The Second Book of the Dun Cow: Lamentations (13 page)

The eggs had been laid. The incubation of the wispy Insect’s maggots lasted but one cryptic hour. And then violence seized the land.

String Jack hop-bounded to Pertelote under the Hemlock, yipping frantically.

“Lady-Lady! Lady-Lady!” His ears popped up
(Bang! Bang!),
and his round eyes stared in two directions

“Slow down, String Jack. What’s the matter?”

“Yep yep.” But the Hare sat, perpetually startled.

“Is it too much to say? Say it.”

“Yep. Nope nope.”

Under other circumstances Perlelote would have read the Hare’s hesitation as shyness. But this was anguish. “When you are able, Jack, tell it to me.”

“We saw his head!” the Hare cried, nipping his words. “
We”
must mean himself and his relations. “Dead,” he cried.

“Jack!
Who
is dead?”

“Dead. All his bones picked clean.”

Again Pertelote said, “Slow down.” And again,
“Who
is dead?”

“Ratotosk. Boring Tooth. Him. Blood spots under a tree. In the woods, blood spots. We found the head bone.” The Hare pointed toward the forest.

Pertelote said, “Show me.”

So the Hare led the Hen to a particular pine, and Pertelote whispered, “No.”

It was the tree that Selkirk the Marten had made his own. Caught in the fork of a limb was Ratotosk’s tail, the bushy fur intact, but the tail itself bitten from its base.

High above her Pertelote heard a swish of branches. Selkirk was leaped from pine to pine, farther and farther away, but Pertelote had glimpsed blood on the Marten’s snout.

Suddenly Pertelote’s heart turned. She loathed the Hares for their round-eyed timidity. These passive Animals! Docile and witless—a dead weight on her back!

Then to the north she heard a terrified bleating.

Pertelote forgot herself. She flew in the direction of the terror.

Sheep! She saw one Ewe on an eastern hillside, running, stumbling, falling—and the Black Wolf Nota after the Sheep, her eyes inflamed.

With a sixteen-foot bound crashed into the Sheep. He locked his fangs on her windpipe.

Pertelote screamed, “Nota! Let her go!”

But the Black Wolf paid no attention. She held the Ewe’s throat until the Creature went limp. Then he shook the body savagely. Blood splattered the earth. The Black Wolf threw her prey aside.

Pertelote was horrified. The Sheep that the Wolf had murdered was Baby Blue.

Now Nota drove her muzzle into Blue’s abdomen and began to gorge herself.

Pertelote was transfixed. She whispered, “Oh, Nota, what a Wolf can do.”

And how sharp are a Wolf’s ears. Black Nota whirled, saw the Hen, lowered her head, and glared at her through manic, blood-red eyes. Foam dripped from the Wolf’s jowls. Amber maggots squirmed in the saliva.

Peretelote muted the cry,
My God.

Nota returned to the Ewe. She sank her fangs in the flesh and dragged out the long rope of intestine, then ran her snout in the steaming carcass, and probed, and pulled out the slick liver, and ate it. She ate as much as twenty pounds, then the wandered into a leafless thicket, slumped, and went to sleep.

Night fell. Pertlote became a pale splash in the moonlight. She crouched right where she was, emptied of all thought.

After she’d spent an hour in the darkness, she chose to believe that her immobility was a midnight vigil.

Someone should sit vigil for the slaughtered Baby Blue.

When she is tired, the plain Brown Bird rides Ferric Coyote’s rump.

He noses the scent of the Weasel, wherefrom he maps their traveling, his and Twill’s and Hopsacking’s and the Bird herself. No longer does the Coyote hide. It has done no good in the past. It can do no good in the future.

Moreover, he is bolder than he has been. Though Rachel has passed away, her spirit comforts him. He has become the mother of h is daughters.

When the Brown Bird has rested, she leaves Ferric. She cannot sing. She says, “Zicküt,” and dances on the wind to keep the grils entertained and to quiet their aching hungers.

At night the Coyotes curl into one another, and Ferric tells them Rachel-stories.

For example:

There is a certain Eagle whose name is Aquila. In time Aquila grows very old. His wings grow slow and heavy. His eyes grow dim in mists of senility. And his whole body becomes infirm and like as not to die. But the Eagle need not die.

For he knows of an oasis in the middle of a desert, a palmy acre, green and good. In the middle of the oasis is a bright, bracing pool. In the middle of the pool a wonderful fountain shoots up, the top of which falls open like the plume of a lily..

Aquila drinks from the pool and gains strength for a final flight.

He points his beak to heaven and soars as straight as a plumb line from the oasis to the circle of the sun. Higher and at his heighest the sun’s rays evaporate the mists in his eyes. Higher still, the sun’s flames scorch his feathers to cinders.

