The Third Book of the Dun Cow: Peace at the Last

by Walter Wangerin Jr.

  “Harassed?” he twitters.

  Pertelote says, “Who are you?”

  “Bat,” he answers.

  The Hen loops her neck in order to get a close look at him. His snout is pushed back into his face. He has wrapped his hairless, leathery wings around himself so that he looks like a package wrapped.

  “Bat,” he says, “1052 of the Bats Multitudinous. Here to ease discomfort.”

  All at once Bat 1052 drops and returns to business.

  Whoa! Suddenly here is a fusillade of small shadows, beeping and pinging after Black Flies. The entire company of the Bats Multitudinous has arrived. They whiz the crowded air, picking and eating Flies, one hundred in a single plunge, yet never so much as bumping into one another or hitting an obstacle. Wizards of the air!

  Oh, what a wonderful sunrise follows! Not a Fly to be seen. Not a Bat either, all of them having gone home to hang upside down and sleep.

  In the weeks thereafter, through nights of good dreams and mornings refreshed by autumn breezes, Pertelote becomes aware that she is listening to a music, a melodic line composed of the lowest notes of an organ.

  The Animals travel west, always westward with the sun. Imperceptibly they’ve begun to ascend from the prairies to the high plains. Though the days are shortening, life is sunny. No one’s in a hurry. Everyone loves the company.

  As always, the White Wolf trots ahead to reconnoiter. On a particular evening Pertelote attends him, flying overhead, sometimes soaring aloft for the pure pleasure of the flight.

  It is at the zenith of one of one such flight that the deep music blooms into words. It is as if the setting sun itself were singing to her, to her directly:

  Before the morning, midnight.

  Before the sun, the storms.

  Before the last age, sacrifice,

  Apocalyptic wars.

  Arise, arise and go,

  Arise and come by roads

  Unknown.

  [Nine] In Which Eurus Howls a Confrontation

  Eurus has been leading his pack in ever-widening circles. Through summer and into the fall he’s been intent on claiming new territory for himself. He dribbles urine where he goes. He drops scats and scratches the ground to keep and release the scent as a warning to any who would dare cross his increasing borders. There are glands under his tail. He sits and scoots forward, dragging the glands’ oils over the soil. The scent says more than “Beware.” It contains information. It announces what he has eaten. It trumpets his size, his force, and his health. The scent fairly shouts the kind of mood that drives him.

  Eurus’s pack has grown to five: Crook, Rutt, Hati, himself, and the daughter born to him last spring. At seven months the child has gained her mature height and has already begun to reveal her nascent temperament. She may never hunt. She would rather preen than lunge. She has her mother’s pale eyes, but not their penetration. Her eyes merely skim the Creatures around her. Often they gaze at the grey sky as if it were a mirror of her own eyes. She has her father’s arrogance but not his force. She has no care nor need for force. She can dominate in other ways.

  Eurus named his daughter “Freya.” Lady. Royalty.

  Since she was but a female, he let Rutt raise her. But as soon as she shed puppyhood, Freya shed her mother’s training as well. She took to raising herself.

  The Wolf-pack’s travel has taken them in round rim west by southwest through ever-diminishing forests, southwest into the tall grass of the prairies. Eurus has been marking a very broad territory, yet is no less hungry than when he began. He strides on long legs like an emperor.

  There comes the morning when Rutt wakes to find frost on the ground and the blades of grass around her. Some memory deep in her soul is thrilled by the sensation. Something, something long ago, when she was young and delighted in sweet experiences.

  The sun melts the frost, and Eurus is again on the move.

  Suddenly he stops and stands stock-still. He drops his nose to the root of a juniper, then claws at it furiously, throwing up clots of earth. A growl starts its motor in his throat.

  He recognizes the scent of Coyote, the sort of Beast he despises. Would kill it, but would not eat it. He detects the scent of Deer. At this his stomach rumbles.

  Still clawing the duff at the juniper root, Eurus barks. He leans back on his haunches. His yellow eye narrows to a slant of malice.

  “I know this one,” he hisses. “I know his name! The upright! The righteous! The God-damnably sanctimonious bastard! The White Wolf! Boreas,” he spits, “has passed this way.”

  Now Eurus raises his snout to a heaven of hatred and howls.

