The White Bone

by Barbara Gowdy

  There is a spell of peace then, an apprehension within each of them of the grandness of their recent loss and of the mystery of their own intactness, or so it seems to Mud because that’s what she feels. She also feels in these moments–when the air has cooled and the plain is no longer a pageant of dust devils–almost blithely certain that Date Bed is alive and that they will find her. With She-Snorts in the lead they will find her. Who suspected that self-absorbed She-Snorts was so devoted to her daughter? Mud doubts that even Date Bed had any idea. And who suspected that she could be so single-minded? In the six days since they left the swamp She-Snorts has scented Date Bed five times, which is phenomenal considering how faint and easily adulterated Date Bed’s odour is, let alone that the wind sucks thepungency out of everything. One time She-Snorts found a neat ball of indigestible palm fibre that Date Bed had spat out. Twice she located Date Bed’s dung and twice she smelled single drops of her blood. At the first discovery of blood, on the node of a log, She-Snorts said, “She is wounded,” and She-Soothes bellowed, “Hardly at all!” and their voices, one frightened, one encouraged, described the precise, contracted boundaries of what could be reasonably felt. Not despairing, not yet. Not relieved yet, either.

  To Mud’s mind the matriarch’s shortcomings are forgivable when set alongside her sharp trunk. She is their hope for locating not only Date Bed but clear water. She-Screams will strut to a spot on a dry riverbed where, two or three decades earlier, the family excavated a drinking hole, and as she digs she makes eager self-satisfied noises and then grunts with exasperation and then she screams to Swamp that she is short of breath, whereupon he strolls up to her, sighing, and kicks loose a few clumps, his trunk always swinging back to Hail Stones, and in the end something may ooze out–rank muck or slime–some sludge that She-Screams acts delighted by and tosses on her hide as if all along she was only planning a mud bath. “Help yourselves!” she trills. Why would they? By now they have themselves dug wells at a place She-Snorts has led them to. Eventually She-Screams inserts her warty, slimecoated trunk into one of these wells and drinks and afterwards, shamed and ill tempered, she slaps Swamp or little Bent or even Hail Stones, and then she fawns over whomever she has mistreated, which effusions Swamp and Hail Stones endure and Bent runs squealing from.

  If the family does not move on at this point, She-Screamswill typically have one of her spells, and after that she will nestle into a mood of frazzled self-pity. While extravagantly ignoring She-Snorts (who will be browsing or sending infrasonic rumbles … and scenting, always scenting), She-Screams will criticize her as if she isn’t there. A squabble is inevitable now. It is inevitable at dusk. Sadly and always, She-Screams is the one to smash that collective spell of peace. She starts by flicking her trunk. She taps her face. She says, finally, something to the effect of: “My poor mother would never have–” “Of course, nobody cares what I think–”

  It is late afternoon on the sixteenth day. They are discouraged, all of them except Hail Stones, but he is so polite and inscrutable who can tell how he feels? They have yet to meet another she-one family. Rather, every day for the past seven days, they have found a she-one carcass. Early this morning they came upon a slaughter: five amputated cow carcasses belonging to the Second She-S’s-And-S’s, who are–or were–close relations.

  Mid-morning they resumed walking. Already they were exhausted from the burying and mourning, the weeping. They hadn’t gone far when She-Snorts turned and led them back the way they’d been going. Many miles later she changed her mind and took up her original route. “You’ve lost the trail!” She-Screams cried, and from then on she whined to herself but not quite to herself, her peevish voice like crevices breaking through the rock-hard heat to release the day’s portion of torment.

  There was no luck in the day, no deliverance. Just before noon they arrived at a wire fence and were forced to walk south along its length until they discovered a break in the weave. Returning north, they passed a bad-tempered, oneeyed bull wildebeest, and as if he somehow knew that his affliction was an ill omen he trotted alongside them, grunting, “Ugly, ugly,” until She-Soothes chased him off. Moments later an airplane flew low overhead and compelled them to stampede toward an outcrop where Bent nearly stepped on a cobra. Despite the wind and the blasting dust, cow flies held fast to their hides in clusters thick as moss. Mud’s bad leg ached. Hail Stones’ foot ballooned. When She-Soothes pierced the swelling with a thorn it discharged a foul green sludge that the nurse cow, for all her bluster, had obviously never seen before. Bent slumped on his rickety knees, and to keep him moving She-Soothes had to curl her trunk between his hind legs and half-lift, half-push him along.

