Mud stands apart from the two cows, upwind to be out of scent. Bent doesn’t matter, he wouldn’t recognize the relief she vents. To give way to sorrow would be easy, but to be glad–for Drought’s sake as much as anyone’s–requires a tightening of the mind and breath and blood. When Bent comes up on his knees and suckles, she can’t quite believe that anything still flows out of her. She forages on roots and watches the vultures. If one of them should glance in herdirection, eyeing Bent, she is able to hear snatches of its gory thoughts, and against these she tests her invincibility. Eventually they begin to sicken her, and she is about to turn her back when one of a pair who is looking at Bent thinks, “Smells like the carcass beyond the blue hills,” and its neighbour thinks, “Sweeter.”
For a dizzying moment Mud perceives that carcass as they first did: at sunset from above. The purple scent cloud, the particulate clarity, the body in its tensed death pose, head thrown back. The flash of the tusks. That the tusks are there pierces her tempered heart. She goes to the cows and tells them.
“It’s Date Bed,” she says, and She-Snorts says placidly, “I thought I smelled something at those hills.”
“She is under a very large feast tree. I can’t imagine that we would fail to find her.”
“I suppose we could set off at dusk,” She-Snorts says.
“Why not now?” Mud says.
She-Snorts cocks her head.
“The sooner we get to her,” Mud says bluntly, “the more of her there will be to mourn.” She doesn’t add, although it is her foremost thought, that the sooner they get to the west of those hills the better their chances of finding the white bone.
“What about this one?” She-Soothes bellows. She touches her trunk to Drought.
The matriarch glances down, glances away. “Forever in oblivion,” she sings softly, “ ‘tis immortality,” and the three of them surround the corpse in the outward-facing mourning formation and sing all one hundred and three verses and then take a last drink and leave. Behind them, the vultures shriek. To Mud that sound is outrage and repossession, as if whatshould never have slipped into the world were being snatched back. Only Bent turns to look.
They hardly make a bee-line. Anything that captures the matriarch’s attention–an ostrich nest, a bit of blown fur–she wanders over to and sniffs. She stops at a teclea bush and breaks off a twig, holds it to her eye. “All the tiny furrows,” she murmurs, and She-Soothes seizes a stick and holds it to her eye and roars, “Look at them all!”
Once they are walking again, Mud moves up beside the nurse cow and mutters, “You had better take the lead.”
She-Soothes recoils.
“We haven’t even travelled a mile,” Mud says.
“She’s searching for the white–”
“Nothing she has picked up is white,” Mud snaps.
“You never know,” She-Soothes rumbles unhappily.
“I do,” Mud says. “I know.”
She-Soothes looks at her. “Has your head grown?” she asks.
The question brings Mud to a stop. “What nonsense,” she says as the implication dawns. She stomps away … and there goes the matriarch to investigate a wildebeest skeleton, so she stomps past her as well.
Her surprise when she hears the two cows falling in behind her soon stiffens to resentment. She has no illusions that she is the new matriarch. Being the one in front is simply another burden on her shoulders, and a danger, what’s more. She keeps an eye out for hyenas, also for termite mounds and boulders despite the unlikelihood of finding the white bone on this side of the hills. She urges a fast pace, which still must be torturously slow to accommodate Bent. Mid-afternoon the wind rises and dust crashes across the plain in swirling pillars and Bent drops to his knees, screaming he can’t, he can’t. She-Soothes charges over, but Mud already has her trunk between his hind legs.
“I’ve got him,” she says.
“You’re not strong enough!” the nurse cow roars.
“I’m not?” Mud rages and starts to shove the whimpering calf forward. “I’m not strong enough?”
Dimly she knows she isn’t. Her withered leg cramps, every breath scalds. She would leave her body behind, if she could. Like this ruined family and the newborn within her ribs, her body is what she lugs, out of no choice. She feels the pounding in her temples as her mind clamouring to escape, and she entertains the prospect that she really did inherit the cleverness that leaked out of She-Screams. She touches her head to feel whether it’s bigger. Hard to tell.
