The Book of the Dun Cow

by Walter Wangerin Jr.

  The little Rooster on the top of the wall and facing the sea, Chauntecleer, in the grip of Pertelote, began to shriek:

  “Come, snake! Viper! Come! I don’t care! I don’t care anymore! This is the way that it ends!”

  The shaking of the earth grew more violent. Whole sections of the wall slipped sideways, broke into great, tumbling chunks; and then there were gaps in the wall. A mysterious confusion struck the waves of the sea: Instead of their rhythmic rolling toward the camp, there was a dizzy turning. They slapped and struggled against one another, giants without direction. They came together, these waves, like enormous hands, clapping.

  Chauntecleer jerked against Pertelote’s hold, writhed in her wings.

  “Why not?” he screamed as the breach in the wall came very close to him; soon he and Pertelote were on a narrow pedestal, and nowhere to go. “Why not? This is the way that it should be, Wyrm! It is all falling apart!” In spite of his broken body, he doubled his effort to tear himself out of Pertelote’s grip. And he would have slashed her, too, if he could have.

  But a ponderous growl ascended from the river—a new sound—and then the very earth sprang back.

  Chauntecleer was thunderstruck.

  As if the earth had a mouth, as if that mouth were opening in a yawn, a chasm had opened up where once there was a battlefield. The pedestal, the whole camp, moved backward slowly, as if in reverence before this hole, to give it space. Suddenly Chauntecleer and Pertelote were on the edge of an abysmal cliff, while across the chasm the other edge was hidden by the torrents of water falling into it. To the left and to the right, as far as the eye could see, the crack in the earth went away—and the gorge was widening. The mantle of the earth had split!

  “Sum Wyrm, sub terra!”

  The voice was greater than the roaring of the waterfall—falls that had no ending either east or west: The chasm was drinking the entire sea before it, and the sea rushed into it like suicide. But ever farther the sea and the falls moved away from the Rooster and the Hen beside him: The gorge was widening.

  “Coming, coming! I mean to be free!”

  Now, for the first time, this great voice had a single source. All in spite of himself Chauntecleer found that he was bending forward to see to the bottom of the chasm. As he did he felt as if he were high in the air and in danger for his life. But he looked: It was from there that the voice rose up.

  “Wyrm,” he whispered. But still he saw nothing. He saw the waters cascade and boil at the bottom. He saw the rocky maw of the earth still separating in the deep. He saw mud sliding down the nearer wall and stones spinning past the mud, down and down deeper than he would have believed possible.

  Then the very bottom of the gorge convulsed, rumpled—and in a moment the odor of rot burst into Chauntecleer’s face. He fell backward. Unconsciously he reached for Pertelote and buried his face in the feathers at her throat. The smell there was good. Pertelote touched him at his shoulder. The Rooster swallowed twice and wept— ashamed.

  “No good!” The voice from the pit, frightening in its clarity. “And late, too late, Chauntecleer! I am coming, coming! I mean to be free!”

  Without releasing Pertelote, Chauntecleer looked down again to the bottom; and he saw Wyrm.

  Slowly easing itself between the lower jaws of the pit was a long black body of horrible size. Neither head nor tail, neither beginning nor end could be seen, for they passed miles and miles away through the earth; and the greater bulk of Wyrm’s roundness was still lodged yet deeper than the bottom of the pit. But the body was turning like a rolling mill, turning, sloughing huge fields of rotting flesh as it did—and this body, as far away as Chauntecleer could see, was itself the floor of the gorge.

  As Wyrm turned, the chasm, the earth crack, grew—a mighty power driving it. And the water, when finally it hit Wyrm’s flesh, steamed.

  Chauntecleer drew Pertelote to himself and held her in despair.

  “The Keepers,” Wyrm said, “have failed. They broke. And the earth is breaking. And I shall be free. And I shall be free!”

  “God forgive me,” Chauntecleer breathed.

  Pertelote said, “He will. There is one thing left to do.”

  “What is left?” said the Rooster in an agony.

