The Book of the Dun Cow

by Walter Wangerin Jr.

  All of the Chickens did a little dance on top of the Coop, and the Dog was blasted out of the hole, backward.

  “You pump! You paragraph!” Chauntecleer hissed. “What are we going to do with noises like that? What won’t Nezer know after such a speech?”

  Mundo Cani hung his head and let a river run onto the ground. “This nose smelled one or two bad smells,” he said, “but that is as it should be. It deserves punishment now and again—may it stick under your Coop forever for sneezing.”

  “All right, all right. Is the Rat still there?” Chauntecleer wanted to know. He was in cold earnest now, and the games were over.

  “Pump is maybe better than Lummox. But Paragraph—this poor head does not know what such a name might mean. Yet if the Doctor—”

  “The Rat!” Chauntecleer hissed directly into Mundo Cani’s ear. “The Rat! Is Nezer still under the Coop?”

  “There was no sound all the day long. Nor any noise at all,” the Dog said. “This nose felt nothing move. It could feel anything—nits, tics, grubs—were they to move even a little bit; but it felt nothing move under your Coop, Doctor. So then it did a poor job?” The question was a mournful one. “Maybe since the morning he isn’t there.”

  “If you haven’t heard anything, then Nezer’s there. It’s the silence,” Chauntecleer said quietly, “that announces him. One last egg was eaten before noontime. Ebenezer Rat is in there, Mundo Cani Dog.” Chauntecleer was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “Watch, now; and wait.” And he left.

  It was Nezer Rat’s eternal silence and his dark secrecy which made any plan to feather him so difficult. Who had ever seen Nezer, except as he was leaving? Who had ever heard Nezer? Why, the long Rat could slide past thirty sleeping Hens and a dreaming Rooster, and no one would ever know that he had been among them—except that Beryl or Jacinth or Chalcedony would wake in the morning with one less egg beneath her.

  It was Nezer’s deep privacy which Chauntecleer had to overcome with his plan. Somehow he had to get Nezer out from under the floor and up into the Coop; there the Rat would be on the Rooster’s ground, and the Rooster might be able to do something then. Chauntecleer decided against luring the Rat out, decided for driving him out. But who would go under the Coop? Who could hurt a Rat? No, the question might better be: Who could sting a Rat?—for therein lay an answer.

  The Rooster went a little distance from the Coop and stopped before a small mound of soft dirt. There was a perfectly round hole in the perfect middle of this mound. Chauntecleer set his eye to this hole and looked in.

  “Tick-tock!” he whispered.

  “Not now!” said someone down in the hole.

  “Tick-tock, rouse it and come up here,” the Rooster said.

  “I’m busy sleeping.” The voice hardly sounded like a voice. It sounded like tiny twigs snapping. “My children are all busy sleeping, and the door is closed. Good night. Hush and good night!”

  “Sleep in the morning, Tick-tock; but get up here now. This is urgent.”

  “Mornings, you enormity, are for working. Nights are for sleeping, and you crew the nighttime in some little while ago. Therefore we are fast asleep. Punctual! Let urgent happen when it’s scheduled. Good night.” Tiny twigs snapping were beginning to sound more like large branches cracking.

  “I crew the nighttime in?” Chauntecleer knew very well that he had.

  “You are an excellent clock, friend Chauntecleer. Good night!” Crack! “Good night!” Crack!

  Chauntecleer lifted his eye from the hole and spoke to himself: “I crew the nighttime in. Well, then, I will crow the morning in.”

  He bent over again so that his tail feathers looped high over his back. He stuck his jet-black beak straight down into the perfectly round hole of Tick-tock the Black Ant. And then he crowed a minor morning crow. Nobody heard it, except for a few hundred Black Ants, who began immediately to march out of the hole in three perfect lines. In the middle of the night, the Black Ants went to work.

  Tick-tock stood atop his hole, crossing his arms, shaking his head helplessly, and watching his laborers labor at a damn-fool hour.

  “Good morning and what is it?” he snapped to the Rooster. “Urgent had better be urgent.”

  “Believe it,” Chauntecleer said. “I wouldn’t be here unless it was.”

  Chauntecleer the Rooster was growing weary of irritations. It crossed his mind for the second time in a day that it would be good to have just one person for simple friendship and for talk. In this single, chilly moment—as he got ready to give instructions to a busy-brittle and punctual Ant—the Rooster felt lonely.

