Tigers have rules. Let me give you three.
First: hold your mountain. One tiger, one ridge, the boundary marked and sworn; trespassers are fought. Second: the hunt. Fix your eyes before you move, kill with one strike — never make prey suffer twice. Third — and this one matters most: no eating people.
The third is new law, set by the White-Bone Ridge tigers three hundred years ago. The old generations held no such taboo — great-ancestor General Yin brought down a calamity that way once; I will come to that. The reason for the new law was simple: the people were dwindling. The villages below emptied one by one, the trade road went cold, even the hunters vanished. Little prey; fewer people. Eat one man and you buy ten years of feud with mankind; buy enough feuds and the tiger clans end. The old Tiger King, dying, summoned the clans beneath the cliff and left one sentence:
"From this day: food may be taken from the tiger's mouth — but a man taken by a tiger's mouth ends that tiger's line."
I was born under that law. I have starved — truly starved: gnawed bark in famine years, dug rat-nests out of frozen ground. But in three hundred years, no tiger of White-Bone Ridge has harmed a human being. Even the Bureau's register concedes it: the ridge holds tigers, fierce but lawful.
Fierce but lawful. Those four characters are the face of our clan.
I was born with hung eyes — the glaring kind. Among tigers, hung eyes see deadliest: grass moving three li off, and I can tell wind from rabbit; a man walking the night road, and one glance at his gait tells me whether his heart is guilty. On these eyes I earned the post of the ridge's high watch: one crouch on the tall cliff, and the whole mountainside is mine to hold.
Which is why, of all the clan, only I saw the whole of what happened that night.
The eclipse. The blackest instant of the black moon. No wind. No sound. And the forest below the cliff began to lower itself, layer by layer — not trees falling: every living thing on the ridge dropping flat at once. The wolves went down. The boars went down. Even the snakes in the cliff-cracks wound themselves tight. And then I watched our tigers — one, then another, tigers who do not blink at thunder — bow their heads together.
Mine bowed too. I did not choose it. The neck bent on its own.
Something passed over the ridge.
No shape. No shadow. No scent. These hung eyes of mine, from which no rabbit hides at three li, saw nothing at all that night. There was only weight — a weight pressing down out of the sky, grinding along the spine of the mountain, as if the whole night had sunk by half a foot. It moved east to west, neither fast nor slow, and took one incense-stick's time to clear the ridge.
Afterward the clan gathered under the cliff, and no one spoke. It was Third Uncle who finally asked the only question:
"When we bowed — was it fear, or was it reverence?"
No tiger could answer. Fear and reverence we know how to tell apart — fear is the legs failing; reverence is the heart consenting. That night was neither. It was something older, like recognition carved into the bone: the bones knew that weight, though no tiger of our generation has ever met it.
Great-ancestor General Yin might know the answer. He is old enough, and he lived through the great calamity of those days. But the ancestor keeps his two graves and has not left his cave in three hundred years. I went to ask. Through the cave mouth he returned exactly eight words:
"A weight that presses mountains. An old account, approaching."
An old account. Whose? And approaching — to collect, or to repay?
The day the medicine-basket boy climbed the ridge, I held him in my eyes from the high cliff for a full day. His gait: no guilt in it. His eyes: nothing hidden. At dusk I came down and barred the path — not against him, but against the Lady White Bone walking behind him: I wanted it said to my face whether the Grudge-Bone Altar's account touched the tiger clans.
I never finished the question. Something about the boy bent my neck again.
Faintly. The same order of thing as the eclipse-night weight — much thinner, as if a thousand li removed.
I stared at him a long while, and made the decision the whole clan calls madness: I go with him.
What were a glaring tiger's eyes made for? To fix on a thing until it is seen clearly.
That weight which ground across our ridge went west.
I will hold this boy in my eyes all the way west —
until the day that weight consents to show its shape.