Read Online The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy - Free Book Online
Authors: Barbara Gowdy
Tags: General Fiction
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sleeping grounds and ripping open or simply lifting the flimsy skin walls of the shelters in which the calves were imprisoned. Noiselessly the bulls walked among the shelters and chewed or yanked apart the restraints.
Torrent still moves noiselessly, even over pebbles and dead leaves, and he still has the sensitive trunk that once sniffedout calves from twenty miles away. Only She-Demands and She-Snorts (both of whom he has mated so often that they have adopted certain of his faculties) can rival his sense of smell.
At every Long Rains Massive Gathering, Torrent is in musth, and all of the other musth bulls stay out of his way. In musth, a bull has no use for any bull of any description, but a bull who also happens to be in musth is especially unwelcome. Regardless of the affection that two bulls may otherwise feel for each other, the larger bull is driven to charge the smaller one and to call him twig-tusk, twig-trunk, cow-bull. Musth bulls of similar size and age get into fights. These fights are a kind of lunacy. They go on for hours, and during most of that time the opponents do nothing except size each other up. The fragrant oestrus cows are still there, beyond the horizon of their enthralment. The bushes and tree stumps are there, looming. Incensed, one of the bulls may attack
them
for a spell. Eventually he’ll whirl back on his enemy, but then, out of the corner of his eye, he may spot more bushes, so he’ll yank these up by their roots. Meanwhile the other bull is doing the same, both carrying on in this fashion until one craves food more than a cow and walks away.
Tall Time’s spell of musth normally starts thirty days before the Massive Gathering and peters out midway through it. At this last gathering he was in musth until the final days, by which time he had weathered (and conceded) two fights, and all the clans were breaking up into their family groupings. Calves who had run wild now leaned into the legs of their mothers, and their mothers–who themselves might have gone a bit wild–were back to their sedateand watchful selves. At the fringes of the dispersing multitude, lone bulls positioned themselves and wondered at a mania that only days before had driven them to mount cows of the ilk of She-Screams. Of She-Wilts.
Tall Time, once he was “ungreen,” was unusual in that he always loitered near the She-S’s. Stealing a whiff of Mud was never easy, however. She tended to keep apart from everyone except for Date Bed. Whenever she did mingle with her family, it seemed to him that she was always on the far side of a big cow. As for his renown and authority, they were lost on her. Unusual for a female, unique in fact, she had no curiosity about the links.
“I demand to smell you!” he would end up roaring.
She would either move closer to She-Scares, who would threaten him with her deadly little tusk, or she would run in her awkward fashion, her withered leg kicking out sideways, and he would take pity on her and resort to watching her from a distance while smelling her in memory. Sometimes, when She-Scares was between the two of them, she would tell him to go away. He laughed at her spunk. He was charmed.
True to his pledge, he had dug her inaugural calf tunnel on the same morning (more than a year and a half ago now) that she came into her first oestrus. His immediate assumption was that from then on she would understand his attachment to her and occasionally indulge it. But the moment her oestrus passed she went back to dodging him, and every time he met with the She-S’s he was more and more vexed by this. There was something so odd about what he felt for her he had come to believe that it must be divine, and that, furthermore, todescribe it was to violate it. At this last Massive Gathering he was driven to try. Across foothills of She-S rumps, he called to her, “We are alike!”
“We have mated only once,” she called without turning.
“You are not
becoming
like me,” he said. “I am
Torrent still moves noiselessly, even over pebbles and dead leaves, and he still has the sensitive trunk that once sniffedout calves from twenty miles away. Only She-Demands and She-Snorts (both of whom he has mated so often that they have adopted certain of his faculties) can rival his sense of smell.
At every Long Rains Massive Gathering, Torrent is in musth, and all of the other musth bulls stay out of his way. In musth, a bull has no use for any bull of any description, but a bull who also happens to be in musth is especially unwelcome. Regardless of the affection that two bulls may otherwise feel for each other, the larger bull is driven to charge the smaller one and to call him twig-tusk, twig-trunk, cow-bull. Musth bulls of similar size and age get into fights. These fights are a kind of lunacy. They go on for hours, and during most of that time the opponents do nothing except size each other up. The fragrant oestrus cows are still there, beyond the horizon of their enthralment. The bushes and tree stumps are there, looming. Incensed, one of the bulls may attack
them
for a spell. Eventually he’ll whirl back on his enemy, but then, out of the corner of his eye, he may spot more bushes, so he’ll yank these up by their roots. Meanwhile the other bull is doing the same, both carrying on in this fashion until one craves food more than a cow and walks away.
Tall Time’s spell of musth normally starts thirty days before the Massive Gathering and peters out midway through it. At this last gathering he was in musth until the final days, by which time he had weathered (and conceded) two fights, and all the clans were breaking up into their family groupings. Calves who had run wild now leaned into the legs of their mothers, and their mothers–who themselves might have gone a bit wild–were back to their sedateand watchful selves. At the fringes of the dispersing multitude, lone bulls positioned themselves and wondered at a mania that only days before had driven them to mount cows of the ilk of She-Screams. Of She-Wilts.
Tall Time, once he was “ungreen,” was unusual in that he always loitered near the She-S’s. Stealing a whiff of Mud was never easy, however. She tended to keep apart from everyone except for Date Bed. Whenever she did mingle with her family, it seemed to him that she was always on the far side of a big cow. As for his renown and authority, they were lost on her. Unusual for a female, unique in fact, she had no curiosity about the links.
“I demand to smell you!” he would end up roaring.
She would either move closer to She-Scares, who would threaten him with her deadly little tusk, or she would run in her awkward fashion, her withered leg kicking out sideways, and he would take pity on her and resort to watching her from a distance while smelling her in memory. Sometimes, when She-Scares was between the two of them, she would tell him to go away. He laughed at her spunk. He was charmed.
True to his pledge, he had dug her inaugural calf tunnel on the same morning (more than a year and a half ago now) that she came into her first oestrus. His immediate assumption was that from then on she would understand his attachment to her and occasionally indulge it. But the moment her oestrus passed she went back to dodging him, and every time he met with the She-S’s he was more and more vexed by this. There was something so odd about what he felt for her he had come to believe that it must be divine, and that, furthermore, todescribe it was to violate it. At this last Massive Gathering he was driven to try. Across foothills of She-S rumps, he called to her, “We are alike!”
“We have mated only once,” she called without turning.
“You are not
becoming
like me,” he said. “I am
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