Granddad untied the well rope from the bundle of guns and secured it around Father’s waist, then lowered him slowly into the well, keeping the weight on the windlass.
‘Be careful,’ Father heard Granddad say from the top of the well as his foot touched a protruding brick and he stepped down on the floor. The black snake with the colourful band raised its head menacingly and flicked out its forked tongue, hissing at Father. During his days of fishing and crabbing at the Black Water River, Father had learned how to deal with snakes, and he and Uncle Arhat had eaten one, baked in dry cow dung. Arhat told him that snake meat is a cure for leprosy; after eating it, they had both felt hot all over.
Now Father stood at the bottom of the well without moving, and, the instant the snake lowered its head, he reached down, grabbed it by the tail, and shook it with all his might until he heard its bones crack. Then he grabbed it just behind the head and twisted it hard. ‘Dad,’ he shouted, ‘stand clear!’
Granddad backed away from the mouth of the well as the half-dead snake came flying out. Granddad’s skin crawled. ‘That little imp’s got the nerves of a thief!’
Father helped Beauty sit up and shouted in her ear, ‘Beauty! Beauty! It’s me, Douguan. I’m here to save you!’
Father tied the rope around Beauty’s waist. Granddad carefully turned the windlass and hauled Mother out of the well. Then he brought up the body of my young uncle.
‘Dad, send the guns down!’ Father said.
‘Stand clear.’
The windlass creaked as the bundle of guns was lowered into the well. Then Father untied the rope and put it around his waist.
‘Pull me up, Dad,’ he said.
‘Is the rope secure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Make sure it’s tight. This is no time to be careless.’
‘It’s good and tight, Dad.’
‘Did you tie a square knot?’
‘What’s wrong with you, Dad? It was me who tied the rope around Beauty, wasn’t it?’
Father and Granddad looked down at Beauty as she lay on the ground. Her skin was stretched taut over her cheekbones, her eyes were sunken, her gums protruded, and her hair was a tangled mess. Her baby brother’s fingernails had turned blue.
7
MOTHER’S HEALTH IMPROVED under the loving care of the lame woman Liu. She and Father had been good friends, but after her rescue from the well they were like brother and sister. Then Granddad came down with a serious case of typhoid fever, and at times he seemed on the brink of death. Once, as he lay there semiconscious, he hallucinated that he smelled the sweet fragrance of sorghum porridge, so Father and the others quickly picked some sorghum, and the woman Liu cooked it in front of Granddad until it was soft and pasty. After he ate a bowlful, the capillaries in his nose burst and released a torrent of thick, dark blood. His appetite returned then, and he was on the mend. By mid-October, he was able to hobble out into the garden to soak up the warm rays of the late-autumn sun.
I heard that at the time a clash between the troops of Pocky Leng and Little Foot Jiang occurred near Wang Gan Aqueduct, with heavy casualties on both sides. But Granddad was far too sick to worry about that – or anything else, for that matter.
Father and the others threw up a few temporary shelters in the village, then scavenged the junk piles for the odds and ends they would need to harvest enough sorghum to get them through the winter and the spring. Autumn rains had fallen steadily since the end of August, turning the dark earth into a sea of mud. Half of the rain-soaked stalks lay rotting on the ground, where the fallen seeds had taken root and were already beginning to germinate. Tender green stalks crowded their way through the spaces between the blue-grey and dark-red patches of decay, and the ears of sorghum swayed in the air or dragged along the ground like bushy, matted foxtails. Steel-grey rainclouds, heavy with water, scurried across the sky, and cold, hard raindrops thudded into the stalks. Flocks of crows struggled to stay aloft on wings weighted down with moisture. During those foggy days, sunlight was as precious as gold.
Father, who ruled the roost after Granddad fell ill, led Wang Guang, Dezhi, Guo Yang (whom we called Gimpy), Blind Eye, and Beauty over to the marshland, where they fought the corpse-eating dogs with rifles. The ensuing battles would turn Father into a marksman.
Every once in a while, Granddad asked him weakly, ‘What are you doing, son?’
With a murderous frown creasing his brow, Father would say, ‘We’re killing the dogs, Dad!’
‘Let it lie,’ Granddad would say.
‘I can’t,’ Father would reply. ‘We can’t let them feed on people’s bodies.’
Nearly a thousand corpses had piled up in the marshland, all laid out by the Jiao-Gao soldiers, who lacked the time to give them a proper burial. The few spadefuls of dirt that had been tossed haphazardly over the corpses were washed away by the autumn rains. The bloated corpses produced an exceptional stench that brought crows and mad dogs scurrying over to rip open the abdomens, which intensified the reek of death.
When the dog pack was at full strength, they were probably six hundred in all, made up primarily of village dogs whose masters lay rotting in the marshland. The remainder, those that came and went in a frenzy, were dogs from neighbouring villages that had homes to return to. They were led by our family’s three dogs: Red, Green, and Blackie.
The hunters split up into three teams: Father and Mother, Wang Guang and Dezhi, Gimpy and Blind Eye. They dug trenches in the marshland and took up positions to watch the paths that had been scratched out by the dogs. Father cradled his rifle; Mother held her carbine. ‘Douguan, why can’t I hit what I’m shooting at?’ she asked.
‘You’re too eager. If you take careful aim and squeeze the trigger, you can’t miss.’
Father and Mother were watching the path in the southeast corner of the field, a two-foot-wide white scar in the earth. The troops emerging onto this path were led by our dog Red, whose thick coat shone after his rich diet of human corpses. His legs had grown firm and muscular from all the exercise, and the battles with humans had put a keen edge on his intelligence.
The fog-shrouded paths were quiet when the sun’s red rays began to light up the sky. The canine forces had dwindled after a month of seesaw battles, so that the dogs lying among the corpses probably numbered a hundred, and a couple of hundred others had deserted. Their combined forces now, in the neighbourhood of 230, tended to run in packs, and since Father and the others were becoming better marksmen all the time, the dogs always left behind at least a dozen corpses after each frenzied attack.
They were waiting for the dogs’ first sortie of the day, like people anticipating the arrival of food on the table. Noticing the rustling of distant stalks of sorghum, Father said softly, ‘Get ready, here they come.’ Mother silently released the safety catch on her rifle and laid her cheek against the rain-soaked stock. The rustling movement flowed to the edge of the marshland like an ocean wave, and Father could hear the panting dogs. He knew that hundreds of greedy canine eyes were fixed on the broken and severed limbs in the marshland, that the dogs’ red tongues were licking the putrid remnants caught in the corners of their mouths, and that their stomachs, filled with green bile, were growling.
As though on command, more than two hundred of them broke out of the sorghum field, barking madly. The fur on their necks stood straight up; bright coats glistened in the fog. Wang Guang and Gimpy opened fire as the dogs ripped the flesh from the corpses with single-minded ferocity. The wounded dogs yelped in pain, while those that had been spared continued to tear frantically at their prey.
Father took aim at the head of a clumsy black dog and pulled the trigger. The dog yelped as the bullet shattered its ear. Then Father saw the head of a spotted white dog explode and the animal crumple to the ground, a piece of dark intestine still in its mouth. It never made a sound. ‘Beauty, you hit it!’ he shouted.