Let me get the ugly part out first: I am a wild boar. Tusks, bristles, a slab of brute muscle — meet me on a night path and you'll jump. All granted.
But these three months of ruined fields at Gao Village are not my doing.
I have lived in the woods beyond this village for forty years. Forty years, under a rule stricter than the village covenant itself: not one ear of their grain do I touch. When hunger bites, I root kudzu in the deep hills or chew reed shoots on the riverflats. Why? Because my mother died in a hunter's snare, and her last words were: child, pigs and people are born with no feud between them. Every feud grows from a single mouthful. Guard your mouth, and you guard your life.
Forty years I guarded my mouth. Slowly the village came to know of the "sensible old boar" in the woods. When children lost themselves gathering mushrooms, I trailed them at a distance, scared off the wolves, and watched from far away until they reached home. The bolder farmwives took to leaving half a basket of sweet potatoes on the field-ridge after harvest — not to feed a pig, they said. The village phrase is thanking the mountain.
Forty years of that goodwill. Three months to bring it all down.
The first incident was the paddy east of the village: three mu flattened overnight. Hoofprints — a pig's. Gouges in the mud like tusk-work. By morning the village was in the woods with hoes. I hid on the bluff watching them tear apart my den, cold to the marrow, and dared not show myself — to step out at such a moment is to walk onto the spear.
That night I went to the field myself.
One look and I knew no kin of mine had done it. A pig roots a field to eat — it eats as it goes and drops dung along the rows. These three mu were flattened in tidy swathes: not a grain missing, not a single dropping. And the hoofprints all pressed to exactly the same depth. Show me the living pig whose every step lands with identical weight.
Those prints were stamped. With a mold. One by one.
I tracked the "trail" half the night. It led to no den, no water, no place any pig would go. It circled the village — one loop, another — and finally gathered at the edge of the old altar deep in the mulberry fields, abandoned these several hundred years. There it vanished.
The earth on that altar was freshly turned. And beneath the turned earth ran thin lines, black ones, cold to the touch, crawling along under the skin of the ground toward Cloud-Ladder Cave.
I'm a boar; I can't name such things. I only know every animal instinct in me was howling: stay away from it.
But I cannot stay away. Every day the field-wrecking goes unsolved, the feud between village and mountain grows a day older. Already the hunters are setting jaw-traps in the woods; already some young yao are throwing stones at granaries in the dark. That is exactly how feuds roll themselves big — my mother taught me with her life.
The day the boy with the medicine basket entered the village, I watched him from the slope a long time. He too went to the fallen fields. He too crouched and measured the depth of print after print. And when he finished, he frowned and said something quiet — my ears are sharp; I caught it:
"This wasn't a pig."
Forty years. The first one.
So I came down the slope and showed him everything I knew — the stamped prints, the old altar, the black lines crawling under the earth toward Cloud-Ladder Cave.
He means to go into the cave. I walked him to its mouth.
Past that point, this slab of muscle is no use. So I hold the entrance — for him, and for the village — and let nothing follow him in.
I ask one thing only. Boy: dig out the real culprit.
I want no compensation. No apology. I want the village to know one thing again, the way they used to —
the old boar in those woods has not touched one ear of grain in forty years.