So then there is no help for it. He plunges headfirst down from the sun, and down until he falls into the white blossom of the fountain. In that sweet water Aquila

is washed as if by honey and wine. Among the green palms he sprouts new feathers that flash in the daylight, and his youth is renewed.

Now Ferric finishes the tale as did his wife before him.

“Rest, my children. God will bless you, and I’ll be here in the morning.”

Mr. and Mrs. Cobb decided to make their departure in stages. Pertinax had excellent reasons to leave, and his wife did not disagree. They were a peace-loving folk.

But when two somebodies have lived all their lives in one place, then every other place is strange. Generations of Cobbs had been born here under the Hemlock, had worked here, bore children here, slept their winters here, and died here. And Pertinax’s duty had always been to love his wife and to serve her and, upon her love, to bring the next generation onto this same small plot.

How, then, could they go away?

But however could they stay?

They left. They planned to make the emigration in stages. Travel half a day, then sit and test the place. What’s the weather? How is the ground? Where are the seeds? Can a new next house and sustain them? Or will the angry Animals spread their wars this far?

If the soil is poor and seeds unplenty, and if warfare creeps too close, they would up and travel another half-day farther.

“Mrs. Cobb?”

“Yes, Mr. Cobb?”

“Are you tired yet?”

“Side by side with you, Mr. Cobb. Side by side wherever we go.”

“Well then what do you say? Is this a place to homestead?”

Half a day’s travel, at their cautious rate, is half one hundred yards.

And the night, of course, is for sleeping.

When the two of them woke in the morning, Pertinax combed his whiskers, picked food from between his teeth with a twig, and gargled. All this while Mrs. Cobb went off into the bushes to do her business. They had come east, and east she went. Pertinax tried to break ground but the ice prevented him.

“Mr. Cobb,” she said, returning, rubbing her nose. “Mr. Cobb, I smell a terrible odor.”

“Well,” he said, and because they had a stick-to-your-guns sort of marriage, they walked forward, but mincingly.

Indeed. Something before them was rank.

They worked their ways under an ice-tinkling bush and came out the other side where Pertinax’s tail sprang straight up. The sight held both him and his wife fast.

For they had known Sweet Baby Blue.

Her eyes were closed; her grey tongue was stuck out and stiff as though beseeching heaven with an unheard cry. Oh, this was all too private. How could friends look on the gnawed-blood-nakedness of a once good friend?

But neither Cobb considered running. Their eyes had shifted to the cavity where her guts had been. Tiny eggs were attached to her interior meat, massed in perfect rows, rows upon rows.

Pertinax took several steps nearer, but then, feeling ghoulish, halted.

He whispered, “Mrs. Cobb, this is wrong.”

She whispered, “Poor Baby Blue.”

He said, “Yes. What happened to her is wrong. But—“

Under the death odor he’d caught the scent of spite, the treacle of hubris and of Lupine savagery. Pertinax was angry.
Now
he moved, stepping toward the ravaged Baby Blue.

Then a Hen came thrashing through the frozen bushes, swearing. “Chip-shit! Chippy-chippy Chipmunks! Them eggs is mine!”

Jasper the Hen pitched her fat body at Pertinax.

“Mr. Cobb!” shrieked Mrs. Cobb.

The Hen caught Pertinax in her right claw. Four yellow nails encaged him.

Mrs. Cobb wrung her forepaws. She should save her husband. But there were no holes for refuge.

“Feathers and fur,” Jasper cackled. “Fur and feathers—and which d’you thinks is prettier, Mister?”

Pertinax determined not to answer, not to beg. He must leave Mrs. Cobb with the memory of a courageous Mr. Cobb.

Jasper screamed, “Which is the prettier, Rat?”

Manfully, Peretinax kept his mouth shut.

“Feathers, Rat-shit! Feathers!”

In her claw Jasper carried Pertinax over to a smooth stone, yelling, “Knock-a-the, knock-a-the, knock-a-the Rat’s head
dead!”

She pinned Pertinax to the ground. She picked up a stone—

Just then another Hen raised a voice as frightening as a siren, “Jasper! For the love of God!”

Pertelote swooped down on the fat Hen, seized her head in one furious claw, and wrenched it.

Jasper gurgled. She spat out a knot of amber worms, then screamed, “Off-a-me, you Rooster’s bitch!” She twisted and bit one of Pertelote’s toes. The two Hens fell away from each other. Pertinax Cobb jumped free.

Jasper yelped at the loss of her prisoner.

Pertelote had the clearer mind. She dived at Jasper’s, flipped her, and tore at the fat Hen’s wattles till they bled.

Jasper shrieked curses. She found her feet and paddled away as fast as her legs could carry her. “See if I don’t, Missus,” she screeched. “Just
see
if I don’t!”

Pertelote lay down and groaned. “I hate this,” she sobbed. “I
hate
this.”

