the moment was, is a luxury when what she needs is to remember the journeys that would tell her where she is in proximity to Blood Swamp. Whenever she tries to link up those journeys, however, her mind races along until it skids to a stop at a place of nothingness.

  She envies birds their sharp eyes and panoramas. She wishes she could seduce one into scouting the landscape on her behalf but she has a hard enough time getting one to talk to her. Even the normally friendly nightjars keep their distance. She blames the drought. There is a gloom to the light, and little charity in creatures. She has resigned herself to being an unwelcome presence to all birds who don’t think of her as food.

  She had resigned herself.

  She picks the Thing up and holds it to her face. She is black from the ash she threw over herself. In its sooty surroundings her eye has a spooky aspect. She turns the Thingand a white disc bolts over the plain. She continues on her way, throwing light into the sky.

  She smells fresh water but not fresh dung nor any kind of creature. She hears, far off to the west, the cry of geese, nothing else. The gerenuk warned her, but she didn’t really believe him, she thought he might merely have regretted telling her about such a valuable find.

  It is the same day, high noon, when even the foulest of water holes are swarming with birds and grazers. Only humans can vacate a place so absolutely, and yet there is no smell of them here. She sets the Thing down and sniffs the dirt, which is weirdly empty of dung, even vulture dung. The dirt vents a smell of date palms. How can that be, when there are no date palms in the vicinity? She picks the Thing up and consults her eye. The thought within it seems to be that she has come all this way, she may as well investigate.

  Slowly she moves forward. To her left, a ball of dead shrubbery tumbles by. A good sign. She picks up her pace. The water hole is beyond a tumult of toppled thorn trees, and as she approaches, the thin odour of old dung wafts her way. Ostrich and patas-monkey dung. She-one dung!

  She hurries to the source of the craved smell. There! And there! Piles of dark, dried-out, trod-on boluses between the logs. Dropping the Thing, she greedily sniffs. It is She-B-And-B dung. She-Brags, She-Bluffs, She-Booms, She-Bluffs again. A fine family, the She-B’s-And-B’s, Tall Time’s birthfamily. The boluses have been polluted by flies and raided by beetles but she eats several anyway, she wants the taste of them at the back of her throat.

  She-Broods, She-Betters … all She-B-And-B dung. Every bolus summons memories of its cow, and despite the menacing queerness of this place she lets herself swoon into the memories, some of them shadowy, some clear. She weaves among the logs. She is at the far side of them when she comes upon the boluses of Tall Time.

  She lifts her head, alert again. So he was here. She sees the glint of the water hole and thinks that if the Link Bull foraged at this place, there can be no ill omens, or at least there weren’t four or five days ago. His fragrance, his regular bull fragrance, has a quality she associates with perfect safety, and she eats one of the boluses and has a clear, happy memory of meeting him for the first time. She emerges from the memory weeping and with the timbre of his voice caught in her ears and then the thought of the Thing jolts her and she rushes back and retrieves it and returns to the far side of the logs and stands there.

  The dark surface of the hole indicates a depth that may account for the hole’s existence in a drought: a source far underground constantly replenishing the migrating higher levels. She shifts the Thing under her chin and starts forward, scenting, ears tensed. Here also the ground is empty of dung and even of sticks and crevices and it vents a fruity odour incompatible with the landscape. The water is like a hallucination. She has not drunk since this morning. She has not smelled water so fresh in hundreds of days. At the edge of the hole she confers with herself in the Thing but her eye has astranded, don’t-ask-me look. She sets the Thing down and drinks, little sips at first, then trunkfuls. She showers and coats herself with dust, after which she squints about and inhales the unfitting odours. Should she stay to eat and sleep or should she leave? If she leaves, where will she go?

  She picks up the Thing and points it at the white crater of the sun and almost instantly a half-dozen oxpeckers arrive and flutter above her, chattering in the embryonic language of their species: “That! It! What! Look! Where!”

  “Scat!” she trumpets and they zoom away. What use are those imbeciles to her? An eagle would be a stroke of luck, but she has failed to attract one so far and now she simply wants to talk to some reasonable creature. Find out whether she is safe here, and why there is no evidence that Tall Time or any of the She-B’s-And-B’s drank.

  Her belly growls. Even if she decides to leave she will have to eat. She goes over to the logs, wedges the Thing in the fork of a branch and tears free a bunch of roots. Thorn-tree roots are, for her, a duty food: their saltiness calms her stomach but she despises the aftertaste. She eats them now only until her belly settles and then she peels a strip of bark and rolls it into her mouth … and hears munching. So much about this place is out of kilter that her first thought is that the sound of what she is doing must have jumped ahead of the act of her doing it, that while she munches she will hear swallowing and while she swallows she will hear herself ripping another piece of bark and so on. A moment later, however, the smell of a black rhino reaches her and she squints downwind and a dark mass is there.