  Added to all this was the incident with the white bone.

  On the day they left the swamp She-Soothes asked if they should keep their eyes open for the “white prize,” and She-Snorts said carelessly, “Suit yourselves,” which they took to mean that she wouldn’t be looking. They were wrong. She has been as eager as any of them to search for a flash of white whenever they come upon a circle of boulders or termite mounds, and she is the one who pointed out that their eccentric formation is an advantage in this search because, spread out as they are, they cover a wider territory. Every so often somebody veers off course, and the rest of them wait until the signal comes back–No.

  If She-Screams isn’t the one who thinks she has spotted something, if she is among the watchers, instead of droppingher trunk in disappointment she cries, “Ha!” Whereas if she is the mistaken one she blames the light, the dust. Once, she said that she rushed away not because she thought she saw the white bone but because she was certain she had smelled Date Bed. She had the gall to say that.

  On this day, in the middle of the afternoon, she suddenly goes waddling off in the direction of an outcrop of boulders. Halfway there she stops and picks something up. “I found it!” she trumpets. “The white prize!” The boulders do not form a circle and there are no hills to the east, but the little bone she holds aloft is very white. Everybody rushes to her. Sobbing, streaming temporin, she waves the rib above their heads and screeches, “I saw it! I’m the one who saw it!”

  “Show it to me,” She-Snorts says.

  “Be careful!” She-Screams whimpers, and as she lowers her trunk Mud sees that it’s not a she-one’s rib at all, it’s a rhino’s.

  She-Snorts has already smelled as much. She retracts her trunk and, disgusted, addressing She-Soothes, mutters, “What’s wrong with her?”

  “What?” She-Screams cries.

  Hail Stones and Swamp have just arrived. “Mother,” Swamp sighs, “that is obviously from a ghastly.”

  “It is not!” She-Screams wails.

  “A perfectly understandable error,” Hail Stones murmurs.

  She-Screams brings the rib to her wet eyes. She sniffs the length of it. The mortifying knowledge that it is, after all, from a rhino twitches across her face. Still, she clutches it under her chin and says with an air of dignity so baseless as to be almost splendid, “None of you wants to believe that I found it. You all despise me.”

  “That’s the salt deficiency talking!” She-Soothes roars. “A few swallows of piss and you’ll feel as sane as stone!”

  “You are grotesque!” She-Screams cries.

  She-Snorts, who has been scenting the air, starts moving away.

  “Wasn’t that exciting?” She-Soothes trumpets cheerfully and she tugs Bent to his feet and beams around at the rest of them through her sighted eye. “Coming?”

  Nobody responds. Swamp has unearthed a bouquet of roots and is offering it to Hail Stones. Hail Stones is regarding She-Screams, and the look on his face–pitying, ruminative–gives Mud the impression that he is reminded of some other pathetic cow. How horrid it must be for him, Mud thinks, stuck with the dregs of this family, obliged to accept the peculiar attentions of a doting bull calf and to limp along on a suppurating foot in search of a calf he hardly knew. All this while bearing, in heartbreaking silence, the loss of his entire
family. He will leave us as soon as he is strong enough, she thinks, and feels a spasm of euphoria as if it is she who will leave. But then she looks at his bony torso, at his foot, and his escape is inconceivable and she is despairing, although consoled as well… . That ignoble feeling is there.

  She tosses dirt over her hide and is about to start walking when something white soars at the edge of her vision. She whirls around and sees dust bloating beyond the outcrop.

  She-Screams rushes to the spot. “It’s pointing that way!” she trumpets, indicating behind herself. “The Safe Place is back there!”

  She-Snorts comes to a stop but does not turn. She-Soothes turns slowly. Bent sinks to his knees. She-Screams retrievesthe rib and lifts it high so they can all witness how it landed. “Shall I throw it again?”

  What can she be thinking? “Oh, I shall!” she cries ecstatically. Like an inebriate* she spins in clumsy loops, shrieking, “I believe! I believe!” and then flinging the bone. It shoots directly at the matriarch and strikes her in the belly.

