Boreas says, “Come.”
“Where?”
“Away.”
Wachanga considers the invitation.
“We can’t steal way, Boreas. These are our friends.”
“Hush. Away from prying eyes.”
Pertelote is not asleep. She hears the tread of the Wolves. An hour later she hears the moans of desires fulfilled.
In the morning Boreas is light on his feet.
Pertelote announces that it’s time to leave this place of convalescence.
With a new grace Wachanga takes the lead, ever snuffling the scent of her Ancestors. Boreas walks beside her, and because Pertelote knows what there is to know, she is not surprised that the White Wolf does not this morning dash ahead to reconnoiter.
Once John Wesley had feelings for Wachanga. Once he found himself mooning beside her and asking if she wanted a drink of water. Now the Weasel knows that it is not his place. Boreas has become Cream-Wolf’s beloved.
The Animals climb through a forest of pine among whose branches the wind moans. Each foothill rises higher than the last. Now and again the Animals tumble down a snowy decline, then pause, gasping for breath.
The mountainsides and the giant cliffs ahead are wrinkled with a craggy rock. In the spring the snowmelt roars down these mountain steeps. Now the water is frozen into colossal columns of ice which look like the massy pillars that hold up the domes of cathedrals.
This is before them? This is what they must climb?
Ferric Coyote has suffered many tribulations in his life. Once he grieved the deaths of his wife and of his son Benoni. Once he feared the starvation of his daughters. After such trials the Coyote thought he was ready for anything. But not this.
Fly she never so high, Pertelote cannot find a pass through the saw-toothed summits ranging north and south. There’s no help for it. Her band must keep climbing.
Eventually the Animals leave the green forest behind. They scrabble over rubbles of fallen rock. They mount steep slopes of grizzled snow. Wachanga is nimble. Moreover, she and Boreas walk on paws the size of snowshoes. But lesser Creatures slip backward. The Mice are fine. The Hens are not. They lose their footing and tumble in a rush of feathers. John Wesley takes it upon himself to urge them upward—by insults.
“Cut-cackle Chickies, they waddles like they can’t pop a poop! Cut-cackles is clueless!” he yells. “Roll, roll, roll, Biddy-Birdies, bubble-busters. Roll, roll, roll down snow and bye-bye to you.”
The offense agitates the Hens. They claw the snow and climb. They flap their vestigial wings, swearing that when they catch a Weasel they’ll peck his tail naked.
If only the Otters would stop tobogganing down the slope! John Wesley hates their hilarities in times of sober goings.
When the sun drops behind the western peaks the Animals are plunged into a sudden darkness. There is no twilight. Daylight dies in four short breaths, and no one moves.
Pertelote consoles them by singing Compline:
“Where has laughter gone?
With the sun.
Who are those that cannot run?
Everyone.
What shall I sing tonight?
Lullabies.
Tomorrow we’ll climb, tomorrow fly,
Unified.
I am, my children, yours;
You are mine.
Climb the seasons, climb the years,
However high.
[Twenty] In Which Rutt Dilates Herself
Eurus is dead. Rutt is taking his place.
She walks the bare ridges as he did once, howling a general summons. More savvy than Eurus, Rutt utters her summons in the various tongues of the untaught Beasts.
The first to answer is Hati, the son who broke from the pack of his yellow-eyed father. He arrives strutting as the dominant Wolf of his own pack. In Hati Rutt recognizes an arrogant, self-confident male.
Therefore she leaps down the ridge, extending her four legs and using her body-weight to drive Hati to the ground. He tries to rear up, but Rutt is quicker and more determined. She catches his skull between her jaws. Hati struggles, powerfully at first, then weakly, until his body goes slack. Rutt releases him. She presses her right paw on his chest. When he regains consciousness, the pressure of her paw establishes her authority over all the Wolves.
Moreover Rutt elevates the second son, Skoll, above his brother. Hati once made Skoll’s life miserable. This is payback.
Rutt howls from dusk till dawn.
A leopard slinks into view. Rutt growls and spits like a Wildcat, and the Leopard, subservient, joins the Wolves.
