The White Bone

by Barbara Gowdy

  “You killed Me-Me,” says Bent. He gapes at the matriarch, at her murderous foot.

  “Good riddance,” the nurse cow growls, but she, too, is astounded.

  She-Snorts strolls to the tree and picks up bits of straw that have fallen from the weaver bird’s nest and scatters these on the cheetah. She goes to where Mud and Bolt are and inserts her trunk into the newborn’s mouth. “You’d have done the same to save mine,” she says as if Mud had thanked her. Her voice is impassive, but temporin slides down her face and her odour of wrath still fumes.

  Mud begins to sob. “Date Bed,” she says, this beloved name a requiem for every loss of her life, from her birth mother to her birth name to Date Bed to the brief, dream-like loss of herself. Bolt screams to nurse, and Mud nuzzles her and is suddenly terror-stricken and thrashes her head around, searching for the perils that could be anywhere.

  “Stop that,” She-Snorts says quietly. She pulls on Mud’s trunk, and after a moment Mud goes still.

  “Lift your leg,” the nurse cow says.

  Mud does. Almost immediately Bolt finds the nipple, and Bent rushes over and latches onto Mud’s other breast, and the two calves root her to the spot so that although she sways she doesn’t fall.

  And now, from out of the termite mound, the mongooses emerge. There are dozens of them. They growl and hiss. They gallop over to the cheetah. Some lunge at her and some bounce on the spot, spectacular leaps as high as Bent. All at once they stop and sit on their haunches and regard their audience.

  “Big, Big, Big, Big,” Mud hears from their minds. She rubs her eyes with the knuckle of her trunk. “What is big?” she thinks.

  A swivelling of every head in her direction. “Big, Big, Big killed, killed, killed the, the stinker, killed the stinker,” they twitter out loud. They look from Mud to She-Soothes to She-Snorts, back to Mud.

  “Ask them if they mind talked with Date Bed,” the matriarch rumbles.

  There go the heads, all turning to her now. “Sing, sing, sing the song, song about, the song about the hot, the hot, hot, hot fight, fight, fight,” they twitter.

  “Did the dead she-one sing?” Mud thinks, and they start screeching and jumping and falling on their backs.

  “What’s the matter with them?” the nurse cow bellows.

  “I don’t know,” Mud says. She can’t decipher the screeches. She pulls away from the calves and walks toward the mongooses, who suddenly sit up on their haunches. She points at Date Bed. “We came to mourn her.”

  “Dead! Dead! Dead!” the mongooses twitter with great distress.

  “Do they know how she died?” the matriarch asks. Her voice is steady.

  “Poison, poison bite, bite, poison bite,” the mongooses twitter, as if they heard.

  “She was struck by a flow stick,” Mud tells the cows and begins again to weep. Her birth mother and Date Bed both killed by snakes. For the third time that day she falls into her birth memory, and when she comes out of it the mongooses are gathered around her feet, twittering urgently about the white bone.

  “That, that way, way!” They gesture and leap toward the southeast. “That way! That way!”

  The pace is slow and not only because of the calves. As always happens before the rains, spears of grass have pushed through the earth, still too fine and short to be properly grazed, but for the bliss of tasting green they walk pecking like birds.

  On the second day the matriarch discovers a clod of Tall Time’s dung. It is, she judges, fourteen to sixteen days old.

  “He may have taken this same route!” the nurse cow trumpets.

  “Perhaps,” She-Snorts says.

  Who they will meet at The Safe Place consumes the two big cows. Torrent, certainly–She-Snorts has no doubt that he’ll have found his way. Swamp and Hail Stones … if they linked up with Torrent or another master tracker, there is a chance that they’ll have made it. And Tall Time. Barring disaster, they can’t imagine why the Link Bull wouldn’t be there.

  Mud doesn’t tell them about her vision, in which she recognized nobody. She saw, after all, only a small corner of The Safe Place and hardly anyone up close. Neither does she speculate. She nurses her calf, and Bent. She plucks the new grass. She does things delicately, out of contrition and because she is weak with love. At least once an hour she falls into a memory and sometimes, coming out of it, she mistakes the smell of Bolt for whomever the memory featured. Bolt is Date Bed, or Hail Stones. Bolt is Tall Time in musth.

  Bolt walks under her, She-Snorts in front of her, She-Soothes and Bent follow. Before them are the blue hills, and directly overhead white wads of cloud speed by, going the other way. If you look back, as Mud keeps doing, you can see the dust raised by their passage rolling out as far as the horizon, and the entire plain washed in light.

