The Book of the Dun Cow

by Walter Wangerin Jr.

  The Rooster slurped down deeper into his mud pile. His feathers were steaming gently, and his little eye cocked balefully at a slippery world.

  “This, that, and the other,” he mumbled to himself for no reason at all. “This, that, and the other. This, that, and the other. Ha!”

  Then he became aware of a little figure with him in the wide world.

  “Blow it out your nose!” he said to a Mouse creeping through the field; but she only looked at him and didn’t try to blow anything out of anywhere.

  [EIGHT] The Wee Widow Mouse makes herself known, as far as she is able, and after that Chauntecleer finds a treasure

  Chauntecleer looked away from the Mouse and expected her to wander on to wherever she was going. She didn’t. She stood still and looked at him.

  Chauntecleer peered off at the iron-grey sky for a while. Then he poked around at the edges of his mud pile and slithered his backside around in order to make a better seat. When this was done, he glanced over at the Mouse, then quickly glanced away. She was still there, gazing at him, gazing directly into his eyes.

  Chauntecleer whistled a tune out of the side of his beak. It was beginning to dawn on him that he was uncomfortable under this woman’s gaze. In fact, it was downright embarrassing to be squatting on a heap of mud in the smack middle of a wide and empty field in the middle of the rain, and to have this small, watchful audience while he did.

  Chauntecleer got up, turned a half circle so that his tail was aimed at the Mouse, and plotched himself down again. He counted up to one hundred fifty-seven.

  She was gone, now. She went home. Good.

  But he hadn’t heard her go away.

  But of course she was gone. Who would stand around in the rain for no other reason than to stare at a Rooster? She had crept away, too polite to say anything to a royal bird, and that’s why he hadn’t heard her leave.

  But it didn’t feel as if she were gone away. In fact—

  Chauntecleer snapped his head around so that he was looking straight over his back. She was still there, gazing at him.

  “Did you hear what I said?” said the Rooster over his back.

  The Mouse nodded. A drop of rain slipped off the end of her nose.

  “Well?”

  She didn’t do anything. She looked at him.

  “You know what it means?”

  She shook her head.

  “It means go home. Blow it out your nose: It means go home very, very fast. Move! Begone! I don’t want you here!”

  The Mouse kept standing where she was and looking at him.

  “COCK-A-DOOD— Ack!” The Rooster started to crow, but the crow got stuck in his neck because his head was twisted all the way around. “So, then! Fine, then!” he said as he stood up. He made a great show of standing up. “Take this place, and I’ll go find another. Perhaps you’d like a warm mud puddle.”

  Chauntecleer began to strut away, muttering. When he glanced back he saw that she was still looking at him, only she had bent her head sideways in order still to see him.

  That did it! He ran at her, flapping his wings and spraying water out in two wonderful arcs. “BLOW IT OUT YOUR NOSE!” he shouted, and the Mouse began to cry.

  Suddenly blow-it-out-your-nose sounded like a dismally stupid thing to say, especially since they were the only two creatures in all this wet field, and since rain makes creatures need one another. The Mouse was crying with wide-open eyes..

  The Rooster sat down again upon his mud pile, this time facing her. And this time he waited for her to talk. But he didn’t look her in the eyes, because she had never once taken her eyes off him, and he was ashamed.

  Her tears flowed sadly through water already on her face.

  When she was done crying, she said quietly, “My children,” and then she stopped.

  Chauntecleer didn’t interrupt even her silence, now. He waited. She was so much soaked that at a distance she had seemed to him another piece of mud dropped on the field. She was remarkably thin, since her fur was pasted to her sides, and little, and tired—her bones so small they should have melted in all this rain.

  “My children are in the river,” she said.

  “The river!” Chauntecleer breathed. “You came all the way from the river?” The river was several miles south.

  She nodded. “My husband is dead,” she said quietly.

  “But your children—they are alive?”

  She nodded, still looking at him. It was the same look which she had all along; but now for the first time Chauntecleer could see that it was asking many questions.

