The White Bone (8 page)

At the fire clearings the humans leave behind the rough wooden skeletons upon which they draped the flesh and hide of the creature they had just torn from its own perfect skeleton. Tall Time stomps these fraudulent skeletons to splinters. He gathers the bones and passes one hind foot a few inches above them in order to release the spirit to the oblivion of The Eternal Shoreless Water, and then he carries them from the clearing, covers them with leaves and dirt and sings a hymn. The skull of She-Bores-And-Bores he took the time to pulverize, and when the pieces were small enough he blew a trunkful at the sun. A plane was passing then, too, cutting between the sun and that flock of bone.

This plane tilts, disappears from view.

Tall Time flings dirt over his back, uneasy now over his alarm. A male cheetah perched eastward on a termite mound guarantees your safety until sunset the following day, and this morning he saw two such cheetahs. He is safe. All afternoon he has been safe. Why did he even bother running for cover?

Because he is losing faith in the links.

No. No, he isn’t. He looks up at the sun. “I am not,” he swears. If nothing foretold this murderous drought, let alone that the humans would launch an era of unprecedented slaughter, it is because, as Torrent warned, “The links may well be infinite.”

But Tall Time isn’t comfortable with that either. When Torrent first said it, Tall Time thought the old bull was trying to goad him or was in the midst of some musth delusion. He replied, and he believed it absolutely, “I know every link there is.”

This was more than a year ago, at the Long Rains Massive Gathering. It was the last time that the two bulls had laid eyes on each other, and their meeting, although brief, was portentous (it turns out) because Torrent also confided a great secret, despite being deep in musth, in “green,” and even more belligerent and crazed than he usually is during that period, what with She-Snorts having come into oestrus.

Scores of cows were in oestrus back then. Unlike now it was a glorious season. The fresh growth high enough to swipe your belly, and all the ponds and swamps returned, the mud revived. You could inhale whole miles of sky without drawing in a speck of dust.

As it has always been, the Massive Gathering took place on Green Down, and because the grass was so unusually lush, families who had not shown up in decades arrived, some having travelled a hundred and fifty miles. Tall Time estimated a crowd of more than four hundred, but She-Reckons put the number precisely at three hundred and eighty-six. Thin-scented and scornful, She-Reckons was hardly the most fetching oestrus female present. She was easily the least flirtatious. Even as Tall Time mounted her she enumerated the oxpeckers, bellowing (to
them,
he assumed), “Keep still!” But Tall Time was not particular. He was desperate to mate and yet obliged to leave the best cows to all the heftier and older musth bulls, of which there were a half dozen in that throng.

The heftiest and oldest and most renowned being Torrent, or the Trunk Bull as many call him in recognition of his valour and depth of spirit and because he is the last of that grand herd of six bachelors who, in their youth, scoured the land searching for abducted calves. At that time in parts of the world where populations of white humans were densest, calves were being enslaved and trained to stand on their hind legs while throwing colossal bubbles back and forth. Without killing a single human or causing any injury to themselves, the bulls rescued eighteen calves by stealing into the sleeping grounds and ripping open or simply lifting the flimsy skin walls of the shelters in which the calves were imprisoned. Noiselessly the bulls walked among the shelters and chewed or yanked apart the restraints.

Torrent still moves noiselessly, even over pebbles and dead leaves, and he still has the sensitive trunk that once sniffedout calves from twenty miles away. Only She-Demands and She-Snorts (both of whom he has mated so often that they have adopted certain of his faculties) can rival his sense of smell.

At every Long Rains Massive Gathering, Torrent is in musth, and all of the other musth bulls stay out of his way. In musth, a bull has no use for any bull of any description, but a bull who also happens to be in musth is especially unwelcome. Regardless of the affection that two bulls may otherwise feel for each other, the larger bull is driven to charge the smaller one and to call him twig-tusk, twig-trunk, cow-bull. Musth bulls of similar size and age get into fights. These fights are a kind of lunacy. They go on for hours, and during most of that time the opponents do nothing except size each other up. The fragrant oestrus cows are still there, beyond the horizon of their enthralment. The bushes and tree stumps are there, looming. Incensed, one of the bulls may attack
them
for a spell. Eventually he’ll whirl back on his enemy, but then, out of the corner of his eye, he may spot more bushes, so he’ll yank these up by their roots. Meanwhile the other bull is doing the same, both carrying on in this fashion until one craves food more than a cow and walks away.

