“How would you know what is tasty?” She-Screams says, folding a swatch into her mouth. “It is not inedible,” she allows after swallowing. She grabs a second swatch and is chewing this when she spies the matriarch scenting the ditch that runs through the clearing. Shrieking, “I’ll find water!” she hurries to the ditch and begins to dig. She excavates five holes before she locates a seepage. “Matriarch first!” she cries happily when the cavity has filled.
She-Snorts sways a little, her bony hips creak like trees. She moves onto a small rise of land in order to transmit her infrasonic calls to Date Bed … or so Mud presumes. But like Mud herself the matriarch appears to have abandoned that chore. What’s the point, if the calls sent by She-Screams–who wasn’t even that far away–failed to get through? Head and trunk lowerered, She-Snorts simply stands there until all of them have taken their drink, and then she comes back and takes hers. At least she acknowledges the water hole, which was no certainty considering that a cow who is not supposed to exist located it.
By late morning, the browse is gone. Grass, roots, bark, branches, they have eaten it all. They retire, still famished, to the rim of shade on the west side of the boulder pile. Me-Me lolls on the ground as if the awesome heat and the flies and the black blowing grit were exactly her element. She doesn’t need water, Mud thinks, astonished, but as soon as everyone lies down the cheetah creeps to the hole and has a long drink. She then sits and begins to lick her left paw as if she intends to settle there.
“Too close!” She-Soothes trumpets.
Me-Me chirps imploringly.
She-Screams comes to her feet. From where she is, she turns in a circle, points and flaps her ears, and Me-Me attends to all this with a cocked head and then moves off to perch on a boulder and scan for prey. Over the course of the afternoon she catches a lizard and two guineafowls. The smell venting from the opened guts is what advertises the nature of the kill, although Mud is able to see the corpses as well. So is She-Screams. In an entertained tone she reportson the capture–"She bit the head off, she’s tossing up the torso. There! That’s the torso!”
Near dusk, just as they are setting out, a raging warthog charges toward them. It trots right by Me-Me, close enough for her to touch it. She watches it sidelong with an attitude of remote curiosity. Squealing at an insanely hysterical pitch, the warthog bolts between She-Screams and She-Snorts and keeps going. Deranged it so obviously is, nobody mentions that. Nobody mentions the other obvious thing, either. They all know the saying: “The three unluckiest things you can come upon: a three-legged she-he, a one-eyed lunatic, a crazy grunt.”
Less than an hour into the trek The Spill starts giving way to populated scrub and night noises–hoots, cackles, barks–and the odour of slaughter and rotting carcasses. Me-Me tries to pick up the pace, but with Bent scarcely able to stand, speed is out of the question. And so she races back to walk between and only a few yards ahead of She-Snorts and She-Screams, and She-Snorts allows this. At such close quarters her smell is a terror to Mud’s newborn, who starts kicking at the belly walls for a way out, that’s how it feels.
Tonight the destination is a pair of baobabs. Me-Me has communicated to She-Screams that the trees were still standing fifteen days ago and that water was in a pool nearby. Because of the mad warthog, Mud has no expectation that they will find either and is surprised when, stamped against the rising sun, she discerns the shapes of the beloved trees. That the pool turns out to be bone dry is the bad warthog luck, so She-Soothes assures everybody, the beginning and end of it.
One tree is completely hollowed out, but the other only partly. They postpone scenting for water and tusk into the pulp, the matriarch and She-Screams going first, Mud and She-Soothes snatching up whatever is dropped and taking quick turns every time the two bigger cows pause to chew. Some pulp is still left in the cavity when She-Snorts begins to search the pool bed for the scent of water. After a quarter of an hour she declares the bed parched. She-Screams then scents and fares no better. She confers with Me-Me and announces that they probably won’t be drinking again until dawn tomorrow, by which time they should have reached a small freshwater basin. “I don’t know how I’ll last until then,” she wails.
How will Bent last? Without water in her belly, She-Soothes is unable to regurgitate any swill. Her milk has dried up, but Bent still tugs at her shrivelled breasts. She feeds him chewed baobab pulp. He coughs it out. He can tolerate nothing except liquids. She dribbles saliva into his mouth, and when her mouth goes dry Mud contributes what saliva she can and sees that his lips foam. To restore her milk She-Soothes needs papyrus or sansevieria. Throughout the afternoon she throws incoherent bellows over the plain as if she could call back the swamps and rivers, and Me-Me, sitting on a crocodile carcass, appears to understand that this fury is not directed at her and stays where she is.
