The White Bone

by Barbara Gowdy

  “Did you fly fast?”

  He flaps his wings, as if to demonstrate. “Show me,” he says.

  She forces him to wait a little longer. She wants to know exactly where the She-S’s-And-S’s are, in what kind of place. In a riverbed, he says, among trees. Standing trees? A nod. What breed? Yellow bark. How many? Many.

  She decides to make the journey. She can’t imagine anybody quitting fever-tree browse in a hurry. A distance that took him five hours to fly, with the wind at his back, will take her three full nights to walk, at least that. She will set off at dusk. Maintaining a straight course will not be as easy for her as it is for him and she asks for geographical markers, although she risks either forgetting them or not seeing them. Another bargain is struck: in exchange for two more daily glimpses of himself, he will track her and correct any deviations. Tomorrow while she rests, just in case the She-S’s-And-S’s do decide to move elsewhere, he will fly ahead to confirm their location.

  So much promised work earns him a lengthy look at himself. When he finally soars away, Stench shows up for his look, and by the time he leaves there are only a few hours to go before dusk. She covers herself in water and dirt and begins to forage. Apparently there is a baobab a third of the way to the riverbed. If she maintains a brisk pace, she should be feeding from that tree by sunrise. There is, moreover, a range of hills east of here, close enough that Sour was surprised when she admitted she couldn’t see them. All this time, then, shehas been in a vicinity where the white bone is likely to be dropped, even though Sour said that on this side of the hills he has come across no circular formations of termite mounds or boulders. Still, as she walks she will keep an eye out.

  The mongooses return and she tells them that she is leaving for at least six days, perhaps longer, perhaps forever, and they clasp her legs and each other and screech, “Danger! Danger! Danger! Peril! Peril! Danger! Danger!” Over the din she tries to reassure them: the eagles have reported that the land is almost free of carnivores and, anyway, a rumour is afoot that she is inedible, poisonous. She swings the Thing and skims a beam of light over the ground and tells them of how the beam scared off the lionesses. They hiss and bristle. They themselves are frightened of the Thing. “Sing, sing, sing, sing,” they twitter, and she gives them a few verses of “Oft in Danger, Oft in Woe.” Soothed, they start disappearing into their den, the last of them, a muscular female, lingering long enough to twitter, “Big’s, Big’s scent, Big’s scent, scent is, is, is different, is different, different.”

  It is true, then. All day she has been telling herself that her symptoms aren’t really there, that her ungovernable mind has taken it upon itself to delude her. She is too sickly to enter her inaugural oestrus. Too small, too skeletal. She picks up the Thing and looks at her good left eye. “But Tall Time is gone,” she says, and tears distort her reflection. She takes it for granted that if she really is in oestrus, then staring at her spirit twin explains how her body gathered the strength to bring the oestrus on. Why, though? Why go into oestrus? Tall Time died at the big water hole, and even if she wanted the attentions of another bull, there aren’t any close enough to smell her, muchless hear her calling. Thinking of Tall Time as he was when he mounted Mud, she begins to rumble “zeal,” that lascivious babble she had assumed, before now, was voluntary.

  She walks in circles, rumbling, and so transported that she loses all sense of where she is until swatted in the face by a light. She stops and squints around and spies a big bird flying low over the plain, weighted down by what he carries.

  The lingering scent is Sour’s. “You have cursed yourself!” she thinks to the dissolving blur of him. He keeps flying. She trumpets, and the mongooses re-emerge. Learning what has happened, they hiss, “These flawlesses, these flawlesses will, will rip, rip the stinkard’s, the stinkard’s wings, wings, wings off, off, claw, claw the stinkard’s, the stinkard’s guts, the stinkard’s guts, guts, guts out, out,” and she is touched and pretends to believe that they will stand by their threats and makes them promise not to do anything rash.

  Once they are back in the den she takes a long drink. She can’t not go. After hours of imagining what it would be like to touch and smell the She-S-And-S cows, the thought of staying is intolerable. She determines precisely where southwest is and sets off, chanting the directions rhythmically, and then working them into rhymes, adding a melody.

  Southwest.

  A burn to my left.

  Dry pond bed, next comes

  A passable cleft.

  Rogue’s web.

  Along my right flank.

