Seven li north of Gao Village stands a derelict altar. The villagers call it Dog-Claw Rise, for the old stone steps worn into grooves by claws.
The grooves are mine. Not all mine — beneath my marks lie claw-prints far older, deep enough to cradle an egg.
That altar is an evolution altar of the dog kind.
I moved to its foot after the bay in my throat could no longer be held down. The day I left Gao Village, Granny Wang griddled me a stack of flatbreads, stroked my head and said: Laifu, come home when you've made something of yourself. She thought I was off to the hills to run wild. I had no way to explain that a farm dog does not bay a whole village of dogs onto their bellies on eclipse nights — I had to learn what I am.
On the altar stands a stele. Broken, but the legible lines were enough to feed me thirty years:
"The dog who walks this way speaks to Heaven by the bay. The first bay sets the soul. The second bay opens the clouds. The third bay —"
Everything after the third bay, along with a corner of the stele, is gone. Cut, not weathered — sheared off by some edge that left the break smoother than the stele's own face.
The first bay — setting the soul — took me ten years. It means folding the bay back into your own bones: the valley shakes, beast and bird go flat, but your own four paws stay nailed to the earth, not one inch of drift. The day I mastered it, the stone slab under me cracked in four directions. I had not moved at all.
The second bay — opening the clouds — took twenty more. It means sending the bay upward. And that gate is uncanny: the voice must pass three layers of cloud. The first is water-vapor: easy. The second is the high gale: hard. The third… the third I have never understood. I only know that every time my voice reaches that layer, it strikes something like a lid, and drops back down, muffled.
Yes. A lid. The "canopy" that Elder Gale-Splitting Falcon speaks of — I have thrown my voice against it a thousand times.
Thirty years. My bay can put every dog within a hundred li into formation; it can shake the snow off half a slope. But it cannot pass the third layer. Sometimes I lie beside the broken stele and wonder: what did the lines after the third bay say? A method for passing the canopy — or a warning against it? And who sheared the stele — someone afraid a dog might learn it, or afraid a dog might know it?
Then, the night before last, it happened.
Lunar eclipse. I mounted the altar as always, pressed thirty years of craft into a single bay, and sent it up. It struck the third layer and dropped back, muffled — the old routine.
But this time, after the fallen sound settled, there came a gap of seven finger-snaps.
And the west answered.
Impossibly far. Not heard with the ears — heard with the bones. And it was no echo. An echo carries my own tune; this did not. This voice was ancient, hoarse, broken — an old dog nearly run to death, spending everything it had left to answer a muster-call with one word:
"…Present."
I stood rigid on that altar until dawn.
Every dog under heaven that hears my bay goes flat. In thirty years, not one has ever answered. The stele says the bay speaks to Heaven — but the answer came not from Heaven. It came from the west. From the ground. From deep down that old road of a hundred and eight thousand li.
Who is out there? What kind of dog holds a post at that distance, keeping one breath alive to answer roll-call?
And that "present" — was it answering me? Or did it mistake my bay for the other call it has been waiting on for three hundred years?
The medicine-basket boy and his company passed Dog-Claw Rise yesterday, westbound. I came down the slope, blocked the road, lay flat, and set my forepaw on the boy's shoe.
The monkey asked: what's it doing?
The boy looked at me a long time and said: it wants to come with us.
Right. But not entirely right.
I don't want to come with you. I have to go and see — how many breaths the owner of that "present" has left. And whether the call it has been guarding all this time is the same whistle that runs through my dreams.