The White Bone

by Barbara Gowdy

  She-Soothes and She-Snorts hurry to her. They nuzzle her breasts.

  “Early milk!” the nurse cow roars.

  She-Screams, chewing tubers, comes over but does not touch Mud and does not speak.

  “How is it possible?” the matriarch says. She squeezes a breast, and milk jets out.

  “It’s early milk!” the nurse cow trumpets. “Early milk! You heard She-Cures speak of it.” She rears up on her hind legs (and Me-Me, who has crept closer, scuttles away). “Early milk!” She spins in a circle. She is beside herself. “Early milk!”

  “Yes, but during a drought,” She-Snorts says.

  “The She has blessed us!” She-Soothes trumpets. “The She is good. The She is great. Jubilation! She-Spurns is the saviour!”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” the matriarch says with some of her former drollery. She drops her trunk on Mud’s head. “But it is true you have saved him.”

  “Little Bent,” Mud says. The tugging sensation, which extends far into her chest, doesn’t feel unpleasant, but it doesn’t feelentirely harmless, either. She is being drained, after all. It is only milk, she tells herself. It isn’t blood. It isn’t memory.

  The sun and moon are warring, although that is not yet known. When a great blessing and a great tragedy happen within hours of each other, then you know. In battles between the holy Mother and Her dissolute son these extreme occurrences are the incidental consequences, the smithereens.

  So far this night there have been only blessings. The milk. The tubers, enough to ease their hunger cramps. Later, after they have walked another five thousand steps (with She-Soothes hauling Bent because when Mud takes over he tries to feed), the ground softens and in a sandy ditch they dig water holes. While Mud waits for hers to fill, Bent nurses. Already, by the strength of his tugs, she can feel that he is hardier.

  Patches of bitter but edible fire grass are in the vicinity, and the matriarch calls an early halt to the night’s trek so that they can forage and celebrate. They sing as they eat. “The Bursting Breast Song” and a hymn of thanksgiving: “Come, Thou Fount of every blessing! Fill my trunk to blare Thy grace… .” Strangely, She-Screams, whose off-key shriek usually dominates any chorus, doesn’t join in. She feeds apart from them, on thorn bushes, and she talks to herself in an unintelligible whimper. Not far from her Me-Me sits and makes a sound in her throat like breaking twigs.

  The fire grass is a sedative, a potent one for cows as debilitated as they are, and Mud, She-Soothes and She-Snorts are obliged to lie down while it is still dark and they are stillfamished. Bent lies between Mud’s legs with his trunk resting on her right teat. She-Screams continues to feed on the thorn bushes. She’ll keep a scent on Me-Me, Mud thinks and yet is uneasy and rumbles to She-Snorts, “Matriarch, I’m going to try to stay awake.”

  “I’ve got that feeling behind my eyes,” She-Snorts murmurs.

  Mud recalls Hail Stones telling them–only hours before the slaughter–that She-Demands had a feeling behind her eyes. “That warning feeling?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “What does it mean?”

  But the matriarch is already snoring.

  Alarmed, Mud hauls herself back onto her feet, determined now to fight sleep. She drifts off anyway. She dreams about Date Bed: She and Date Bed are wading among water lettuces in a swamp that transforms into a meadow of consimilis grass, and Date Bed says in her earnest way, “You must understand, we aren’t where we think we are,” and when she turns, Mud sees that she has no trunk, and out of the cavity where the trunk should be a wind blasts, and a newborn cries, “Mama!”

  She wakes up. Bent is gone. A vagrant wind blows, it scatters his cries, which come from the north, then the west, then the northeast.

  “Bent!” she trumpets.

  She-Soothes and She-Snorts awaken.

  “Bent!” the nurse cow roars.

  “Where is She-Screams?” She-Snorts says.

  Mud is so surprised at the matriarch’s mentioning the banished cow’s name that it takes her a moment to realize She-Screams isn’t here. She squints into the darkness. “Where is Me-Me?”

