Read Online The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy - Free Book Online Page A

trying to tell you that I think of you as I think of myself. Orphaned and selfcontained. But smaller … and female, needless to say–” From under the young bull who was mounting her She-Snorts laughed, and Tall Time stopped, feeling ludicrous. He browsed on white flowers for a spell and then gathered himself up and said with some emotion, “It was ordained. It was ordained that I would have an unnatural attachment to you from the day of our first meeting until the day of your death.” He paused, flustered. “Which is not to say that you will die before me,” he said.
    Mud peered at him from behind She-Scares. “What day will that be?” she said. Her eyes were the green of the visionaries and when they glittered, as they did now, you could see the gleam fifty yards away.
    “What day will what be?” he said, entranced.
    “The day I die.”
    “I dare say I have no idea. You misunderstand.”
    She lowered her trunk.
    “Let me smell you.”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    Date Bed raised her lean little head. “She is not at all like you,” she said shyly, in the formal timbre.
    He walked away, skimming his trunk over the ground for a whiff of Mud’s urine. He felt pitiable and sickened … andalarmed, more so than seemed called for, as if any second he would collide with a herd of humans.
    It was Torrent he collided with.
    “Cow-bull!” Torrent roared.
    Tall Time bolted to one side. “Forgive me,” he said in the formal timbre.
    “Flat-footed twig-stick,” Torrent muttered.
    Tall Time flattened his ears against his neck. “Quite right,” he said.
    This was not excessive courtesy, this was terror. In musth, Torrent had been known to gore bulls who were careless enough to catch his eye, let alone bump into him, and Torrent was still deep in musth, his temporin glands swollen, the temporin itself pouring down his face, and his enormous green penis dribbling egg-sized drops that smoked as they hit the stubble and discharged an odour so sharp Tall Time couldn’t fathom how the big bull had taken him by surprise. “Very clumsy of me,” he murmured. “Entirely my fault.”
    He turned away but Torrent bellowed, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you!”
    Tall Time looked over his shoulder. The big bull folded his ears and rumbled something menacing and then threw up his great head in which his eyes flew, mad and murderous. Tall Time ran.
    “Stop!” Torrent roared.
    Tall Time slowed down and looked over his shoulder again, past nervous cows trotting away in all directions and a flock of grouse splashing up like muck.
    Torrent rocked from foot to foot. He was evidently makinga terrible effort to calm himself. “Come back here,” he said, “you little … you scrawny little… . Come back here … son.”
    “I haven’t been speaking with She-Snorts,” Tall Time said. In oestrus, She-Snorts was always pursued by a host of young bulls, the bull who was currently mounting her being only the mightiest of the smallest. But she had yet to enter her “radiance,” those few hours during which a cow’s scent is at its most delectable and for which Torrent reserved himself.
    “I know that,” Torrent growled.
    “It was the calf Mud I was speaking with.”
    “Yes, yes, yes. Get over here.”
    Almost certainly, Tall Time could have outrun Torrent, but he was now curious about whatever was obliging Torrent to subdue his musth mood. More than that he felt sorry for the old bull. He knew what it was like to find yourself persecuting a smaller bull whom a thin current of reason proclaimed a friend.
    “I must tell you something,” Torrent rumbled. “Several things. Vital … vital things. The first of them is, do not imagine that your grasp of the links is infallible. There are links you know nothing of.”
    “Which links are these?” Tall Time said, affronted. Unconsciously he had dropped the formal timbre.
    Torrent jerked his head toward the She-S’s. Trunk up, he took a long inhalation. “Any number of