  It started to rain. Not a heavy rain. Not a storm. Just a miserable drizzle which pattered all over the roof of the Coop and which blew a cold mist through the windows.

  Chauntecleer crouched in a dark corner, waiting, and was heartsick.

  “Ebenezer Rat,” he cursed quietly to himself. All thirty of his Hens were getting wet on the top beam of the Coop. But they would not, nor could they, come into the Coop for shelter. They had to wait in their chilly place, and Chauntecleer had to wait in his; and the difference was that he was alone.

  He held two strong, long, white feathers in his left claw. He could barely see them through the heavy darkness; but he felt them several times over and knew them to be exactly what he wanted: They were sharp and barbed, bright and steely in their strength.

  Left and right Chauntecleer tipped his head for a sound; but if there was one below, the sounds above covered it up. Black Ants are mighty quiet. He didn’t expect to hear Tick-tock or his reserves. And Nezer was smooth silence itself: He surely didn’t expect to hear the Rat creeping through his gloomy depths. But when the two came together, then there should be some sound for the warning. That was what Chauntecleer listened for.

  Yet silence and the rain continued. Once the Hens clucked against the itchy rain and shuffled for a better perch above him; but then the hush settled down again.

  Suddenly beneath the floor there was a scurrying. No voice. Not even a small cry. But the scurrying was desperate, like wind in a bottle, like someone holding his breath—a dry scratching sound which shot under the floor from one end of the Coop to the other. A body bumped the wall. Chauntecleer was inclined to jump, but he waited, shivering. The sound moved in a circle for a moment, then straightened out and aimed for Nezer’s door through the wall.

  A short, astonished bark came from that place. Then a truly painful yelping rang out. The Coop began to shake. Mundo Cani was caught, hurt, and trying to break free all at once.

  “Oh, Ebenezer! Oh, Rat!” the Rooster swore, but he waited. He fought an urge, and he waited.

  In that moment his battle instincts were annoyed: Nezer had created an excellent cover for himself in Mundo Cani’s yelping. Chauntecleer lost all sense of the sound underneath the floor, and that gave the advantage to the Rat. How could Chauntecleer know, in this oily blackness, when Nezer was passing through his hole in the floorboards? How would he know the moment for attack?

  Chauntecleer pulled a feather from his breast. He would lay it over the hole and then, perhaps, see its shadow white move at the Rat’s entrance. With the feather in his beak he touched along the floor toward the hole, the beak brushing wood. Suddenly he knew precisely where the hole was. He didn’t see it. He hadn’t felt it. But immediately beside his ear he heard it: The Rat’s breathing nose was there. Then a whole Rat and a silent mouth.

  Ebenezer flew at Chauntecleer’s throat and tore feathers away.

  The Rooster went up on his claws, beating his wings together in front of him. Shock turned into ferocity. The Rat hunched, ready again for a spring. Chauntecleer’s feathers shook out and stood away from his body, so that he seemed an enormous shadow. He hopped, head high, and hissed a taut threat to the Rat.

  But night was Ebenezer’s element. He slipped throu
gh the air like a lizard and seized the Rooster at the back of his neck.

  So violent a convulsion shook the Rooster’s body that the Rat fell away, and immediately Chauntecleer turned and leaped—beak, beating wings, and claws all forward at the Rat. The right claw came down on Ebenezer’s back like a beam and clutched, gripped. But the Rat twisted himself rubberwise and buried his snout in Chauntecleer’s stomach. There he began to gnaw. The Rooster did not let go. And while Nezer jerked and chewed at his flesh, he took one of the white arrow feathers into his beak and dug down at the Rat.

  Mundo Cani had fallen quiet, though nobody knew just when he had. None but the rain made a noise. Silently a Rooster and a Rat were fighting. The Rat would kill if he could; the Rooster wanted only to finish the plan which he had.

  Chauntecleer pulled his head away from the Rat’s shoulder. His beak was empty and the feather gone. Ebenezer was an eating worm within his stomach; yet faithfully the Rooster held him. He took the second white feather into his beak, found a place in Ebenezer’s other shoulder, and pushed. With sudden, almighty thrusts he pushed the barb of the feather deep into the Rat’s hide.