By sunset, with the wind down, Bent can walk on his own. Since the matriarch is no longer trying to detect Date Bed’s dung, the underscents are no longer a concern, and Mud decides that they should keep going until dawn. In the middle of the night a gang of hyenas attends them on all sides, and neither She-Soothes nor She-Snorts care. But Mud, annoyed at the hyenas’ presumption and thrilling at her own absence of fear, drives them off.
“Ten couldn’t bring down a she-one,” she crows to Bent.
“I know,” he says.
“Well,” she says, brusquely. Of course he knew, even Bent knew. “I didn’t.”
Dawn arrives, the sun climbs. Mud wants to press on until at least noon but the matriarch begins to stagger and she herself is limping badly and fighting the treacherous descent intomemories of Date Bed, treacherous for how they may unbrace her, and she calls a halt on the shore of a pan. That her head is indeed bigger seems confirmed when she is the first to excavate a water hole. After drinking and showering she lies apart from the cows, whose grief she finds stifling. Behind her a pair of plovers calls in that loud irritating way they have that is like two stones being knocked together, and she is on the verge of getting up and charging them when she feels her third eye opening.
It is a vision of the near future. Dawn. A smoky yellow light. Transecting hippo paths, all muck, tiny green leaves on the thorn bushes. Five hippos walk in a line. Their backs bristle with oxpeckers. The screech of queleas, thousands of them … and here they are, rising from a swamp as if sucked by a funnel of wind. In the air they form a square mat that shifts this way, that way. The hippos arrive at the swamp. Sighing, they slip into the papyrus. The crocodiles sink down. The separate cries of the queleas attenuate to a single, rapidly fading creak. Mud doesn’t recognize this place. She doesn’t recognize the voice. “I envisioned the lilies,” it says and sounds like a bull calf but can’t be, bulls don’t have visions. It is, though. A little bull calf. Outlandishly long tusks, small ears. With the certainty visions provide, she knows that he is a Lost One. Behind him are two big cows of her kind and behind them is a newborn whose tail is in the grip of its mother’s trunk. The cows are strangers to Mud. Her eye lifts and sweeps over more of them–cows, calves, newborns. From this height they are like stepping stones. The plain glints with the green of new grass. On her eye goes, along a road pocked with water pools, off the road to a resting vehicle. Perched in the vehicle’s back cavity is a human. It stares toward the swamp. If humans feel emotions she would say that this one feels amusement. When its head turns in her direction, her third eye closes.
She comes to her feet. “Let’s go,” she says.
“Where?” Bent says.
To The Safe Place … but the words don’t reach her mouth. Where? she thinks.
“What’s the matter?” Bent says.
“Quiet. It’s all right. I had a vision.”
“Oh.” He goes still and reverent.
“I don’t know the way,” she says miserably.
“Was it a bad vision?”
She glances down. What a doomed little creature he seems. “No,” she says. “It had rained.”
“Here?”
“There.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
She sleeps standing. When she awakens it is late afternoon, and She-Snorts has moved onto the pan and is scenting to the south. Mud sees the approaching shape and the shadow streaking eastward. “Me-Me!” she exclaims
.
The matriarch starts walking back. “I was dreaming about her,” she says in wonderment, vaguely mystified.
“Bent!” The nurse cow is scrambling to her feet. Bent rushes to her. “Be off!” she trumpets over the plain.
“Are you mad?” Mud cries.
“She-Soothes wants to charge!” the nurse cow roars.
Mud slaps the bigger cow, who rears back, stunned. “Youlisten to me,” Mud rages. “I have envisioned The Safe Place and she is going to take us there.”
She-Soothes gapes down at her.
“I will warn her to stay away from Bent,” Mud says.
“She is lame,” the matriarch observes mildly.
Mud whirls around to see. So she is: a buckling of the right foreleg, the result, no doubt, of being kicked by She-Screams. About fifteen yards away she stops and sits. Mud casts a warning glare at the nurse cow and starts forward. The cheetah rises. “I won’t hurt you,” Mud thinks.
Me-Me dangles her foreleg reproachfully.
“Yes,” Mud thinks. “That’s a shame.”
“Where is the one with the warts?” Although she chirps, in Mud’s mind her voice is a peevish sing-song.
“She died,” Mud thinks.
“The bull calf is Me-Me’s.” She twitches her small head, seeking out Bent.
