You say Mamei was betrothed but she disappeared when the mother-in-law came to fetch her. She ran away with her lover, a young village fellow.
Was he a lantern dragon dancer? she asks.
The lantern dragon team involved in the fighting in town was from Gulaicun downstream, this young fellow’s family was from Wangnian, fifty li upstream. He was lower than her in the clan hierarchy but was a fine youngster. Mamei’s lover had neither the money nor the means, his family had only two mu of dry land and nine portions of paddy field. In this area, people won’t starve if they work hard and have strong limbs. Of course that’s as long as there are no natural disasters and no rampaging soldiers, when these occur it’s not unknown for eighty to ninety per cent of the villagers to die. Now back to Mamei. For her lover to marry such a pretty and clever girl as Mamei, this bit of property wasn’t enough. A girl like Mamei came at a specified price: a pair of silver bracelets for the deposit, a betrothal gift of eight boxes of cakes and a dowry of two cartloads of gilded wardrobes and chests. The person who paid this price lived in Shuigang, behind what is now the photographer’s shop. The old house has long since changed owners, but we’re talking about the owner at that time. His wife kept giving birth to daughters and because he had his mind set on having a son, this wealthy man decided to take a secondary wife. It so happened that Mamei’s mother was an intelligent widow who had worked out her daughter’s future: it was better for her to become the secondary wife of a rich man than to spend her life working in the fields with a poor man. An agreement was made through a go-between. As there would not be a bridal sedan, the required sets of clothing for both the bride and her mother were to be provided. A date to fetch the girl was fixed but during the night she ran away. She just bundled up a few clothes, and in the middle of the night tapped on her lover’s window to get him to come outside. They burned with passion and she gave herself to him right there. Then, wiping the tears from their eyes, they pledged themselves to one another and agreed to run away into the mountains to eke out a living. Arm in arm they arrived at the river crossing and looked at the surging waves. However the lad vacillated and said he’d have to go home to fetch an axe and a few work tools. He was discovered by his parents. The father beat the unfilial boy with a length of wood and the mother was heartbroken but couldn’t bear to have her son leave home. In the prolonged chaos of the father’s beating and the mother’s weeping it was soon daybreak. The ferryman who was up early said he had seen a girl with a bundle. Then there was a heavy mist and as it became light, the morning mist from the river became thicker so that even the sun turned into a ball of dark red burning charcoal. The ferryman doubled his guard: bumping into another boat wouldn’t be too serious but there would be a disaster if they were rammed by a timber-float. There were crowds on the bank on their way to the markets, these markets which have been going for at least three thousand years. Amongst those on their way to these markets there were inevitably people who heard a shout which was instantly stifled in the mist. Then there was the sound of thrashing in the water. Some with sharper ears said they heard it more than once, but everyone just went on talking and nothing could be heard clearly. This is really a bustling crossing, otherwise Yu the Great wouldn’t have decided to make his crossing here. The boat was laden with vegetables, charcoal, grain, sweet potatoes, mushrooms, chrysanthemums, edible fungus, tea, eggs, people and pigs, so that the punt-pole curved and the waterline came to the top of the sides of the boat. The rock called Grieving Ghost Cliff was just a grey shadow in the white mist of the river. Some women prattled about hearing the cawing of a crow early in the morning. It’s a bad omen to hear a crow cawing. A black crow was cawing as it circled in the sky, it must have detected the aura of someone dying. When people are about to die, before they actually die, they give off an aura of death. It’s something like an aura of bad luck which can’t be detected by the eyes and ears, and can only be sensed.
Do I have an aura of bad luck? she asks.
You just make it hard for yourself, you have a masochistic streak. You’re deliberately teasing her.
Hardly, living is such agony!
You then hear her screaming again.
10
The moss on the trunks, the branches overhead, the hair-like pine lichen hanging between the branches, even the air, everything, is dripping. Big bright, transparent drops of water, drop after drop, slowly drip onto my face, down my neck, icy cold. I tread on thick, soft, downy moss, layer upon layer of it. It grows parasitically on the dead trunks of huge fallen trees, grows and dies, dies and grows, so that with every step my sodden shoes squelch. My hat, hair, down-lined jacket and trousers are wet through, my singlet is soaked in sweat and clings to me. Only my belly feels slightly warm.
He has stopped just up ahead but doesn’t turn around, the three-section metal aerial at the back of his head is still swaying. As soon as I clamber over a mass of fallen trees and get close, he takes off again before I have time to catch my breath. He is not tall and is lean and agile like a monkey. He thinks it’s too much trouble to zigzag and I have no choice but to make my way straight up the mountain. Since setting out from the camp early in the morning, we’ve been going for two hours without a break and he hasn’t spoken so much as a sentence to me. It seems he’s using this strategy to put me off, thinking I’ll find it’s too hard and turn back. I struggle desperately to follow close behind but the distance between us keeps widening, so from time to time he stops and waits for me. While I catch my breath he puts up the aerial, dons his earphones, tracks the signals and makes a record in his notebook.
Weather equipment has been installed in a clearing. He inspects it, takes notes, and tells me the humidity is already at saturation point. These are his first words to me all this time and may count as a sign of friendship. A little further on he beckons me to follow him into a clump of dead Cold Arrow Bamboos. Standing there is a big pen fenced with round wooden stakes taller than a man. The bolt isn’t in place and the gate is open. The pen is for trapping the pandas which are shot with an anaesthetic rifle, tagged with a transmitter neckband, and then released. He points to the camera I’ve got hanging on my neck. I hand it to him and he takes a photo of me outside the pen, thankfully not inside it.
Going through the gloomy linden and maple groves, mountain birds trill in the nearby flowering catalpa bushes so there’s no sense of loneliness. Then at an altitude of two thousand seven or eight hundred metres we come into a conifer belt — patches of scattered light gradually appear and giant black hemlocks soar up, their branches arched like open umbrellas. However, at a height of thirty or forty metres they are surpassed by grey-brown dragon spruce which soar to heights of fifty or sixty metres and are majestic with their peaked crowns of grey-green new leaves. There is no longer any undergrowth and it’s possible to see quite a distance. In between the thick spruce and hemlock trunks are some round alpine azaleas. They are about four metres high and covered in masses of moist red flowers. The branches bow with the weight and, as if unable to cope with this abundance of beauty, scatter huge flowers beneath to quietly display their enduring beauty. This unadorned splendour and beauty in nature fills me with another sort of indescribable sadness. It is a sadness which is purely mine and not something inherent in nature.