  [Ten] In Which Wachanga Remembers Mercy

  Wachanga and Kangi Sapa are resting on a knoll under the bright autumnal sun. The day is clear and very cold, so the sun comforts the Cream Wolf’s coat.

  “Tell you what, babe,” says Kangi Sapa, shaking out his feathers. “Black’s better than white for catching rays. Hoo, but I’m hot!”

  Wachanga smiles. The Raven exaggerates. It’s his sort of humor.

  During these nights ice has begun to snaggle the shores of small lakes. In the morning it melts.

  “So, darlin’,” says the Raven, throwing out a topic for conversation. “How’d you come by that scar? Want to talk about it now?”

  Wachanga pauses, then says, “Somebody hurt me.”

  She does that a lot, closing a good gossip right at the start.

  “I’m your sympathetic sort of Bird,” says Kangi Sapa. “A gadabout too, if you believe what the Cottonwoods say. A party Animal, I say. But I’m a good listener. So. Who hurt you?”

  “My sister.”

  “What? It’s not much of a sister that hurts her sister.”

  Wachanga has just surprised herself by calling Rutt her sister. The word slipped out, as if a box of mementoes in the back of her mind opened and the word flew out: “Sister.”

  Swiftly Wachanga amends the relationship. “Well, not quite a sister. Rutt,” she says. “Rutt was the only other woman in the pack I left behind. A handsome Wolf, Mr. Sapa, and very strong. She wears a lovely dark shawl across her back. She looks always ready to stroll off with a lover in a midnight beauty. I liked the sight of her. I always thought that her eyes … Well, I think there were mysteries in her eyes. Before she…”

  Wachanga hasn’t recalled the She-Wolf much since the last winter. But now, at this distance, the pale-eyed Wolf seems to have been more harried than vicious. And now the term “sister” takes on a truer meaning. Deep, deep in their unremembered past there must be some experience they shared together. And now the name “Rutt” seems not a name but a deception.

  The Raven says, “So, then, this Rutt what-you-call. You say you liked her—but she hurt you? Sorry, babe. I’m not tracking.”

  “It’s very confusing.”

  “She must have been a double-crosser.”

  “Don’t blame her too much, Mr. Sapa. She had a cruel mate.”

  “So, why did this beauty hurt you?”

  Wachanga shifts her position.

  Kangi Sapa says, “I bet that scar tells a story.”

  “I took care of Rutt’s children, like their auntie—”

  “Rutt! Ha ha! Sounds sexual, babe.”

  “I did the best I could for them, but … I think that was the beginning, Mr. Sapa. The beginning of, well, of her jealousy. Her mate, the dominant Wolf of the pack, refused to let her mother her sons. His sons, is what he called them, not hers. He put them in my care.”

  Wachanga falls silent. She is no longer aware of the sun’s warmth or of the day’s kindness. A melancholy expression has settled on her face.

  Finally she says, “In the winter, when Rutt came into heat so did I. Her male started to follow me.” Wachanga shivers. “Oh, that Wolf was hateful to her. He wanted to give me what he owed Rutt. So she despised me. She bit my sex. She clawed at my rump and chewed the skin. Is how I got this scar
.”

  The Raven shakes out his wings. “Where is this Rutt? I’ll pluck her belly-hairs bald! I’ll give her a swipe and a scar!”

  “She said,” said Wachanga with a kind of wonderment, “she would kill me. So I ran.”

  “Kill you? Kill my Wachanga? I’m a high-skyer, girl. Show me the way you came!”

  The way I came.

  Kangi Sapa meant the way she came here. But she is thinking of the way she came to Eurus’s Wolf pack—and suddenly the vision of a cave flashes before her sight, and in its dark recesses, two large, brown, moist and most merciful eyes.

  [Eleven] In Which a Weasel Eyes a Raven with Suspicion; A Hen and a Wolf Make Friends

  A midnight snow swirls around Pertelote. She lids her eyes against the icy flakes. John Wesley crouches beside her. They are sitting at the edge of a cutbank, while the rest of the Animals huddle below, shivering and trying to sleep.