  “But, Widow—You said they were in the river,” Chauntecleer said, himself speaking quietly now. “The river moves very fast.”

  She nodded again. Perhaps she was nodding that he had her words correctly. Perhaps she was nodding that, yes, the river moved very fast.

  “Widow,” Chauntecleer said, “are your children all right?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are they in danger?”

  She nodded, looking at him. “The river moves very fast,” she whispered. Her voice made of the words a plain statement; but her eyes said: “Why should the river move so fast?”

  “Then they need help?” Chauntecleer asked.

  “They are on branches,” she whispered so softly that he barely heard her. But she was looking at him as clearly as before. “We came downriver on branches. I tied them to branches.”

  “How did you get off, Widow? How did you come here? Can you swim? I need to know these things.” Chauntecleer felt that he had to hurry up; he had to get as many answers as possible before her voice died away altogether.

  “I couldn’t untie them. God help me,” she whispered, looking at him. “My husband is dead. He was killed under the Terebinth Oak.”

  “That is surely something to be sad about,” Chauntecleer said; “and I, too, will be sad over the death of your husband. But, forgive me, Widow, not now. Your children are still alive. Tell me, where are the branches? What part of the river?”

  “He wouldn’t leave them alone. He wouldn’t run. He fought them, and they killed him under the Terebinth Oak.”

  “Widow. Are the branches near the level bank?”

  She gave him nothing. Neither a nod nor a no.

  “Did the branches stop at the island?”

  Nothing.

  Chauntecleer blinked against his impatience. “There is a cove on this river. Did you pass a cove? Did your branches go into a cove? It’s like a bite out of the side of the river.”

  Something picked at her memory. Her eyes came to focus. “The branches were caught by reaching arms,” she whispered.

  “Arms? Arms? Whose arms?”

  “Crooked, broken. Cracking arms from above.”

  Impulsively, Chauntecleer stood up and walked, thinking. Of all the places along the river, the cove was the likeliest. The water ran too fast at the level bank. The island showed a vicious point against the current. Anywhere—anywhere else the branches would have been shaken apart. But a whirlpool turned in that cove, drawing flotsam into it. It was a dangerous harbor. There were—Of course!

  “Arms!” Chauntecleer cried. “Oh, Widow, why did you think they were arms? Those are the tree limbs that overhang the cove! But, look: There’s a whirlpool in that place.”

  “I wanted to feed them. They wanted to eat,” whispered the Wee Widow Mouse. “There was no milk.”

  Chauntecleer spoke lowly, but urgently: “One more question. Do the branches touch the shore?”

  The Mouse moved her mouth. Immediately Chauntecleer put his ear close to her mouth, but there wasn’t a sound. And when he drew back to see her again, she was looking at him with clear, earnest, pleading eyes. Her eyes said, “Answer me.”

  “Dear Widow,” he said
, “I want to love your children. I want to see them living that I may love them. Can someone step from the shore to these branches, or does someone have to swim?”

  Again her mouth moved without a sound. Her voice had finally gone away, but her lips were still making the words. Chauntecleer could see what they said. They were not answering his question. They said: “Why should the river move so fast?”

  The Hens had been making the best of a rainy day. They scratched, fed, cleaned the Coop, and gossiped—all inside the Coop. The scratching was useless, unless it was for the exercise, because a wooden floor and a little scattering of straw yielded neither grubs nor seed. The cracked corn on which they fed was not a joy, for it was too moist for their taste. Cleaning was plain business. Yet this is all that the weather had left for them to do—this, and gossip. But that gossip more than made up for a grey, thankless day.