Then Snakes, then Wolverines, Rats, the Ferruginous Hawk who cements her nest with Cow shit, then a Linx.
Rutt, Hati, and Skoll attack the first Bear that answers her howl. They tear the Beast to pieces and force the rest of Rutt’s swelling pack to drink his blood and to eat his meat. Pale-eyed Rutt watches the Beasts’ bloody transformations. Stags follow and are slaughtered. Moose, Sheep, Pronghorns.
The Merlins learn to feed on Larks, on Songbirds and their nestlings. The Raccoon develops a taste for Voles and Mice and small Rabbits.
Rutt’s pack becomes a rabble.
By an iron will and the savagery to enforce it, by a dexterity of language—sometimes rude, sometimes elegant, persuasive, dire, promising punishment or delight—Rutt dazzles and commands a mob.
Only Freya is proof against her mother’s domination. She is her mother’s better. She follows, but does not serve.
Rutt refuses to let anyone veer off to hunt and eat on their own. Their hunger has a purpose.
[Twenty-One] Another Sort of Story Altogether
The Animals find in the escarpment a cavern where they pass the night.
Kangi Sapa says, “I have another tale to tell. This one from the Cottonwoods.”
“Better than the last one, I hope,” says Pertelote.
“More important,” says the Raven. “Shorter.”
Wodenstag Mouse pipes up: “Nobody dies in this one, Mr. Sapa? Nobody makes fires?”
“Sorry, my little Mouse-friend. There is fire. There has to be fire.”
“Maybe,” Wodenstag whispers, “maybe you don’t tell it?”
“That, too,” Kangi Sapa says with pity. “I have to tell it, even if no one listens.”
Pertelote says, “Is this tale necessary?”
The Raven pauses. “Necessary, Mrs. P. All too necessary.”
Wachanga whimpers.
Boreas the White Wolf swallows a growl.
Then Kangi Sapa unfolds his story without humor. He speaks in tones the Animals don’t recognize as his. The Raven knows a thousand languages. This one is formal and foreboding. The Cream-Wolf scarcely recognizes the teller of the tale.
So. The Cottonwood Trees stood along the shores of brooks and streams, drinking the water through their roots. They were peaceful in those days.
They talked about the past when their ancestors were seedlings—as seedlings they still were. They talked about the Creator’s resting on the seventh day. The sky was new. The earth was breaking forth in flowers and in forests. The rains fell fresh from heaven. The soil was moist, and the sun was three days old. Generation after generation, the Cottonwoods taught their children their histories. In this way the traditions were never lost. The hand of God was upon them all.
One day the Cottonwoods saw a ball of fire streaking down the sky. Surely God would not have hurled it at the earth. The Trees became frightened. Their sap ran cold.
The fireball had a long red tail. It plowed the air. It was racing to a place not far from them. Its coming produced a continual roar. Its light was fire. The Cottonwoods expected death.
But the burning ball missed them. It exploded among the mountains. The earth shook. Its mantel rolled below them like a rug, and smoke billowed up. The mountains vomited clouds of dust. The dust darkened the sun and turned the moon to b
lood.
Five days, six days—it was a week before the winds had swept the dust away.
On the eighth day a Sharpshin Hawk, her feathers singed, fell into the river from which the Cottonwoods drank.
When she could speak the Hawk told them that the fireball was a massive stone, that it had punched a tremendous crater in the saddle between the shoulders of two mountains. She said that it glowed red with heat. That it had an odd, slender protuberance which reached ten yards away from its forepart. That great stone was cooling. And that the cooling cracked in its grounded side a cave.
Sharpshin had watched the event dumbfounded. In spite of her scorched feathers she believed it was her duty to carry the message abroad.
Is this story-teller Kangi Sapa? He seems to have been swallowed up in oratory. The Animals cannot sleep. Their cavern has shrunk to the size of a cup.
Even Wachanga feels that her friend has been replaced by an unhappy and premonitory prophet.
[Twenty-Two] Plans Put into Practice
Whenever it is necessary, Rutt mauls her recalcitrant Beasts. When quarreling breaks into outright fighting, Rutt commands the Grizzly Bears to kill the combatants. And when she reads mutiny in her famished horde, she calms them with promises.