  But they had to leap backward. They had to race ahead of collapsing ground. Sections of the camp sighed and began to fall into the chasm, down and down the face of it. Earth along the edge of it simply gave up and slid away. The gorge was widening.

  “What to do?” cried Chauntecleer, clawing at his breast. For the next thing was that the Coop was on the edge of the precipice. And the next thing was that it, too, leaned drunkenly toward the deep, as if looking. And then the next thing was that its back end lifted off the ground. It hung on the edge a moment, considering its death; then it tipped over and passed away.

  “What? Pertelote, what?” Chauntecleer screamed as he ran back to the eating cliff.

  A long, long time the Coop spun downward, until it was tiny—until, a leaf, it landed on the floor, Wyrm’s flesh, and flashed into flame.

  “WYRM!”

  Chauntecleer looked up, stared wildly about, to see who had cried out with such a piercing conviction. Who had challenged Wyrm?

  The animals were mewling at the edge of the forest, frantic at the disappearance of the ground in front of them, squirming one under the other’s belly, making an ingrown knot of themselves—a helpless lot.

  “WYRM! Does evil look upon a Dog?”

  Not from the animals! But running in a shaggy, loping, easy gait along the very lip of the chasm, never missing a step, staring nose over into the vile depths—Mundo Cani, far, far west of the Rooster!

  “Wyrm, look at me! Wyrm, see me! A Dog! A Dog! A nothing to look upon!”

  Chauntecleer, too, was on the edge. He saw the body cease turning for a little moment. Wyrm, wound through the earth, held still.

  “A Dog is going to fight with you!”

  Now Chauntecleer shot a narrow look at this Dog. Fight with him! For God’s sake, Mundo Cani!

  Suddenly, a closer look and recognition: Mundo Cani was carrying a weapon. Wood, it seemed, like any other bleached branch, but curved and dangerously sharp. Or bone brought to a lethal point. Or this: It looked exactly like the lost horn of the Dun Cow!

  “Oh, Wyrm! Oh, Wyrm!” Mundo Cani cried—bellowed, challenged in a ringing, imperative bark. So lightly he ran along the wasting cliff, dancing away from the chunks that nodded and tumbled in. Mundo Cani had a talent.

  “Oh, Wyrm! Great Wyrm—afraid to look at a nothing, a nose, a flea! Fears to see the speck that calls him out! Such evil, to split the earth, but from a Dog—a Dog to hide! WYRM—” A cry to heaven and earth, a cry to all the regions underneath the earth: “WYRM!”

  Chauntecleer cast a quick glance to Pertelote. She had known this! But when he looked at her he saw that she was huddled to the earth, covering her face and her eyes and her ears against Mundo Cani’s lonely game.

  Chauntecleer’s heart split. He began to gather dust and throw it upon himself. The high, thin wail of grief and guilt rose up from his chest and filled the air around him.

  “Oh, my God!” he wept.

  “Wyrm! Wyrm! Wyrm!” Mundo Cani was sneering, needles he sent with the utmost scorn down into the pit. He was running the edge far, far away from Chauntecleer.

  Then the body below began to move again. Not turning, this time, but with a new purpose it slid straight in the crevice: bunching and sliding, bunching and sliding.

  “A Dog is going to fight with you! It is right! Of all the noble, a Dog is chosen. Look at me, Wyrm—and see yourself, evil Wyrm!” Mundo Cani swung the horn in wild arcs. “But look! Look! Oh, Wyrm, look at me!”

  Then deep in the gorge, sliding out of the stone, out of the dungeons of the earth, there came a s
ingle, steady eye.

  Monstrous, unblinking, lidless and looking, that cold eye, Wyrm’s eye. White around black, and black so black that all the hosts of night might enter there and never be found again.

  Mundo Cani had his wish. Wyrm was looking at him.

  For one second Mundo Cani crouched, taut upon the cliff, the long horn between his teeth. Then, with a cry, he leaped.

  Over the edge, past the mud, missing the rock like a shadow, down and down Mundo Cani fell, the white horn livid in the dark.

