The Third Book of the Dun Cow: Peace at the Last

by Walter Wangerin Jr.

  The Third Book of the Dun Cow:

  Peace at the Last

  Walter Wangerin, Jr.

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2013 by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com.

  First Diversion Books edition September 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-626810-71-6

  For Robert Klausmeier

  [Prologue] Homeless

  After the death of Lord Chauntecleer the Rooster, while the Beautiful Pertelote was still in mourning, spring burst open as if it had been swelling in the womb of the earth all through Fimbul-Winter.

  Rain fell in torrents. The Mad House of Otter rejoiced, mud-slithering and cavorting and calling to one another and laughing because they said they looked like wet cigars.

  The Queen Honey Bee and her Family Swarm buzzed abroad in search of blossoms dusted with pollen.

  The Doe De La Coeur stayed in the hall under the boughs of the Hemlock tree. Her long legs would sink in the mud, and she’d be left stranded in an open field.

  Likewise String Jack. He with all his friends and relations watched the heavy rainfall from under the eaves of the Hemlock, tisk-tisking at the Otters because the Otters were ruining shoots of young grass, and it was grass that the Rabbits wanted for food.

  Sheep bowed their heads patiently. When other Animals came close to them they bleated warnings and begged them to go away. Sodden wool stinks, and stinking can embarrass a soft-hearted Sheep.

  But hope had returned to the Animals. Slaughter had left them, please God, for good. Those Creatures who had learned to love the taste of blood had absconded: the yellow-eyed Wolf, gone; the Marten, after killing and eating the Grey Squirrel, gone; the fat Hen, who had proposed to eat a Ground Squirrel, gone; and the black Wolf, the red-eyed Wolf, dead.

  And Wyrmesmere, that heaving sea, had been rolled back like a scroll. And Wyrm himself had been reduced to maggots.

  John Wesley Weasel had decided to take the Brothers Mice under his wing, as it were. It was his notion to turn them into a militia as grim as he himself was grim.

  “File single!” he commanded.

  When the brothers had flipped into their places, Wodenstag first, Samstag last, the Weasel faced them. “Mices! Count off!”

  “One,” squeaked Wodenstag. “Two!” This was Donnertag. Freitag was just about to squeak “Three,” but the Weasel interrupted:

  “John, he can’ts hear you!”

  So Freitag threw out his tiny chest and squeak-roared, “Step-papa! Three!”

  Dienstag, Samstag, Sonntag, Montag all squeak-boomed, “Four! Five! Six! Seven.”

  John Wesley turned his back to them and cried, “Forwards, harch!”

  Spring eased Pertelote’s grief. And just as well. In Chauntecleer’s absence someone must take his Animals into her care. She sang Matins. She sang every one of the Canonical Crows:

  “My darlings, sweet the sunrise, soft

  The dawning, good the eve when falls

  The dusk.

  Work the daylong, sleep the night through,

  Dream of him who still requires your

  Trust.”

  So it was in those days when spring was filled with promises. And so it might have gone for the rest of the Animals’ lives.

  But the spring that smiles is the season that must also frown. Nothing exists without its opposite. Light needs darkness to prove that it is light. Day needs night. Heat needs cold. Health needs disease. Joy needs suffering. And life cannot be measured unless it is by death.

  Black clouds swelled over the land. Wind blew the rain like pellets into the Creatures’ faces. Creatures took cover under the Hemlock. Thunder rolled, and lightning stuttered closer and closer on spiders’ legs, until a single firebolt struck the pinnacle of the Hemlock tree. Immediately its needles spat and sparked. And, in spite of the rain, its boughs burst into flame.

  Pertelote was horrified but not dumbfounded. She cried out. She raised her cry to the level of an outright Crow. The mighty crash of the lightning and the fire in the crown of their tree had sent the Animals not rushing out, but huddling around the trunk of the Hemlock.

  Pertelote called John Wesley Weasel, who saw their rank stupidity and bombed the Animals with his body.

