The White Bone Read online

  She heard Mud’s newborn within hours of Mud’s oestrussubsiding. A cow calf, she declared, but Mud insisted, then, that she was mistaken, there was no newborn. Now, apparently, the creakings are ear splitting, and Mud’s breasts and belly are fat, and yet she has no sense of harbouring a life, and she doesn’t cherish what might be inside her any more than she cherishes her intestines. She prays that she has not been “truly dug,” but everybody says that Tall Time is a true digger and She-Scares says that come the rains she will drop a cow calf. The other dug cows, She-Snorts and She-Stammers, will drop bull calves. They feel their newborns rolling, and She-Stammers is hearing the dreams of hers.

  “B-b-b-bad dreams,” she tells everyone with her usual terrorized fluster. “Loud n-n-n-noises, com-commotion,” and she has taken to standing protectively over her little brother, Bent, as if he were the dreamer.*

  She stands over him now. A hippo tries to enter the water close to her, and she beseeches with her trunk toward She-Scares, who charges it, trumpeting.

  But it is the rest of the hippos who suddenly move away. The whole mob swells out of the water and lumbers to the shore, spraying up the geese, whose see-saw honks bore through the air in front of them. Beyond the hippos, clopping down from the plain and setting off explosions of dust, a pair of giraffes appears at the edge of a small group of zebras and wildebeests. The members of this group look starved and unnerved. In some collective dazzlement they stare toward the setting sun (andthat they all face the same way is one more omen that goes unnoticed).

  By comparison, the giraffes, who can browse the high foliage–and near the swamp enough of that remains–look indecently hale. They glide through the grazers but suddenly stop a few feet from the shore and rotate their heads so that they, too, are gazing at the sun.

  Mud lifts her trunk and swivels it behind herself. Opens her ears. No strange scents that way, no sounds. And still the giraffes continue to stare, and now the oxpeckers that ride the hippos take flight.

  Mud turns around.

  Above the sun, down through spindles of light, a vulture lounges in silhouette. Mud scans the fever trees. The black shape of a leopard reclines on a limb of the tallest, but it threatens no one, not yet.

  Where Mud’s family is, the bank is lower, offering an unobstructed view of whatever has arrested the giraffes. Except for She-Sees, everybody is scenting. She-Scares flaps her ears and rumbles a few inaudible words in Mud’s direction.

  “What is it?” Mud calls, but She-Scares is heading for shore now. As she passes She-Sees, She-Scares nudges her to come along, and like a submissive calf She-Sees obeys.

  “It is done,” Mud murmurs, surprised. Although she has always known that as the second-biggest and second-oldest cow She-Scares would one day assume command from She-Sees, she is so taken aback by witnessing the actual transition of power that she wades to shore unaware that she is on the verge of a vision. She is in the midst of it, her third eye wide open, before she recovers herself.

  The vision is of a web of silver twigs. A “Rogue’s web,” it must be. (Mud has never seen one but she knows of them, everyone does–their length and their impregnability, the magically regular pattern of their weave, and their tendency to form closures within which bewildered cattle often find themselves.) Her third eye slides down. She has no idea what she will see, and so for a few seconds it is incomprehensible. An embankment, boulders. No. Carcasses.

  Dozens, hundreds, all wildebeests and zebras. Her third eye tracks along the base of the fence, and the debacle goes on and on. And then her eye veers away and she is looking at another debacle.

  The remains of her own kind.

  All the faces are hacked off, the trunks tossed aside, the tusks gone and some of the feet as well. Marabou storks step daintily among the wreckage, they seem to lean away from her third eye as it races over the bodies. On a certain cow her eye settles, and by the line of the jaw she recognizes She-Doubts-And-Doubts. So these are the She-D’s. Twenty-three bodies she counts before her eye dims.

  She starts splashing to shore. Date Bed waits at the water’s edge, but Mud races past her to the bank. Halfway up, her bad leg crumples and she slips down, and Date Bed moves behind her and pushes her hindquarters until she gains the lip.