  She-Screams releases a delighted-sounding screech. Mud gasps, and She-Screams gives her an infuriated look that collapses into horror and then she, too, gasps.

  Blood dripping from her wound, She-Snorts steps around to face She-Screams. “I harbour a newborn,” she rumbles.

  “Of course,” She-Screams says. She begins to weep. “I … I don’t know … it’s so hard for me… .” She sobs openmouthed, like a calf. “Swamp!” she wails, flailing for him.

  Swamp ducks out of reach.

  “Only a flesh cut!” She-Soothes trumpets after a quick investigation of the matriarch’s wound.

  The matriarch flaps her ears. From her, who hardly ever rages, this is a menacing sign. Bent scuttles under She-Soothes’ belly. She-Screams shuts up. In the erotic, hip-rolling fashion of an oestrus cow presenting herself to a bull, She-Snorts turns her back to the rib. She raises one hind foot and stamps down hard. Mud is reminded of She-Demands crushing the body of her newborn and she lets out a distressed sound, which brings from She-Screams a look, both contemptuous and yearning, that says, “It was only a ghastly’s rib, you dimwit,” and “Was it the white bone? Was it?”

  For the rest of the afternoon Mud’s belly rumbles and cramps, and she can’t dodge the thought that there really is life in there. The snarls of tenderness that unfurl with the thought horrify her. Her sense is that if she loves even the idea of her newborn, she is doomed to give birth, and if she gives birth, and the calf lives, she will have to stay in this family forever. Two cows on their own (she is imagining herself and Date Bed) have a fair chance of surviving, so she has persuaded herself. A calf with only two young cows to protect it has no chance. She doesn’t want the calf to die, what she wants is for it not to be born.

  She refrains from telling She-Soothes about the cramps because she suspects that the cure requires the ingestion of something repugnant, and as soon as She-Snorts calls a halt to the day she lies alongside the croton thicket whose unappetizing branches they will feed on during the night. Their normal routine–eating steadily from before dawn until several hours after dark and then sleeping for about five hours–cannot be maintained on a trek. They eat as they walk, drink when they can. In such torrid heat travelling at night would be far easier and safer, but She-Snorts will not risk overscenting any sign of Date Bed, and night is when the ground heaves up the distracting odours of burrowed life: catfish and reptiles, and the musk of regeneration in scorched roots.* By the time the sun is low, everybody is ravenous and they forage most of the night and sleep very little, except for Bent, who falls into brief stupors day and night.

  She-Snorts locates water in a sandy depression under a grille of fallen thorn branches, and Mud arouses herself to drink and then lies back down, saying that her bad leg needs to rest a while, which it does. Not that anybody is listening. She-Soothes is investigating Hail Stones’ foot. On his other side, She-Snorts kicks for grass roots while murmuring her blandishments: “You must be the most long-suffering bull calf on The Domain. Any other bull calf in your state would have turned into a raving brute by now… .” Directly behind him, facing the other way, Swamp also kicks the ground, although with frequent sighs and less vigour. From where Mud lies, the two bulls appear to be joined tail-to-tail–Swamp with his greater height and girth like Hail Stones’ distended shadow.

  Before the drought Mud asked Swamp, “Does the prospect of leaving the family frighten you?” and he looked at her, for so long that she thought the question had offended him, but finally he said, “On the contrary, it captivates me.”

  “Why don’t you go, in that case?” she asked.

  Another long empty look. She guessed that he was wondering whether or not to blame his mother, because She-Screams tells him and everyone else that he is too trusting and dreamy to be on his own yet.

  Again Mud was wrong. “I am waiting for the right moment,” he said. And then he said, “The right moment is always as apparent as the sunrise.”

  Now, in the moonlight, Mud watches his spiritless kicks and wonders whether the right moment wasn’t the arrival of Hail Stones. Perhaps Swamp was told, by a visionary or in a dream, about a bull calf showing up one day to captivate him. Every few moments he sniffs behind himself as though thenauseating smell that gases out of Hail Stones’ foot is, to him, irresistible.

  One of the times that he does this, his trunk is snatched midair by She-Screams, who inserts the end of it into her mouth. He draws it back out. Ignoring this slight, she says in a loud voice, “I am so proud of you. Staying with Hail Stones, putting yourself at risk.”

