The White Bone (22 page)

After several hours, without a word to any of them, She-Snorts kicks the ground to make a bed. At the outset of their journey they slept, as they always have, in a clump. Now, sixteen days later, their habit is to sleep in a line–She-Screams at one end, next to Swamp, then Hail Stones, She-Snorts, Bent and She-Soothes. Mud is at the other end, next to She-Soothes, and the space she leaves between the two of them is not, as she suspects everyone thinks, more evidence of her aloofness, or even of her repulsion to the nurse cow’s obnoxious-smelling eye wad. That space is where Date Bed would sleep if she was here. Where she will sleep when she returns.

The big cows seldom snore. Tonight they do–they are a ruined choir featuring She-Screams. Starting at an excessively high note, She-Screams’ exhalation quavers downward as though toppling from a cliff, and Mud thinks, “Every breath is precious for her now.” She can’t imagine telling She-Screams about the vision (“… trunk-necks fed from your skull”). She can’t imagine telling anyone. If She-Snorts knew, she might find it easier to take She-Screams in stride, but Mud can’t face the possibility that She-Snorts will be relieved. No, that’s not the whole truth. She can’t face the possibility that if she witnesses relief in the matriarch, she will locate it in herself.

There is nothing to guide her. This is her first vision of a dead family member, and when She-Sees had such visionsthey weren’t spoken of, not in front of the calves. It isn’t as though telling anybody what she saw will prevent it from happening. This much Mud is certain of, and she wonders why, in that case, the future allows itself to be glimpsed. Are the affected parties meant simply to brace themselves? If so, she
ought
to tell She-Screams.

But she won’t, she knows she won’t. And she won’t sleep. She lies there wondering things. How soon She-Screams will die. (Judging by the look of her–her tusks, her emaciation–it won’t be long.) She wonders why She-Snorts didn’t scold She-Screams for saying that Date Bed couldn’t be alive, and whether beyond the limits of the vision there were more carcasses. Every once in a while in a ritual as regular and unconscious as scanning the horizon she draws her thoughts together until they are the shape and scent of Date Bed, not any particular memory of her but an impeccable likeness that she then releases from her mind as an inspiration from which Date Bed herself may take heart.

She does sleep, straight through until dawn. When she wakes up, the others are already on their feet.

There is an odour of anxiety, thick as smoke. “I don’t smell her,” She-Snorts says. Faced away from everyone, she shakes dirt from a bunch of roots.

“What nonsense!” She-Screams trills.

“I don’t hear her,” She-Snorts says.

A forced laugh from She-Soothes. “How can you not hear the cow?”

“Her words are wind.” She-Snorts looks over her shoulder, directly at She-Screams.
“She
is the dead one.”

Mud thinks, “She heard my mind, she knows that She-Screams is doomed.” But even before the thought is formed she realizes that it can’t be. If She-Snorts is hearing minds, then Date Bed is dead, and if Date Bed was dead, She-Snorts would be wailing on her knees.

“Blasphemy!” She-Screams cries.

She-Snorts chews, flicks her tail.

“Are you banishing her?” She-Soothes roars.

“Banishing whom?” She-Snorts asks incuriously.

“She-Screams!”

“There is no She-Screams.”

The nurse cow gives She-Screams a bewildered glance.

“Yes, there is,” Bent says in a worried voice. He touches She-Screams’ leg. “She’s right here.”

She-Snorts snorts. “That,” she says, “is a memory.”

Swamp grunts, an amused sound, and his mother swats him across the head. “It would suit you fine,” she shrieks, “if I were a memory! Then you and your darling here"–a thrash of her trunk toward Hail Stones–"could wander off without me to worry about, be your own merry little bachelor herd.” She starts to weep. “Well, I am
not
a memory! I will
not
be banished!” She turns on Mud. “This is your fault!”

“Mine?”

“You were the one who made me say it.” She puts on a low, doltish voice–her imitation of Mud: “'She’s what? What? What were you going to say about Date Bed?’ ”

Swamp sighs. “Don’t exaggerate, Mother.”

“You are an interloper!” She-Screams trumpets at Mud.

“No, no!” She-Soothes bellows. “Enough now!” She curls her trunk around She-Screams’ trunk.

She-Screams wrenches away. “If anybody should be banished, it is her.” She gazes over Mud’s head. “There is no She-Spurns!” she announces.

“Enough of this crap!” the nurse cow roars. She looks from She-Snorts, who peacefully tusks the ground, to She-Screams, to Mud.

“There is no She-Spurns,” She-Screams repeats in an official way, and swinging her hips she goes to the other side of the croton thicket.

“This will blow over!” She-Soothes roars. “We’ll all come through this!” She strokes Mud’s head. “She-Soothes is hungry! Aren’t you?”

Mud looks at the nurse cow–her kind expectant face, her eye socket with its rank stuffing, her sighted eye … wide open, guileless–and she shakes her head. Yes, she is hungry, but no, it won’t blow over. They won’t come through this, not all of them.

“I
am hungry,” Bent says tearfully.

“Up on your feet.” She-Soothes says and pulls him off his knees and stretches out her foreleg so that he may suckle.