  About a hundred yards away, out on the plain, three wraith-like cows and a bull calf drag themselves through the powdery red light. After every spastic step the bull calf flings his head to one side. The biggest cow carries something between her lower jaw and shoulder. She drops it on theground, producing a high bloom of dust. While she scoops it up with her tusks the others wait.

  “What is that?” Date Bed says, sniffing.

  “A newborn,” Mud says. “A dead newborn.”

  The reek is that of a corpse at least five days old. It masks the scent of the family, but as they come closer Mud recognizes them. “The She-D’s,” she says, hurrying forward.

  Date Bed falls in beside her. “No,” she says, incredulous. The She-D’s were one of the largest families.

  Mud adds these four to the twenty-three in her vision and says, “Four left out of twenty-seven.”

  Their own family has reached the travellers. She-Screams shrieks in alarm and is swatted by her mother, She-Sees, who then trumpets, “Declare yourselves!”

  Mud lifts her mouth to She-Sees’ slotted old ear. “It’s the She-D’s,” she says. “The last of them.”

  “Oh, dear,” says She-Sees. Her trunk plummets.

  Mud moves up beside She-Scares and the nurse cow, She-Soothes.

  “It’s bad,” She-Scares says softly.

  She-Soothes says, not so softly but toned down from her usual bellow, “A mixture of water-tree bark and grunt piss ought to do it. She-Soothes will need pools of piss.”*

  She-Soothes and She-Scares are consulting about a poultice for the bull calf. He is Hail Stones, Mud realizes after a moment of puzzlement… . It has been two years since she last saw him, at a Massive Gathering, and his odour is masked bythe stench of his right forefoot. Looking closer she sees that above the middle toenail is a hole in which maggots, livid in the twilight, squirm.

  “How will you carry it?” She-Scares asks She-Soothes.

  “Carry what?”

  “The urine.”

  “She-Soothes will ask the grunts to piss on the bark itself. She-Soothes will tear off a strip, munch it up, then spit it out, right there where the grunts are.”

  “Do what you can,” She-Scares says. So that the warthogs can be appealed to in their own language she adds, “Take Date Bed.”

  When the two of them are gone She-Scares approaches the She-D matriarch. “She-Demands,” she says, using the formal timbre.

  She-Demands rocks from foot to foot.

  “We did not cross paths at last year’s Massive Gathering,” says She-Scares, and as she extends her trunk the air erupts with the gunshot rattle of a flappet lark beating its wings.

  The She-D’s rear back in terror.

  “It’s a burr fly!” She-Scares trumpets. “It’s only a burr fly!”

  The She-D’s calm down quickly, as if panic is so familiar to them that it fails to hold their interest. She-Demands shifts the fetid bundle under her chin and regards She-Scares through half-closed, glistening eyes. The cows on either side of her are her eldest daughters: She-Drawls-And-Drawls and She-Distracts.

  “What did you name her?” She-Scares asks. She snakes out her trunk to the dead newborn but She-Demands turns her head away, and She-Scares withdraws the trunk and says, “You have reached the water. It is safe here.”

  A nightjar has told Date Bed that the stars are falling. “Are you able to see them?” Date Bed whispers to Mud.

  Mud cocks one eye skyward. It is a Rogue’s night and she sees only the gaping moon. “Did he say how many?”

  “Countless.”

  “At least the She-D dead are spared that atrocity,” Mud thinks.

  “How do you know?”

  “In my vision all the tusks were
hacked off.”

  “But you don’t know when that happened.”

  “There was something so desolate about them.”

  “Well,” Date Bed breathes, “a slaughter–”

  “It was more than the slaughter. I can’t describe it … a hopelessness. I don’t think any of them became sky cows.”