  Date Bed has a soft spot for rhinos because of their weakeyes and fabulous ugliness, and because of how rare they are. When she was a calf, there was always at least one black rhino mother and calf at Blood Swamp. In the last five years none has shown up, so many have been slaughtered by humans, and in fact it is very odd that one should be here, close to a water hole but not at it and nowhere near a mud wallow. The munching grows implausibly loud. For a reason nobody understands, you can hear rhinos eating a hundred yards away and sometimes, such as now, the sound seems to issue from your own throat. As she starts walking forward, Date Bed thinks about her theory that the sound is transmitted from the rhino’s “tusks” by some means having to do with the peculiar placement of the “tusks” on the snout. “Hello, bull peerless,” she thinks, forcefully to be heard above the chewing. “What an honour and surprise it is to come upon a peerless in this wasteland.”

  Snorting, the rhino bustles over to her. It is only a few feet away before Date Bed scents that it is not a male. So here is another oddity: a lone
female. Like herself. “I beg your pardon,” she thinks. “Cow peerless.”

  The rhino turns sideways and as if addressing somebody off to the west squeals, “Go away! Scat! Are you crazy? Are you a crazy defective half-wit?”

  “Certainly not–”

  “Then get away from here!” She jabs the air with her horns. “Why did you come?” She puffs and trots around in a circle and when she is facing Date Bed, squeals, “You must be a stupid crazy simpleton!”

  “I apologize for trespassing,” Date Bed thinks, flattening her ears and hunching so that she appears less of a threat. “I camefor the water, and because I was told that my kind had recently been here.”

  The rhino goes still. Her hog-like ears twitch.

  “I am separated from my kind,” Date Bed thinks. “From my family.”

  The rhino steps right up to Date Bed’s forelegs. Date Bed lowers her trunk and smells the expiration of pure misery. She can’t say what comes over her–compassion, loneliness, or perhaps she is simply reckless with curiosity–but she touches the rhino’s back, the scored skin there, the wrinkle of an old wound, and the rhino stands still and lets herself be dabbed, which is stranger than what Date Bed is doing, and in the midst of this unlikely moment, the rhino grunts, “Poor witless ignoramuses. They have been killed.”

  Date Bed draws up her trunk. “Who have been killed?”

  “Your kind.” She steps back and cocks her head. “They were here. Yes, yes, they were. A small meagre herd of ten or fifteen, and they were killed.”

  “All of them?”

  “All? Yes, yes, I think so. Well, perhaps not all. I don’t know, I don’t know. But that is what happens at this place. Know-nothing demented dunderheads come to drink, and vicious brutal hindleggers come to slaughter them. Why do you imagine there is a huge enormous water hole in the middle of nowhere? Who do you imagine dug it?”

  Date Bed sways on the verge of fainting. “There is no blood, no scent of–”

  “They cover their tracks.” She snorts the ground, all at once distraught again. “Go away!” she squeals. She squats, and urine fans out behind her. “Don’t be a stupid raving numskull!”

  The sharp smell of the urine brings Date Bed out of her dizziness. “When?” she thinks, meaning when were her kind slaughtered.

  “Immediately! Straight away! At once!”

  “But you are here.”

  “I can’t leave!”

  “Why not?” Date Bed is weeping.

  The rhino goes still again. “They killed my calf.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, yes, they killed him, slaughtered him, butchered him, and took him away.”

  “Oh, how dreadful.”

  “I am waiting for his breath.”

  Date Bed has heard about this, how rhinos believe that after an interval of anywhere from ten to thirty days the breath returns from wherever the spirit has gone. For an hour or so it lingers above the place where the death occurred, and if a female rhino happens to inhale the breath she will one day give birth to a calf in whom some portion of the spirit of the deceased is preserved.

  Date Bed thinks, “Aren’t you afraid that the hindlegger will kill you?” but far enough back in her mind that the rhino won’t hear. It is not for her to question the rituals and compromises by which somebody stumbles through monstrous loss. “Thank you for the information,” she thinks at audible range. She gives a brisk nod and heads back to the water hole.

  “Not that way!” the rhino calls after her. “Dolt-head lunatic moron!”

  At the water hole Date Bed has a drink and a shower and collects the Thing. She looks at herself in it. Red, witless eye. Lunatic moronic dolt-head eye. Against whom, against what breadth of experience, can she measure herself out here? She throws dust over herself and starts off with “Get away from here,” the only directive in her head.