The land where she intends to take them, she says, will be a paradise of abundant food.
In order to seduce her rabble, Rutt uses a lyrical language. She murmurs charms. She creates visionary images of weak Creatures and soft bellies. Blood, she says, will spout like fountains and flow as streams. Tender Animals will lie down before the mouths of every hungry Beast and beg to be eaten. For these Meek Creatures—so should her mob understand—will consider it an honor to enter the guts of demigods. “It is as gods that you shall fall upon the Meek!
“Patience,” Rutt concludes her promises. “Let your appetites increase, so that your satisfactions may be orgasmic.”
Rutt returns to the place where she had dispatched her yellow-eyed tormenter.
She comes to find and to follow the White Wolf’s scent. Clearly he does not run alone. And since he and the Weasel are of different species, yet speak in a single, articulate tongue, she assumes that more than a few races travel with them.
The ground is rucked and gouged from the previous combat. Scraps of skin still thick with fur are scattered around the site. Rutt scans the ground, searching for Eurus’s bones. She wants the satisfaction: Rutt, triumphant!
She looks for the long jaw and his hollow brainpan.
But she can find nothing of Eurus. Even this absolute absence should satisfy her lust for a final revenge: Eurus consumed by hellfire—but then she notices one of her Wolverines clawing at a patch of loose earth.
The Wolverine kicks out ribs picked clean, then a skull bone. Eurus’s skull bone!
Dammit! Some fool has honored the coward’s corpse!
Rutt shoulders the Wolverine aside. Violently she claws up Eurus’s bones, throwing them to the Beasts.
“Crack them!” she cries. “Suck out the marrow!”
She raises her head and sees a second grave, this one still open. Rutt leaps to the hole and looks inside.
A Marten! Here is a Marten lying on his side, his tail wrapped around his body. The Marten’s eyes are hidden. Rutt can’t tell whether he’s dead or alive. She grabs his body. She whips it back and forth until she hears the spine snap. Warm blood spurts into her mouth. So: he was alive. Now he’s dead.
Hati dashes past her. He tries to declare his dominance by taking the first bite. But Rutt rakes his hindquarters, and he shrinks back.
Rutt has found and is following the White Wolf’s scent. She reads its complex odor. He’s been wounded. Good! His life force must be draining away. Good!
Rutt is fixed in an ungoverned rage. Rage constricts her bowels. It has dried the spit in her mouth. Rage no longer considers the Beasts behind her as individuals. They are a roaring engine of destruction.
[Twenty-Three] Endings
Statim! Statim, Gallina! Te
Insequitur perfidia!
Make haste! The unholy age rages
At your heels.
Fly hither!
“Statim,” indeed, drives Pertelote forward. The “Te Insequitur perfidiea” fills her with a dread so heavy it oppresses the band of Animals climbing behind her.
She hovers over Wachanga, aware of the Cream-Wolf’s new intensity.
“What do the Ancestors say?” she calls.
“‘Home,’” Wachanga answers. “They say, ‘Home is in the mountain fastness.’ They say, ‘Hurry home.’”
The Animals’ ascent has become treacherous, cliffs that are almost perpendicular. Here is a foothold. There is a projection. Muscles cramp, and legs grow dull. Boreas has the tread of a Mountain Goat. He plots the best paths for the weary Animals.
Pertelote crows, “Don’t look down!”
The Otters no longer play. The sport has gone out of them. The Hens have no breath for complaint.
Ferric and his daughters brave the ascent silently.
At this height the cold should stupefy the Creatures, but their labor creates an internal warmth.
This is no country for a long-legged Deer. So the Mr. and Mrs. Cobbs help De La Coeur—Mrs. Cobb riding her shoulders, murmuring encouragement, Pertinax shouting instructions below: “Here! Here’s a niche for your foot.” And again, always again, “Step here, and here, and here, and here.”
John Wesley Weasel has placed himself at the rear of the Critters in order to catch the one that falls.
