As if there will be another day.
John Wesley has forced himself to stay right where he is. To face this legion is to face his fears: he will give his life away.
Bears bawl threats. A gang of Wolves grins with lips as thin as knives. Snakes slither like licorice upward. Double-tusked Boars break rock, whose shards spin down the escarpment. Rats drag tails as long as whips. Leopards, Wolverines, the primordial Opossum—countless tribes of countless tongues spit, yowl, scream, bellow, mount and come.
The first to gain the lip of the plateau is the saddle-backed Wolf. Pale-eyed, she stiffens her legs, retracts her cheeks, wrinkles her snout, flashes her fangs. The hair on her back rises like a mat of spines. Pure rage drives at John Wesley, bowls the Weasel over, but he jumps to his feet and stands his ground.
In a coquettish, merciless tone the Wolf says, “Who thinks he can defeat me!”
John Wesley is willing.
But before he can make the sacrifice Boreas lands, grabs the Weasel by his back, and slings him ten feet to the side.
“I can,” the White Wolf growls.
Wachanga moves toward the fissure that cuts across the plateau. She lowers her nose. “Pertelote,” she says, “the scent. The Ancestors descended here.”
Pertelote, hurries over. “But how did they—?”
A rubble of crushed stone drops into the fissure, making a narrow, treacherous pathway down to the floor of the crater.
Wachanga says, “This crack is not a new separation. It has been waiting to take us home.” The Cream-Wolf puts one paw into the fissure. “The Ancestors’ scent descends right here!” Straightway Wachanga flies down the rubble-path.
Pertelote stretches her neck and crows a purely Chaunteclarion Crow. “Where Wachanga goes, go!”
She spreads her wings and wheels over the bewildered Animals, commanding, cajoling, encouraging, imploring them to follow Wachanga. They hesitate. The fissure seems a sudden sorcery. What if it closes on them?
But a bestial bellowing spins them around. Savagery itself is showing its thousand heads above the far lip of the Plateau. At the same time John Wesley Weasel comes rocketing toward the band of Animals.
“Buggars, do! Is no times for dawdling. Do and do and do!”
The Weasel has understood Pertelote’s crow. He rips into butt-feathers. He drives Mices into the narrow defile. He conjures new swearwords. He blisters Critters with his swearwords. He makes himself a more immediate threat than the horde behind.
Otters pour down the rubble like water down a sluice. Hens, terrified, tumble after them. Amazingly, the Hens learn how to tiptoe and how to balance on one claw by fluttering their nubbly wings.
Pertelote loks at the rusty Coyote and is overwhelmed with affection. Behold: Ferric is denying his fears for the sake of the Doe De La Coeur. He takes a step down, then waits for the Deer to place a hoof on his bony haunch. Blessed Ferric! He offers his body as an easy staircase down.
The drop is dangerous. But Pertelote’s band has become a glory of resolution and bravery. The Hen’s heart breaks for her love of them.
But then Twill Coyote lets out a painful cry and plunges down the last ten feet, hitting the floor, but keeping her Chick unhurt.
Her cry draws her sister and her father and the pitying Brothers Mice.
Twill has fractured a foreleg. The sharp bone has broken through the skin.
If Boreas were actually crawling away from the pale-eyed, raging She-Wolf, it would denote a stunning defeat. His old wound has, in fact, torn open. Blood makes a trail behind him. But he is not crawling away. This is a feint. The Watch-Wolf is luring his enemy a long route around the plateau. He hopes suddenly to grab her and whirl her over down the escarpment, confounding her thousand-footed mob by the loss of their leader.
But hopes are not achievements. Each Beast is his own leader now. They have, all of them, smelled the soft bellies ahead. The whoresons see the Meek and are rushing to feed their hunger.
Pertelote mounts the air. She sees Blood-Slaughter stampeding closer.
If it would do any good, she’d lie down before thundering horde that Death might stop to feed on her.
Instead the Hen steels herself against despair. Oh, my darlings! She will console them. She will make their dyings as painless as possible.