The trek that night takes them along one of the gravel trails favoured by vehicles. They follow it because it is an easy walk, level and empty of rocks, but when She-Screams hears a distant roar they turn west and go in that direction for a mile before resuming their northeasterly course. They meet a smallherd of buffalo too listless to do more than shuffle a few steps out of their way. Passing an old bull, Mud is grazed, shoulder to rump, by the tip of his horn. She feels not transgressed but taken account of: she has a certain shape and length, she moves. She lives.
She sleepwalks and dreams. Or these aren’t dreams, they are visions that exhaustion loosens into dreams. All are of debacles. Carcasses, skeletons. Gunshots, and the cows that have been hit dropping with that almost comical suddenness. She falls into a memory of the slaughter at Blood Swamp. Her trumpets halt the trek. She-Soothes persuades her to eat cold grass ash, and it is immediately effective, securing her for several hours in the desolate present.
Tonight they produce as much noise as any other creatures. Bent whimpers, and She-Screams is back to her old practice of wailing grievances. She claims to be having her spells, but her stride is strong, her head and trunk up. Twice she rushes off to investigate circular boulder formations barely visible to Mud’s eyes, and miles before even the matriarch appears to have caught the scent she announces the proximity of lions and hyenas. Lions she scents almost simultaneously with Me-Me, who fears them above all other carnivores. “We’ll protect you!” She-Screams cries as if Me-Me were their comrade rather than a murderous exploiter. She warns that their slow pace may provoke Me-Me into giving up on them, but when She-Soothes begins to stumble from exhaustion Mud is the one who offers to take over nudging Bent along. She has to curl her trunk between his hind legs and half-push him, halflift him. It is the most strenuous thing she has ever done. She can’t imagine how even stalwart She-Soothes kept it up overso many miles. This is love, she thinks, She-Soothes’ sensible brand: ferocious while it is required, abandoned the moment it stops serving any purpose. As the hours pass and she and Bent are still paired, she begins to believe that the choice between ferocious attachment and abandonment is the essential choice. You haul the calf or you abandon it. You stay with your dead sister’s newborn under the gutted baobab, or you suckle it one last time and run.
It occurs to her that it is madness for four cows and a calf to be risking themselves in an almost hopeless search for a single calf. The thought comes and goes in an instant. But it comes.
Just before dawn She-Soothes relieves her of Bent. By now Mud has lost all sensation in her trunk and it remains curled for several moments and then floats up on its own like something airborne. Her bad leg is past feeling and past straightening. “We are almost there,” she tells herself. They aren’t. They keep going, continuing on from the miniature basin at which they were supposed to drink. It isn’t that Me-Me deceived them. Water was there only days ago, they smell the vestige of it and see it in the wilted frill of new grass whiskering the basin’s lip. And yet the holes they dig are dry.
The sun climbs. Egrets appear and alight on the raw skin of their spines. Every movement of those little feet feels lik
e stabbing thorns. The wind awakens and sucks the dust into coils that crash into their legs as if with malignant intent. Where the heat has opened the earth, down in several of the widest seams, are heaps of bones, and She-Snorts stops and rummages in one of the seams and lifts out a tiny monkey skull whose odour, like Date Bed’s, is frail and pleasant and ambiguous. She-Snorts fondles the skull. She hangs it on the end ofone tusk and studies it from that angle. Then she smashes it against a boulder.
The sun is almost overhead by the time they arrive at the place where Me-Me stepped in Date Bed’s dung–a small pan surrounded by bleached logs. In the centre of the pan are five Grant’s gazelles who come snorting to their feet. A cheetah wouldn’t ordinarily frighten them but they are little more than the bones of their ordinary selves, and when Me-Me sinks to her stalking crouch they turn and bound away. Now, where they were, can be seen the fly-swaddled corpse of a newborn fawn.
“I smell water!” She-Screams cries. She hurries past the corpse, which Me-Me is already starting to drag to the logs.
