Where Dahe came from, people didn’t call their fathers “Dad.” They called them “the old man.”
But Dahe had never had the chance to call anyone that. His old man had died when he was just one year old. Dahe came from generations of hunters. His father had gone into the mountains to hunt and encountered the wolf king. His body was never found. All that remained in front of the mountain god’s shrine was a pool of blood, a few white bones, and a tuft of wolf fur.
A light rain fell over the mountains that day, pattering softly and steadily.
When Dahe’s mother heard the news, she fainted on the spot. His grandfather smoked his dry tobacco pipe all night, sweat beading on his forehead as his whole body trembled.
The villagers all said Dahe’s father must have done something wicked and angered the mountain god. Otherwise, why would he have died right in front of the shrine? The abandoned old shrine halfway up the mountainside had supposedly been extraordinarily efficacious before Liberation.
The village Party secretary gathered everyone in the village clearing and gave them an ideological lesson about the matter. The shrine had been smashed during the progressive movement twenty or thirty years earlier. In this new era, they were supposed to study science and embrace science, not indulge in feudal superstition. A wolf had come down from the mountains and taken a citizen’s life, so it had to be dealt with ruthlessly. The secretary rallied every able-bodied young man in the village to follow Dahe’s grandfather into the mountains and hunt the wolf king. They searched and lay in wait for two days and two nights. On the morning of the third day, in front of the mountain god’s shrine, Dahe’s grandfather shot the wolf king dead with his own hands, avenging his son.
Dahe’s grandfather chopped off the wolf’s bloody head and turned to look at the shrine. The little structure, barely half a man’s height, was reduced to half a ruined wall. The progressive fighters had smashed the head off the mountain god’s statue, and several stalks of fresh green bamboo lay across its broken stone neck.
Dahe’s grandfather offered the wolf’s head at the shrine entrance, the very place where he had once knelt beside Dahe’s great-grandfather decades ago, burning incense and presenting offerings with all the reverence in the world.
A light rain fell over the mountains again that day, pattering softly and steadily.
The villagers went home in high spirits through the unending drizzle and told Dahe’s bedridden mother how they had finally avenged her husband.
Dahe’s mother had always been frail, and after her husband’s death she had spent most of her days unable to rise from bed. When she heard the news, joy and grief overwhelmed her. A few months later, she too passed away. At eighteen months old, Dahe was an orphan.
Fortunately, his grandfather was still there.
His grandfather was still fairly strong in those years. He left his hungry, nursing grandson in the care of the village women and went back to his old trade of hunting. Dahe grew up on milk from many households, and after a few years he could run and jump like any other child. But children without a father or mother were often shunned by the others. Whenever his grandfather went hunting, Dahe was just a lonely, grubby little thing, forgotten in the dilapidated family home at the edge of the village.
When he was a little older, his grandfather took him up the mountain once. They didn’t go far, only a half-hour’s walk to the mountain god’s shrine halfway up the slope. His grandfather refused to go any farther with him. Up to this point, he said, it was still safe. Beyond it lay the hunting grounds, where dangerous beasts roamed. As he explained, he set out his offerings in front of the ruined shrine.
Ever since Dahe’s father’s death, his grandfather had brought an offering for the mountain god on every hunting trip. Sometimes it was a few sweet potatoes, sometimes corn, sometimes oranges. At New Year he would bring boiled eggs and rice wine, then take the eggs back for Dahe to eat once the offering had been made.
Behind the village secretary’s back, his grandfather had even repaired the shrine a little, patching it with mud bricks and tree bark, shaping a new head for the god out of clay, and covering it with a piece of red cloth.
His grandfather didn’t believe in the village secretary’s “science.” He told Dahe that the mountain god had always been there.
He said that back in Dahe’s great-grandfather’s day, several families in the village had still lived by hunting. For generations they had enjoyed the mountain god’s blessings: he kept the hunters safe and ensured plentiful catches. Before entering the mountains, the hunters would kneel in earnest worship before the shrine on the hillside. But now people no longer held the mountain god in reverence. They had even destroyed his shrine, so naturally they would suffer his wrath. Dahe’s grandfather said that his own son had been punished for it. As he spoke, he took Dahe’s hand and made him kowtow before the ruined shrine, begging the god to keep protecting him and his grandson and to forgive them.
Dahe knelt with his grandfather and knocked his forehead against the ground a few times. When he looked up, he saw a little bamboo shoot pushing tender green leaves out of the mud in front of the shrine. A drop of dew clung to it, so pretty that he broke into a simple, delighted grin, showing the front teeth that had only recently come in.
He was only three or four then, a slow, guileless little boy who couldn’t really understand what his grandfather was saying. He simply thought the green bamboo in front of the shrine was beautiful, and the red cloth over the mountain god’s head was rather interesting. Everything was new and fun.
Perhaps the mountain god really was looking after them. Whenever Dahe’s grandfather went hunting, he came home with something. He could trade his catches for rice and grain from other villagers, or take them into town and buy lengths of cloth. Every few days, Dahe would trot along to see his grandfather off. He helped arrange the offerings and kowtowed in front of the shrine, then, while his grandfather headed deeper into the mountains, he trotted back home along the same path.
One day, he carried a little bamboo basket up the mountain. After kowtowing, he decided to dig up some tender bamboo shoots and wild vegetables around the shrine to cook for lunch. As he bent over, rump in the air, and scratched at the soil, a drop of dew fell from a bamboo leaf and landed squarely on his little forehead.
