The Third Book of the Dun Cow: Peace at the Last (9 page)

Whenever it is necessary, Rutt mauls her recalcitrant Beasts. When quarreling breaks into outright fighting, Rutt commands the Grizzly Bears to kill the combatants. And when she reads mutiny in her famished horde, she calms them with promises.

The land where she intends to take them, she says, will be a paradise of abundant food.

In order to seduce her rabble, Rutt uses a lyrical language. She murmurs charms. She creates visionary images of weak Creatures and soft bellies. Blood, she says, will spout like fountains and flow as streams. Tender Animals will lie down before the mouths of every hungry Beast and beg to be eaten. For these Meek Creatures—so should her mob understand—will consider it an honor to enter the guts of demigods. “It is as gods that you shall fall upon the Meek!

“Patience,” Rutt concludes her promises. “Let your appetites increase, so that your satisfactions may be orgasmic.”

Rutt returns to the place where she had dispatched her yellow-eyed tormenter.

She comes to find and to follow the White Wolf’s scent. Clearly he does not run alone. And since he and the Weasel are of different species, yet speak in a single, articulate tongue, she assumes that more than a few races travel with them.

The ground is rucked and gouged from the previous combat. Scraps of skin still thick with fur are scattered around the site. Rutt scans the ground, searching for Eurus’s bones. She wants the satisfaction: Rutt, triumphant!

She looks for the long jaw and his hollow brainpan.

But she can find nothing of Eurus. Even this absolute absence should satisfy her lust for a final revenge: Eurus consumed by hellfire—but then she notices one of her Wolverines clawing at a patch of loose earth.

The Wolverine kicks out ribs picked clean, then a skull bone. Eurus’s skull bone!

Dammit! Some fool has honored the coward’s corpse!

Rutt shoulders the Wolverine aside. Violently she claws up Eurus’s bones, throwing them to the Beasts.

“Crack them!” she cries. “Suck out the marrow!”

She raises her head and sees a second grave, this one still open. Rutt leaps to the hole and looks inside.

A Marten! Here is a Marten lying on his side, his tail wrapped around his body. The Marten’s eyes are hidden. Rutt can’t tell whether he’s dead or alive. She grabs his body. She whips it back and forth until she hears the spine snap. Warm blood spurts into her mouth. So: he was alive. Now he’s dead.

Hati dashes past her. He tries to declare his dominance by taking the first bite. But Rutt rakes his hindquarters, and he shrinks back.

Rutt has found and is following the White Wolf’s scent. She reads its complex odor. He’s been wounded. Good! His life force must be draining away. Good!

Rutt is fixed in an ungoverned rage. Rage constricts her bowels. It has dried the spit in her mouth. Rage no longer considers the Beasts behind her as individuals. They are a roaring engine of destruction.

Statim! Statim, Gallina! Te

Insequitur perfidia!

Make haste! The unholy age rages

At your heels.

Fly hither!

“
Statim,”
indeed, drives Pertelote forward. The “
Te Insequitur perfidiea”
fills her with a dread so heavy it oppresses the band of Animals climbing behind her.

She hovers over Wachanga, aware of the Cream-Wolf’s new intensity.

“What do the Ancestors say?” she calls.

“‘Home,’” Wachanga answers. “They say, ‘Home is in the mountain fastness.’ They say, ‘Hurry home.’”

The Animals’ ascent has become treacherous, cliffs that are almost perpendicular. Here is a foothold. There is a projection. Muscles cramp, and legs grow dull. Boreas has the tread of a Mountain Goat. He plots the best paths for the weary Animals.

Pertelote crows, “Don’t look down!”

The Otters no longer play. The sport has gone out of them. The Hens have no breath for complaint.

Ferric and his daughters brave the ascent silently.

At this height the cold should stupefy the Creatures, but their labor creates an internal warmth.

This is no country for a long-legged Deer. So the Mr. and Mrs. Cobbs help De La Coeur—Mrs. Cobb riding her shoulders, murmuring encouragement, Pertinax shouting instructions below: “Here! Here’s a niche for your foot.” And again, always again, “Step here, and here, and here, and here.”