  They described Ebenezer Rat and his two careening wings a thousand times over—clucking, chuckling, and laughing outright, until it seemed as if the sun were shining in this Coop. They shook their thirty heads over the wounds which their Lord had sustained in the fight. Chauntecleer knew very well of the one wound in his stomach. But he had taken no notice of the fact that his neck, front and back, had been stripped of its feathers. This the Hens had seen immediately. They also could see where Chauntecleer had found two feathers long and strong enough to be planted in the Rat’s shoulders: They were primary feathers, one from each of his wings. Without them the Rooster’s flight would be a grievous desperation. There was much to talk about, much to cluck and mutter over, much grist for a good gossip on a rainy day.

  Mundo Cani Dog just lay before the door all the morning long with his two paws on top of his nose. He was trying to cover it up, but that was impossible. A spying Weasel might cheerfully have thought that the Dog was dead, except that once in a while he would sigh so powerfully that he blew up a cloud of dust from in front of his nostrils, and the dust made the Hens to cackle and bitch.

  Suddenly the Dog raised his head. Nobody had heard anything, but he had heard something: His hearing was remarkable. But a moment passed, and he put his head back down again with a sigh. With a thump, too, which caused thirty Hens to hop.

  Then he heard it again: “Mundo Cani! Dog, get out here! I need you!” That was clear enough, even if it was still far away. Chauntecleer had a crowing voice.

  “Beryl, you too! I want you both!”

  The gossiping stopped, and all the Hens went still. The Dog ambled out, and the Chicken fluttered behind.

  “Oh, Doctor,” the Dog murmured when he saw Chauntecleer squadging through the mud at a distance. “Such a stinking world that we live in to do such a thing to you. I am maybe ill luck and maybe should go away.” For even at that distance the Rooster looked like a boiled soup-bone.

  His chest, his stomach, his wing pits, and the loins between his legs were covered with a foul crust of grey mud, which had dried, hardened, and cracked. It was an odd casing to be walking in; but he was walking in it. But who can walk with a spade between his legs? He waddled. He rocked left and right.

  His neck was skinny, pink, and featherless. It was a bent finger coming out of his shoulders, a sadness to see on one so royal.

  And on his back was—what? A mud lump? A dead fish? Why, if the Rooster would only stand up straight, it would fall off and he would be rid of it. But he waddled crouched over, as if he wanted the morsel to stay on his back; and that, of course, made waddling an even greater difficulty.

  “Dog, you are a wizard!” the Rooster crowed. Never mind the way he looked; Chauntecleer crowed like healthy thunder. “And Chicken, you surely know what you’re doing. Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your brains are maple wood. When somebody says that he needs you,” crowed Chauntecleer as he puffed along, “you know that he doesn’t mean it. Prophets! Providential geniuses! You know he only wants you to gape at him until he dies.”

  “Oh, no, Doctor,” said the Dog whose nose was a log. “That’s not what you meant. Forgive my speaking up, but it seemed to me that you needed us.”

  “WELL, THEN SHAG IT, YOU SUITCASE! GET OVER HERE!”

  Mundo Cani Dog could run very fast when he had to. And Beryl came flipping behind.

  “That’s good to see,” said Chauntecleer when they were near. “I need your speed, Mutt. Beryl,” he said, “hold still and be tender.”

  The Rooster laid the Mouse, who had been borne upon his back, on Beryl’s clean back. The Wee Widow Mouse was asleep, and so she was no help to the one who carried her. “You will take this one back to the Coop. Warm her. Feed her. Bring her back to life. And for the Lord’s sake, be quiet around her while she sleeps. Beryl,” he said, “walk tenderly.”

  “I will, my Lord,” said the Hen. Chauntecleer watched her narrowly to see whether her walk was indeed a tender one. It was.

  “Dog, squat down,” he commanded, and Mundo Cani went down in the mud. Chauntecleer climbed onto his back and grabbed the mangy fur in either claw.

  “Do you know where the river is?”

  “In my childhood,” sighed the Dog, “I played at the edge of the water. My reflection I saw, once, when I was old enough to know evil. My nose—”

  “You know where the river is. Run, Dog! Skin the wind! Run to the cove which is west of Liver-brook. MOVE!”