He wiped it away with the back of his hand, licked the moisture, and looked up curiously, but he couldn’t see where the drop had come from. He turned toward the shrine, wondering whether the mountain god was telling him it was getting late and he ought to go home.
He shouldered his little basket and obediently started back. But after a few steps, he turned around again. Seeing no sign of his grandfather returning, he crept up to the shrine on tiptoe, bent down, and slipped his hand beneath the red cloth to give the clay face he had been curious about for so long the gentlest touch.
Cold. So very cold.
He jumped in fright, staggered back two steps, and fled with his basket on his back. Only after running a good distance did he look over his shoulder, curiosity getting the better of him. The shrine was still there. The little bamboo stalks in front of it swayed their leaves softly. Sunlight slipped through the shade of the forest and spilled across the stones, making them gleam.
Nothing at all had happened. He had touched the mountain god’s head, and the god hadn’t punished him.
So he gave another of his guileless grins.
Perhaps the mountain god wasn’t as frightening as Grandpa said, and perhaps he didn’t punish people so easily after all.
The vivid green bamboo before the shrine was lovely, as were the clusters of wildflowers behind it and the birds and squirrels hopping among the trees. It was summer, and the mountains rang with the clear singing of cicadas. Crickets chirped in the grass, too. All those sounds were much nicer than the village aunties shouting at him to go away, or the children laughing and jeering that he had neither mother nor father. When he grew tired of digging for bamboo shoots, he would tear off a few bamboo leaves and blow them like whistles, or weave a bamboo dragonfly, or make two bamboo crickets and set them fighting. He liked it here.
Surely a mountain god who lived in a place this lovely couldn’t be frightening.
He grew fonder and fonder of visiting the shrine. Little by little, he carried all his treasures from home up there and hid them beneath a large rock behind it: a bamboo tube full of pretty stones from the river, more than a dozen bamboo crickets in all sizes, and brightly colored candy wrappers the village secretary had brought back from market in town. Whenever his grandfather went hunting, Dahe played in front of the shrine. Sometimes, when the sun was nearly setting and Grandpa still hadn’t returned, a drop or two of dew would land on his head, as though urging him to go home first.
“Grandpa, is the mountain god really inside the shrine?” he asked one day over dinner.
With his dry tobacco pipe clenched between his teeth, Grandpa squinted as he peeled a sweet potato for him. “He is.”
“Then why won’t he come out and play with me?” Dahe asked. He had even set his favorite big bamboo cricket on the god’s earthen altar.
His grandfather tapped him on the head with the stem of his pipe. “Good ancestors above! That’s the mountain god! You’re supposed to worship him, not play with him!”
Dahe ducked his little head sheepishly.
A few days later, after he had finished “worshipping” the mountain god and while his grandfather was away, he crawled inside the low shrine and leaned toward the statue’s clay ear. “Mountain God, come out and play with me, please? Please?”
The wind rustled through the forest. A little green-tailed bird perched on a bamboo stalk in front of the shrine and chirped away. The mountain god gave no answer.
“Grandpa, does the mountain god really exist?” he asked again over dinner.
“If you believe in him, then he exists!” His grandfather glared at him.
Dahe ducked his little head again.
The afternoon sunlight was warm and bright. Dahe wandered around the shrine, using the little bamboo knife his grandfather had whittled for him to chop at clods of earth with a scritch-scritch sound. All the while he thought, I do believe. I really do. But where is the mountain god? Why won’t he come out?
The days slipped by. Dahe grew a little older each day, and his grandfather grew older with him. Often he woke at night to the sound of violent coughing, and he would rub his sleepy eyes, climb out of bed, and pour his grandfather a cup of water after the old man had coughed up thick phlegm.
Then, one winter when Dahe was seven, his grandfather went into the mountains and never came back. Dahe carried his little bamboo basket to the shrine to wait for him, only to find Grandpa lying in the clearing in front of it. His face was gray. One cheek was buried in the earth, while the exposed half of his face looked peaceful.
A fine, pattering rain fell over the mountains again that day. Dahe sat beside his grandfather, his hands covered in mud, smearing dirt across Grandpa’s face and then his own.
The village secretary said Grandpa had died of old age, without sickness or pain, and that his passing had been peaceful. The villagers called a meeting and decided to pool money for his funeral and entrust Dahe to a distant relative in the village, a man who could, by a rather generous reckoning of the family tree, be called his Third Maternal Uncle.
His grandfather was buried in the mountains, not very far from the shrine. As the coffin was carried past it, Dahe walked in front dressed in coarse white mourning hemp. During the dozen or so steps it took to pass the shrine, a wind began to whisper through the trees. Leaves loosened from the green bamboo one by one, spun above their heads, then drifted gently onto the coffin and the mourners.
The young men carrying the coffin were so frightened they didn’t dare take another step. They looked about in alarm but saw nothing. Only Dahe kept his eyes on the green bamboo in front of the shrine.
A young man stood there in an unusual long robe of vivid green. His long black hair was partly gathered into a bun at the back of his head, with the rest falling loose. He had fine, handsome features and stood straight and still in the rain of bamboo leaves, watching Dahe and the coffin behind him.
Dahe burst into tears. For the first time since his grandfather’s death, he truly cried aloud, sobbing uncontrollably.
The mountain god had appeared to bid farewell to the last hunter of the mountains. In that gentle rain of bamboo leaves, Dahe finally believed the god was real. And he understood that the only family he had left in the world was truly gone.