So she sails down the wall of the crater. She alights among her Animals. But they are paralyzed, gaping upward to at the rim of the crater’s wall. A thousand brutal heads ring the edge of it. A thousand gullets vomit thunder. A thousand mouths drool. Ten thousand teeth gnash.
It is Wachanga who breaks the spell.
The Cream-Wolf howls, “I know the door!”
Wachanga is snuffling the side of the colossal rock in the center of the crater.
Pertelote doesn’t understand. A door? What door?
Wachanga dashes back to the Hen.
“The Ancestors’ scent,” Wachanga barks, “does not stop at the stone!”
But to Pertelote’s ear the Wolf’s words become distant, as if they came through a river of water.
Gallina! The deep voice rolls like boulders. Seek my heart. Ego sum mons meus. I am my mountain.
All at once the universe slows. Time slows down.
One of the Bears has flung herself over the crater wall, but falls interminably, as if she were a floating pillow.
Now the forepart of the monumental rock begins to move. It rises a minimal degree. Light peeps under it. That fore-stone resolves into the shape of an enormous head which begins to swing its long, lateral limb toward Wachanga and Pertelote.
Veni, filia—this in the hearing of Pertelote’s soul, this is the thrumming of the cosmos: Veni, filia, in montem sanctum meum.
Daughter, enter into my holy mountain.
Suddenly Time ticks again and springs forward. The floating Bear now drops at speed. She pounds the ground like a pile driver, rolls over once, and then with a single spasm perishes.
Death means nothing to the hordes above her. They leap headlong. Beast after Beast hits the hard floor. Carcasses pile up until they make a stairs, down which more Beasts tumble.
But Wachanga is on the move.
She rears and races directly at the side of the rock, bounding faster and faster until she must shatter her bones against it.
Pertelote shrieks, “No!”
Veni intra me! rolls the voice.
At her last leap, without a sound, the Cream-Colored Wolf passes into the stone.
Venite intra me!
All my children, enter me!
And then to Pertelote:
Gallina, veni in montem:
In montem sanctum meum!
And in this final hour, Pertelote understands the language of the powers.
“Follow Wachanga!” she cries.
The Beasts that reach the ground alive—Snakes, Wolverines, Bears, Wolves, Leopards, Rats, Wildcats—break across the flats.
Pertelote makes her cry an absolute command: “Follow Wachanga!”
Death behind them, Death before them—the Animals choose the manner by which to die.
The Deer De La Coeur, fleet afoot, leaps at the side of the rock—and passes through.
The greathearted Brothers Mice follow, pip pip, into the solid rock.
The Otters, suddenly compassionate, turn themselves into a long toboggan. They heave the crippled Twill onto their backs and carry her into the massive stone.
Mrs. Cobb refuses to debate her husband. She orders him to go, and he goes, and she goes right behind him, and they disapear.
Hopsacking takes her chick in her mouth. Ferric takes the other. All four vanish into the stone.
John Wesley would stay and fight, but Pertelote will have none of that. Nor does she stop for kindness. Mercy makes her brutal. She drives the Weasel at the monumental rock and into it.
But Pertelote will not take the way of the Ancestors until every last Animal is safe.
The violent mass of Beasts gallops headlong at the rock, but breaks their skulls against it: cries and shouts and moans of agony.
The Plain Brown Bird still flies. She has not entered.
Two Wolves fall into the crater, locked together, snarling, bleeding, fangs sunk in each other’s flesh: Boreas and the saddle-backed Rutt roll down over the lifeless bodies, then find footing, rise up and pull back. Rutt has the advantage. Boreas was already wounded. She is empowered by the greater hatred. She has laid his shoulder bare, has gashed it to the grey bone.
The White Wolf can’t catch his breath. His chest heaves. Bloody bubbles pop at his nostrils. The She-Wolf shakes her ruff, steps back, grins in triumph, prepares to slaughter her enemy and to feed on his liver.
Once in her past Least had been seduced into piercing the brain of a monster with her slender bill and killing him.