John Wesley Weasel has placed himself at the rear of the Critters in order to catch the one that falls.

Their climbing is not eased where the mountain grade angles to a gentler field. Screes of gravelly stones cover the fields. Shale cuts the pads of the Animals’ paws. They track blood. Small gravel shoots out behind an unwary step. A Creature slips. John Wesley catches her.

The difficulty of their ascent causes certain Creatures to ignore their own pain in order to help others. Pertelote’s band has become a single soul with a common purpose. Two plus two equals One. And love makes a One of Many.

Finally, finally the Animals reach the top of the terrible escarpment. They slump on a plateau, a snowless plain, and lie in a dreamy weariness. Behind them the mountainside plunges into clouds. Before them the plateau comes to an absolute edge.

Wachanga is still afoot, still sniffing the scent of her Ancestors. She trots straight to that farther edge, stops, stands still, and peers down.

Pertelote alights beside the Cream-Wolf and sees what she sees: a precipitous drop into a crater, its wall several miles around. And in the center of the crater, a colossal rock humped into two parts, the foremost with a long, stone extrusion, a lethal, lateral limb that reaches from the rock’s forepart to a tip as sharp as a rapier.

What can Pertelote say to the band that has trusted her so long, the Animals who have traveled with her to the end of the earth? Pilgrims, they are not Pilgrims; Pioneers, they are not Pioneers; Adventurers and not Adventurers; Evangelists and not Evangelists. How can she comfort her dear ones?
Say your prayers. Lie down. Sleep, and never wake up?

Lord God! Why have you forsaken us?

Suddenly Pertelote hears John Wesley is screaming, “Lady Hen! Oh Lady Hen,” and worse comes to worst. Pertelote has never heard such fear in the Weasel’s voice.

She leaps into the air, beats her wings furiously, and flies toward the Weasel.

Wachanga behind her, peering into a great crater; John Wesley before her, peering down the mountain’s steeps whence the Animals have come.

“Lady Hen! Is diabolicals! Is diabolicals rumplings the mountainsides!”

John Wesley is horrified. She flies to him and circles.

“Lookee,” the Weasel screams.

O God! The downward face of the fissured massif is a carpet of barbarity. In the lead climbs a nimble, saddle-backed She-Wolf, her ears pricked to the Weasel’s scream. She pauses, narrows her eyes, sees John Wesley, and winks at him.

John Wesley whispers, “Is howlings out of hell.”

The She-Wolf barks. Her thousand-footed horde heaves itself upward. Their coming causes the plateau to quake. They bay and bawl. They roar like an uprising thunderstorm. Beasts claw the Beasts in front of them, climbing their backs, lacerating them.

The Animal band at the crater cries, “Disaster!”

Pertelote flies from one terror to another. The crater-wall has begun to crack. Its floor is separating. The fresh crack knifes across the stone plateau between the band of Animals, and the Animals stumble backward. Wachanga alone stands unmoving.

In the sky, out of the sky, the Ferruginous Hawk lays back his wings and stoops. He carries a black bundle in his claws. The Hawk skims the surface of the plateau. As he passes Wachanga, he drops the bundle then soars into the sky with a metallic shriek.

Wachanga puts out a paw and touches the thing the Hawk has dropped. It unfolds like a bag of garbage.

Wachanga gasps. She lowers her head and begins to lick the mess of feathers. This is the Raven Kangi Sapa: his neck twisted, his great black beak silent, his eyes closed under lids as soft as flannel.

Pertelote would weep for him. She would gather the Animals together and sing a loud lamentation for their storyteller. Would prepare him for a proper burial. But there isn’t time.

“Wachanga,” she says, but the Cream-Wolf, crouches beside her friend, doesn’t answer.

Pertelote alights and says, “Wachanga, I need you.”

Each of the sister Coyotes is trying to console her little Chick.

John Wesley is absent.

So is the White Wolf.

The plateau continues to quake.

The Brothers Mice grip one another.

The Otters skitter back and forth, to the drop in the crater and back again.

Pertelote says, “We
need
you, Wachanga! Kangi Sapa loved you, yes. His life has flown away, yes. But he has left his love behind. For his sake, save your grief for another day.”

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.