  She-Soothes starts racing north. They hurry after her, sidestepping guineafowl flushed into the open by her bellows. Bent’s odour and calls now arrive from all directions. The wind moans. How can She-Soothes know which way to go? By some grace granted terrified mothers, she does. She goes straight to him.

  He sits on his haunches near the edge of an escarpment. “She-Screams is down there!” he cries, shrugging himself free of their trunks.

  “What?” the nurse cow roars.

  Mud moves to the brink and looks over. The bottom, all blackness, is a long way down. Her vision of She-Screams returns to her. “She fell,” she thinks, finally understanding the reason for the crushed skull.

  “She walked over!” Bent cries.

  “Walked over?” the nurse cow roars.

  “She may still be alive,” Mud says. That her vision could actually have been fulfilled horrifies her, as if she had wished it. She-Screams’ new big head … shattered. “Is there a path down?” she wonders out loud.

  “Bent, what do you mean, ‘walked over'?” She-Snorts says.

  The drop is sheer, the face of the escarpment one great slab, Mud can discern that much.

  “She did it on purpose!” Bent wails and begins to sob, and the wind shifts and throws up a breath of She-Screams’ odour in which the fetor of death is detectable.

  “Ah, she’s gone,” Mud says.

  * When Rogue was making cheetahs He intended for them to have orifices that would release temporin, but in His careless fashion He settled for the easier solution of permanent lines.

  * An expression akin to “pulling the wool over somebody’s eyes”; hoodwinking.

  Chapter Fourteen

  By Date Bed’s twenty-third day in the vicinity of the huge acacia she has scratched fifty-three marks on her tusks (forty on the left, thirteen on the right) and made bargains with three martial eagles, three males. Two of the eagles showed up for the first time on the same day–day nineteen. The third arrived only this morning and has already returned twice.

  They are enthralled by the Thing, far more so than she could have wished. All three tried to negotiate unlimited daily looks, but that would have restricted the breadth of their search and she held firm to a single look every second day. They tell her that there are no humans or vehicles or other she-ones in their territories and she says, “Go beyond your territories.” If humans are headed her way, she wants to know. For a sighting, provided they bring back proof (dung or “skin”* or clutter from the humans; from the she-ones, dung or a message) they will be granted daily looks. Thereward for finding and delivering the white bone is the Thing itself.

  They perch either on a large boulder or on an abandoned termite mound, and while they study their reflections she holds the Thing and studies them. She can see, this close, how their pupils contract at certain sounds–other birds, and any noise from the dwarf mongooses whose den is in the mound. They have hooded, yellow eyes, empty of expression, and no emotion vents from their bodies, but how they feel is evident by how they stand. One keeps glancing around, and his wings are never still. One sways a little, he seems to swoon into what he sees. The third is transfixed except for his tongue, which flutters in his open bill. This one has a mob of black spots on his belly. The nervous one has hardly any spots, and his right foot turns slightly inwards.

  From inches away they are individuals. From more than a yard away they are identical in her dim eyes. It is by their scents that she initially identifies them. The transfixed one, the one she lured this morning, has the most revolting odour. Privately, she calls him Stench. The swooner smells like a stagnant swamp. She can hardly call him Swamp (although, like Swamp, he moves slowly, flying off on sluggish wings), so he is Swoon. The nervous one is Sour.

  She could probably attract more than three but she worries about a gang conspiring to steal the Thing. Five or si
x martial eagles against one sickly calf–she knows who’d win. And too many gazers might weaken the sharpness of the reflections. If speaking of the white bone by name reduces its powers, who’s to say that looking into the Thing won’t have a similar effect? She herself looks into it no more than twice a day and only ifshe is especially frightened or dispirited. She holds it up to her stronger left eye and addresses the eye in the formal timbre, saying, “What do you think?” and “Help,” saying, “Are you there?”

  She is careful to tuck the Thing under her belly whenever she lies down. While teetering through her dizzy spells she tries to keep it within the barricade of her legs, and she wedges it into a bole of the acacia before wandering away to drink or eat or send infrasonic rumbles. She has decided that the earth is almost certainly blocking infrasonic rumbles and yet she continues to send them anyway, two or three a day. Mostly, during the day, she keeps to the acacia’s dense shade.

