Mud is a young African elephant who travels with her adopted family, the She-S's. Droughts and poachers have destroyed many families, and many elephants feel that their only hope is the White Bone, a magic artifact that can point the elephants to the Safe Place, a rumored land where all creatures can live in peace.
The White Bone contains examples of:
- Crisis of Faith: The bull Tall Time has memorized so many links, or superstitious signs and rules, that he's known as the link bull, and cows go to him for advice. When his links fail to predict either the droughts or the slaughters inflicted on the elephants by humans, he loses all faith in them, as well as in the She, the goddess who supposedly created the links.
- Due to the Dead: When an elephant dies, her family stands around the body and sings mourning songs.
- Evil Poacher: The humans massacre entire families of elephants and saw off their tusks, preventing them from entering the afterlife.
- Hand Signals: As the She-S's search for the missing Date Bed, a cheetah named Me-Me approaches with the smell of Date Bed's dung on her paw. There are no mind talkers available to communicate with her, so She-Screams launches into an elaborate series of gestures and noises to offer her She-Snorts' unborn calf in exchange for helping them find Date Bed.
- Left for Dead: Mud was born into the She-M's. Her mother was bitten by a cobra while giving birth and collapsed on top of her. The other elephants tried and failed to free her, and eventually gave up and went on their way. Later rain softened the ground, allowing Mud to get out from under her mother's corpse, and she wandered until she was discovered by the She-S's.
- Magic Compass: The white bone is the rib of a newborn elephant massacred by humans long ago. If an elephant tosses it into the air, it lands pointing in the direction of the Safe Place. In times of darkness, it starts appearing in circles of boulders or termite mounds. If an elephant finds it, it stays in that elephant's possession for exactly two days, long enough to set a course, before disappearing and reappearing in a different circle. Long ago, the Lost Ones
were guided by the bone to forested areas where they were unbothered by humans, but now humans are starting to encroach on their home, and they hope the bone will point them to a new one. - Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Not only do the elephants not know who their fathers are, they don't even know that a bull's seed is needed to get a cow pregnant. They believe that a bull digs a cow's calf tunnel, making her capable of giving birth, but she produces the calf by herself.
- No Infantile Amnesia: Mud's memory starts at birth. She experienced everything at the time as an incomprehensible barrage of sensation, which she was only able to make sense of later.
- Photographic Memory: The elephants perfectly remember everything they've ever noticed until they start to go senile.
- Rite-of-Passage Name Change: Every calf is born with a name given by their mother, usually a Line-of-Sight Name, like Date Bed, who was born on a bed of dates shaken from a tree, or Tall Time, who was born in the morning when shadows are long. Bulls keep that name for their entire lives, but when cows reach sexual maturity, they receive a new name with the format She-Verbs selected by the whole family. Mud's newly-received adult name is She-Spurns due to her aloof personality, but she hates it and still thinks of herself as Mud.
- Seeing Through Another's Eyes: When Date Bed is lost and thirsty, she asks a swarm of flies where she can find water. They answer, "That way," which doesn't help, since they're all facing different directions. Instead she enters the mind of one of the flies and watches from his perspective as he flies to where the water is.
- Seers: Mud is a visionary, which means that she sometimes have visions of things that happen in the future or things that are happening elsewhere. She also has very sharp eyesight for an elephant.
- Telepathy: Date Bed is a mind talker. She can read other elephants' minds as well as communicate telepathically with most other species.
- Third-Person Person:
- She-Soothes likes her name so much she refers to herself in the third person.
- Mongooses rarely use personal pronouns. Their name for their species is "flawless," and they refer to themselves and others as "this flawless" and "that flawless."