  Sky cows are dead cows who have ascended to the sky to join the family of the She. A star is the shine of a sky cow’s tusk. When stars fall it is because sky cows are dropping out of the family of the She and into The Eternal Shoreless Water, where they will bloat and drift insensible among the calves and dead bulls, all of whom fall into The Eternal Shoreless Water directly from this life, the hard truth being that not even newborn calves are granted a spell of bliss in the company of the She. Stars falling in great numbers means that a dead human has slunk out from under the crush of The Domain* and, since he is flat now, easily airborne, has wafted up to the sky, where he is hacking off as many tusks as he can before the She awakens. To have your tusks hacked off in paradise is painless, there is that consolation. To have your tusks hacked off while you are on earth is an incomparable physical anguish regardless of whether you are still alive (the notion that pain ends at the instant of death is not taken for granted). It also denies cows entrance into the family of the She, since for a cow to become a sky cow, at least one tusk, or the stump of a tusk, must remain attached to her skull for a full day and night following her last intake of breath. Like bulls and calves, tuskless cows will never know even a second of paradise.

  “Listen,” Mud thinks, spreading her ears. The pathetic honking of a wildebeest carries above the rabble of night sounds. The wildebeest is injured. Not by a lioness or leopard, whose choke-hold kills are virtually soundless. By jackals, or wild dogs. Or hyenas. “Do you hear?” she says out loud. “Do you hear?”

  “You’ll alarm the She-D’s,” Date Bed whispers. She pulls on Mud’s trunk.

  But Mud has fallen into a memory of the hyena that circled her on the night of her birth, and she herself is circling as she attempts to keep the hyena in her sights. At the outskirts of the memory she senses Date Bed tugging her, and gradually the hyena gives way to the silver shaft of moonlight agitating across the surface of the swamp and she comes to a stop. The shaft is the reflected strong tusk of the She. It is meant to be a comfort, but how can it be tonight? “I have such dread,” Mud thinks.

  Date Bed is silent.

  “So do you,” Mud thinks. “I smell your dread.”

  “I cannot tell if the dread is my own,” Date Bed concedes, “or if I have absorbed the dread of those around me. Your dread.” She looks toward the plain. “Theirs.”

  Earlier she told the family about talking to one of the wildebeest bulls–an unusually approachable and intelligent patriarch–when she went off with She-Soothes to collect warthog urine. Sixty days ago, in a herd of thousands of wildebeests and zebras, the bull arrived at the wire fence of Mud’s vision. There was a pond less than a mile away, on the far side of this apparently endless barrier, and the bull said that the smell of water is what kept the herd galloping up and down the fence’s length until they succumbed to exhaustion. All of the bull’s cows perished from thirst, all the calves perished. How the She-D’s died, he couldn’t say. He never saw them, which makes sense to Mud. According to her vision, their deaths were more recent.

  Mud looks at the She-D’s. They seem beyond dread. They huddle together, removed from Mud’s family, most of whom sleep now, the cows on their feet, the small calves lying in a clump. Normally the She-S’s would have left the swamp at sunset to return to the relatively safe shelter of the acacia bush, but there was no question of abandoning the She-D’s, or of waking them. Even Hail Stones appears to be asleep, one ear draped over his eye and his bad right foot resting on his left forefoot. Galled by urine, the worms have fallen from his wound. Some were still convulsing on the ground hours after the poultice was applied, but a few moments ago She-Demands stepped on them. And then returned to guarding the corpse of her newborn. It lies between her forelegs. Behind her, She-Distracts and She-Drawls-And-Drawls doze leaningagainst each other. All four of them have drunk and bathed and eaten, but they have yet to speak. Even their thoughts are mute. Apart from a bleak cavernous whistling, Date Bed says she hears nothing.

  The night slides through itself. That avalanche down the bank is the hippos returning. At the shore the two lead hippos stop and crack open their jaws and a dull light flaunts their canines. When She-Scares charges after them, their jaws clamp shut and the whole pack turns and trundles to the end of the swamp where crocodiles throng under a froth of mist.

  The giraffes come next. Passing the two families, they dip their necks and look down at the tiny corpse. Giraffes She-Scares tolerates, although barely.

  “She-Soothes is as dry as an old teat,” She-Soothes roars, and She-Scares jolts around, startled, it seems, by this call to matriarchal duty, and trumpets, “Drink! Eat! Bathe!”

  It is not for She-Scares to direct the She-D’s, but they, too, head for the water, She-Demands leading them downshore from the She-S’s. Hail Stones limps behind the cows, and She-Soothes rumbles to him, “Try not to soak that foot! She-Soothes will bring you all the tail grass you can eat!”