  Glossary

  All-throat Gerenuk (it has a long neck)

  Away vision A vision of a distant place in the present moment

  Bad tree Euphorbia candelabrum tree (its latex is toxic)

  Big fly Ostrich

  Big grass Bamboo

  Bluff odour A scent disposed to coating itself with whatever other frail and agreeable scents are in the vicinity

  Burr fly Flappet lark (it produces a high brrrr, brrrr, brrrr, brrrr sound during its mating display)

  Carrion plant A foul-smelling parasitic plant found growing on the roots of acacias

  Creaker Cricket

  Delirium Oestrus

  Descent The advent of human beings

  Domain Planet Earth

  Drought fruit The dung of other creatures (crude)

  Early milk The milk secreted by a cow just before she gives birth

  Endless song A song exceeding five hundred verses

  Eternal Shoreless Water Oblivion; the place where the spirits of deceased bulls, calves and tuskless cows go

  Feast tree Acacia tortilis tree (its bark, buds and flowers are all edible and delicious)

  Fine scenter Anybody who possesses exceptional scenting ability (usually only one per family unit)

  Fire charing A place where humans smoke the flesh of their kills

  Fissure The place of perdition under the Earth where deceased human beings go

  Flesh-eater Carnivore

  Flow-stick Snake

  Fly Bird

  Fruits Testicles (crude)

  Formal timbre A respectful form of address characterized by exaggerated enunciation

  Ghastly Rhinoceros, black or white (it has short unsightly legs, and its "tusks," or horns, are arranged one on top of the other rather than side by side)

  Green Musth

  Grounder Infrasonic call

  Grouping A method of rapidly calculating the passage of time (a group is roughly equivalent to a month) invented by Date Bed

  Grunt Warthog

  Hack Chain saw

  Head drool Temporin

  Heat deep Heat stroke

  Hide-browser Oxpecker

  Hindlegger Human being

  Hind-trunk Penis (crude)

  Honker Goose

  Howler Jackal

  Hump Termite mound

  Jaw-hg Crocodile

  Kick fly Secretary bird (it kicks out backwards as it walks)

  Later vision A vision of the future

  Links Omens, signs and superstitions

  Little smoke Cigarette smoke

  Longbody Cheetah

  Long Rains Massive Gathering Annual congregation of elephants

  Lunatic Wildebeest (it is noisy, chaotic and prone to unpredictable fits of springing and bucking)

  Master tracker Anybody who possesses exceptional tracking ability

  Memory night A particularly starry night

  Mind talker A telepathic cow or cow calf

  Mock head drool The black lines on a cheetah’s face

  Musth An annual period of heightened sexual and aggressive activity among bulls lasting anywhere from three days to four months (during this time the penis turns green and dribbles urine)
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  Other Domain The place where the spirits of all deceased creatures except for human beings and elephants go

  Peak-headed sex Cows, who have an almost triangular forehead in profile (the forehead of a bull is more rounded)

  Radiance Those few hours during oestrus when a cow is most fertile

  Ribs Zebra (in an earlier incarnation its skeleton covered its flesh)

  Roar fly Helicopter or airplane

  Rogue Son of the She; creator of all creatures except human beings and elephants

  Rogue’s night A night when the moon is full

  Rogue’s web Wire fence

  Shadow memory An imperfect memory (similar to a human memory)

  The She The first elephant and the mother of all elephants

  The She-eye Sun

  She-he Spotted hyena (both sexes appear to have male genitalia)

  She-ones Elephants of either sex (comparable to "mankind")

  Skin Paint on vehicles

  Sky-diver Eagle or hawk

  Slider Vehicle, specifically truck or jeep

  Small time High noon (shadows are short)

  Speck Insect

  Spike weed Castor oil plant (it has spiky flowers)

  Sting Bullet

  Stink tree Sausage tree (its flowers smell unpleasant)

  Strong tusk The favoured tusk (one tusk is always favoured over another, in the same way that people are either right- or left-handed)

  Tail grass Papyrus

  Tall time Dawn or dusk (shadows are long)

  Temporin A viscous secretion that oozes from a gland behind the eye during states of excitation

  Third eye Visionary capacity (metaphoric)

  Trunk Soulfulness; depth of spirit

  Trunk-neck Vulture, most species (it is believed that sections of a dead elephant’s trunk, when incubated by a vulture, become the necks from which the rest of the baby vultures generate)

  Underscents The powerful, ponderous odours heaved up by the earth at night

  Visionary A cow or cow calf who is capable of seeing both the future and the distant present

  Water-boulder Hippopotamus

  Water-ghry Water lily

  Water tree Fever tree (it grows along the shores of rivers and lakes)

  Wattle Cow bell

  Zeal A cow’s lascivious babble during oestrus

  Acknowledgements

  Many books proved helpful to me during my research. Among these are: The Eye of the Elephant by Delia and Mark Owens, The Last Elephant by Jeremy Gavron, Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway, I Dreamed of Africa by Kuki Gallmann, In the Presence of Elephants by Peter Beagle and Pat Derby, Elephants: Majestic Creatures of the Wild edited by Jeheskel Shoshani, Elephants: The Deciding Decade edited by Ronald Orenstein, Elephants by S.K. Eltringham, Safari: Experiencing the Wild by Neil Leifer and Lance Morrow, Elephants by Reinhard Künkel, and The Natural History of the African Elephant by Sylvia K. Sikes, this last a rather chilling text for how often the author shot in the head “a fine and healthy specimen” so that she might study its corpse. Various field guides, especially those published by Collins and by the National Audubon Society, were constantly consulted, as was a remarkably comprehensive and fascinating treasure called The Behavior Guide to African Mammals by Richard Despard Estes.