Now the piercing is necessary and no shame.
She swoops down. She aims her needle beak at the She-Wolf’s eye, stabs it bloody, then stabs the other.
Rutt howls, not for pain, but for rage. Blood runs down her cheeks like tears.
The advantage has shifted.
Boreas takes his time. He breathes deeply. He fills his lungs and gathers his strength and walks slowly to blind Rutt and crushes her skull between his jaws. The limbs of the saddle-backed Wolf kick out in spasms, then merely quiver, and then she lies inert.
The White Wolf crumples beside the corpse of the She-Wolf and passes out.
Least has done what she can. She flies after the rest of the Animals and flits into the rock.
Without their leader, without the tongues that commanded them, the Bestial horde becomes confused. Some wander, lost. Some fall upon others. A babble of nonsense echoes around the crater.
Only Pertelote is left behind. Only Pertelote sees what Boreas has accomplished. And she grieves. She determines to stay by him. When his soul flies upward, she will sit vigil beside him, singing his memorial. Then she will walk the earth, telling the tales of two who once were grand: of Boreas the White Wolf and of Chauntecleer, the golden Rooster.
“Lady?”
Pertelote turns.
The Cream-Wolf has issued from the monument. She speaks with confidence. “Lady, for love you must follow your band into the living stone, and for love I must remain behind to nurse Boreas. I have a thing to tell him.”
Pertelote obeys. She spreads her wings and rises in an unspoken farewell, then flies with a full heart into the living monolith.
[Twenty-Four] How Love Lasts
Pertelote’s skills at healing were not lost on Wachanga—patience being the healer’s first quality.
As long as he lies unconscious, Wachanga licks the White Wolf’s wounds. She murmurs his name over and over. She mounts the rubble-steps of the crater. She cannot fly for medicinals like the Raven, but she is tireless in the search and brings back frozen leaves and berries and tree bark. She thaws these in her mouth. She chews them into a mash. She collects fat from Bears’ bellies and mixes the vegetation with the fat, creating a Pertelote-poultice which she laves on the White Wolf’s wound. Softly, day and night, she sings the lullaby:
“God grant thee goodness, O my dear,
And laughter.
God grant thee life through all our years
Hereafter.”
Wachanga spurts water through her lips into his mouth. Again (and again) she mounts the crater’s wall and forages for food. She massages the White Wolf’s throat in order to remind him how to swallow. Even so the Cream-Wolf salves his injuries, grants solace to his mind, and cools his inflammations.
Often she murmurs in his ear, “I have such a lovely thing to tell you, Boreas.”
When his white eyes open and he recognizes her, Boreas whispers, “Wachanga.”
His eyes close again and he sleeps while she weeps for the resurrection.
In the morning Boreas wakes again. He manages a smile.
She whispers, “Can you hear me?”
Boreas nods.
Wachanga says, “Oh Boreas, our future is in my womb: when spring comes round again, I will bear you children.”
By means of these two wolves and the four to come, God favors the world. He populates the earth with a love that lasts even down to this present day.
[Twenty-Five] But What Continues
Once the two Wolves have abandoned the place of Borea’s convalescence, Rutt’s daughter arrives at the crater. She descends the putrefying ramp of the dead Beasts’ bodies and walks across the floor to her mother’s corpse. It is her own, this is Freya’s own victory march.
Thin, tendril Maggots wriggle in Rutt’s eye-sockets. They crowd her mouth and flow from her guts like an amber waterfall. Her carcass smells of corruption. Shreds of flesh cling to the bones. Rutt’s sinews have popped and her veins are unplugged. What dugs remain on Freya’s mother’s breast have hardened into knobs.
Freya has her own teats now, fresh and unspoiled. And Freya is world-wise. She knows that the scent of her vulva can drive a male Wolf mad.
She has the handsome aspect of her mother, and the willfulness. On the other hand, Freya has the dominating self-assurance of her father. She will get by. But not in the company of other Wolves. No pack for her. She intends to concern herself with no one but herself. She might one day decide to spawn daughters in her own image. But if she did, it would be when she was ready. Or she may not reproduce at all. Why bear children who might one day challenge her as she had challenged her mother? Or maybe she would simply abandon her pups. Let some other foolhardy female raise them.