“He is not. He never was. The one with the warts had no right to offer him.”
“That one gave birth.” Staring now at She-Snorts.
“Yesterday. A stillborn.”
Her tail slaps the ground. She looks toward Mud’s hind legs. “You haven’t given birth.”
“Not yet.”
“It’s Me-Me’s.”
Mud’s belly seizes. “That’s the bargain,” she says.
Me-Me gazes west. In her orange eyes are suns. “Me-Me knows where to go,” she says gloatingly but not dishonestly. For the first time Mud appreciates that a claim made in the mind cannot be false. All she hears of cunning is that until the newborn is born the route will be indirect to prevent them from guessing it.
“You’ll lead us there,” Mud thinks, “whether my newborn drops before we arrive or after.”
“This way,” the cheetah says, turning east.
“No, this way,” Mud thinks reluctantly. She nods toward the southwest. “First we must mourn one of our dead.”
“What’s done is done,” Mud thinks.
They encircle and fondle the carcass, stinking and eyeless though it is, smeared with vulture dung and gouted with flies and spilling over with maggots though it is. Behind them, Me Me dozes at the termite mound into which, when they arrived, a horde of mongooses fled.
The tusks have almost fallen out of their sockets. The narrow skull is unrecognizable under its rag of skin. “Afloat upon The Eternal Shoreless Water,” the nurse cow said when they arrived, and Mud’s throat clenched. Poor Date Bed, dying too young to ascend to the family of the She. Mud would have wept had She-Soothes not burst out with, “What’s done is done!” and despite all the times she has bellowed it and the inevitability of her bellowing it now, Mud was struck as if by a transcendent, authorizing truth. “So it is,” she said, seeing the nurse cow in an elevated light.
“What’s done is done. What’s done is done.” Chanting this to herself, Mud wards off memory and therefore grief. It is so simple. The matriarch turns her back to the corpse and starts up a hymn. Mud turns and plants her eyes and trunkon Me-Me, who is their salvation. And whose facile heartlessness Mud suddenly envies. By what misguided arrangement were she-ones made swollen with memory rather than sleek with appetite?
It is dusk when they finish mourning. They browse and drink and then lie close enough to Date Bed to protect what’s left of her from predators. Now that Me-Me is back, Bent has resumed sleeping next to his mother, and She-Soothes has instructed him to wake her if he wants to go to Mud and suckle. As for Me-Me, she hasn’t budged from the termite mound. That the mongooses are trapped is Mud’s last thought before she drops into her first sleep in two days.
A fierce belly cramp wakes her several hours later. She comes to her feet–disturbing only Me-Me, who looks around with shining eyes–and walks to the nearest thorn bush. The stones still hold the heat of the day. The crickets circumscribe the darkness. She suspects she has entered labour but isn’t certain until she urinates. It is not only the unmistakable odour that tells her, it is the great volume. Me-Me slinks forward.
“Stay away,” Mud thinks.
“It’s Me-Me’s.”
“I’m in pain. I could hurt you without intending to.”
“You could kick Me-Me.” Self-pityingly.
“Go on!” She tosses her head and Me-Me scuttles to the mound. The cramp eases. She lies on her side but another cramp twists through her abdomen, and she hauls herself up to a squat and begins to dribble urine.
“I thought it would be tonight,” says the voice of the matriarch. She awakens the nurse cow, and the two of them and Bent come closer.
She-Soothes tastes the urine. “Clear!” she announces happily.
“Clear,” the matriarch echoes, wistful.
Mud straightens. Teeters. She recalls how in the moments after she was born, her mother teetered, and she plunges deeply into that memory and emerges from it sobbing, to her alarm. Both cows prod their trunks at her mouth. She pulls away. Her urine tasting clear is not happy news. A live newborn will be so much harder to surrender, and yet this witless pair obviously hopes for a live one and she realizes that they may try to thwart the bargain with Me-Me. “Go back to sleep,” she says as a stupendous pain brings her up on her toes, and she falls against She-Soothes and loses consciousness.
Opening her eyes, she finds herself supported between the two cows. “Why won’t it drop?” she wails.
“Kneel,” the matriarch says, and she and the nurse cow help lower her. “Strain,” the matriarch says. Mud strains. The matriarch strokes her rump. The nurse cow strokes her vulva.