  Bad trees, a streambed,

  With stones on the bank.

  So far the trick has worked. Here is the streambed, here is the stony bank, here she is alive and unmolested. But feeling the absence of the Thing more severely by the hour. The Thing steadied her. Without it she is anxious. The reek of lionesses clings to these stones. Could she defend herself? She is far weaker than she had counted on, having lost the habit of walking, and being driven, during voluptuous states of mind, to strut and to peer coquettishly over her shoulder.

  She digs three holes that come up dry. Not wanting to waste any more time, she points herself southwest (verifying her position by the moon and the prevailing west wind, now fallen to a light breeze) and starts walking.

  Rock path.

  A straight narrow burn.

  Fissured brown earth past

  A stink tree upturned… .

  She reaches the baobab after sunrise. It is so thoroughly gutted she wonders how it can still be standing–her last thought before she falls asleep on her feet. When she opens her eyes the sun is past its meridian. She kicks loose a mound of dirt, throws it over her back. Aside from the tree’s smell, the odours here are thin: jackals, and a cobra, but they are old smells. She sniffs for a source of water and in the endexcavates enough tubers to slake her thirst and allow her to eat the bit of pulp she is able to prise from the baobab’s cavity. She finds a sharp stone and chisels a mark into her tusk. Day fifty-six.

  She sleeps again and awakens into darkness. How many hours has she lost? At least five. Anxious, staggering, she hurries away. “Thorn scrub,” she sings, “all trampled and ruined, a raised path, a pan, egg-shaped… .”

  Then what? Something that rhymes with “ruined.” Nothing does. But here, underfoot, is the thorn scrub, trampled and ruined. “A pan, egg-shaped… .”

  It’s no good. The rest of that verse is lost. “Southwest,” she tells herself. That’s all she needs to know. Southwest.

  The other verses are similarly butchered. She sings what she can remember and hums what she can’t. She fights the fall into hallucinations and memories. Alertness is essential. Somewhere in this vicinity there are human dwellings: “… hindlegger nests on a circular ridge… .”

  Midway through in the night her right hind leg develops a wobble. It may be from the strain of all that carnal hip-swaying, but it’s possible she has been bitten by a snake and, if so, she needs sausage-tree fruit or palm fruit, the antidotes. A little farther on, as she is threading through a colony of termite mounds, she hears a snort. Terrified, she stops and scents. It is a giraffe. Two giraffes, a female and a calf. “Masters!” she thinks joyfully. They will tell her where she is, where water is! She moves blindly toward them. They gallop off. Through the pall of dust she smells palm hearts. But it is a memory of smell.

  The madness starts there. For the next three days she is lost in memories. They aren’t even shadow memories, they are amixture of the remaining fragments, a corrupt redisposition. She is wading in a pond and surely it should be Mud who is with her, not Swamp, and Swamp says something that was said, yes, but never by him. A helpless part of her knows.

  When she emerges into the present–and she does, briefly, every few hours–she discovers that she is otherwise behaving rationally. Lying in the shade. Drinking. While her mind was looping through its shambles she must have sniffed out water and dug a hole! She wonders if her practical
mind operates more cunningly when she is unaware of it. She has obviously decided she should return to the acacia. Every time she finds herself on the move, she is labouring along (no longer strutting, her oestrus has passed) in a northeasterly direction.

  On the second night, there she is having an apparently cordial conversation with five wild dogs.

  “Or is it only yourself?” a big male is asking.

  She blinks at him, trying to imagine the question and finally answering, “Not only myself,” because of safety in numbers.

  He backs away. “The smell is evil,” he growls, and she guesses that he is referring to her leg and that his question concerned the rumour that she is poisonous.

  On her right hind shin is a putrid sore. If she was, after all, bitten by a snake, no snake she has ever heard of would leave such a mark and provoke the kind of derangement she is suffering. She tells herself that once she is back at the tree she will start to heal. She is not without hope that Sour will feel cursed by his thievery and return the Thing and she will be able to look into her eye again and locate her sanity.

  She is lying under the acacia, breathing in its ancient, elaborate odour, and the mongooses are scuttling up and down her body and twittering, “Reek, reek, reek.”

