The White Bone

by Barbara Gowdy

  At the thought of She-Snorts trying to locate her, scenting the air with her sensitive trunk, Date Bed’s eyes well up. In the Thing she watches the warping of herself, and a part of her mind wonders whether tears seep up from under the lower lidor from minuscule holes in the eyeball itself. It is only now occurring to her that in order to help her mother, the best thing she can do is to stay put in one spot for a while.

  This is as good a spot as any. Near a riverbed, plenty of bark on this tree, scrub thorns. She inhales and squints in all directions. Overhead she spies a bird. Probably a vulture, but seconds later she is overcome by acute self-awareness and realizes that she is living a moment already experienced by a visionary, which means that it is a moment of consequence. With the sense that she is being directed by a need more distressed even than her own she angles the Thing at the sun.

  * Said when approaching or leaving a sacred place.

  Chapter Eleven

  A great n1umbness hits Mud’s heart. She peers through the darkness, sniffing. Except for Bent, who now lies beneath his mother, everyone is scraping the ground for roots.

  She-Screams stands near Swamp and doesn’t seem upset, and that can only mean that while Mud was lost in her vision, nothing happened. She-Snorts must have held her peace. Why? Why would she after She-Screams had declared Date Bed a lost cause? There were all those inhalations of the calming underscents, but Mud can’t believe that they alone would have stopped She-Snorts from reacting to what must be the most unforgivable thing She-Screams has ever come out with.

  Mud goes over to the matriarch and brushes her rump. As if Mud wasn’t there She-Snorts continues to pull on a root cord, and Mud can’t bring herself to speak. She moves beside She-Screams and starts to tusk at the earth while weeping silently over the image of She-Screams dead–her crushed skull, her bloated torso. She-Screams, smelling her sorrow(and no doubt considering it, whatever its source, less justified than her own), lets out irritated breaths, and this strikes Mud as almost cruelly pathetic–that She-Screams, in ignorance of her fate, should behave exactly as she always has.

  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 t
o 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.

  “Don’t be brash!” She-Soothes roars.

  Bent starts to wail. She-Soothes positions herself over him and he tugs at her left breast, her right, her left again, and then falls to his knees and squeals, “Where’s my milk?”

  Mud weeps, too, not to herself but producing tears, although it is foolish to waste fluids. Her newborn seethes. It is like digestion, and she feels a reluctant gratitude that at least something stirs in her belly. She-Snorts no longer speaks of her condition, and Mud wonders whether this is because she fears the worst. The matriarch has already suffered two stillbirths, one eight years ago and another three years later. “Let mine perish for hers,” Mud thinks, shocking herself a little. “Should a choice be necessary,” she appends, and as if in retribution for that unholy prayer her left ear is stabbed by She-Screams screaming, “What do we do now?”

  Silence, except for the bleating of Bent.

  “Well?” She-Screams cries, looking from She-Snorts to She-Soothes so that you would think a response was her incontestable due. “Find water, I suppose,” she finally mutters. “But where? Look at all these useless pits,” and she indicates the long line of holes that were presumably dug by Date Bed.

  The family is on the floor of a departed river–Jaw-Log River, so called for the crocodiles that once milled in dense packs just under the surface. All that’s left of them are coils of rib and racks of teeth tossed into heaps. Up on the banks among the fallen trees, bleached bones bristle out of the earth like some miserable species of thicket.

  The trees are giant ebony and Phoenix palms. Most have been knocked down and stripped of bark. The bit of bark that remains is the only decent forage in the vicinity. To the west is a land of black boulders known as The Spill, on the far side of which is Feed Swamp. Getting to the swamp takes five days according to Torrent, who is the only living she-one known to have made the journey. With the water gone from Jaw-Log River, nobody would have cause to come here.

  And yet Date Bed came.

  “Why?” She-Screams asks. While everyone digs for water, She-Screams carries on a bitter conversation with herself: “I’ll tell you why. Some lunatic told her to!” (Date Bed’s reliance on other creatures to guide her to food and water is taken for granted.) “Some lunatic said, ‘There is still plenty of water at Jaw-Log River!’ and Date Bed believed it! Either that, or she was … well… .” She waves her trunk. “Never mind,” she mutters.

  Either that or Date Bed was suffering from “heat sleep.” Who among them hasn’t entertained the awful prospect of Date Bed wandering in a stupor?

  “Smell this,” She-Snorts rumbles from downstream, or what was downstream before the river departed.

  “Water!” She-Screams cries, shoving into the lead.

  Yes, water, bubbling out of the sand. What the mat
riarch is pointing out, however, is a plug of compacted brush and dirt and dung. “This was in here,” she says, holding out the plug.

  “Date Bed!” Mud exclaims. The dung is Date Bed’s.

  “What’s it doing in the hole?” Bent asks.

  “Date Bed stuck it there!” his mother bellows. “What has She-Soothes been saying all along! Date Bed’s mind is as sharp as a thorn. You dig a water hole, you plug it up so that the water is still there when you return!”

  “But why would she return?” Mud asks.

  “Why? Why? Because… .” Confusion plays over the nurse cow’s face.

  “Because she dug the hole?” From Bent.

  “Because she dug the damn hole!” She-Soothes roars.

  The matriarch is looking thoughtfully at She-Screams, who is taking advantage of the preoccupation over the plug to drink before her turn. (Or taking advantage of her banishment–if she does not exist, how can she be reprimanded?) “Perhaps Date Bed knew we would come here,” She-Snorts rumbles at last.

  “How could she know that?” Mud says.

  “I have no idea. But she could have made a plug with only saliva and dirt. And yet she rolled a bit of her dung into it.”

  “To preserve it from scavengers!” She-Soothes bellows.

  “To let us know she was here,” Mud says. Her throat seizes.

  “The urge to leave a trail is at the root of all inventiveness,” Swamp declares languidly.

  “Matriarch, may I speak?” It is Hail Stones, using, as he does when addressing She-Snorts, the formal timbre.

  “Of course.”

  “I would only like to suggest that she may be on the trail of the white prize.”

  “The white bone?” cries She-Screams, water spraying from her trunk.