Their climbing is not eased where the mountain grade angles to a gentler field. Screes of gravelly stones cover the fields. Shale cuts the pads of the Animals’ paws. They track blood. Small gravel shoots out behind an unwary step. A Creature slips. John Wesley catches her.
The difficulty of their ascent causes certain Creatures to ignore their own pain in order to help others. Pertelote’s band has become a single soul with a common purpose. Two plus two equals One. And love makes a One of Many.
Finally, finally the Animals reach the top of the terrible escarpment. They slump on a plateau, a snowless plain, and lie in a dreamy weariness. Behind them the mountainside plunges into clouds. Before them the plateau comes to an absolute edge.
Wachanga is still afoot, still sniffing the scent of her Ancestors. She trots straight to that farther edge, stops, stands still, and peers down.
Pertelote alights beside the Cream-Wolf and sees what she sees: a precipitous drop into a crater, its wall several miles around. And in the center of the crater, a colossal rock humped into two parts, the foremost with a long, stone extrusion, a lethal, lateral limb that reaches from the rock’s forepart to a tip as sharp as a rapier.
What can Pertelote say to the band that has trusted her so long, the Animals who have traveled with her to the end of the earth? Pilgrims, they are not Pilgrims; Pioneers, they are not Pioneers; Adventurers and not Adventurers; Evangelists and not Evangelists. How can she comfort her dear ones? Say your prayers. Lie down. Sleep, and never wake up?
Lord God! Why have you forsaken us?
Suddenly Pertelote hears John Wesley is screaming, “Lady Hen! Oh Lady Hen,” and worse comes to worst. Pertelote has never heard such fear in the Weasel’s voice.
She leaps into the air, beats her wings furiously, and flies toward the Weasel.
Wachanga behind her, peering into a great crater; John Wesley before her, peering down the mountain’s steeps whence the Animals have come.
“Lady Hen! Is diabolicals! Is diabolicals rumplings the mountainsides!”
John Wesley is horrified. She flies to him and circles.
“Lookee,” the Weasel screams.
O God! The downward face of the fissured massif is a carpet of barbarity. In the lead climbs a nimble, saddle-backed She-Wolf, her ears pricked to the Weasel’s scream. She pauses, narrows her eyes, sees John Wesley, and winks at him.
John Wesley
whispers, “Is howlings out of hell.”
The She-Wolf barks. Her thousand-footed horde heaves itself upward. Their coming causes the plateau to quake. They bay and bawl. They roar like an uprising thunderstorm. Beasts claw the Beasts in front of them, climbing their backs, lacerating them.
The Animal band at the crater cries, “Disaster!”
Pertelote flies from one terror to another. The crater-wall has begun to crack. Its floor is separating. The fresh crack knifes across the stone plateau between the band of Animals, and the Animals stumble backward. Wachanga alone stands unmoving.
In the sky, out of the sky, the Ferruginous Hawk lays back his wings and stoops. He carries a black bundle in his claws. The Hawk skims the surface of the plateau. As he passes Wachanga, he drops the bundle then soars into the sky with a metallic shriek.
Wachanga puts out a paw and touches the thing the Hawk has dropped. It unfolds like a bag of garbage.
Wachanga gasps. She lowers her head and begins to lick the mess of feathers. This is the Raven Kangi Sapa: his neck twisted, his great black beak silent, his eyes closed under lids as soft as flannel.
Pertelote would weep for him. She would gather the Animals together and sing a loud lamentation for their storyteller. Would prepare him for a proper burial. But there isn’t time.
“Wachanga,” she says, but the Cream-Wolf, crouches beside her friend, doesn’t answer.
Pertelote alights and says, “Wachanga, I need you.”
Each of the sister Coyotes is trying to console her little Chick.
John Wesley is absent.
So is the White Wolf.
The plateau continues to quake.
The Brothers Mice grip one another.
The Otters skitter back and forth, to the drop in the crater and back again.
Pertelote says, “We need you, Wachanga! Kangi Sapa loved you, yes. His life has flown away, yes. But he has left his love behind. For his sake, save your grief for another day.”
The Third Book of the Dun Cow: Peace at the Last Page 9