  “Mices!” he roared. “File single!”

  Their step-papa’s command emboldened seven little hearts.

  “Hup! Hup! Nip Buggars in their butts!’

  The military Mice obeyed. Hens began to cackle and run. Ferric Coyote, who would have hunkered down and fixed himself into a desperate freeze, yiped and ran. His daughters followed him out and across the mud.

  The Weasel tore fur from the Jackrabbits’ backs.

  Then Pertelote brought order to John Wesley’s galloping mess. She gathered the Animals into ranks and led them away from the Hemlock. Under black clouds the tree was a shooting candlestick. Its blaze reflected in the Animals’ eyes. It cast a lurid light over their faces. Pertelote herself seemed a firebrand as she flew back and forth, under the tree and out again, making sure that no one had been left behind.

  Chauntecleer was dead. The Hemlock was dying. When every Animal had been accounted for, and Pertelote had alighted beside John Wesley, her emotions overwhelmed her. What were they going to do now? No focus for a home. No purpose but survival. No season that was not untrustworthy.

  The trunk of the Hemlock did not burn. Rather, it became a singular, smoking spire, and then a black obelisk, a memorial to civilizations past.

  Here begins the book entitled

  Peace at the Last

  [One] In Which Eurus Forms a New Pack

  The cry of a Loon rises through the windless mists of the lake.

  A cream-colored Wolf pauses in her passage, lifts her head, and listens. The Loon sustains his yodel a while, then the cry sinks into silence, and the forest seems more hushed than before.

  The Wolf stands in a wet greenery on a soup of duff. Every leaf holds pregnant drops of the morning’s dew. Breezes shake them free, and the Wolf is alert to the small pattering on the ground.

  She moves forward again, pursuing a trail marked by the scent she believes her Ancestors to have left ages ago.

  Balsam firs pique the air with a spicy aroma. Lichens cover the limbs and the trunks of birches. Yellow violets and the shy pink blossoms of wild lilies of the vaelly spot the forest floor. The Wolf’s tread is noiseless.

  The yellow-eyed male, whose cruelties she escaped several months ago, gave her the name “Snowtra.” It has always lain uneasily upon her soul. She has never accepted it.

  The dominant Wolf—Eurus. His mate—Rutt.

  Before the Cream-Colored Wolf appeared, Eurus had prowled the northeastern territories alone thereafter. He had severed himself from an ineffectual community of Animals who were governed by that golden Rooster, Chauntecleer. Once Eurus had tasted blood, he’d come to scorn the goddamn meekness of those Animals. He could no longer abide their nerveless obedience, and he left.

 
In the autumn after his departure, Eurus began to climb the high ridges and howl in search of other Wolves—not for the comfort of their company, but because he desired to dominate.

  It was under a midnight moon that there came the timid bark of another Wolf. Eurus howled an answering command, “Show yourself!”

  Out of the brush below the ridge crept a younger, leaner Wolf. Eurus bared his teeth and began a rumbling growl. He stiffened his legs and cupped his ears forward. His mane and the hairs of his ruff bristled. He gave every sign of a banked, explosive hostility.

  The lesser Wolf crept to the space below Eurus’s ridge, dropped into a crouch, tucked his tail between his legs, flattened his ears, and in this manner climbed to the waiting, yellow-eyed Eurus. At the top of the ridge the lean Wolf sidled close to the big one. Impassively Eurus accepted this cringing subservience. So the newcomer took tiny steps, tapping the stony ground with his forepaws. Then he licked Eurus’s muzzle with quick, repeated stokes. He rolled onto his back and presented his genitals.

  Good. This was the submission Eurus had been looking for. Therefore he laid the joint of a foreleg across the beggar’s neck, and their relationship was established.

  So there were two Wolves. And Eurus named the second “Crook.”

  In the morning light Crook was revealed as a mangy Creature, his cheek scarred from an earlier injury. The scar was a black stripe descending from his ear to the corner of his lips.