  She works at retrieving her memory. Her method is to select a certain shadow memory and pluck from it every part she is certain of–the odour of cattle dung and bruised lilies, a cool dry southwesterly breeze and so on. She then dwells on the parts in turn and allows herself to fall into the other memories that the parts invoke. Sometimes, in the midst of one of these other memories–even if it, too, is incomplete–she recalls a lost fragment of the original shadow memory.

  It is a painstaking enterprise, and it won’t save her. While she is recapturing one fragment, a thousand others are escaping. To make the effort more worthwhile she tells herself that a recaptured piece of memory is equivalent to an hour of life. She tells herself (and this doesn’t seem arbitrary; this, she feels, stands to reason) that you never forget the things you alone witnessed. She means the things outside of yourself. But not a shadow or a tree or rock, because though you may have experienced any of these from a perspective peculiar to you alone, they have also been perceived by others … variousnotions of them exist regardless of you. Not a cry, either, or a clap of thunder or any sound that countless other creatures will have taken account of. Not even an ant climbing a rock, since the ant itself will have recorded a version of that small event. The fluttering of a new leaf is the kind of phenomenon she is thinking of. The dull snap of a wet twig in which no worm resides. At the end of a long life you forget everything except who you are. But who is that? What is left to you? When she had an impeccable memory and the prospect of a long life, she might have said that you are the measure of what your cow name has come to signify. She can imagine (although not recall) having thought something along those lines. Now her hunch is that you are the sum of those incidents only you can testify to, whose existence, without you, would have no earthly acknowledgement.

  She has stopped appealing to the She, but she gives thanks and she sings hymns for the pleasure of being able to. No lyric has yet abandoned her. Her singing brings the mongooses. They climb onto her, if she is reclining. If she is standing, they gather at her ankles and scuttle and hop, all of them except for the biggest female, who sits on the summit of the termite mound and scouts for predators. They tell her that the vibration of her singing voice temporarily relieves their skin irritations, but they enjoy the lyrics, too. Incredibly, they understand lyrics. Like other creatures with whom she mind talks, they find her thoughts comprehensible and her speech gibberish. Why they should understand sung words, she has no idea. Their explanation, sufficient for them, is that it is because the words are sung. Imparting any kind of general information, they tend to chorus out loud, everybody delivering roughly thesame phrase and starting and stopping at roughly the same moment. Their speech is a twittering in which words are repeated two and three times: “Sing, sing, sing the song, song about, the song about the hot, the hot, hot, hot fight, fight, fight.” (“Though Hot the Fight” is a hymn promoting faith in the face of insufferable hardship, but they think it glorifies territorial battles.)

  They and the martial eagles couldn’t express themselves more differently. Thinking and speaking, the eagles use as few words as possible. “There.” “How long?” They prefer to gesture. “Bad, bad, bad,” the mongooses initially growled at her for deliberately attracting an eagle (they are under the impression that all three eagles are the same one) but within a few days they were clasping her legs and twittering, “Sorry, sorry.” The eagles are so hungry to see themselves in the Thing that they ignore the mongooses, as Date Bed promised would be the case. And they fly away the instant the Thing is withdrawn. If any other large birds arrive with the object of hunting, Date Bed trumpets and thrashes her trunk and they fly off as well.

  The mongooses are dear to her. They are what she is not: quick, thriving, fierce, part of a family. Well after sunrise they emerge from their den. “Big, Big, Big, Big,” the twittering starts. “Big” is their name for both her kind and her individually. Usually she is lying down, and they climb on her and eat her ticks. They are excessively careful, moving as weightlessly as flies and skirting her infected burns. The worst burns cause them to peep sympathetically or screech in alarm. They like to strum their toes along the notches on her tusks where she marks the days. In the crook of her trunk an elderly male sitsgrooming himself and telling her the story of his life, which is one vicious territorial battle and one riotous mating session after another. He has no name, none of them do. Their name for themselves as a species is “flawless.” “This flawless” means I or me, “that flawless” means any other mongoose. Pronouns are used sparingly. “This flawless, this flawless,” the old male twitters, “mounted, mounted, mounted that flawless, that flawless, flawless, flawless one hundred, one hundred and nineteen, and, and nineteen times, times, times… .”