Tall Time’s spell of musth normally starts thirty days before the Massive Gathering and peters out midway through it. At this last gathering he was in musth until the final days, by which time he had weathered (and conceded) two fights, and all the clans were breaking up into their family groupings. Calves who had run wild now leaned into the legs of their mothers, and their mothers–who themselves might have gone a bit wild–were back to their sedateand watchful selves. At the fringes of the dispersing multitude, lone bulls positioned themselves and wondered at a mania that only days before had driven them to mount cows of the ilk of She-Screams. Of She-Wilts.

Tall Time, once he was “ungreen,” was unusual in that he always loitered near the She-S’s. Stealing a whiff of Mud was never easy, however. She tended to keep apart from everyone except for Date Bed. Whenever she did mingle with her family, it seemed to him that she was always on the far side of a big cow. As for his renown and authority, they were lost on her. Unusual for a female, unique in fact, she had no curiosity about the links.

“I demand to smell you!” he would end up roaring.

She would either move closer to She-Scares, who would threaten him with her deadly little tusk, or she would run in her awkward fashion, her withered leg kicking out sideways, and he would take pity on her and resort to watching her from a distance while smelling her in memory. Sometimes, when She-Scares was between the two of them, she would tell him to go away. He laughed at her spunk. He was charmed.

True to his pledge, he had dug her inaugural calf tunnel on the same morning (more than a year and a half ago now) that she came into her first oestrus. His immediate assumption was that from then on she would understand his attachment to her and occasionally indulge it. But the moment her oestrus passed she went back to dodging him, and every time he met with the She-S’s he was more and more vexed by this. There was something so odd about what he felt for her he had come to believe that it must be divine, and that, furthermore, todescribe it was to violate it. At this last Massive Gathering he was driven to try. Across foothills of She-S rumps, he called to her, “We are alike!”

“We have mated only once,” she called without turning.

“You are not
becoming
like me,” he said. “I am trying to tell you that I think of you as I think of myself. Orphaned and selfcontained. But smaller … and female, needless to say–” From under the young bull who was mounting her She-Snorts laughed, and Tall Time stopped, feeling ludicrous. He browsed on white flowers for a spell and then gathered himself up and said with some emotion, “It was ordained. It was ordained that I would have an unnatural attachment to you from the day of our first meeting until the day of your death.” He paused, flustered. “Which is not to say that you will die before me,” he said.

Mud peered at him from behind She-Scares. “What day will that be?” she said. Her eyes were the green of the visionaries and when they glittered, as they did now, you could see the gleam fifty yards away.

“What day will what be?” he said, entranced.

“The day I die.”

“I dare say I have no idea. You misunderstand.”

She lowered her trunk.

“Let me smell you.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Date Bed raised her lean little head. “She is not at all like you,” she said shyly, in the formal timbre.

He walked away, skimming his trunk over the ground for a whiff of Mud’s urine. He felt pitiable and sickened … andalarmed, more so than seemed called for, as if any second he would collide with a herd of humans.

It was Torrent he collided with.

“Cow-bull!” Torrent roared.

Tall Time bolted to one side. “Forgive me,” he said in the formal timbre.

“Flat-footed twig-stick,” Torrent muttered.

Tall Time flattened his ears against his neck. “Quite right,” he said.

This was not excessive courtesy, this was terror. In musth, Torrent had been known to gore bulls who were careless enough to catch his eye, let alone bump into him, and Torrent was still deep in musth, his temporin glands swollen, the temporin itself pouring down his face, and his enormous green penis dribbling egg-sized drops that smoked as they hit the stubble and discharged an odour so sharp Tall Time couldn’t fathom how the big bull had taken him by surprise. “Very clumsy of me,” he murmured. “Entirely my fault.”

He turned away but Torrent bellowed, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you!”

Tall Time looked over his shoulder. The big bull folded his ears and rumbled something menacing and then threw up his great head in which his eyes flew, mad and murderous. Tall Time ran.

“Stop!” Torrent roared.

Tall Time slowed down and looked over his shoulder again, past nervous cows trotting away in all directions and a flock of grouse splashing up like muck.