  The bright blue days of autumn have given way to winter, and the last weeks have offered Pertelote’s Animals scant nourishment. Hunger and the freezing temperatures have sapped them of their strength. Her band’s persistent malaise, and her inability to ease them, have darkened the Hen’s mood. In the day the sun has become a small white disk in a distant sky.

  The indifference of this season has put Pertelote in mind of the Fimbul-winter that nearly wiped out a continent of Creatures, at the end of which her Lord Chauntecleer perished.

  John Wesley says, “Critters is wearisome, Lady Hen.” He sharpens his voice in order to be heard through the wind. “Pooped to the bone.”

  Pertelote says nothing.

  “Night-nipped and day-blowed,” says John. “And sad, Lady Hen.”

  Pertelote knows this as well as the Weasel. She has no response.

  “Does Lady Hen hear gossipings? No. Happy chatterings? No. Critters doesn’t talk no more. What’s the what we gots to do?”

  Pertelote sighs. Her sigh is lost in the snow.

  With greater force the Weasel says, “We gots to stop!”

  “We are,” says Pertelote, “stopped. We always stop for the night.”

  “John Double-U, he don’t wants to mis-agree with his Lady Hen, but she knows. She knows what means John’s ‘Stop.’ Not nights. Not for a night.”

  Yes. She knows. But she cannot stop. Her motives have never been clear to her. She hasn’t a goal to which she goes, and that has become a tremendous desolation. Yet she is driven forward. Where Pertelote is is never right. Chauntecleer’s corpse lies far behind. But she bears something like his spirit in her soul. Wherever she goes it seems that she carries his name. The earth abroad should remember him. Galaxies should memorialize him.

  Or so she justifies her restlessness.

  John Wesley says, “Critters, they loves you, Lady Pertelote.”

  What’s this? This “Pertelote?” Never before has John called her by her given name.

  The Weasel stands and stalks away.

  The ground on which he was crouching is dark, snowless. Pertelote notices several pale shadows there. Absently she touches one with a claw. It moves and proves to be a white pebble. Her heart does a double skip.

  Oh, Chauntecleer!

  The ivory-white toenails of her husband! Above which rose his strong azure legs. And his golden feathers. His black beak and his coral-red comb…

  Pertelote has thought she was done with grieving. Yet here it is again, swelling in her breast, choking her, and spilling from her eyes. She can smell her husband’s scent, if only in her memory. She sees the two of them perched together on a Hemlock limb. Chauntecleer’s widow starts to heave huge, gasping sobs.

  Boreas the White Wolf is himself a stroke of winter. Trotting over snow he becomes the snow. In one bound—white into white—he will vanish from the Animals’ sight.

  But a sharp eye might pick him out by the grin of his black lips, by his black nose, and by the rim of his red tongue flicking between his incisors.

  When he runs he lays his ears back, narrows his slant eyes, and straightens his tail. His legs clutch and stretch, gather and stretch, gather and reach for the snow before him. His spine is a taut bow.

  Standing still, the White Wolf is lofty and alert. His chest is slender, and his ruff imperial. He prefers to walk the high ridges, patrolling the places the Animals go. Boreas, the Watch-Wolf. On flatland, in order to survey the closer territories, he will leap perpendicular ten feet high.

  Tonight the White Wolf’s duties have drawn him away from the cutbank. He trots softly on drifts of snow. Boreas has paws like snowshoes, four inches wide. A strange new scent, blowing windward, has piqued his nostrils. He goes to track it down.

  Jasper the Hen has grown so fat that grease seeps through the pores of the pink, naked patches on her neck. Her eyes weep oil.

  “Damn slickery soup,” she grumbles aloud, “dribbling out my asshole!” Jasper stinks.

  There is no love for the Hen that stinks.

  Nor would she return love for love. She’d rather drub another Hen down. As for a Rooster? Sex and then a kick in the head to drive the witless idiot away.

  Nobody owns Jasper. Not even God. Jasper owns Jasper.

  But lately she has begun to feel lumps in her abdomen. A sorry state of affairs—until she realizes that the lumps are eggs. Children. Now this will mess up her life!

  On the other hand, Chicks might make a fine repast. Or! Or what about this? The chicks would be formed in her image! She likes that idea. Little Jaspers outfacing the world. Ha!

