fissured torso, five holes describe a circle. Vapour puffs from the holes, there is no blood, and the ancient cow remains standing. The human strolls over and raises his gun again. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure!” She-Sees trumpets, extending her trunk in the greeting gesture. When the human is close enough she wraps her trunk around the barrel. The human fires, then prances back from the red spray. Still, She-Sees does not fall. The chain-saw human shouts, and Mud looks toward the shallows. The chain-saw human holds the tiny tusk of She-Scares between his legs. He pumps his hips. More shots from downshore, and then a tremendous shuddering underfoot as She-Sees drops to the ground.
Dimly it occurs to Mud that she should make for the bank. Off she goes, through channels of gunshot, past the corpse of She-Drawls-And-Drawls, whose entire head has been severed … blood still bubbles from the flaming gristle of the neck. She steps on smoking gore and spent shells and parings of skin, and when she reaches the bank it is slick with blood so that her ascent is dream-like as she slides down, wins the brink, slides down.
Little by little the earth breaks away under her grappling forefeet until a small gorge is created, out of which she is ableto haul herself. She sways inches from the edge, obscurely conscious that she is an easy target for the humans, and takes account of herself. Her palsied leg, her magically keen vision. Her intactness, as if this were a memory, not even her own, into which she has helplessly fallen. Behind her the chain saw brays. To the east, barely visible, is the hump of The She-Hill.
She will go to The She-Hill, she thinks with hypnotic resolve. She starts walking. The stunted bushes and trees glide out of the dust, a ghostly emergence. As she walks she sends infrasonic alarms to each member of her family who may still be alive, but gets no response. If there are signs of her own kind here, she cannot locate them. She has not the acuteness of scent to penetrate the slaughter and dust, and she is unwilling to deviate from the straight path she has set upon, even when she finds herself treading between the fretted bands that are the tracks of the vehicle.
Chapter Six
The landscape that Mud now travels through is known to her, but as a wet season oasis, not as this depleted place. There is nothing green here and nothing in flower and nothing not withered. Almost every tree is black with vultures, the earth a pandemonium of bones poking through drifts of red dust or, where the ground has been burned, through black ash.
The skeletons belong to the grazers, but it is those zebras and wildebeests and gazelles still standing who seem more dead, less lucky, than their fallen relations. The living haven’t any young among them, and even the carnivores seem to find this hard to believe. The jackals trotting among the Thomson’s gazelles hold their muzzles up and scout over their shoulders as if searching for something more sprightly and delectable than the wretches whose trembling legs they look through.
With the grass cropped right down, and despite the blowing dust, Mud can spot lion prides early enough to avoidthem. And yet she takes no detours and they, in their glutted stupor, don’t even lift their heads as she goes by. She passes close to the bizarre pairing of a cheetah and a lappet-faced vulture as they rip apart a still-thrashing zebra whose eye finds Mud’s an instant before the vulture plucks it out. Farther along, near a cordia ovalis shrub, a patas monkey shakes her dead infant by the foot. When Mud is within a few yards of her she starts jumping and chittering and striking the infant on the ground and then she tosses it and it lands in a flourish of dust at Mud’s feet.
Mud halts. The dust funnels off, and Mud takes this to be a manifestation of the spirit flying to that crowded mysterious place (The Other Domain) where all deceased creatures, aside from her own kind and
Dimly it occurs to Mud that she should make for the bank. Off she goes, through channels of gunshot, past the corpse of She-Drawls-And-Drawls, whose entire head has been severed … blood still bubbles from the flaming gristle of the neck. She steps on smoking gore and spent shells and parings of skin, and when she reaches the bank it is slick with blood so that her ascent is dream-like as she slides down, wins the brink, slides down.
Little by little the earth breaks away under her grappling forefeet until a small gorge is created, out of which she is ableto haul herself. She sways inches from the edge, obscurely conscious that she is an easy target for the humans, and takes account of herself. Her palsied leg, her magically keen vision. Her intactness, as if this were a memory, not even her own, into which she has helplessly fallen. Behind her the chain saw brays. To the east, barely visible, is the hump of The She-Hill.
She will go to The She-Hill, she thinks with hypnotic resolve. She starts walking. The stunted bushes and trees glide out of the dust, a ghostly emergence. As she walks she sends infrasonic alarms to each member of her family who may still be alive, but gets no response. If there are signs of her own kind here, she cannot locate them. She has not the acuteness of scent to penetrate the slaughter and dust, and she is unwilling to deviate from the straight path she has set upon, even when she finds herself treading between the fretted bands that are the tracks of the vehicle.
Chapter Six
The landscape that Mud now travels through is known to her, but as a wet season oasis, not as this depleted place. There is nothing green here and nothing in flower and nothing not withered. Almost every tree is black with vultures, the earth a pandemonium of bones poking through drifts of red dust or, where the ground has been burned, through black ash.
The skeletons belong to the grazers, but it is those zebras and wildebeests and gazelles still standing who seem more dead, less lucky, than their fallen relations. The living haven’t any young among them, and even the carnivores seem to find this hard to believe. The jackals trotting among the Thomson’s gazelles hold their muzzles up and scout over their shoulders as if searching for something more sprightly and delectable than the wretches whose trembling legs they look through.
With the grass cropped right down, and despite the blowing dust, Mud can spot lion prides early enough to avoidthem. And yet she takes no detours and they, in their glutted stupor, don’t even lift their heads as she goes by. She passes close to the bizarre pairing of a cheetah and a lappet-faced vulture as they rip apart a still-thrashing zebra whose eye finds Mud’s an instant before the vulture plucks it out. Farther along, near a cordia ovalis shrub, a patas monkey shakes her dead infant by the foot. When Mud is within a few yards of her she starts jumping and chittering and striking the infant on the ground and then she tosses it and it lands in a flourish of dust at Mud’s feet.
Mud halts. The dust funnels off, and Mud takes this to be a manifestation of the spirit flying to that crowded mysterious place (The Other Domain) where all deceased creatures, aside from her own kind and
Similar Books