  She touches her trunk to the ones she can reach, their quivering little bodies, and in the bliss of being among them again she urinates and streams temporin, and the mongooses near her skull dab at the exudant and twitter, “Sticky, sticky.”

  “Flow-stick bite,” she thinks to explain the foul smell, and they growl and spit and say how, if they’d been there, they’d have “chewed, chewed the, the stinkard’s, stinkard’s, stinkard’s head, head, head” and beaten the stinkard against a rock and so on.

  “How long was I away?” she asks.

  “Four, four, four days, days, four days.”

  “Get off me now,” she thinks, all of a sudden conscious of her enormous thirst.

  In the riverbed she digs a water hole at a spot they recommend. As she waits for the hole to fill, and then as she drinks, they are strangely quiet. It isn’t until she begins to shower that they chorus that yesterday a lone female cheetah showed up and ate two of their young (“that new flawless and that new flawless”). Date Bed staggers and they dash away from her feet. She can’t believe how hideous she feels, as if the infants belonged to her own family. She begins to weep. The mongooses don’t. They become enraged, remembering. They slam their hips into each other and describe how they lunged at the cheetah and tried to bite her. They perform a re-enactment, finishing with a chorus of “Killed! Killed! Killed!” and then they abruptly calm down and advise her to feed herself. Still weeping, she dislodges a length of bark from the acacia. Whileshe eats they tell her that on the morning after her departure, the martial eagle (they continue to believe there is only the one) returned many times and perched on the termite mound. Did he have the Thing? she asks. “No, no, no, no!” they screech, alarmed because of their fear of it, but then they swear that had they seen it they would have retrieved it for her by “biting, biting, biting the, the, the stinkard’s, the stinkard’s wings, wings” and various other tactics.

  She falls into memories.

  When she resurfaces, the sun is overhead. She is on her feet, and the mongooses forage nearby. Squinting, she discerns them scurrying beneath the scrub. Everything shimmers in the heat. No wind, the insects sending out their long lines of sound. She chews bark. She is light-headed, but the stench of her shin wound has diluted and for that she credits the bark. She sings a hymn of thanksgiving: “Blessed be the trees we uproot at our will,” and the mongooses come trotting back and are assembling around her ankles when one of them, the lookout, screams, “Wings!” and they all race to the termite mound.

  Date Bed cocks her head at the sky. The bird must still be way up there. Or perhaps it is an airplane, she can hear an airplane’s roar. She closes her eyes to scent hard, and something drops on the ground behind her.

  She turns. Even from this distance, even though dust shrouds it, she sees the sheen, and it is not a light. It is not the Thing.

  The mongooses are already there, twittering, “White! White! White!”

  She picks it up. It smells faintly of Sour and nothing else. She holds it to her eye.

  “Whose, whose is, is, is that bone, that bone, bone, bone?”

  She fondles and tastes it. She weeps. The mongooses scream and throw themselves up in the air and against her legs. “Whose, whose is, is that, that, that bone, bone?”

  “The white bone,” she says out loud. They don’t understand and keep screaming. “It is a newborn’s rib,” she finally thinks. “From one of my kind. It is magical.” She curls it under her chin, twists her head around, then jerks forward, flinging her trunk open.

  Its landing is obscured by dust. She hurries to it and in sudden exhaustion lowers herself to her knees. The tapered end points southeast. “That way!” she says, amazed, but any direction would have amazed her. The mongooses hop and twitter, wanting to know what she’s doing. She gets herself standing, and the mongooses spring from her feet as she toddles through a dizzy spell. When her head has cleared she picks up the bone and throws it a second time and staggers over to the sprouting of dust. Southeast.

  She cherishes the bone against her throat. “Goodbye,” she thinks ecstatically to the mongooses, and starts walking off. “Danger! Danger! Peril! Peril! Peril!” they scream. Their voices and the heat and her breathlessness and all the places on her body that hurt drift out into the passing landscape, no concern of hers. Even as she falls, she believes herself to be walking, and on either side of her the brutal plain slides by.

  She is lying under the tree. In the strong breeze the weaver-bird nests sway and disassemble and bits of yellow grass flockdown. Behind her the mongooses forage. She cannot move her legs or her torso, but at the same time every part of her twitches in agony. She waves her trunk across the ground. Lifts her head and squints about, drops her head back down. If the white bone is anywhere nearby, she can’t see it.

