The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy

Author:Barbara Gowdy [Gowdy, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780312264123
Publisher: Picador
Published: 1998-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

She smells fresh water but not fresh dung nor any kind of creature. She hears, far off to the west, the cry of geese, nothing else. The gerenuk warned her, but she didn’t really believe him, she thought he might merely have regretted telling her about such a valuable find.

It is the same day, high noon, when even the foulest of water holes are swarming with birds and grazers. Only humans can vacate a place so absolutely, and yet there is no smell of them here. She sets the Thing down and sniffs the dirt, which is weirdly empty of dung, even vulture dung. The dirt vents a smell of date palms. How can that be, when there are no date palms in the vicinity? She picks the Thing up and consults her eye. The thought within it seems to be that she has come all this way, she may as well investigate.

Slowly she moves forward. To her left, a ball of dead shrubbery tumbles by. A good sign. She picks up her pace. The water hole is beyond a tumult of toppled thorn trees, and as she approaches, the thin odour of old dung wafts her way. Ostrich and patas-monkey dung. She-one dung!

She hurries to the source of the craved smell. There! And there! Piles of dark, dried-out, trod-on boluses between the logs. Dropping the Thing, she greedily sniffs. It is She-B-And-B dung. She-Brags, She-Bluffs, She-Booms, She-Bluffs again. A fine family, the She-B’s-And-B’s, Tall Time’s birthfamily. The boluses have been polluted by flies and raided by beetles but she eats several anyway, she wants the taste of them at the back of her throat.

She-Broods, She-Betters … all She-B-And-B dung. Every bolus summons memories of its cow, and despite the menacing queerness of this place she lets herself swoon into the memories, some of them shadowy, some clear. She weaves among the logs. She is at the far side of them when she comes upon the boluses of Tall Time.

She lifts her head, alert again. So he was here. She sees the glint of the water hole and thinks that if the Link Bull foraged at this place, there can be no ill omens, or at least there weren’t four or five days ago. His fragrance, his regular bull fragrance, has a quality she associates with perfect safety, and she eats one of the boluses and has a clear, happy memory of meeting him for the first time. She emerges from the memory weeping and with the timbre of his voice caught in her ears and then the thought of the Thing jolts her and she rushes back and retrieves it and returns to the far side of the logs and stands there.

The dark surface of the hole indicates a depth that may account for the hole’s existence in a drought: a source far underground constantly replenishing the migrating higher levels. She shifts the Thing under her chin and starts forward, scenting, ears tensed. Here also the ground is empty of dung and even of sticks and crevices and it vents a fruity odour incompatible with the landscape.

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