  She-Snorts falls quiet.

  She-Screams swells into the void. “There is no bull calf more generous than you are. No bull calf more comely, either. Or well spoken. Everybody says so.”

  Swamp sighs.

  She-Screams strokes his head. “All I’ve ever wanted is for you to be safe. We could have been on our way to The Safe Place this very day–”

  At this, She-Snorts snorts. She-Screams falters–she knows she has overstepped the bounds–and yet on she goes as if she could persuade their incorruptible memories that her foolishness was really an act of doomed heroism. “Well,” she rumbles, “that’s the end of the white bone.”

  Another snort from She-Snorts but, surprisingly, nothing more. She-Screams delivers a few fussy huffs. She will be quiet now, Mud thinks. Surely. And it seems that she will–she snaps off a thorn branch, and the darkness itself seems to unloosen … and then she says to Swamp, “You are the longsuffering one.”

  Mud groans.

  She-Screams whirls on her. “What do you know?” she cries. “Always wandering off, snubbing everybody, what do you know about this family?” She turns to Hail Stones. Quavering, brightly courteous, she says, “I don’t wish to offend you, Hail Stones, but it is not by choice that you trail behind the rest of us. Swamp has a choice, and he chooses to watch over you even though your wound is an attraction to the flesh-eaters. For your sake he willingly places himself in danger.”

  “I am very grateful to him,” Hail Stones says quietly. “I am grateful to all of you.”

  “Mother,” Swamp moans.

  She-Screams smacks him. “Who will stand up for you if I don’t?” she trumpets.

  There is a hill of boulders to the east, and a high note from her voice rings among them like a particle of reason worth hearing out. When the note dies, She-Snorts rumbles matter-of-factly, “Swamp is a coward.”

  “Shame!” She-Screams cries.

  She-Snorts looks at Swamp. “You are,” she says, as if she couldn’t care less.

  “Shame!”

  Still addressing Swamp, whom she has never before reproached, not in earnest, She-Snorts says, “You did not join the V formation before the slaughter. You went into the middle with the newborns.”

  “I was in the grip of a paralysing terror,” he says complacently.

  “Oh, this is insufferable!” She-Screams trumpets. She turns on She-Snorts. “You sl
ander my calf and here I am almost an invalid, and my skin is cracked, I have extremely tender skin, I shouldn’t be out in the sun nearly as much as I am, and by the way"–a swerve of her trunk in She-Soothes’ direction–"I require a poultice for my shins. But I do what I must. I traipse through this wasteland for the sake of finding your calf"–whirling back to She-Snorts–"even though she’s… .”

  “She’s what?” Mud says.

  “Dead,” She-Screams mutters. “We all know she’s dead.”

  “No!” She-Soothes trumpets.

  “How can she possibly have survived out here on her own?” She-Screams says. “When she’s wounded, what’s more?”

  “A few drops of blood, that’s nothing!” She-Soothes roars. “Date Bed is doing fine! You saw her crap heaps! She-Soothes will tell you how she’s surviving. By her wits!”

  Mud reaches her trunk toward She-Screams. “Are you–?” she rumbles. Her heart swings in her ribs. “Are you hearing anybody’s thoughts?”

  “No, no.” Irritably. “Nothing like that.”

  Tonight the underscents are especially powerful and as Mud sucks them in, her belly goes still. Either her newborn has withered or it is asleep or, more probably, the underscents have lulled it. Like everyone else, Mud is waiting for She-Snorts’ reaction. The matriarch sniffs, deep thirsty breaths, while She-Screams fidgets and sighs and finally rumbles, “I would dearly love to be proven wrong. You all know how fond I am of Date Bed.”

  She-Snorts keeps scenting. Starlight slides down her swivelling trunk and pools in the dip of her strong tusk, whose shape and glow are precisely the new moon’s. The sky is overrun with stars. It is a “memory night,” when the sky is recollecting itself, every cow who ever dwelt up there, every shine, retrieved and lit up in a sensational dream. Down here, hares have appeared. Their eyes leap like sparks. Mud’s eyes dim,and she feels a burning between them and knows that her third eye is about to open.