My name is Xiangshan. I'm a hunter. Boar, muntjac, hare — I supply half the meat counters in town.
In this trade, the first thing you learn isn't how to hunt. It's what not to hunt. My father left me three rules. One: nothing carrying young. Two: nothing that has gone to ground — once it's in its den, that's its home, and hunting it there makes you a bandit, not a hunter. Three: nothing that understands people. The third matters most. Anything that lives long enough in these hills gets a measure of sense. It looks at you once, and you know. There's arithmetic in that look — a ledger, give and take. Kill a creature like that, and the hills remember.
People call me superstitious. I don't argue. Come live in these hills twenty years, then we'll talk.
This plague year, something new came down. The xiao — the elders call them shan-sao: one-legged, night-walking, fond of imitating human speech. The old bestiaries like the Shan Hai Jing record the hill-dwellers under a dozen changing names, but they're one kind of thing: tenants who've lived in the hills longer than people. In other years the xiao kept to the deep ranges. This year they're down, and not alone. I've read their tracks — front pads deep, hind pads shallow. Heading for town.
The most wrong thing is this: they're learning people.
Last month, old Qiu the hunter heard someone call his name at night, in the voice of his dead mother. If he hadn't remembered my telling — when a familiar voice calls at night, don't answer first — he'd have opened that door. Next morning his threshold was covered in claw marks.
So, bounty-takers, the ugly truth up front: a xiao is not a boar. When you stalk it, it's watching you; you think you're encircling it, but maybe it's walking you. Come to me before you enter the woods. I'll show you their runs and teach you tracks, back-combed fur, and the peach pits they leave. Then go.
A hunter learns what not to hunt first. Hunting yao begins with not being hunted.