The light this morning is misty and fraudulent. To the east are lakes of light Mud would swear were water. They are a favourable sign, such lakes. Feeling invulnerable, she walks some distance to a shelf of stone and sends an infrasonic call to Date Bed. She waits a moment, and then decides to test Date Bed’s theory about severe droughts leeching the earth of too much moisture for infrasonic rumbles to get through, and she sends a rumble to She-Snorts. The matriarch doesn’treact, but Mud suspects that the failure may have something to do with the short transmission distance.

She stands there for a while looking at her family. They seem like acquaintances, no more known to her than Hail Stones is. Whereas to themselves (Hail Stones is excluded from this impression) they appear complete and alike in some way that she can’t hope to insinuate herself into.

“I
am
an interloper,” she thinks, mildly astonished that it was She-Screams, of all cows, who enlightened her. She-Screams, who is banished to death. As they all are one day, Mud doesn’t need reminding, but she has not envisioned any other deaths and she cannot imagine them. Only to She-Screams does she grant the kind of unobscured perspective she supposes must occasionally be the prerogative of even the unwitting and silly among the soon-to-be lifeless.

The laws of banishment are not, it turns out, inflexible. In better times they may well be, who knows? (She-Soothes says that this is the family’s first experience of banishment.) But when the land itself is so hard, everything and everyone upon it sacrifices a little rigour.

If She-Screams cries “Stop!” because the bulls have fallen too far back, She-Snorts calls a halt. If, however, She-Screams cries “Stop!” because she is having one of her spells, the matriarch, once she has established the reason for the cry, keeps going, and since she
is
the matriarch the rest of them follow. When She-Screams talks, naturally they all hear her, but only Bent, in his innocence, appears to listen, andnobody answers her questions. “We must all respect the matriarch!” She-Soothes will bellow. “What the big cows say, the smaller cows obey!” Something along those lines to let She-Screams know that she would acknowledge her if she could. She-Screams cries, “Nonsense!” She accuses everyone, including the nurse cow, of being only too delighted to have an excuse to ignore her. “Oh, now!” She-Soothes blurts, then she slaps her own face, abashed at her direct response. And yet she continues to examine She-Screams’ cracked hide and to rumble, as if to herself, that cracked hides should be rubbed with the flesh of acacia galls, that vulture dung toughens the soles of feet.

Mud, having been banished by She-Screams, is never addressed by her and is not expected to speak up, would get no thanks from the older cow if she did. Which is too bad. Ever since envisioning She-Screams dead, Mud is more apt to make allowances for her querulousness and her ridiculous antics and to want to take her side. For the first time in her life she almost admires She-Screams, pities and admires her, and these feelings have little to do with the fact that the older cow’s days are numbered. It is She-Screams’ uneasy place in the family that moves her, and She-Screams’ refusal to accept that place, although refusal means constantly having to perform an ungainly dance that attracts not even ridicule. She-Screams looks one way and there is Mud, whom she pretends is not there. She looks another and there is the matriarch, pretending the same about her. She grasps her son’s trunk and he doesn’t even pull away, so disincarnate is she. She orders Hail Stones, who as a young bull and a family guest owes her deference, to answer her question, and he dipshis head in an apologetic gesture. She sprays dirt in his face. Swamp blows the dirt away. She weeps and begs Hail Stones’ forgiveness. She wiggles her ears at Bent. He laughs, and she screeches, “My darling calf!” which frightens him. She strolls off, head up, trunk up, feigning nonchalance and contempt and then comes racing back when water is found. “I’m next!” she squalls. So she is. If there is just the one hole, first the matriarch drinks and then the second-biggest cow, regardless (it would seem) of whether or not she exists. She lies down, her trunk extended toward her son, murmuring into the darkness, “I am here, Swamp. Mother is right here.”

What makes it worse for her is that her banishment of Mud is recognized only by herself. “Don’t speak to her!” she orders Swamp and Bent and Hail Stones. “Don’t touch her!” But they do. She-Screams is not the one who makes the rules. She becomes hysterical. “Look at Hail Stones,” she cries, “talking to nobody!” She steps into Mud’s shadow and says, “Isn’t this peculiar! The shadow of a cow when there is no cow!” She shrieks with laughter. Overhead, vultures circle. Rabbits sheer off onto the plain.

On the thirty-sixth day of the trek, after three days of following the thinnest strand of scent, She-Snorts discovers a dung ball no bigger than a beetle. Date Bed’s dung. It is thirty-five days old.

“This calls for a celebration!” roars She-Soothes and she regurgitates a foul stew that begins to cook on the hard hot ground and that she starts sucking back into her trunk, invitingeveryone to join “the banquet,” and so scanty have their feeds been these past days that Swamp rumbles, “It can’t be as nauseating as drought fruit,” and helps himself to a mouthful.

The dung doesn’t call for a celebration. True, it is the first visible evidence in thirty days of Date Bed’s existence, but it is also, apparently, the end of this particular scent trail. After sniffing the air and earth around a perimeter at least a quarter of a mile wide, She-Snorts says, “I’ve lost her,” and picks up the piece of dung and puts it in her mouth. Temporin oozes down her face and lures flies. Her scent is pure dejection.

“Are you weeping, Matriarch?” Bent asks.