The White Bone Read Online Free PDF

a cow to become a sky cow, at least one tusk, or the stump of a tusk, must remain attached to her skull for a full day and night following her last intake of breath. Like bulls and calves, tuskless cows will never know even a second of paradise.
    “Listen,” Mud thinks, spreading her ears. The pathetic honking of a wildebeest carries above the rabble of night sounds. The wildebeest is injured. Not by a lioness or leopard, whose choke-hold kills are virtually soundless. By jackals, or wild dogs. Or hyenas. “Do you hear?” she says out loud. “Do you hear?”
    “You’ll alarm the She-D’s,” Date Bed whispers. She pulls on Mud’s trunk.
    But Mud has fallen into a memory of the hyena that circled her on the night of her birth, and she herself is circling as she attempts to keep the hyena in her sights. At the outskirts of the memory she senses Date Bed tugging her, and gradually the hyena gives way to the silver shaft of moonlight agitating across the surface of the swamp and she comes to a stop. The shaft is the reflected strong tusk of the She. It is meant to be a comfort, but how can it be tonight? “I have such dread,” Mud thinks.
    Date Bed is silent.
    “So do you,” Mud thinks. “I smell your dread.”
    “I cannot tell if the dread is my own,” Date Bed concedes, “or if I have absorbed the dread of those around me. Your dread.” She looks toward the plain. “Theirs.”
    Earlier she told the family about talking to one of the wildebeest bulls–an unusually approachable and intelligent patriarch–when she went off with She-Soothes to collect warthog urine. Sixty days ago, in a herd of thousands of wildebeests and zebras, the bull arrived at the wire fence of Mud’s vision. There was a pond less than a mile away, on the far side of this apparently endless barrier, and the bull said that the smell of water is what kept the herd galloping up and down the fence’s length until they succumbed to exhaustion. All of the bull’s cows perished from thirst, all the calves perished. How the She-D’s died, he couldn’t say. He never saw them, which makes sense to Mud. According to her vision, their deaths were more recent.
    Mud looks at the She-D’s. They seem beyond dread. They huddle together, removed from Mud’s family, most of whom sleep now, the cows on their feet, the small calves lying in a clump. Normally the She-S’s would have left the swamp at sunset to return to the relatively safe shelter of the acacia bush, but there was no question of abandoning the She-D’s, or of waking them. Even Hail Stones appears to be asleep, one ear draped over his eye and his bad right foot resting on his left forefoot. Galled by urine, the worms have fallen from his wound. Some were still convulsing on the ground hours after the poultice was applied, but a few moments ago She-Demands stepped on them. And then returned to guarding the corpse of her newborn. It lies between her forelegs. Behind her, She-Distracts and She-Drawls-And-Drawls doze leaningagainst each other. All four of them have drunk and bathed and eaten, but they have yet to speak. Even their thoughts are mute. Apart from a bleak cavernous whistling, Date Bed says she hears nothing.

    The night slides through itself. That avalanche down the bank is the hippos returning. At the shore the two lead hippos stop and crack open their jaws and a dull light flaunts their canines. When She-Scares charges after them, their jaws clamp shut and the whole pack turns and trundles to the end of the swamp where crocodiles throng under a froth of mist.
    The giraffes come next. Passing the two families, they dip their necks and look down at the tiny corpse. Giraffes She-Scares tolerates, although barely.
    “She-Soothes is as dry as an old teat,” She-Soothes roars, and She-Scares jolts around, startled, it seems, by this call to matriarchal duty, and trumpets, “Drink! Eat! Bathe!”
    It is not for She-Scares to direct the She-D’s, but they, too, head for the