While the Hen and the two Ground Squirrels were mourning Sweet Baby Blue, the soot-colored Nota prowled west of the Hemlock, hungry again.

Her head slung low between her shoulders, she had tracked the Fawn De La Coeur to this valley. This prey would be an easy catch, for she reclined, having folded her forelegs under her chest, and seemed oblivious, lost in sorrow. A stringy Hen stood by, murmuring words in the Fawn’s ear. Nota wondered whether the Hen thought she was guarding the Fawn. If so, she was no more than a trinket constructed of tendons and reeds and not worth the trouble.

All at once the Hen set up a piercing clamor. She ran round and round the Fawn, raising a hell of a squawk. “Wolf,” she gabbled. “O Baby get up and go. It’s a Wolf in the thicket!”

The Hen’s alarum electrified Nota. As a single, taut nerve she broke from cover. Kill that damn Hen? Or skip her and strike the Fawn’s tender flesh?

Both!

Nota seized the Hen in her teeth, and whirled her, and slammed her to the ground. Chalcedony managed one pitiful cry, then quivered and went slack.

In the time it took to kill the Hen, the Fawn had leaped to her feet and went bounding, twenty-five feet in a flight.

Nota streaked after her. The wind ripped strings of saliva from her jowls. She had strength and endurance and the rage of a hunter. She would run a mile if she had to, but didn’t think she’d have to. The Black Wolf skimmed the ground like an arrow launched. Hunter and hunted performed a
Totentanz,
a mortal dance across the valley.

In half a minute Nota reached the aerial Deer. Nota leaped. She lanced the space between them, almost pouncing on the Fawn’s hindquarters—

But then the whole world seemed to slow down, and Nota floated as in a dream.

She heard a specter-like crow: “For your father, child.”

Then the crow was close above her: “For your father, too noble for this earth.”

The Wolf experienced a clean, painless parting of the artery in her neck. The world turned.

Nota thought,
Am I this child? Am I a child again?

The ground came up, and her fall came down, and she and the earth met as loves meet. Darkness swaddled her, and Nota never woke to another morning.

In the sound of a whirlwind Lord Chauntecleer swept away.

Feathers like banners, glorious, golden,

Upon his frame once floated and flowed.

(This, all this, was in the olden

Long-ago.)

And though the golden Lord once dallied

(In those sweet days)

Around the Hemlock, plumed and grand, he’s

Gone away.

The Marten Selkirk has left the Hemlock of his own accord.

The blood which he drank from the veins of Ratotosk the Grey Squirrel congealed in his stomach. Spasms wracked his body. And then the Hen Pertelote arose to damn his carnage, and this, he believes, was the beginning of his punishment.

A part of his soul is riven, for he deserves any punishment to which righteousness condemns him.

But another part of his soul craves slaughter, and more pulsing blood.

He knows not which part will dominate: decency or bestiality.

Therefore, Selkirk roams the frozen wilderness alone.

A mother’s children never completely leave her. Not even death is thief enough to destroy their spirits.

Pertelote remembers their burial. Remembers the small tombstones set like dolmens upon their graves. Her children were lost in Wyrm’s destructions, but she did not, and does not, rue the loss. The stones are in her bosom now. She bears them lightly. She has herself become her sons’ memorial.

But now
this,
Sweet Baby Blue violated. How did the Wolf’s fangs feel in the Ewe’s throat? What could Blue have been thinking in the moment of her suffocation?

And Jasper was slashed by her own claws. Pertelote, too, has shed blood.

And Chalcedony: “Why mayn’t I have children as any other Hen?” Chalcedony shall never know the motherhood born of her tender womb.

Shame. And who can survive such sorrows?

John Wesley maunders to the south. He goes without conviction. But if he didn’t go, something inside him would cease to exist.

Might-be he gives up his soul by finding and fighting his dear Rooster. Would be like fighting himself. Might-be he dies by a slash of the Rooster’s spur. Might-be he rips the wiggle-worms from his Lord Rooster. Well, and so.

The weather is malarial. John Wesley’s heart is heavy laden.

Eurus, the Yellow-Eyed Wolf, has come to loath society. He despises these mealy-mouthed Creatures, the Meek who pretend to be warriors. Community? They deceive themselves. Ruled by bluster. Afraid of a damn Cock.

So Brown Eurus courses the outlands. Elk. Moose. Venison. He has better game to kill.

The corpse of the Char-Black Nota lies still unburied, but busy. For the nearly invisible Insects were quick to impregnate her dead flesh with masses of their myriad progeny. Fat little buntings which, when they hatch, will feed on her corpse as she has fed on others. They will enlighten her inward parts with a gentle amber glow.

String Jack has become a carving in marble.

The Animal’s dread of the monstrous Wyrm had become the Animal’s dread of Lord Chauntecleer.