Yingchun, displaying considerable courage, walked up to me with a handful of fresh green grass.
“Little Blackie,” she muttered, “don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you. Come home with me…”
When she was standing next to me, she rested her left hand on my neck and put the grass in her right hand up to my mouth, stroking me gently as she shielded my eyes with her bosom. The sensation of her soft, warm breasts was all the stimulation Ximen Nao’s memories needed to flood into my head, and tears spurted from my eyes. She whispered in my ear, and the hot breath of this hot-blooded woman made me lightheaded. My legs shook; I fell to my knees.
“Little black donkey,” I heard her say, “my little black donkey, I know you’ve grown up and that you’re looking for a mate. A man thinks of marriage, a woman wants a mate, a donkey wants to sire its young. I don’t blame you for that, it’s perfectly normal. Well, you found your mate and you’ve planted your seed, so now you can come home with me…”
The other people quickly put my halter on and affixed the reins, adding a rusty-smelling chain, which they put in my mouth. Someone pulled the chain tight around my lower lip. The pain was so intense I had to flare my nostrils and gasp for air. But Yingchun reached out and hit the hand that was tightening the bit,
“Let that go,” she said. “Can’t you see he’s injured?”
They tried to get me to stand. That’s exactly what I wanted. Cows and sheep and pigs and dogs can lie down, but not donkeys, not unless they’re dying. I struggled to get to my feet, but my body weighed me down. Was I going to die at the tender age of three? For a donkey, that was not good news under any circumstances, but the idea of dying like this really got to me. There in front of me was a broad road, divided into many little paths, each leading to a scene worth viewing. Swept away by intense curiosity, I had to go on living. As I rose up on shaky legs, Lan Lian told the Fang brothers to stick their long club under my belly, one on each side, while he went around behind me to hold up my tail. With Yingchun holding me around the neck, the Fang brothers gripped their ends of the pole and shouted, “Lift!” With their help, I stood up, still wobbly, my head drooping heavily. But I struggled to stay upright; I mustn’t fall down again. I did it, I was standing straight.
The people walked around me, amazed and puzzled by the bloody injuries on my rear legs and my chest. How could the act of mating produce injuries like that? they wondered. I also heard members of the Han family discussing similar injuries on their female donkey. Is it possible, I heard the older Fang brother ask, that the two animals spent the whole night fighting one another? His brother shook his head. Impossible. A man who’d come to help the Han family retrieve his donkey downriver, pointed to something in the river, and yelled:
“Come over here and tell me what this is!”
One of the dead wolves was rolling slowly in the water; the other was pinned underwater by a rock.
The crowd rushed over to see what he was pointing at, and I knew that it was wolf fur on top of the water and blood on the rocks – wolf blood and donkey blood – still filling the air around the spot with its stench. The signs of a fierce battle were obvious from prints on the rocks from wolf claws and donkey hooves and from the blood-streaked injuries to my and Huahua’s bodies.
Two men rolled up their pant legs, took off their shoes and socks, and waded into the water to bring the two wolf carcasses up onto the bank. I sensed people turning to me with looks of respect, and I knew that Huahua was being honored by the same looks. Yingchun threw both arms around me and lovingly stroked my face; I felt moist pearls fall from her eyes onto my ears.
“Damn you all!” Lan Lian said proudly. “The next person who says anything bad about my donkey will answer to me! Everyone says that donkeys are cowards, that they turn tail and run if they see a wolf. But not my donkey. He killed two ferocious wolves all by himself!”
“Not by himself,” stonemason Han corrected him indignantly. “Our donkey deserves credit too.”
“Yes, you’re right,” Lan Lian said with a smile. “She does. And she’s my donkey’s wife.”
“With such severe injuries, I doubt that this marriage was ever consummated,” someone volunteered lightheartedly.
Fang Tianbao bent down to examine my genitals, then ran over to check underneath the Han family’s female. He lifted up her tail and took a good look.
“Yes, it was,” he announced authoritatively. “Take my word for it. You Hans are going to have a new donkey.”
“Old Han, you’d better send a couple of pecks of black beans over to help our black donkey regain his strength,” Lan Lian said somberly.
“Like hell!” was Han’s curt reply.
By this time, the musket-armed men who had been hiding in the tamarisk bushes joined the others. Light on their feet, they moved furtively. Clearly, they were not farmers. Their leader was a squat man with piercing eyes. He walked up to the dead wolves and bent over to turn the head of one with the barrel of his weapon, after which he did the same to the abdomen of the other wolf. In a voice that betrayed surprise mixed with regret, he said:
“This is the destructive pair we’ve been looking for!”
One of his men, also armed with a musket, turned to the crowd and announced loudly:
“That does it. We can go back and report to our superiors now”
“I doubt that you people have seen these two,” one of the men said to Lan Lian and the others. “They’re not a pair of wild dogs, they’re gray wolves, the kind you seldom see out on the plains. They fled from Inner Mongolia and left a bloody trail. They were both tricky and vicious. In just over a month they killed a dozen or more head of livestock, including horses, cows, even a camel. We think people were next on their menu. If word had gotten out, the people would have panicked, so we organized six hunting teams in secret, searching and lying in wait for these two day and night. Now it’s over.” Another one, a man with an obvious sense of his own importance, kicked one of the carcasses: “You never thought this day would come, you bastard!” he cursed.
The team leader took aim at the head of one of the wolves and fired. Flames from the barrel of his musket and the smoke that followed swallowed the animal up, its head now shattered, just like Ximen Nao’s, the rocks splattered with grays and reds.
Another hunter took the hint and, with a smile, shot the other wolf in the abdomen. A fist-sized hole opened up in its belly, out of which a dirty mess of guts poured.
Dumbfounded by what they’d just seen, Lan Lian and the others could only gape at one another. Once the smell of gunpowder had dissipated, the melodious sound of flowing water beguiled their ears; a flock of sparrows numbering in the hundreds came on the air, rising and falling like a dark cloud. They settled with a loud fluttering sound on tamarisk bushes, bending the pliant branches like fruit-laden trees. Waves of bird-talk enlivened the sandy ridges. To that was added the gossamer voice of Yingchun:
“What was that for? Why shoot dead wolves?”
“Is that your damned attempt to take credit for this?” Lan Lian thundered. “You didn’t kill those wolves, my donkey did.”
The leader of the hunting team took two brand-new notes and tucked one under my reins, the other under Huahua’s.
“Do you really think you can shut me up with money?” Lan Lian said, spitting mad. “That’s not going to happen!”
“Take back your money,” Han the stonemason said. “Our donkeys killed those wolves, and we’re taking them with us.”
The hunter smirked.
“Good brothers,” he said, “with one eye open and the other shut, everyone wins. You could plead your case until your lips were chapped, and no one would believe that your donkeys were capable of doing that. Especially now that one’s head has been blown open and the other’s belly has a gaping bullet hole.”