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

them,” he rumbled.
    “Indeed?” Tall Time said coolly.
    Torrent turned back around. “I have only recently come to appreciate, as a result of a remarkable meeting, that the links may well be infinite.”
    “I know every link there is.”
    Torrent glowered over the rim of one of his splendid tusks. Frightened afresh, Tall Time took small steps backwards.
    “Would that were true,” Torrent said.
    Tall Time hesitated, struck by something beaten in Torrent’s tone. Torrent flapped his torn ears and yanked at the grass. Suddenly he snapped his head around. He closed his eyes, an indication that any moment now She-Snorts would enter her radiance. Torrent’s sense of smell being what it was, he would pick up the tell-tale odour even before the bull who was mounting her did. That bull had better be fast on his feet, Tall Time thought.
    “I don’t suppose you are interested in learning
whom
I met,” Torrent said, still sniffing.
    “On the contrary,” Tall Time said, “I am exceedingly interested.”
    Torrent looked at him, the expression in his bloodshot eyes at once percipient and deranged. He curled his trunk around a swatch of grass, cut the swatch with his forefoot but instead of eating it he pitched it over his hide, a pointless, calf-like thing to do. “The Lost Ones,” he said.
    “The Lost Ones?” Tall Time said, astounded.
    “You heard me.”
    Nobody Tall Time knew had ever actually sighted, smelled or caught rumblings of–let alone spoken to–the Lost Ones, or the Forest Dwellers, as they were sometimes called. Always it was a distant acquaintance of a distant acquaintance who was rumoured to have had dealings with them. Despite which, descriptions of them never varied. The abnormally long narrow tusks, the small ears, sleek skin, luminous green eyes. A strong race, though diminutive, beautiful despite their size. And gifted. All of them visionaries, all of them nimble and capable of scenting seven-day-old dung from twenty miles away. They were glorious singers, what’s more. Moving in single file through the forest, trunks grasping tails, they roared like hurricanes, but in melodious harmonies and complex rhythms. “You possess Lost blood,” it is said of anyone who sings often and pleasingly, as Tall Time does, but to his thinking that has always been a mere figure of speech. “Lost ears” for tiny ears, “Lost-footed” for sure-footed, “Lost green eyes"– all figures of speech, unless you believed, and many did, that the Lost Ones existed.
    Torrent believed. He had never come across any sign of them (until, if he was speaking the truth, recently) but he had always believed. He had even claimed a blood connection. It was Torrent who had originally told Tall Time how the Lost Ones were no different from other she-ones before being driven by humans into an immense forest where they disappeared for centuries and the She Herself declared them vanished while, beneath the thick canopy that denied them the watch and warmth of Her eye, they continued to worship Her. When at last they were found (either by a She-V or a She-G matriarch, members of the two families argue the point to this day), the She was so moved by their steadfast devotion to Her that She granted each of them, and all of their descendants of both sexes, the third eye. As for their stealth and keen trunks, these are attributed to the clear forest water. The reason for their marvellous voices is not so easily explained, although Torrent leans to the theory that they eat the eggs of songbirds. They are capable, he admits, of heartless conduct, such as slaying their deranged elders.
    “You met them?” Tall Time asked now.
    “I did,” Torrent said. His tone was conjectural, as if questioning the event himself.
    “When?”
    “At the outset of the drought, those first torrid days. I had a sense that the short rains weren’t going to arrive, and I was looking for fresh sources of water. Where the big burn is, to the west of it, I came