I am the smallest of the litter.
How small? When my brothers and sisters crowd the trough, I can slip through a gap and walk the whole length of it flat against the bottom without touching anyone. Mother says this isn't smallness — it's not yet grown into myself. In our line, she says, you don't judge a pig's growing by the frame. You judge by one thing: the bristles.
The day the ridge of bristles stands up along your spine, you are grown.
Every day I check my back in the water vat. Smooth as a gourd. Not one bristle.
But I'm not worried. Because Mother has told me about the Old Ancestor.
Our family is no ordinary farm stock. Count back more generations than anyone can, Mother says, and our Old Ancestor came down from the sky. The sky! An official who governed a great river up there — the River of Heaven, wider than all the water in Gao Village put together. Somehow he came down to the mortal world, and where he settled was right here: worked in the village, even married in the village. The old folk called him Old Ancestor Ganglie — Old Iron-Bristle.
Later the Old Ancestor left with the scripture-pilgrims. Before he went, he scrubbed his feeding trough clean, turned it upside down on the pen wall, and said one sentence, passed down litter to litter until it reached me:
"Keep it. Old Pig will be back to eat."
So for three hundred years, the pigpens of Gao Village have always kept one extra trough. Each year when the new grain comes in, the first scoop of bran goes into that trough and sits overnight; next morning it is fed to the smallest of the pen. This year the smallest was me. I ate it. Mother watched me eat, and suddenly she was crying. I asked why. She said: a piglet who eats the Old Ancestor's first-feed grows its bristles early.
But lately the village has been uneasy.
Fields ruined night after night, crops flattened in swathes. People say wild boars did it and walk the lanes with hoes, hunting boars. My brothers are too scared to leave the pen. Only I think something's wrong — I went and looked closely at the fallen rice. Hoofprints, yes. But does a rooting pig root without eating? The ground is all wreckage, and not one grain is missing.
That was not the work of pigs. That was the work of something that wants people to think it was pigs.
Then came the trouble at Cloud-Ladder Cave, and the village burned its lamps through several nights running. Word drifted into the pen: that the great boar-yao in the cave also bears the name Ganglie; that some evil pattern had wound itself around his body; that a boy with a medicine basket had gone into the cave.
Also bears the name Ganglie.
Mother was ladling feed when she heard those words. The whole scoop of bran went onto the ground.
That night I dreamed. I stood on a river too wide for edges, silver water flowing from under my hooves all the way into the stars. And behind me a gruff voice laughed: little runt — bristles not even up yet, and already dreaming of the River of Heaven?
I woke with a start. The pen lay quiet. Overhead hung that blackened moon.
I felt along my back.
Dead center on my spine stood one bristle. Stiff. Sharp to the touch. Like a single small tooth of a nine-toothed rake.
Just one.
Mother was still asleep. I didn't wake her. I burrowed back into the straw and went through the dream again from the beginning, and the more I thought, the further sleep ran from me —
the Old Ancestor said he would be back to eat.
Is the empty trough about to be needed?