  And a Dog did skin the wind. Mundo Cani had a talent which nobody would have suspected: He could run like any horse at a full gallop. He spun clots of mud out from under his paws with every wide, wild stride. The muscles in his hips and withers rolled, snapped, and tightened with perfect power; and the wind in Chauntecleer’s face blinded him.

  The Rooster was hard pressed to hang on. But he did. He stuck out his wings for the balance, leaned forward, crowed for pure joy at the speed underneath him, and gripped the sparse fur with all of his strength. Mundo Cani had a talent indeed!

  The miles were minutes, the green hills a gone-again blur, the trees a constant danger avoided, the rain tiny bullets in Chauntecleer’s face.

  They sped up a long rise and fairly flew over the top of it. There Chauntecleer saw a valley; and in the bottom of it, the grey river. So many miles, so quickly!

  Now down the side of the valley, with barely a paw on the ground.

  The river had looked flat and still from above, a grey weight at the bottom of a valley. But as they plunged down to it, Chauntecleer saw violence in the water. The current whirled and eddied near the shore; at the center of the river that current went flat out in one direction: westward toward the sea with tremendous might. The rains had swollen the river. But how, thought Chauntecleer, could loose branches and Mice survive on the face of that water? And why, for the Lord’s sake, would they want to take such a trip?

  A cluster of trees showed where the cove was to their right. Between them and the trees pumped the dark brown Liver-brook, thick with water. Mundo Cani never paused, but took the brook all in a single leap, touched land on the other side, and galloped. He ran with the river. Chauntecleer was surprised to find that so much water and so great a current, choked with so many logs, branches, and shunt, made not a sound at all.

  Then Mundo Cani sailed into the cluster of trees.

  Not the Dog, but the Rooster was breathing hard as they stared at the jam of wood spinning in the cove. Tree limbs from above were holding the flimsy island in place; but they wouldn’t much longer, because the tree limbs and the island were untwisting one from the other. And then there would be no hope for it at all.

  “She said that she tied them to the branches,” Chauntecleer panted. “Can you see them? Can you see them? What do you see?”

  “What are they?”

  Chauntecleer had forgotten to give the Dog any reason for their trip. “Her children. The Mouse’s children.”

  “Oh, Master of the Universe!” Mundo Cani began to weep on the spo
t.

  “Not now!” the Rooster barked. “Look for them. What do you see?”

  It was like trying to spy a friend on a merry-go-round. This mass of wood had many hidden parts to it, all of it going in circles. The more Chauntecleer stared, the more he didn’t see what was really there. Wood was there. Branches, as the Mouse had said; twigs, stems, limbs, leaves, branches: broken and whole, naked and barked, rotten and dry and white above the water. But the Rooster began to see other things. Bones. Shattered ribs. Choppy, dry fingers clutching at the air. Pieces of crushed skull. A spinning cemetery of bones; and for just a moment it made him afraid.

  “There!” shouted the Dog. His vision was remarkable. “What’s that?”

  Chauntecleer saw the branches again. “Where?”

  “There.” His nose turned circles, pointing.

  “Mundo Cani Dog! There they are!”

  It was a bird’s nest crammed tightly into a dense part of the branches, a mere fist of twigs. The nest was not tied to the branches; but the children were tied into the nest. Many strands of hair had been patiently tied, crisscross, over the top of the nest; and Chauntecleer could see bulges in the webbing, bodies bumping it.

  He leaped to a low branch on the tree beside him, found his balance, then leaped to a higher branch. This way he climbed the tree to the place where it leaned out over the water. Now he could walk along a limb, flipping his feathers to keep balance. The limb sank underneath his weight. His wings went out, but he didn’t fall. By his beak and his claws he grappled his way down droopy branches, until he hung, head down, directly over the turning island.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw a part of the shore which he had not seen before. There was something white there, like a stone or a pillow, or salt. But in the middle of it was a burning patch of brilliant color. There was no time for the looking. He dropped down.