  The eye had almost begun to turn. But Mundo Cani had aimed himself well, had made an arrow of his fall. He hit the eye hard, with all four feet. He scrambled, grabbed a footing with his sharp claws, raised the horn, and drove it to the butt through the white flesh.

  How Wyrm raged then!

  Back and forth the body slammed against the sides of the canyon, the earth crack. Howlings ascended, as if the caverns of the earth were all Wyrm’s throat, all filled with his hideous dismay. No longer was his vast motion controlled. It was mad, enraged—and blind.

  The far side of the chasm began to crumble altogether. Boulders hurtled into the deep. The streaming water gouged and pounded the cliff face, digging at the weaker parts, spitting out stone, and raking the face to the bottom of it. Soon rock and the whole wall burst inward, spraying and then jamming the bottom. The sea above simply stumbled, as if surprised in its forward walk by a drop-off: The sea stumbled, then settled much lower than it was before. And in a moment—by rock and boulders, by mud and mountains of loose earth; and by the mixing water, a strong mortar—the chasm was filled, the earth crack patched.

  In heaven the clouds ripped asunder like a veil. And the light of the sun plunged down and filled the earth. And Chauntecleer could see. And Chauntecleer, in a world suddenly silent, suddenly bright, grieved.

  Behind him neither Coop nor camp nor wall. A desolation.

  In front of him, at a good distance from him, a sparkling and peaceful sea. And, finally, between him and the sea, an endless scar east to west in the face of the earth—an angry seam closed.

  It was this scar that the little Rooster was watching. But he wasn’t seeing the scar at all. Over and over again in his mind—as if it were still happening—he was watching a memory: He remembered that as Wyrm swung himself about so grimly a moment ago, and as the wall was caving in on him, there was a Dog in his eye, stabbing and stabbing that eye with a long horn until the eye was no more than a blind and shredded socket.

  Wyrm, and more than Wyrm—that scar had knit Mundo Cani into the earth.

  In sunshine Chauntecleer went to Pertelote and lay down next to her.

  “Marooned,” he said. He buried his face in the flaming feathers of her throat. “Marooned.”

  Here ends the third part of the story about Wyrm’s campaign for freedom, its failure, and a Dog’s curious entrance into the Netherworld.

  FINAL WORD

  [TWENTY-EIGHT] And the last thing done is Pertelote’s doing

  John Wesley Weasel did not die; but it took him a long time to accept that fact.

  More than ever before in his life he developed an abhorrence for the light. It made him sick, both in body and soul, just by being light when he should have awoken in death’s darkness. It hurt his eyes, since he was, after all, a Weasel and every Weasel weakness about him was intensified during his convalescence. It humiliated him, for he would catch other animals flitting odd glances at his one-eared head and at the hairless scar along his side. It angered him: The sun had never—never once—shone upon the Wee Widow Mouse when she was alive with him; but now that she was dead, and now that the sun had no business being, it shone with an outrageous glory. For John Wesley Weasel, sunshine now was a cruel gift, come altogether too late.

  So as soon as he could walk he took himself into the darkness. There was no Coop for the shade, no roof for the covering, no floor nor any space beneath a floor for the hiding. He went back to his burrow at the base of a certain maple tree.

  “Is no use in it,” he said, and he determined never again to come out.

  Pertelote heard these remarks. She had been tending to the Weasel all through his healing.

  “Mice cleans in the spring. What’s that to kill for and to take a house away?”

  When, after several days and nights, he neither came out of his burrow nor made a sound inside of it, Pertelote took the problem to Chauntecleer—who dealt with it directly.

  “Yo, John!” He set up a clamor from the middle of the flat, empty yard. “John, yo! Wesley, yo! Weasel!”

  The rest of the animals he had sent to their homes. Scattered about him, pecking and working with an afternoon’s industry (for it was the middle of the afternoon, and the proper canonical crow had been crowed as ever it was before the violation of the times by Wyrm) were twenty-nine dutiful Hens, while seven adolescent Mice buzzed between the yard and the forest, a-gathering.

  There came no answer from the burrow.

  “John Wesley, laggard! Get out of there! We are not going to bring you food. We are not going to spend pity on you. And when you have wasted away we are not going to mourn a fool’s passing. Get out and get to work! There’s work to be done in this place!”