  Finally somebody jumps off to start digging for beetle larvae, and it seems to Date Bed that every morning the whole clan forgets why they came out of the den until one of them remembers and starts doing it, at which point they all leap to the ground and begin a manic search as if to compensate for lost time.

  Her own earnest feeding time begins at dusk, after the mongooses have retired. As soon as the last of them is in the termite mound she peels a narrow strip of bark from the acacia, having calculated that by restricting herself to a single short, thin strip per day she will be able to eat sweet bark forty days all together. For the rest of the night she consigns herself to the tasteless, disfigured scrub.

  The nights are quiet, and cold. But some nights are not so cold and this is when the fireflies rise from the ground. Thousands of them, flickering in perfect synchrony, a green nebular light in which, for an instant, the silhouette of the acacia erupts, and then blackness again. And then the light. Slow alternating pulses of light, black, light–as if the days are passing in a matter of seconds.

  Other nights she is overtaken by hallucinations.

  Her fabulous hallucinations, she welcomes them. The wonders she has seen! Corridors flanked by soaring slabs of rock upon whose smooth faces, ground to sky, rows of identical squares are aligned, the squares radiating a white light as if the rock impounds a sublime fire. A conical green tree bristling with short thorns and laden in what appear to be sparkling fruits or flowers of every shape and hue but are actually miniature antelopes, miniature humans (not living, and yet not rotten or ravaged), and the sky around suddenly darkens and the tree is swarming with tiny blue smokeless flames that don’t spread beyond themselves.

  Has anybody ever witnessed these sights, or even dreamed them? She has begun to think that they must be connected with the seeping of her memory. The lost memories of a creature from a place unknown and unimagined have drifted over the plain and found temporary refuge in the cavities created by her seepage. Her own memories … supposedly they linger outside herself until they evaporate, but if it is true that she shelters an exotic’s memories, then perhaps her memories have entered the body of some strange, doomed creature who, like her, is enthralled by the scenes unfolding in its mind.

  Not that the creature would be ceaselessly enthralled. It would be frightened by some of
its hallucinations, it would have to be. Terrified. Plenty of what Date Bed has forgotten is nothing she would ever willingly recall.

  On her twenty-fifth morning under the acacia her odour becomes stronger and muskier. Throughout the rest of the morning and early afternoon she falls into daydreams about Tall Time mounting her. Standing, she is inclined to sway her rump.

  Mid-afternoon Sour swoops down and drops before her feet a ball of fresh dung belonging to She-Slanders of the She-S’s-And-S’s.

  The She-S’s-And-S’s are her closest relations outside of her immediate family. She picks up the ball and the pieces that have fallen away from it, and he perches on the termite mound and says, “Show me.”

  “In a moment,” she thinks. Weeping, she wedges the dung into a crevice of the mound.

  He rocks from foot to foot, one eye on the Thing.

  “How many in the family?” she thinks.

  “Four.”

  “How many calves?”

  “Four cows.”

  “Ah,” she says, breathless with grief. Not a calf left. Her wound buzzes, and she presses it with the knuckle of her trunk. “How did the cows seem to you? Were any sickly?”

  “Bony.” He tips his head to look at her.

  “Did you speak with the mind talker?” Before the drought that would have been She-Scoffs.

  A jerk of the head to one side.

  “Why not?”

  “They have no mind talker.”

  No mind talker. How odd … another family who has become separated from its mind talker. “Where are they?”

  He looks southwest.

  “How long did it take you to get here?”

  He sweeps a wing at the sky, indicating the movement of the sun from mid morning to now.