Passing cheetah and fawn, She-Snorts growls but keeps walking. She is scenting hard. She goes to the other side of the pan and out onto the plain, and Mud, She-Soothes and Bent follow. At a deserted ostrich scrape she stops and picks something up.
A hard, blackened morsel of dung.
“How old is it?” Mud says.
“Thirty-five days,” She-Snorts murmurs. “Perhaps more.”
They smell the morsel in dumb wonder. It is so precious and so paltry. She-Screams, who has already excavated a seepage, comes over and pokes her trunk in among everybody else’s. “Thirty-seven days exactly” is her exasperated judgement.
She-Snorts brings the morsel up to her eye. Puts it in her mouth. She declines to drink and begins scenting the terrain for a clue to where Date Bed went from here.
“I’ll do that later!” She-Screams yells. “I can do that!”
Me-Me is the one who turns around.
“I’m not talking to you!” She-Screams yells, sounding almost fond.
With a jerk of her head Me-Me fixes on Bent.
“What are you gawking at!” She-Soothes roars.
Me-Me resumes ripping apart the fawn. Out on the plain the gazelles watch.
“Thirty-seven days!” She-Screams cries, as all of them except She-Snorts head back to the centre of the pan. “I wish somebody would explain to me what use we will be to Date Bed if we are corpses by the time we find her!” She glances at the matriarch and lowers her voice. “If we find her. We have been searching for forty-two days. Do you realize that? Forty-two days, wandering like lost newborns.” At the hole she has a long drink and then says, “I don’t know why you stand for it, She-Soothes. Watching Bent suffer.”
“Date Bed is lost,” the nurse cow mutters. Both she and Mud have excavated their own holes and are waiting for them to fill.
“Oh!” She-Screams lets out a high, crazy laugh. “And we’re not?” She drinks again and showers. “When my skull grew,” she says, squirting water between her legs, “it split open my skin.” She inclines her head to show the nurse cow her crown. “See there? I need one of your water-glory poultices, but what hope is there of that? In my opinion, the wisest course"–she has switched to her sermonizer’s voice–"the only course, as our Matriarch will eventually realize provided she doesn’t die first, is to stop the search right now and have Me-Me lead us to The Safe Place.”
“Suppose Me-Me doesn’t know where The Safe Place is?” Mud asks.
“At The Safe Place,” She-Screams continues as though Mud has not spoken, “we can regain our strength and then go out and search again if we must. For all we know, Date Bed may already be at The Safe Place.”
“Suppose Me-Me doesn’t know where The Safe Place is?” She-Soothes rumbles without betraying, by her tone, that the question has already been asked.
“She knows,” She-Screams answers distantly, and an odd, harsh smell leaks from her hide.
She-Snorts finds only a single scent trail. It either approaches from the northeast or heads off that way.
“She must have left more than one trail,” She-Screams says, but after a quick search complains that she never knew a calf to have such a thin odour. “What was she doing here, anyway? There’s no browse. Not a speck of shade.” She turns to the matriarch. “What’s the plan? I hope it’s not to keep going northeast.” Quoting Torrent, she says, “There’s only empty plain and more empty plain and at the end of it all is a desert.” She starts tapping the warts on her face. “We don’t even know if that’s the way Date Bed went. It may just as easily be the way she came.”
She-Snorts keeps drinking. She is so lean that in the workings of her throat and belly it is possible to track the descent of the water. Her belly is bloated, from hunger or the newborn, Mud can’t tell. She is red. They all are. They have coated themselves in the pan’s red sand. They are another species, Mud thinks–baked and spiny, frail as insects.
“Are we going northeast?” She-Screams persists.
No answer.
She-Screams nods. They are going northeast, she has concluded. She turns to She-Soothes. “It is the worst drought in living memory,” she says. Her measured tone suggests that she and the nurse cow see eye to eye. “And the plan is to head for a desert.”
She-Soothes looks at She-Snorts. “Is there spike weed in that desert?” she bellows. Spike-weed oil stimulates the flow of milk.
“I would not go to The Safe Place,” She-Snorts says, “knowing that Date Bed might still be alive and lost.”
“Nor would I,” Mud says. In her shame she weeps. The matriarch’s allegiance to Date Bed is steadfast while hers has wavered.