All in good time.
For now it is enough to gaze upon her mother defeated, all her days and all her rages come to nothing.
Rutt had not the the cunning of survival. Her malice was all too evident.
Freya will do better. Her end will be no end at all.
[Epilogue] These Are the Dreams the Dun Cow Dreams
A Hen and a Weasel are walking across a greensward field, discussing matters of their past. They nod, remembering. The Hen comments, the Weasel glances at her, and they laugh like old folks playing cards.
No scars on the Weasel now. He has both ears, the ears he was born with. His pelage is brushed, supple, and glossy.
The Hen’s feathers shine as white as the gown of an angel. The feathers on her throat blaze crimson. Her comb is a crown and her wattles are the tags of majesty.
The summer sun washes the field with a translucent light.
All is well.
On the banks of the horizons left and right tower white clouds. Their shapes change in a slow transformation. They are cathedrals. They are Wolves in various postures, sitting, standing, sometimes their heads are thrown back as if to howl, but the clouds are soundless. Perhaps the shifting of their shapes comes of the shadows that change under the sun’s passage.
As the Hen and the Weasel walk, they remember sorrows too. If they didn’t, they would not be whole. They contain everything they’ve ever experienced. They are their past, and the past forms their identities.
But though sorrow must be remembered, the grief is gone.
The friends walk along a crystal river. Ahead of them there grows a single Tree which is rooted on either side of the water, whose trunks join into one above the river. The Tree bears twelve kinds of fruit. Apples fall simply by the asking. Blossoms cover its almond branches like snow. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of every affliction.
The sky is eternal. The earth is steadfast. Green hills establish the farther slope of the field. The sun before them smiles, and the moon behind them reflects his light.
In this place life has become Life.
The Hen says, “We were married in a snowfall, Chauntecleer and I.”
“Critters,” says the Weasel, “what gives pretty presents to Bridie and Bridiegroom..”
“The Coop,” the Hen murmurs. “Oh, John, sweet were the good o
ld days.”
“Cozynesses,” the Weasel agrees.
“And we bore children.”
“Scootery bitty-butts.”
“Chauntecleer named the Chicks. And Tick-Tock the Black Ant with his regiments entertained them. Russel the Fox taught them … Oh, John, let’s not mention what came after.”
“Unmentionables.”
They walk in silence. The wind through the mouths of the clouds murmurs assents and benedictions.
Suddenly the Hen pauses and lays a wing upon her breast. “Oh,” she whispers.
The Weasel says, “Not John. John, he don’t mentions a word of unmentionables, not a Chickie-cheep.”
“No, John,” says the Hen, “Look.”
The Weasel looks toward the green hill.
“Mudslidings,” he says.
“John! It’s an Animal running! Long legged, his ears flapping in the wind.”
The Weasel says, “Boom-feeted!”
The galloping Creature howls a most piteous howl: “Maroooooooned!”
Pertelote can’t believe what she sees and hears. But the evidence is in the howling, and she knows the voice.
“Mundo Cani!” she cries. “It’s Mundo Cani Dog!”
“Woe is me!” the great Dog bellows. “No one should look on such a woe as me!”
Yet he pounds across the field like celebration. His nose is a boot of old leather. His bones are rangy and his paws huge.
At the last instant the Dog leaves the earth and crashes into the Weasel, who somersaults backward, then scrambles to his feet.
“Terpsichore Mutt!” John yells, wiping drool from his face. “Is ways to love-smack a Weasel!”
The beautiful Hen smiles and swells with well-being.
“Mundo Cani, Mundo Cani, I never thought I’d see you again.”
“Oh, I am such a mortal woe.” Tears pour from the Dog’s eyes. Snot-drops run from his nose. It is in this way that Mundo Cani rejoices.
The Third Book of the Dun Cow: Peace at the Last Page 10