  “Let’s not overdo it!” cries She-Screams. “What little food there is left is going to have to last us until who knows when!”

  “That hasn’t stopped you from feasting like a bull,” She-Snorts rumbles.

  “Or you!” She-Screams shrieks. She tosses her trunk.

  She-Screams is an ugly cow. Her face bubbles with warts, her tusks are blunt and chipped, and yet she carries herself with the arrogance of a beauty. Like She-Snorts (a true beauty), she sways her rump and tosses her trunk, except that in her case the intent is not always clear, especially to strangers, who have been known to back away in alarm from her haughty greeting gestures.

  “I have my suitors to consider,” says She-Snorts. She lolls her trunk at Swamp, who–an odd thing for a fourteen-year-old bull calf, especially such a handsome one–shows no interest in the females. Far from attempting to mount them he scarcely sniffs them, and it is this unnatural but welcome passivity that has allowed him to remain in the family well past the age of expulsion. “Oh, don’t rebuff me,” She-Snorts says as he ducks away from her, and although pretending to pine for him is a relentless amusement of hers, to which he has never paid any attention, there is, today, a note of melancholy in her voice, and he looks around at her and rumbles, “I am not rebuffing you. I am withdrawing from you.”

  “Hurry up, son,” brays She-Screams. “I feel a spell coming on.” She grabs the end of his tail but he pulls free and enters the water on his own, with his customary torpor.

  Most of the She-S cows make their way toward the sedge grasses. She-Sees has given up trying to chew the coarse browse, and she stays in the shallows to feed on the thinner grasses and creepers. With her are She-Soothes, She-Scavenges (named for her habit of eating whatever falls from anyone else’s mouth) and the three small calves. The She-D’s keep to the shallows as well, She-Demands frequently lifting her trunk in the direction of her dead calf, where She-Stammers lingers as if she wouldlike to stand over the body. Eventually She-Stammers moves into the water and contents herself with standing over her brother, Bent, and after that She-Demands appears less fretful.

  For an hour or so the two families bathe and feed. The She-D’s lean into each other and caress each other with their trunks but still maintain their strange silence, and consequently when She-Demands trumpets, although it is a thin and rattled sound, the She-S’s are so alarmed that they start up a chorus of “Help!” and “Beware!” before they know what the danger is.

  It’s a spotted hyena. Up on the bank, trotting back and forth above the corpse of the newborn. She-Scares sloshes to shore. By the time she reaches it, She-Demands has chased the hyena onto the plain, but for good measure She-Scares chases it farther.

  Back on the
beach She-Demands walks over to the corpse. She turns and raises a hind foot. Looking off to one side she brings the foot down on the torso.

  The whoosh of impact carries out onto the swamp. She lifts her foot again. Whoosh!

  Four times she steps on her dead newborn. She kicks sand over the remains, walks to where the sand is dryer and blows two trunkfuls over herself. Her daughters and Hail Stones go to her as the rest of the She-S cows start moving out of the swamp, and She-Scares–who watched the spectacle from up on the bank–slides on her haunches down to the shore and herself kicks sand over the body.

  “Mud,” She-Demands says.

  Mud is coming out of the water a little behind her family, who now surround and sniff the corpse. Surprised at beingsingled out, she nudges her way through the big cows until she is in front of the She-D matriarch. She-Demands used to be one of the more forbidding cows, famous for her spiritual sermons and the wideness of her head. Now her head slings forward from her shoulders and is so deflated that Mud wonders how it is possible she scented the hyena. Temporin leaks down her face, and respectfully Mud touches the exudate and then slips her trunk into the old cow’s mouth but quickly withdraws at the stench of despair and decaying molars. She-Demands dips her head to look at her. In those milky eyes, behind whatever accretions of misery have killed all expression, Mud sees the glitter of a cow alight with visions.

  “My newborn I named Mud.” Her voice is grainy and soft, as if she has suffered damage to her throat. “Scratch would have been the more appropriate name; there was no mud in the vicinity. However, I prefer the ring of Mud, and I had been dreaming of wallows.”