  So Jasper the fat Hen has broken off the interior twigs of a thicket and scratched the ground beneath. Snow outside and a nest inside. The fat Hen wriggles her corpulence into the nest and sits. Impatiently.

  Sooner than she expected she is compelled to cackle, and she lays an egg. She cackles again. Cackles four times altogether: four eggs. Jasper compliments herself on her bulk, for she could have brooded over ten eggs if she’d had to.

  Fat she may be, but now she’s growing hungry. Motherhood is its own affliction.

  In time she hears tiny scratchings in the nest below. She stands and steps back. A tiny hole appears in one eggshell and in the hole the point of a tiny beak. Chip-chip-chip, the shell breaks open, and a yellow Chick struggles out. Soon enough a second shell cracks open and a second Chick wobbles out of his half shells.

  Jasper frowns and cocks an eye. She takes the measure of the two children, their fuzzy little skulls, their pinless wings, the yellow balls their bodies make. They look nothing like her. They look like themselves, and they are helpless.

  Perhaps it is their very helplessness that causes a twinge in Jasper’s heart. She can’t stop staring. Gazing, actually. Oh, what small beaks and sweet peepings! What pretty questionings they ask of their mother.

  But there are two Chicks still unhatched. Jasper sits on them and broods a little longer—patiently.

  But no new peckings happen. Instead, Jasper feels that the two eggs are growing cold. She begins to worry. This is a new emotion. She scarcely knows what to do with it. All at once, franticly, she starts to peck the shells herself. She cracks an egg and claws it open and suffers another new emotion. Sadness. For the Chick she pulls out is floppy, its closed eyes bulging but sightless. Stillborn. The other egg also proves to be a little tomb. Jasper has delivered two Chicks alive and two Chicks dead. She is suddenly overcome with unhappiness.

  She carries each dead Chick outside the thicket and lays them on the snow. What did Chauntecleer and Pertelote do with their three Chicks when they’d been killed by the Basilisks? And what did the Animals do with Russel’s body?

  Jasper walks some little distance away and begins to dig into the snow. When she strikes the frozen ground she scratches furiously, trying to make a grave.

  The intensity of her action conceals the sounds of another Creature creeping down the trunk of an alder tree. In a flurry the Creature drops to the dead Chicks and seizes them. The living Chicks cheep loudly. Jaspe
r pulls her head from her snow hole and sees the Marten Selkirk just as he dashes up the trunk again.

  Jasper stands mute, astonished by grief.

  Daybreak. The sun breaches the eastern horizon. The sun! Its red-golden rays skim the snow past Pertelote to the snow-field on the far side of the cutbank which glisters in the light. Last night Pertelote’s band huddled at the bottom of the cutbank for shelter against the wind. Now the Amimals begin to rustle.

  Far off a Wolf howls. Pertelote’s stands. Her nerves go taut. Where’s John Wesley when she needs him? Where is Boreas?

  But the Wolf howls again—not in threat, in a kind of proclamation—and this time Pertelote recognizes the voice.

  It’s Boreas himself! Somewhere in the east.

  Down the side of the cutbank is a washout which has formed a rocky stairway down to up. John Wesley comes climbing up and takes a position beside Pertelote.

  “Lady Pertelote?” he says. “Might-be sun-shiningnesses makes a good day?”

  “Did you hear Boreas howl?”

  The Weasel squints toward the northeastern sky. “What is?” he asks.

  He points. Pertelotes follows his aim, and there in the vermillion sky is a black dot careering crazily.

  Pertelote watches as the black dot grows.

  “I think it’s a Bird,” she says.

  “Birdy, Birdy, is a Birdy. But lookee! Is a rum-pot of a Birdy.”

  The Animals come wandering up the rock-stairs.

  “A slatternly Bird,” Pertelote agrees. “I think he’s losing feathers.”

  The Bird yells, “Quork!”

  John Wesley bounces up on his hind legs. “By Gaw, is a boogaloo mess! By Gaw! Is flap-happy Crow!”

  In spite of her dolor last night, Pertelote is amused. What an awful trash of a Bird! But a Raven, not a Crow.

  Finally the Raven crash-lands on the edge of the cutbank, clambers backward, then rights himself on long black claws.

  He clacks his outsized beak. “Hey ho, brother Weasel. Kangi Sapa here.”