  She thinks, “I am dying.”

  The acacia smells unusually strong. “Tree,” she thinks in a kind of last inventory. “Dung,” she thinks, “wound, poison,” each of these scents seeming to burst up, to offer itself as a phenomenon no less sublime and yearned for than the white bone itself. She arches her neck and squints toward the plain. “Dust,” she thinks, “bush,” and as her vision closes into herself–"stone, dirt, me, Date Bed.”

  She can’t remember (perhaps she never knew) but she suspects that you don’t become a sky cow unless you have been designated a She. Twisting her head so that she is looking at the sun, she says, “From this day forward and forevermore, Date Bed shall be She-Soothes-And-Soothes.”

  Nothing happens. There is no change in the strength of the breeze, no branch falls from the tree. The big cows would now say, “The She approves.”

  Date Bed says, “So be it,” and closes her eyes.

  * Clothing

  Chapter Fifteen

  Only hours after promising I-Flounder that he will be able to lead the We-F’s to the spot where the white bone was thrown, Tall Time is forced to confess that he has never been anywhere near that region. By now he has fallen into a memory of the blue hills he saw, just once, ten years earlier; he has studied their profile and compared them to the profile of the hills in his vision, and even making allowances for perspective and distance, there is no pretending they are the same range.

  “We shall find them” is I-Flounder’s response.

  “How?”

  “From your descriptions of the landscape it was immediately apparent to us where they were.”

  He is dumbfounded. Humiliated. “Where?”

  “Our method of calibrating location would not be comprehensible to you.”

  “I’d be interested in hearing it, all the same.”

  “You are ashamed,” she says crisply. “Don’t be. You cannot be expected to know what is beyond yo
ur capacity to know.”

  Once the trek is under way, his shame is not so crushing. The Lost Ones outmatch him when it comes to scenting water and hazards and moving rapidly through the darkness, which they do grasping tails and thundering song, rods of green light sweeping from their eyes like celestial antennae. But all of them except for the melancholy Sink Hole are jittery, too easily alarmed. At the smell of lions they run. At the sound of aircraft they stop dead. They don’t have his endurance either, or his tolerance for heat. Most of the day, under a coating of sand, he sleeps. Not them. Almost buried in sand they pant and burn and drift in and out of visions, none of which they tell. At the end of the second day the skin of the calves is so severely blistered that I-Flounder makes the decision to return to the cave and await the rains. Without consulting him, it is decided that Sink Hole, whose skin remained relatively unscorched, will remain behind as his guide and his charge. Once the two of them arrive at the blue hills, Tall Time will retrace the route revealed to him in his vision and Sink Hole will “correct any blunders.”

  “Between the two of you,” I-Flounder says, “there is but the one tracker.”

  A tracker who, it turns out, is every bit as masterful as I-Flounder herself. He steers the course away from ominous scents and sounds, if there is browse he finds it. More than I-Flounder appeared to, he takes account of omens and signs. Should Tall Time mention what a feature of the terrain signifies according to his prognosticators–and out of some despairing urge to instruct, he often does–Sink Hole snorts or ignores him, which wounds Tall Time only a little. Let Sink Hole snort at the old lore, it’s not as if Tall Time hasn’t. Forthe record (Tall Time can’t help keeping one) both varieties of signs have so far been accurate. Proof of nothing. Proof of coincidence.

  They travel, the pair of them, with Sink Hole out front, silent and not singing. There is no hint that Tall Time should hold the bull calf’s tail. As soon as they were alone together Tall Time awaited the twitch that would say, “Grasp.” He felt obliged in those first moments to make conversation: “Just you and I, a bachelor herd of two.” “When I first set off on my own, I was scarcely ten years old, which is younger than you are, I’ll warrant.” Sink Hole moved father away from him. Now when they are on the move Tall Time talks under his breath. Occasionally he sings … hymns, prayers for Mud’s safety and songs about being astonished–"Well, I’ll Be!” or “Incredible, Inedible.” Here he is, trotting blindly behind a calf he hardly knows, who himself blindly obeys what can hardly be known, since the omens are infinite and contradictory. The calf turns, Tall Time turns. The calf stops, Tall Time stops.