  Work, indeed. A sea to the south of them. A little closer than the sea, the scar, which had never yet grown a single blade of grass in its clenched, poisonous soil. And then, from the scar to the forest, an open space which had once been the busy center of Chauntecleer’s land and the Coop—but was now mere open space.

  “It’s done, John Wesley; and now the time is ours again, if we make it so. It’s done, John Wesley! And now we look to the day. We put it back together again.”

  But still, from the burrow beneath the maple, nothing.

  “Okay, that’s it, Pertelote,” Chauntecleer said to the Hen, turning his back to the forest. “I’ve no time for a mope.”

  “But it will kill him.”

  “That’s what he wants, isn’t it?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Want! I want my land made new again. I want the past scrubbed out of my soul. I want never to think of it again.”

  “You can’t help thinking about it,” Pertelote said. “And you are not, Chauntecleer, able to clean out of your soul the thing that has changed you. Do pity the Weasel. He’s slower with the changes than you are. He needed the past and its order more than you, for all of his bluster.”

  “As long as he remembers in this way, as long as he sulks, he’s a memory for me of what happened. I’m going to forget the past, Pertelote. And if I have to forget John Wesley with it—well, so. That’s the way it is.”

  “And Mundo Cani?”

  “What”—Chauntecleer bristled—“about Mundo Cani?”

  “Then you forget him, too?”

  “No!”

  But, yes. As a matter of fact, ever since the war was done and the earth closed, Chauntecleer had wanted to forget Mundo Cani, because there was guilt in such a memory. The Dog’s good act stood ever in accusation of the Rooster’s sinfulness. Chauntecleer did not like to think of himself as a failure at the final moment. Therefore Chauntecleer did not like to think of Mundo Cani at all.

  And that, strangely, is why he was willing to talk about Mundo Cani to anyone and to praise him vigorously.

  So Pertelote had not one problem, but two: one whose present was too much steeped in the past, and one whose present denied the past altogether. But the Hen of the crimson throat was equal to both of them. And what she did about them we might call the last and the best battle of all. She talked.

  Chauntecleer had a dread of the Netherworld Scar; he was never at ease sleeping on ground level with it. Therefore Pertelote had not the least trouble talking the Rooster into a roost above ground. That she chose for the roost a certain maple tree at the edge of the for
est was of little consequence to the Rooster. Its branches were lean, clean, and low for the leap; twenty-nine-plus-one Hens and a Rooster could be well accomodated by the maple; so to the maple they repaired for the night.

  There Chauntecleer crowed both vespers and compline. And thence the Hens pattered the ground below. That is to say, they flipped their tail feathers, they delivered a damp plop to the ground, and they snugly resettled themselves on the branch above. That is to say, they relieved themselves there. It was a most natural performance for the Hens. They had done it all their lives. The only difference was that now they were dropping their wet packages around, near, and into John Wesley’s burrow. This made for discomfort and for a very sour sulk.

  Who knew but Pertelote about John Wesley’s new distress? Not Chauntecleer. He had gone to sleep. There was much work to do in the morning.

  Therefore Pertelote woke him up.

  “Mundo Cani!” she said loudly—angrily, in fact.

  “What?”

  “Mundo Cani Dog. Nothing more. Good night.”

  But, of course, she had made the night instantly ungood, and Chauntecleer could not go back to sleep. Pertelote’s tone had been curt, forbidding; so he didn’t feel that he should talk, either. What was left? He tried twelve various positions, shaking the limb heartily with each one and giving Pertelote herself something to think about.

  Finally he burst out: “Mundo Cani what?”

  A Weasel below tried to turn his wrinkled snout from the entrance to the shaft of his burrow and failed.

  “He’s on your mind,” she snapped.

  “He is not!”

  “No, of course he isn’t.”

  “He is, too!”

  “Of course he is.”

  “I haven’t forgotten him, Pertelote, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Nothing of the kind. You memorialize him.”

  “But I don’t dwell on him, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Ah, no. The past is past.”