The White Bone

by Barbara Gowdy

  “Certainly we knew.”

  “You knew?” He began to weep at even the possibility that no one kept his mother out of harm’s way.

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘know'?” she hedged.

  It was a comfort for him to discover that his birth mother had died as a result of a specific circumstance–that, with vigilance, such deaths could be avoided. He became a student of signs, omens and superstitions, or “links,” as all three are more often referred to. The common links–tell a fib, maim a “rib"; a “hide-browser” on your left tusk brings good luck–he knew, of course. It was the unsung ones that he was anxious to acquaint himself with. He grilled the cows in his birth family. At Massive Gatherings he would stand next to some ancient matriarch for all the hours it took her to recite every link that had ever entered, and had not yet drained, irredeemably, from her body.* In this way he became an expert of the uncanny, a famous one by the time he quit his family at the precocious age of ten years.

  Normally a bull leaves when he is twelve or thirteen, but rarely does he do so, as Tall Time did, for reasons of his own. Any bull will admit that he would have stayed with his family forever had the big cows not driven him off. It is a hard affair, expulsion, and Tall Time has known young bulls to linger near their families for years, tragically optimistic that they will be forgiven their mounting games, their charging games–whatever it was that turned the cows against them. Even these diehards eventually drift away, though, and either they wander on their own or they try (almost always without success) to ingratiate themselves into some other family. In the end they usually take up with a small herd of bachelors whose oldest member is a leader of sorts, if he is not decrepit.

  That is one course, the more favoured one. The other is to become a hermit … seek out cows when the urge to mate overwhelms, but otherwise keep your own counsel. Be your own patriarch.

  Tall Time considers himself a hermit, despite a deep and sentimental love of family and friends, and despite the fact that right from the start he was rarely on his own for long. Cow families, lone bulls and often bachelor herds (who are prone to inciting each other into fits of apprehension) visited him whenever an upset in their lives could not be accounted for. Why has my milk dried up? Why do I twitch? Although Tall Time rued the invasion of privacy, he was happy to solve the mysteries, if he could. It flattered him to be consulted, and here were opportunities to confirm or discount the power of certain superstitions and thereby refine his inventory of determinants.

  Within fifteen years he knew every link there was, but by then being a celebrity was oppressing him. He became evasive. He dissipated his odour by urinating and defecating in water. He camouflaged his footprints by walking backwards or, whenever possible, on rock. He sang softly. Many of the good-luck rhymes are more potent if sung, and sung with gusto, and he loved to sing, he had his birth mother’s tremolo and enough volume to initiate wildebeest stampedes. But when he belted out a tune he risked attracting appreciative audiences of his own kind and so he took to singing under his breath or in his head, except at Massive Gatherings, where he allowed himself to be coaxed into roaring a verse of “Recollections.”

  None of these precautions would have been onerous had he not also been at the mercy of a thousand superstitions. Defecating in a river is frowned upon but is not apt to harm you. The same is true of defecating in a swamp after dark or under cloud cover. But, “Void in a swamp in the sight of the She and your hind legs will itch from your groin to your knee.” And walking in the footprints of a musth bull is courting a gut ache. And so on. Still, he managed to find his way around most injunctions and, when it suited him, to shun his kind–except for Torrent, a master tracker who turned up as he chose and who, in any case, was a welcome source of news.

  It was from Torrent that Tall Time learned, in the short dry season of his twenty-seventh year, about another calf whose mother had died hours after the birth and who–a more pitiful story than his–was abandoned by her family as she lay trapped beneath the mother’s body. At the brink of death she was rescued by the She-S’s.

  Her fate moved him, it was so much like his own, and he was curious to find out what had precipitated the mother’s ill luck. But it was something else, some uneasy yearning he could not account for, that drove him to seek out the She-S’s (whose matriarch he had once, unsuccessfully, tried to mount). Understandably they were wary of his approach. When he was still a long way away, She-Sees spotted him and issued an infrasonic warning that he advance downwind, and even after he had explained himself, only She-Snorts was openly welcoming. She walked a few feet in front of him and swayed her haunches so that the cow calf who trotted under her belly was obliged to sidestep. Since the calf appeared to be the right age–just shy of two years–he assumed she was Mud.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” She-Snorts rumbled in that voice of hers, which was somehow both witheringly sardonic and extraordinarily lascivious. She smiled over her shoulder and flicked a twig in her trunk.

  “That you are very beautiful,” he answered. She was, he thought she was, but he told her so only because he found her expectation of praise to be like an obstruction that grows larger and more impassable with every second that you refuse to acknowledge it.

  “What’s more, I bring luck,” she said.

  “Indeed?” She had his attention.

  She released the twig and turned to face him. In precise little steps the calf also turned, and he noticed how narrow her head was and thought that he was seeing what the weight of a cow could do to a newborn’s skull.

  “Any bull who mounts me is guaranteed a season of excellent health,” She-Snorts said.

  He rifled his memory for any similar superstition. There was none. “Are you quite sure?”

  “Climb on.” She shimmied around, offering him her backside. “Find out for yourself.”

  He smelled her vulva. She was not about to enter oestrus and so he shook his head. “But thank you, nevertheless,” he said, baffled by her useless offer.

  “Ha!” She tossed up her trunk.