Torrent rocked from foot to foot. He was evidently makinga terrible effort to calm himself. “Come back here,” he said, “you little … you scrawny little… . Come back here … son.”

“I haven’t been speaking with She-Snorts,” Tall Time said. In oestrus, She-Snorts was always pursued by a host of young bulls, the bull who was currently mounting her being only the mightiest of the smallest. But she had yet to enter her “radiance,” those few hours during which a cow’s scent is at its most delectable and for which Torrent reserved himself.

“I know that,” Torrent growled.

“It was the calf Mud I was speaking with.”

“Yes, yes, yes. Get over here.”

Almost certainly, Tall Time could have outrun Torrent, but he was now curious about whatever was obliging Torrent to subdue his musth mood. More than that he felt sorry for the old bull. He knew what it was like to find yourself persecuting a smaller bull whom a thin current of reason proclaimed a friend.

“I must tell you something,” Torrent rumbled. “Several things. Vital … vital things. The first of them is, do not imagine that your grasp of the links is infallible. There are links you know nothing of.”

“Which links are these?” Tall Time said, affronted. Unconsciously he had dropped the formal timbre.

Torrent jerked his head toward the She-S’s. Trunk up, he took a long inhalation. “Any number of them,” he rumbled.

“Indeed?” Tall Time said coolly.

Torrent turned back around. “I have only recently come to appreciate, as a result of a remarkable meeting, that the links may well be infinite.”

“I know every link there is.”

Torrent glowered over the rim of one of his splendid tusks. Frightened afresh, Tall Time took small steps backwards.

“Would that were true,” Torrent said.

Tall Time hesitated, struck by something beaten in Torrent’s tone. Torrent flapped his torn ears and yanked at the grass. Suddenly he snapped his head around. He closed his eyes, an indication that any moment now She-Snorts would enter her radiance. Torrent’s sense of smell being what it was, he would pick up the tell-tale odour even before the bull who was mounting her did. That bull had better be fast on his feet, Tall Time thought.

“I don’t suppose you are interested in learning
whom
I met,” Torrent said, still sniffing.

“On the contrary,” Tall Time said, “I am exceedingly interested.”

Torrent looked at him, the expression in his bloodshot eyes at once percipient and deranged. He curled his trunk around a swatch of grass, cut the swatch with his forefoot but instead of eating it he pitched it over his hide, a pointless, calf-like thing to do. “The Lost Ones,” he said.

“The Lost Ones?” Tall Time said, astounded.

“You heard me.”

Nobody Tall Time knew had ever actually sighted, smelled or caught rumblings of–let alone spoken to–the Lost Ones, or the Forest Dwellers, as they were sometimes called. Always it was a distant acquaintance of a distant acquaintance who was rumoured to have had dealings with them. Despite which, descriptions of them never varied. The abnormally long narrow tusks, the small ears, sleek skin, luminous green eyes. A strong race, though diminutive, beautiful despite their size. And gifted. All of them visionaries, all of them nimble and capable of scenting seven-day-old dung from twenty miles away. They were glorious singers, what’s more. Moving in single file through the forest, trunks grasping tails, they roared like hurricanes, but in melodious harmonies and complex rhythms. “You possess Lost blood,” it is said of anyone who sings often and pleasingly, as Tall Time does, but to his thinking that has always been a mere figure of speech. “Lost ears” for tiny ears, “Lost-footed” for sure-footed, “Lost green eyes"– all figures of speech, unless you believed, and many did, that the Lost Ones existed.

Torrent believed. He had never come across any sign of them (until, if he was speaking the truth, recently) but he had always believed. He had even claimed a blood connection. It was Torrent who had originally told Tall Time how the Lost Ones were no different from other she-ones before being driven by humans into an immense forest where they disappeared for centuries and the She Herself declared them vanished while, beneath the thick canopy that denied them the watch and warmth of Her eye, they continued to worship Her. When at last they were found (either by a She-V or a She-G matriarch, members of the two families argue the point to this day), the She was so moved by their steadfast devotion to Her that She granted each of them, and all of their descendants of both sexes, the third eye. As for their stealth and keen trunks, these are attributed to the clear forest water. The reason for their marvellous voices is not so easily explained, although Torrent leans to the theory that they eat the eggs of songbirds. They are capable, he admits, of heartless conduct, such as slaying their deranged elders.