  It is a horror to fight an enemy altogether silent, whose one cry is the rip of his teeth through skin. Chauntecleer—beak empty for the second time—shattered the silence with a wild crow of victory, spun the Rat through the air behind him, and heard his body thump against the wall.

  Then the fighters lay down. But it was Ebenezer Rat who had lost.

  Forty-eight Black Ants, who had been biting the Rat’s tail, duly hopped off, formed a perfect line, and marched out of the Coop. But the two magnificent feathers which were hooked into Ebenezer’s black hide would stay there until his own last day.

  “Now, Ebenezer! Now, Rat, find you a hole,” breathed the hoarse Chauntecleer from where he lay. “Find a hole, black Rat, which will let you pass through it like a secret. It will have to be a cave. And learn all over again how to sneak, now that you have two wonderful feathers to tell all the world of your coming. The Chicken eater chickened! Ha!” Chauntecleer barked. “Go with God, Ebenezer Rat; and forever leave my eggs alone.”

  Thirty shivering Hens plopped down from the top beam of the Coop and slipped inside, trusting without a doubt the crow they had heard. They tiptoed around the Rat, for they could see him now, and lined up on their roosts. Someone might have said something about what had taken place here; but as it happened, no one said a thing. They settled down close to one another and looked at one whom they had never seen before.

  So this is Ebenezer Rat.

  And while this gallery watched, Nezer got up and stumbled underneath his ungainly, lolling feathers. Stumbled away and out of the Coop by the door, since his holes were now impossible to him.

  That was a nice sight, and everybody thought that it was time to dry out and to have a rest.

  No, not everybody.

  Someone was weeping hopelessly in the rain outside the Coop door. This was the kind of weeping which would soon become a wailing, and after that a howling. “Barood!” that someone wept, wailed, very nearly howled: “Barooooood!”

  So Chauntecleer waited to do one more thing before he climbed to his perch, figuring that if he was to get some sleep, he had better say something now:

  “If you come inside this Coop,” he croaked, irritated for the last time that day, “you’ll shut up. Understand, luggage? Some nights I can tolerate being awakened by your dreary trumpet. Some nights. Not tonight.”

  “Thags,” wept Mundo Cani Dog as he stepped inside. “Thags,” as he curled himself into a loop at the doorway. And then he, too, was quiet and there was only the rain. But a sensitive soul must know what an effort it was for him not to weep. His heart was woeful, for his great nose had swollen to twice its size.

  [SEVEN] Something about the penalties of Lordship, together with Chauntecleer’s prayer

  At twelve noon on the following day, Chauntecleer the Rooster was to be found plotched upon a mud heap in the middle of a wet and runny field in the middle of a grey, rainy day. Spasmodically his wings slapped the mud around him and his head jerked with the bark of the little word “Ha!” His color was spoiled yellow in the rain, and everywhere his feathers stuck to his body.

  It is a lesson, how one may pass quickly from the immortal feeling of triumph to the mortal mood of grumpiness. From midnight to noon Chauntecleer had made the transition: He was in a filthy mood. But then, he had a multitude of reasons, any one of them good enough to provoke the Dun Cow herself.

  There was, first of all, the rain. The night had passed; the Rat had disappeared; but the rain had not. Tap, tap, tap—through the night and through the morning after it the chilly drizzle had persisted, and the boding clouds hung very near the earth. There was no sun, that sickly day, no cleanliness to crow to—only a leaden light which made breathing difficult, which sucked the green out of the leaves, and which made the muddy field feel like a hopeless hallway. Nothing whatever was solid in such a rain: The earth was slippery, water driveled everywhere, the sky merely dripped, and every standing thing lay down to weep. Plot, plottery, plot, plot: The rain fell into the puddles all around him, spinning out foolish circles. Nonsense! Ha and nonsense! Chauntecleer hated the drear rain, and he would have attacked a puddle if it would have done any good. But it wouldn’t have—and so he was grumpy. His soul itself was damp.

  “Ha!” he said, bitterly, blinking to keep the water out of his eyes and slapping the mud. “Ha! Cock-a-bullwhistle. Ha!”

  Also, he had the throbbing pain of the wound in his stomach. In fact, the wound was the reason why he should be squatting in the mud at all.

