The White Bone Read Online Free PDF Page A

She-Sees’ slotted old ear. “It’s the She-D’s,” she says. “The last of them.”
    “Oh, dear,” says She-Sees. Her trunk plummets.
    Mud moves up beside She-Scares and the nurse cow, She-Soothes.
    “It’s bad,” She-Scares says softly.
    She-Soothes says, not so softly but toned down from her usual bellow, “A mixture of water-tree bark and grunt piss ought to do it. She-Soothes will need pools of piss.” *
    She-Soothes and She-Scares are consulting about a poultice for the bull calf. He is Hail Stones, Mud realizes after a moment of puzzlement… . It has been two years since she last saw him, at a Massive Gathering, and his odour is masked bythe stench of his right forefoot. Looking closer she sees that above the middle toenail is a hole in which maggots, livid in the twilight, squirm.
    “How will you carry it?” She-Scares asks She-Soothes.
    “Carry what?”
    “The urine.”
    “She-Soothes will ask the grunts to piss on the bark itself. She-Soothes will tear off a strip, munch it up, then spit it out, right there where the grunts are.”
    “Do what you can,” She-Scares says. So that the warthogs can be appealed to in their own language she adds, “Take Date Bed.”
    When the two of them are gone She-Scares approaches the She-D matriarch. “She-Demands,” she says, using the formal timbre.
    She-Demands rocks from foot to foot.
    “We did not cross paths at last year’s Massive Gathering,” says She-Scares, and as she extends her trunk the air erupts with the gunshot rattle of a flappet lark beating its wings.
    The She-D’s rear back in terror.
    “It’s a burr fly!” She-Scares trumpets. “It’s only a burr fly!”
    The She-D’s calm down quickly, as if panic is so familiar to them that it fails to hold their interest. She-Demands shifts the fetid bundle under her chin and regards She-Scares through half-closed, glistening eyes. The cows on either side of her are her eldest daughters: She-Drawls-And-Drawls and She-Distracts.
    “What did you name her?” She-Scares asks. She snakes out her trunk to the dead newborn but She-Demands turns her head away, and She-Scares withdraws the trunk and says, “You have reached the water. It is safe here.”

    A nightjar has told Date Bed that the stars are falling. “Are you able to see them?” Date Bed whispers to Mud.
    Mud cocks one eye skyward. It is a Rogue’s night and she sees only the gaping moon. “Did he say how many?”
    “Countless.”
    “At least the She-D dead are spared
that
atrocity,” Mud thinks.
    “How do you know?”
    “In my vision all the tusks were hacked off.”
    “But you don’t know when that happened.”
    “There was something so desolate about them.”
    “Well,” Date Bed breathes, “a slaughter–”
    “It was more than the slaughter. I can’t describe it … a hopelessness. I don’t think any of them became sky cows.”
    Sky cows are dead cows who have ascended to the sky to join the family of the She. A star is the shine of a sky cow’s tusk. When stars fall it is because sky cows are dropping out of the family of the She and into The Eternal Shoreless Water, where they will bloat and drift insensible among the calves and dead bulls, all of whom fall into The Eternal Shoreless Water directly from this life, the hard truth being that not even newborn calves are granted a spell of bliss in the company of the She. Stars falling in great numbers means that a dead human has slunk out from under the crush of The Domain * and, since he is flat now, easily airborne, has wafted up to the sky, where he is hacking off as many tusks as he can before the She awakens. To have your tusks hacked off in paradise is painless, there is that consolation. To have your tusks hacked off while you are on earth is an incomparable physical anguish regardless of whether you are still alive (the notion that pain ends at the instant of death is not taken for granted). It also denies cows entrance into the family of the She, since for