“It’s not time,” the nurse cow rumbles. “Lie down, She-Spurns.”
Mud lies down. The two cows soar above her, irresistible, suffocating. Under the nurse cow’s belly Bent hunkers. Me-Me paces at the termite mound. The shine of her eyes shafts through to Mud’s belly, to the newborn, piercing it. She-Snorts steps to one side, and now the precise distance between her legs and She-Soothes’ legs draws Mud into another birth memory of looking through those other legs that, during her entrapment, were the bearings of the known world.
Again she sobs. It doesn’t matter. Like a calf she sucks at the matriarch’s trunk. She sleeps. Sleeps for hours, it turns out. When a cramp wakes her, the darkness is lifting but the cowshave not moved. The cramp heaves her to her feet. The cows assist her as she sinks back to the ground. Another cramp, and she is helped up by She-Soothes, whose eye plug drops out and is stepped on by She-Snorts. The matriarch raises her foot. “Leave it be!” She-Soothes bellows. “She-Soothes doesn’t care!” Down comes the foot. Down from the eye socket comes a dreadful stench. Mud vomits. She-Soothes kicks dirt over the gleaming pool. Mud strains and feels her entire birth canal disgorging and sees a blue shimmer she thinks is escort to the agony.
“Lightning,” the matriarch says.
“Here she comes!” She-Soothes bellows.
The force of the expulsion propels Mud onto her rump. Frantic, she scrambles to her feet.
There it is. Alive. Running in slow motion. Female, as predicted. Mud smells the head, which is still encased in the foetal sac. She pulls the sac free and steps aside.
“That was a bolt of lightning,” the matriarch says, looking off.
“Name her Bolt!” the nurse cow trumpets. She nudges the tiny thing with one foot.
“Bolt,” Mud whispers.
“She shall be Bolt!” the nurse cow trumpets.
Mud is aware of the cheetah creeping toward them and yet somehow can’t determine the peril, or who presents it. When Me-Me gets too close, the nurse cow roars and the cheetah runs back to the mound. “Do
n’t look at her,” Mud tells herself, as if not hearing Me-Me’s mind is the solution.
From Bolt’s mind come faint peeps. She is trying to stand. Finally she does and locates the nipple, and then Mud hears a humming, which must be pleasure although Mud suspects it is also the sound of another kind of satisfaction: that of having an urgent notion confirmed. But from where in that memoryless body could a notion have arisen?
The matriarch points east. “Look,” she says. Along the dawn horizon is a range of pink clouds.
“Jubilation!” the nurse cow trumpets.
“Jubilation,” the matriarch says thoughtfully. She and She-Soothes and Bent walk about twenty yards onto the plain. In this burnt light, from Mud’s vantage point, their thinness is accentuated and yet they seem not diminished but refined to a more intricate and essential anatomy. Behind Mud, the cheetah creeps closer. There is no sound, there is only the thickening of her nauseating stench. It is all Mud can do not to fall into a birth memory of the hyena. “I could lie down,” she thought that night, and she thinks it now, the impossible decision being, should she lie beside her newborn or on top of her? She looks over her shoulder.
Me-Me is not three yards away. “Tell them it’s Me-Me’s,” she is thinking.
Mud thinks nothing.
“You are the leader.”
“I’m not.”
“Me-Me knows where to go.”
“The Safe Place,” Mud thinks stupidly. The cleverness she inherited from She-Screams has deserted her.
“Walk over there.” Me-Me points to the termite mound.
“No.”
“It’s Me-Me’s. It’s Me-Me’s.”
As if won over by such conviction, Bolt starts toddling toward the cheetah. Twice she falls but gets herself back up and keeps going. She is crumpled, tiny, hairy and, to Mud’s eyes, alien, belonging to nobody. Nothing could be more inevitable than her woebegone little journey. Me-Me creeps closer. She is reaching out one paw when the matriarch’s foot catches her under the chin and stretches her up on her hind feet. Bolt rushes back to Mud. The second kick gets the cheetah in the ribs. The third, in the side of the skull, throws her limply against the tree. Immediately the vultures hop down to the lower branches.
The White Bone Page 27