  In addition to the above are three books I could not have done without, all written by people who have spent the better part of theiradult lives in Africa studying the elephant and tirelessly fighting for its safety. The fight is an uphill one because of the pressures of the ivory trade, which encourages poaching, and the disappearance of habitat. These books are: Echo of the Elephants by Cynthia Moss and Martyn Colbeck, Coming of Age with Elephants by Joyce Poole, and Among the Elephants by Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton.

  I am indebted as well to Christopher Dewdney and Jan Whitford for commenting on an early version of the manuscript, and I am forever grateful to Beth Kirkwood not only for her editorial suggestions but for helping me find my way to the Masai Mara so that I might see the African elephant in its natural home.

  Thanks to the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council for financial support. And a special thanks to my editors: Iris Tupholme at HarperCollins Canada for her foresight and unwavering faith, and Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan Books in New York for her acuity and devotion.

  About the Author

  BARBARA GOWDY is the award-winning author of Helpless, The Romantic, Mister Sandman, Falling Angels and We So Seldom Look on Love. Her books have appeared on bestseller lists throughout the world. The recipient of the Marian Engel Award and the Trillium Book Award, Gowdy has been a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and a repeat finalist for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She lives in Toronto.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  International Acclaim for The White Bone

  “Brave… . Gowdy has embarked on the creation of an extremely distinct, invented world, with its own social and linguistic structures, its own myths and totems.”

  –Newsday

  “Readers … will never think the same of elephants and their ‘appalling resilience.'”

  –USA Today

  “Fascinating… . Through the course of The White Bone we come to care about the elephants as much as we would humans.”

  –The Seattle Times

  “Engrossing… . Touching… . A captivating fictional venture.”

  –People

  “Gowdy [has a] great gift for sensual description… . The novel is plenty funny and plenty odd.”

  –The New York Times Book Review

  “With The White Bone … Barbara Gowdy has produced a classic quest story that is also a technical feat… . A surprisingly moving, high-stakes work of imagination.”

  –Elle

  “Brilliant… . Gowdy’s elephants are astonishingly embodied, their world made up of vivid sensory particulars and depicted with precise naturalistic realism… . The pathos of their condition, its recognizability, is, in the end, the book’s most lasting effect.”

  –The Boston Book Review

  “Compelling… . The White Bone takes place in a self-sufficient and brilliantly authentic world… . Impressive and delightful.”

  –Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “Gowdy brilliantly imbues these uncommon characters with wrenching emotions.”

  –The Village Voice Literary Supplement

  “The White Bone is a brilliant precursor of the novel of the future–a realization of noble and tragic lives not our own. This sorrowful novel does holy work because it engages us in the holiest of acts–empathy.”

  –Joy Williams

  “This is a beautiful and heartbreaking book… . Momentous… . Mesmerizing. The writing throughout the book is rich and poetic, evoking the stark beauty of the African plains and the mythic dream-world of the elephants.”

  –The Arizona Daily Star

  “The White Bone combines scrupulous research with fictional license to help the reader understand from the inside what it means to be an animal under attack… . The White Bone has the capacity to arouse not only outrage at human cruelty, but also wonder at the revolutionary power of language to up-end preconceptions.”

  –L.A. Weekly

  “[Gowdy] has imagined what it is like to be an endangered African elephant. The result is a tender, tragic, majestic triumph… . Anyone who believes that animals are sentient beings will be moved and fascinated by Gowdy’s deeply imagined novel.”

  –The Hartford Courant

  “Gowdy has accomplished the unlikely feat of unfurling a fascinating drama completely from the perspective of a community of African elephants.”

  –New York Magazine

  “From the enormously gifted Gowdy [comes] a mesmerizing journey into the heart of Africa… . Warmly conveying a remarkably full vision of elephant life, as well
as the almost incomprehensible tragedy of species annihilation, Gowdy has created an astonishingly moving saga.”

  –Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “The mysticism and majesty of the African elephant loses no honor in Gowdy’s new novel… . [A] masterfully crafted novel.”

  –Library Journal (starred review)

  m“A richly detailed novel.”

  –New York Daily News

  Copyright

  The White Bone

  Copyright © 1998 by Barbara Gowdy.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

  EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40079-4

  Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  First published in hardcover by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd: 1998

  First paperback edition: 1999

  First Harper Perennial Canada paperback edition: 2003

  This Harper Perennial Modern Classics trade paperback edition: 2010

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.