  During the next several days the two Wolves ran together—until the morning when Eurus stopped, lifted his snout, sniffed the wind, and told Crook to stay right where he was. Then he followed a new scent windward.

  Already, by the scent, he knew the next Wolf to be a female. When he saw her he paused until she had scented and seen him. She was larger than Crook, though her frame had less of the heft and the power of Eurus’s. She was ornamented with a dark saddle across her back. Her general color was grizzled. She was broad-skulled and strong. Her pale eyes revealed willfulness, something Eurus would be glad to command.

  He said, “Who are you?”

  She answered that she did not know.

  When she approached him, this female showed little of the grovelings Crook had displayed. She may not have known who she was, but she came with a growl that answered his own. Several times she snapped her teeth together, emitting a few sharp barks—and that was that. Three Wolves in Eurus’s pack, and one by whom he intended to bear sons.

  In light of this expectation he named her “Rutt.”

  Eurus believed that he had been set free—that he had come into his full stature—when he had learned the force and the authority of slaughter. Food roamed everywhere, and fangs ignited fear in other Creatures’ eyes. In order, then, to give his small pack a taste of blood, the yellow-eyed Eurus took them hunting.

  It is the habit of Beavers in late autumn to stock provisions against the winter. Eurus nosed out one such Beaver who was chewing a sapling at a dangerous distance from her dammed-up pond. Her leathery tail was bent flat beneath her. She leaned on it to stand at her full height.

  Eurus crept forward. Suddenly he leaped and pounced and, with one hard shake of his head, snapped her neck. Immediately he drove his fangs into the Beaver’s belly and tore it open. He pulled back his bloody muzzle and called to Crook and Rutt, “Eat!” They tasted blood and knew which food would satisfy them for the rest of their lives.

  Teaching, teaching, Eurus scared up a Hare and sent Crook after it.

  The Hare was quicker than the lean Wolf expected. She cut left and right, baffling her pursuer, until Eurus jumped from an ambush and dispatched her.

  By degrees Eurus increased the size of the small pack’s prey. Now it was time to teach them teamwork.

  Autumn; mid-afternoon; the sun declining southwest; Three Wolves trotting single file through a tall, dried, crackling grass, the first Wolf’s head and snout higher than the others’; their motion careless; chaff-dust rising in a gentle cloud behind them.

  It was on this day and in this climate that Eurus perceived the proper prey ahead of him. She was a Moose browsing near a small lake among the twigs and the branches of poplar trees.

  Eurus lowered his chest. So did Crook and Rutt. All three worked forward slowly, their breasts to the ground, until they were twenty yards from the Moose. She swept up her head, leafy branches hanging from either side of her mouth. She was a vast Creature with a fleshy, bulbous nose.

  Suddenly Eurus barked, “Now!”

  The pack broke from the grass and streaked toward her, their bodies absolutely level to the earth, their tails straight back. The Wolves distended themselves. When Crook reached her he closed his jaws on her right rear cannon bone. She galloped away from the lake, through a close stand of spruce, stripping Crook loose, then turning in a wide semicircle back to the water. Several times the Wolves overtook her but failed to make a clean attack.

  Before the Moose-Cow hit the river’s bank, Rutt lunged and sank her fangs in the high muscle of her rump. Eurus dashed ahead of them both, executed a hard right turn, then flew at the face of the Moose and clamped his jaws on her muzzle. Even still she kept running, dragging Eurus between her forelegs. Rutt dropped back, ripping flesh from the Cow’s rump. The Moose threw her head up, heaving Eurus bodily into the air. She thundered into the lake and slapped him flat on the water. He lost his hold. She swam out to a sand bar four feet under the lake’s surface and found footing. She huffed and blew air. The water around her ran red with blood. But her humped shoulders promised reserves of strength.

  Eurus swam quickly ashore. He caught his breath and said, “Enough. Time’s on our side.”

  He lay down, his muzzle across the joints of his forepaws. The other two Wolves did the same. They waited.