  When he had awakened that morning, he had heard the rain on the roof and had decided without a second thought that he’d stay inside, where dry was dry, even if it was also dim for seeing. He would crow lauds, the first crow of the day, from right where he was on his sleeping perch, and then go back to sleep. If that meant that the Hens’ ears would ring on account of a nearby crow, and if that meant that Mundo Cani would feel rejected since his mat of a back had not been used for the crow, well, so be it. Chauntecleer had earned the right to crow from his perch.

  But what no one had told him, and what he himself had absolutely forgotten, was that his wound had stiffened during the night and glued itself to his roost. The scab included the wood he was perched upon. So when he stood up to crow, he only gargled and tumbled from the perch. The scab had ripped open; the wound had begun to bleed afresh; the pain had shot backward all the way to his gizzard; and the Rooster was furious with himself for so foolish an action.

  Then one other damnable thing happened, and he went outside into the rain, grumbling blackly to himself, and looking around for some sticky mud. Dripping mud would be useless. Thick, sticky mud was what he wanted. This he found in the middle of an open field. He pushed up a pile of the stuff with his claws, kicking it out behind him and patting it smooth. Then he straddled the pile and settled down upon it as if it had been a nest of eggs to be hatched. It was his poultice.

  “Mud, be nice to that cut,” he said. “Mud, be a friend to me.”

  And then he sat all alone, with rivulets passing him by on every side, and looked at nothing.

  “Hens!” he said. “God can cork, skewer, pluck, gut, and boil them, for all I care. Hens!”

  For the Hens of his Coop had done that other damnable thing to send him out of his Coop. They were the ultimate, indisputable cause of his grumpiness. Neither the rain nor his wound could match them for botheration.

  What the Hens had done was to try to comfort him. They had quick, feeling eyes for somebody’s pain; and they had seen the blood run down his azure legs to the white toenails beneath. If their ears were ringing after that morning crow—that morning gargle, to be truthful—they didn’t show it. Instead, all thirty of them gathered around the bleeding Rooster, clucking busy bouquets of sympat
hy and dipping their pretty white heads. They offered him water for his hurt, water for his forehead and his thirst. They peeped at his wound, shuddered, and kissed him fondly on his wattles. They draped their wings over him for the warmth, and they cuddled him.

  Now, even that would have been all right. Chauntecleer could enjoy the cuddle of a pert and pretty Hen on a rainy day. In fact, that might be the quickest way to perk a Rooster up, ripen his comb to a violet red, and heal his wound. But—“Cock-a-HA-HA!” The pertest and the prettiest Hen, the plumpest and the proudest scoot of a Hen, was nothing more than a Chicken if she had to say “sir” in the middle of a cuddle!

  “Lord God,” Chauntecleer cried out from the middle of a wide and soggy field, from the top of a mud pile, through the moist air, to the belly of the clouds grey from horizon to horizon: “I put it to you, who put me over this Coop. What good is a kiss if it comes with a ‘Please you, sir’? That is a chilly kiss. And what kind of a love is it that curtsies? And where is companionship in fear?” Chauntecleer began to beat the mud on either side of him and to spit, as if there were bile in his mouth.

  “I didn’t ask for this,” he shouted. ‘‘You, God—you bound me body and soul to it, and you never told me! Come down out of heaven and tell me why. I can be only one thing around these Hens: a leader, a commander, and ever right and never wrong. Do you suppose that I could put my head down and weep like that boat-headed Dog you sent me? Of course not! Oh, you know that very well. The Hens would panic and their world collapse. Do you suppose that I could be afraid out loud? Even you don’t suffer this loneliness—you who are never afraid. Do you suppose that I could make love to a ‘Yes, sir’? Do you think that I could hold a ‘Good of you, sir’ close to myself and call it love? Of course not! Of course not! Oh, you know that almighty well indeed. I should line my roost with pots and pans and be as happy. Pots and pans can only clang—but all this sweet propriety of my mincing Hens is nothing more than the clang of a Chicken! Let the Lord God,” Chauntecleer roared to the heavens, “let the Lord God himself come down and stand before me and give an accounting of himself—that he makes Roosters lonely! Ah, forget it,” he grumped, suddenly tired of his prayer. “Go step on a mountain somewhere.”