She-Screams whirls on She-Soothes. “And what do you have to say?” she cries.
“Is there spike weed in that desert?” the nurse cow rumbles.
Behind them, to the southwest, the land smoulders in the low red sun. Ahead is a clarity squandered on so much nothingness. No bushes are visible northeast, no trees except for two poisonous candelabrums. Is this the right direction? As if she can’t believe it, Me-Me keeps glancing around. She roosts on termite mounds to wait for them, her gaze on Bent. She is not the leader anymore, and yet she walks out in front.
They haven’t chased her off because She-Screams has convinced them that she is their best hope of arriving at The Safe Place, whether they make use of her now or wait until they find Date Bed. Before quitting the pan She-Screams gyrated through another consultation with the cheetah and afterwards told them she had led Me-Me to believe that the bargain (She-Snorts’ newborn in exchange for the location of Date Bed’s dung) would be honoured. “But,” she said, “in exchange for taking us to The Safe Place, I had to strike a second bargain. So I promised her She-Spurns’ newborn.”
The matriarch, who hadn’t betrayed that she’d been listening, now looked at Mud.
“Our newborns may drop before we arrive at The Safe Place,” was all Mud said. The possibility had to be mentioned, she felt, that they could actually be forced to honour their bargains or else lose Me-Me and almost all hope of finding The Safe Place. Hearing her own calm voice, in which no objection to the bargains themselves was perceptible, Mud understood that she had declared her position–between Date Bed and her own newborn she chose Date Bed–and she felt vindicated and worthy, and she felt immeasurably vile.
“Bent is not to be bargained with!” She-Soothes warned.
“Don’t worry,” She-Screams rumbled.
For what remained of the afternoon they rested. She-Soothes, Bent and She-Snorts slept. Mud lay on her right side and watched Me-Me. Having eaten the gazelle fawn, she was spraying certain logs with her urine. Choosing a log and a spot on the log seemed to require much deliberation and uneasy sniffing. Here? Here? On the burning plain the fawn’s family waited … for an opportunity to mourn the bones, Mud presumed.
She-Screams, who also lay facing the cheetah, whined continuously but at muted volume. Occasionally she glanced at Mud and
each time seemed incensed to find her awake, as if Mud were eavesdropping on her torment. She whined about being famished, scorned, sickly, despised, burdened and smarter than everyone else. She said that she was tired of the struggle. “How much longer?” she asked once, and imagining that she was wondering when she would be relieved of this life, Mud silently told her, “Soon.”
Late afternoon, with only water and dirt in their bellies, they left the pan. The matriarch set a slow pace for the sake of Bent and She-Soothes. For the sake of all of them. To keep her mind occupied, Mud counted steps. Now, as the light leaves, she finds herself nodding off. At any sudden sound she jerks awake, amazed that while she dozed she did not veer from the course. Lions are nearby, and wild dogs. When a pride passes on their left flank, Me-Me moves back between She-Snorts and She-Screams. The dogs come in close and look around with their twinkling eyes. Dogs tend a low fire in their skulls.
Fires are on the ground, set by fireflies (She-Snorts suspects) because neither she nor She-Screams can smell humans, although it is difficult to pick up scents through the smoke. Like a thousand fallen blossoms the scattered flames flutter wherever the stubble of some despicable vegetation has survived. Between the flames, gangs of hornbills run. “They drive me mad!” She-Screams shrieks, it is not clear why. The hornbills pursue the scorched insects whose odour (She-Screams alone is able to distinguish it from the overall smell of the smoke) also drives her mad. The heat drives her mad. She wails that it is more than she can bear. Later, when the firesare behind them, the cold is more than she can bear. “My feet!” she wails. You would think she’d welcome the rest stops, but when they are called she cries, “Again? Already?”
After the seventh stop, in the middle of the night, Mud offers to carry Bent for a while. She is hauling him up when She-Screams trumpets that she has caught the scent of tubers. Everybody waits while she investigates. Mud falls asleep. And awakens to find Bent trying to suckle her. She pushes him away and, as she does, smells milk. She touches the nipple and brings the wetness to her lips. “I have milk!” she trumpets. Bent latches onto the other nipple.
The White Bone Page 22