  So passed the rest of the day. Both Rutt and Crook dozed. Eurus kept one eye open.

  In twilight the Moose-Cow had grown weak from the loss of blood. Her knees had begun to buckle in the belly-deep water. Wearily she moved off the bar and began a slow swim shoreward, then collapsed in shallow water.

  Immediately yellow-eyed Eurus rose and walked to the lake-bank. He emitted a threatening growl. The Cow struggled to her feet. Eurus stood back and measured her exhaustion. Her snout was lacerated. Her hide was stripped to the living meat. Nevertheless, a blow from the hoof of a Moose could break his spine.

  Eurus switched his tail back and forth. The bright moon cast shadows at this feet. Time was on his side.

  One hour, and Rutt joined the dominant Wolf. Next came Crook.

  Finally the Moose-Cow slumped to her knees, and with a great splash dropped on her side.

  Eurus’s pack moved in and began her final slaughter.

  Gravely the Cow watched the Wolves at work. They ripped her flesh, rocking her body, and drove their noses into the muscle, tore out great hunks of meat, grunting with the effort, and swallowing. Their faces blacked with her blood. Eurus ripped her abdomen and yanked out her bowels like a lumpy rope, then went for her liver. The Moose closed her eyes and passed away.

  Late that winter Rutt’s vulva swelled. The snow lay deep and crusted in the clearing that Eurus had chosen as their meeting-site. When he scented the change in his mate, he mounted her. He seized the nape of her neck between his teeth. Rutt cried out and tried to fight free, but her forelegs plunged through the white crust, fixing her in an helpless stance. Eurus laughed at her efforts and ground her neck-bone with a greater ferocity until her tail was turned aside. Then he drove into her. He would have his way. He would humiliate her. He would break the willfulness in her pale eyes. And he would have sons.

  In time she grew great with her unborn pups. Though this was new to her experience, instinct taught the female what to do.

  At winter’s break Rutt found a tunnel in a jumble of rocks. She widened the tunnel’s neck. Then, at the end of it, she dug out a larger chamber. She picked her new room clean of filth and every vermin.

  Throughout the next seven d
ays Rutt grew restless. She paced back and forth in the snow melt outside her den. She did not hunt. Eurus permitted the deviance. He wanted his children whole and healthy when they would spring forth.

  Finally the She-Wolf entered her chamber and stayed. This was her place. She refused Eurus an entrance. No one would disturb her now. Her place, her task, her own sole exertions.

  Rutt wrestled from one position to another, her nerves afire.

  Then the contractions began. Between each and each she panted and swallowed. She twisted around and licked her genitals.

  Suddenly a pup squirted into existence, a small, slick ball of black fur. On the point of a fang Rutt broke the water sac. She chewed through the cord. When she had bitten it in two, she surprised herself with a quick catch of regret.

  She lapped the amniotic fluid and swallowed it. She ate the cord and the afterbirth and the damp pieces of the pup’s caul. By the soft strokes of her tongue, then, she washed the blind pup clean. Next she worked her head around and cleansed her hindquarters. Rutt tidied the den according to unremembered instincts.

  Soon the contractions renewed themselves. She suppressed the mewings of urgency. Let silence be her curse upon the yellow-eyed male outside.

  A second pup popped into the world, his tiny ears completely deaf, his face pug-nosed.

  Rutt repeated the process of purification, then offered her sons the intimacy which was a mother’s only. She nudged the pups’ snouts to her teats and curled around them and felt the pleasure of her babies’ tuggings.

  For the following weeks Rutt warmed her chilly pups with her own warmth. She licked their tender bellies. The sensation caused them to pee and to eliminate tiny scats. These too Rutt swallowed, ever maintaining the purity of her chamber. No grubs here. No fleas. Nothing to infect her children.

  The mother required substance to renew her milk and to keep her strength up. Crook, not Eurus, recognized the need and left hunks of meat at the mouth of the tunnel.