  He looked down at her as if from a cliff. For his age he was extremely tall, “the fit of his name,” as the saying goes. He was too lean for handsomeness but his tusks were a fair size, and the length of his legs appeared to have an intoxicating effect on cows who really were in oestrus. And yet being so high offthe ground was not all to the good, he had found. There were occasions, such as this one, when he felt that what was apparent to everybody else failed to reach him at his altitude, as if he were another creature entirely. A giraffe. A bird.

  “You do amuse me,” She-Snorts said, scratching her hide on a termite mound. “You mannerly young bachelors.”

  Oh. He understood now. He was being teased, something he had no stomach for after enduring the deceptions and trickery of his adoptive mother, She-Bluffs. He felt the temporin sliding down his cheeks and he waved his ears to calm himself, and as he did the calf moved out from beneath She-Snorts and so he curled the end of his trunk under her tiny trunk and said, “Mud, is it not?”

  The calf gave her head a single decisive shake. “No, I am Date Bed,” she said in the formal timbre, “daughter of She-Snorts. I know who you are. You are Tall Time the Link Bull. I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”

  So taken aback was he by her gravity and old-fashioned eloquence … and her courtesy–how could this calf be the blood daughter of She-Snorts?–that he laughed (now he was the one laughing), which had the effect of sobering She-Snorts, who sauntered away, and of encouraging the other big cows, who hurried up to him and began to talk all at once:

  “My trunk aches, is that from stepping on a flow-stick?”

  “Two nights ago in my right ear I heard water.”

  Above the other voices bleated the voice of She-Screams: “I have borne only one calf! Why should that be? What is the matter, what have I done?”

  Addressing all of them, he said, “Eat newborn dung,” because doing so generally altered one
’s fortunes, and then hetensed his ears and raised his trunk to lend himself girth and authority, and bellowed, “Where is the calf named Mud?”

  Except for She-Screams, who carried on with her lament, the cows shut up. However mannerly and young he might be, he was still a grown bull, more powerful than any of them.

  “Mud is here,” a voice said. Low, ferocious, coming from behind him. She-Scares.

  He turned and looked down at the calf by her side, and the earth tilted, the sun flashed, his sense of smell bristled, assaulting him with a thousand queer scents. He was no longer aware of where he was. He knew what was happening to him, though. Six days earlier, at the forks of Brown River, he had come upon a pair of male kudu carcasses whose locked horns indicated that they had died in combat, and the coincidence of those horns at that location was a sign that he should prepare himself for an exceptional encounter of his own.

  Mud seemed oddly unmoved. She stepped back and stumbled and was hauled upright by She-Scares, and he saw her withered hind leg and thought, “She is sturdy enough but no beauty.” With She-Scares looking on, ears perked, he sniffed her head.

  For a moment he inhaled only her calf sweetness. Then he caught a sliver of her nascent cow odour and his penis shot out under his stomach, and Mud squealed and ducked beneath She-Scares.

  She-Screams stopped her wailing. She-Soothes, with nursely bravado, scented his mouth. There was a silence, broken finally by She-Sees, who said, “My dear, you are a marvellous length. A shame, really, that none of us is in our delirium.”

  “But thank you, nevertheless,” She-Snorts called.

  She-Soothes asked if he had been eating ebony-tree bark. “Enough of that crap,” she roared, “and your hind-trunk will lash out like a big fly’s leg!”

  “It’s Mud,” he said. “I am aroused by Mud.”

  “That is ridiculous!” She-Sees trumpeted.

  “Unheard of, Matriarch.” He extended his trunk to where Mud cowered under She-Scares. Already he craved another draught of her scent. But Mud tottered backwards, out of his reach.

  “When she comes into her first delirium I will be the one who digs her calf tunnel,” he said. “By my troth.” He sniffed the air and cast around for some favourable sign to guarantee his vow. There wasn’t any, except for chips of fallen sky in the form of blue flowers, and their power applied more to matters of vitality and digestion. He tossed his trunk. He really felt no need of a sign, he had his will. Although it was puzzling having a will that was not dictated by some link, unless the link that had ordained his seduction by a crippled little calf was still at work, giving him the impression of will.

  “You will have competition,” She-Scares growled.

  “I will be the one.”

  He walked off, his penis lurching under his belly, until he was out of sound and scent of the entire herd, by which time it was dawning on him that he had not asked Mud about her birth mother. He had not spoken to her at all.

  He hears another airplane and makes for the thorn bush, which, fortunately, is in the direction opposite the escarpment. That the escarpment is no longer visible doesn’t make any difference. You must not face it when a plane is overhead. Even if you are a hundred miles away, you must not face it.

  He cocks his head at the sky, and the plane’s shadow sweeps over him. There are two breeds of plane: the small plump breed, which has a single twirling wing on its skull, and this breed, with its stiff wings that never flap or fold and its smooth featherless skin.

  In the guts of both are humans. Slaughterers–a new and stunningly voracious generation. It’s the tusks they want, sometimes the feet. Almost always they abandon the torso but once in a while they smoke the flesh at fire clearings and then carry it elsewhere, strewing the bones. From the skulls Tall Time can tell whether he has come upon an acquaintance. During the past two hundred days he has discovered twelve acquaintances, one of them his drab, kindly aunt, She-Bores-And-Bores, the cow who unwittingly inspired him to learn the art of sleeping with his eyes open and ears spread, as if he were still listening.

  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.