  It could be that she has travelled across this landscape before but she doesn’t remember. She prays, out loud and immoderately. All these slaughters have been conceived of and are now being remembered by the She, who is not vindictive or mad–unless She is, in which case She might be bargained with, but Date Bed does not believe this. If the One in whose image all she-ones were created is mad, then they themselves are piecemeal madness. And they aren’t, not yet. Date Bed will not accept that the living, however many remain (all the thousands of them or all ten of them), are mad. But enough suffering may drive them mad, and if that happens, if all of Her best creations go mad, it will be the reshaping of Her. The maddening of Her. Which, of course, She knows. Praying, “In the name of mercy, let Tall Time be alive,” Date Bed has only the tiniest hope that she can influence what has already taken place.

  She loves Tall Time, she can say that now. She can admit to herself that she wanted him to dig her inaugural calf tunnel and that she has always been a little jealous of his adoration of Mud, although she understood it from the start. It has much to do with why she loves him. At the Long Rains Massive Gathering when he said to Mud, “We are alike,” she thought, “No, we are alike, you and I,” and wondered, purely baffled, how somebody as observant as he could fail to recognize whom he resembled. Like her, he is inquisitive and fastidious and lean. They both categorize information, they gather factsthat nobody else can be bothered with. They both have a fondness for the old language … she its inflections, he its turns of phrase. They both love unnaturally. The thought of him dead is terrifying because she loves him but also because what he knows should have protected him. If the Link Bull can be caught off guard, who is safe?

  A high wind flames the dust. She walks straight into it, eyes shut against the grit, smelling and hearing her way, which is no way, no direction. Where there is forage she eats. Roots, twigs, they taste like dirt to her. She trumpets prayers, mutters to herself and feels ancient and crazy. She sings hymns:

  Blind unbelief is sure to err

  And scan Her work in vain;

  She is Her own interpreter,

  And She shall make it plain.

  And:

  To us a Calf of hope will come,

  To us a Daughter soon.

  She shall the hindleggers destroy,

  And send them to their doom.

  That she is carrying the Thing she forgets until she sets it down to feed and then she thinks fretfully, “I mustn’t go off without it,” and she never does although every time she puts it on the ground she can never remember having picked it up again. She ambles through hallucinations: the interior of a cave, straight white walls, green stone floor as shiny and flatas a still pond, miniature suns in the roof of the cave spreading a cool white light. Another wall, twice as high as she is and three times her width, it stands alone on a web of silver sticks, and life unfolds against it in jerks and flashes as if it were the shifting scene of someone else’s memory. And this: a male human holding bunches of aromatic yellow fruits in his forefeet and offering them to Date Bed while saying something that her mind cannot translate. But the sound of his voice–a throaty cooing such as a dove makes–is soothing.

  Four days later she finds herself under the shade of a huge acacia close to the bank of what was once a river. No other trees still stand, only this solitary giant with its splintered trunk that holds most of its bark and supports a miraculous crown of foliage, withered however, crackling in the wind, and in any event too high for her to reach. From almost every branch forsaken weaver-bird nests dangle like a moribund harvest, and farther up is the immense dish of a vulture’s nest but it, too, looks vacated and the splats of white dung on the ground directly underneath smell old.

  She has excavated a seepage in the riverbed and has eaten three strips of bark. Now she lies on her side and gazes at herself in the Thing. “Don’t fret, spirit twin,” she says several times. “I am here.” Presently, from her eye’s dark circle, she feels prodded to recall her inspired idea. “I haven’t forgotten,” she says, but as she considers the idea she begins to tinker with it.

  The idea is this: sh
e will attract an eagle, and as soon as he (or she) is hovering close enough to hear her mind she will saythat his spirit twin, his guardian, is resting in “this oasis of impenetrable water” and yearns for a glimpse of him. He will be curious enough to drift lower, he may even land on a bush or a termite mound, and when he does she will show him not only the clearest image of himself he has ever seen but in all likelihood the only image he has seen in many days. He will be riveted.

  She will offer him a bribe.

  In exchange for glimpses of his guardian he must patrol the land for the white bone. She will direct him to concentrate his search to the west of hill ranges and to pay particular attention to any boulders and termite mounds that form a circle.

  Initially the plan also involved getting him to hunt for others of her kind, and she will still ask for sightings, but if the sighting is farther away than a two-day trek and the cows aren’t She-S’s, she won’t pursue it. In a drought, nobody stays in one place very long unless the place is a body of water, and except for Blood Swamp and the evil water hole, most bodies of water seem to be gone. She has decided not to imperil herself by returning to Blood Swamp even though it is her sacred duty to mourn the bones. Her family, those of them who returned to the swamp, probably won’t be there now anyway. They will be on the move, as she is, looking for a white bone, looking for her. If her mother hasn’t died, she will be the new matriarch and the one leading the search.