Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

backing up, all the way to the water’s edge, where I could let Little Flower swim safely away. Then I’d turn and fight with all the wit and courage I possessed. After dining on an exclusive diet of fish brains and roe, these animals’ intelligence was nearly on a par with foxes, so they were probably not going to be fooled by my strategy. I spotted two of the boars move around behind me so they could surround me before I reached the water. I realized that retreat was a dead-end street, that it was time to go on the offensive, to feint to the east and attack to the west in order to break through the encirclement and flee to the expansive center of the river sandbar. I needed to adapt Mao Zedong’s guerrilla tactic of forcing changes in their formation and attack their weaknesses. I signaled Little Flower to let her know what I was planning.

“My king,” she said softly, “go on, don’t worry about me.” “I can’t do that,” I said. “We’re in this together, like brother and sister. Where I am is where you’ll be.”

I charged the male that was launching a frontal attack. He wobbled and started to back up, but I abruptly changed directly and headed toward a nearby female. When our heads hit, it sounded like the crash of broken pottery, and I was treated to the view of her body tumbling backward at least ten feet. Now the circle had been rent, but I could hear the snorts from their noses behind me. With a swinish yell, I ran like the wind toward the southeast. But when I realized that Little Flower was not behind me, I put on the brakes and spun around to wait for her to catch up. But poor Little Flower, dear Little Flower, the only one willing to escape with me, loyal Little Flower, had been bitten on the rump by a savage male wild boar; her screams of pain and terror blanched the moon. “Let her go!” I roared as I charged the offending boar.

“My king,” she yelled, “go on, don’t worry about me.”

You’ve listened to me this far, and I’d be surprised if you weren’t deeply moved or if you didn’t see our actions – pigs or not – as noble. Well, that boar held on and continued his savage attack. Her cries nearly drove me crazy. Nearly? Hell, I was crazy. But a pair of males ran up and blocked my way, keeping me from rescuing Little Flower. Abandoning all battle strategies and tactics, I charged one of them, who didn’t get out of the way fast enough to avoid getting bitten in the neck. I felt my teeth bite through his thick skin and sink all the way down to bone. He rolled over and got away, leaving me with a mouth filled with rank-tasting blood and spiky bristles. Meanwhile, the second boar ran up and bit my hind leg. I kicked out like a mule – a trick I’d learned as a donkey – and connected on his cheek. Then I spun around and went at him. He ran off screeching. My leg hurt like crazy; it was gushing blood, but I had no time to worry about that, with Little Flower being ravaged by that other bastard. I jumped up with a loud war whoop and charged. When I hit the bastard I felt his innards rip and tear, and he was dead before he hit the ground. Little Flower was still alive, but barely. As I picked her up, her innards tumbled out of the wound in her belly I didn’t know what to do about all that steamy, slippery, foul-smelling stuff. I was helpless, helpless and heartbroken.

“Little Flower, my darling Little Flower, I failed you…”

She struggled to open her eyes. A blue and white, and very bleak, gaze emerged.

“My king,” she managed to say as saliva and blood seeped from her mouth, “would it be all right… if I call you Big Brother instead?”

“Yes, of course,” I replied through my tears. “My little sister, the closest person in the world to me…”

“I’m so lucky… Big Brother… so very lucky…” She stopped breathing and her legs stiffened, like four little clubs.

“Little Sister!” I was weeping as I stood up and walked straight toward the remaining boars, determined to fight them to the death – my death.

They formed up and, fearful but disciplined, began backing off. When I charged, they spread out to surround me. Abandoning tactics altogether, I butted here, bit there, and fought like a mad pig, wounding them all and getting my share of wounds in the process. When the shifting battle lines brought us to the middle of the river sandbar, to the edge of a row of abandoned military structures, with roof tiles and crumbling walls, I saw a familiar figure seated beside a stone feeding trough half buried in mud.

“Old Diao, is that you?” I shouted in amazement.

“I knew you’d come one day, my brother,” Diao Xiaosan said before turning to the approaching wild boars. “I cannot be your king. This is your true king!”

After a momentary hesitation, they fell to their knees and, with their snouts in the dirt, announced in unison:

“Long live the great king!”

I was about to say something, but with this latest development, what could I say? So, in a state of utter bewilderment, I became king of the sandbar wild boars and received their fealty. As for the human king, the one sitting on the moon, he had already flown off millions of miles from earth, and the gargantuan moon had shrunk down to the size of a silver platter, so small and far away that I could no longer have seen the human king, even with a high-powered telescope.

33

Pig Sixteen Has Thoughts of Home

A Drunk Hong Taiyue Raises Hell in a Public House

“Time flies.” Before I knew it, I was entering my fifth year as king of the boars on this desolate and virtually uninhabited sandbar.

At first, I’d planned to implement a system of monogamous relationships, as practiced in civilized human society, and had assumed that this reform measure would be greeted with cheers of approval. Imagine my surprise when, instead, it was met with strong opposition, not only by the females but also by the males, who grumbled their dissatisfaction, even though they would have been the primary beneficiaries. Not knowing how to resolve the issue, I took my problem to Diao Xiaosan, who was sprawled in the straw shed we’d provided to protect him from the elements.

“You can abdicate if you want,” he said coldly. “But if you plan to stay on as king, you’ll have to respect local customs.”

My hooves were tied. I had no choice but to let stand this cruel jungle practice. So I shut my eyes and fantasized images of Little Flower, of Butterfly Lover, and, less clearly, of a female donkey, even the hazy outline of some women, as I mated almost recklessly with all those female wild boars. I avoided it whenever possible and cut corners when avoidance was out of the question, but as the years passed, the sandbar population was increased by dozens of wildly colorful little bastards. Some had golden yellow bristles, others had black, and some were spotted like those dalmatians you see in TV ads. Most of them retained their wild boar physical characteristics, but they were clearly smarter than their mothers.

In 1981, during the fourth lunar month, when the apricot trees were blooming and the female wild boars were in heat, I swam over to the south bank of the river. The water was warm on the surface, but icy cold below, and at the point where the warm and cold water met, I encountered schools of fish swimming upstream against the current. I was deeply moved by their indomitable desire to return to their spawning grounds, whatever the difficulty, however great the sacrifice. Moving over to shallow water, I became lost in my own thoughts as I stood and watched them struggling heroically ahead, their fins flapping.

Suddenly I was struck by an outlandish thought – actually it was more like an urgent internal desire, to travel back to Ximen Village, as if I had an appointment made years before, one virtually impossible to reschedule.

It had already been four years since I’d paired up with Little Flower and fled from the pig farm, but I could have found the way back there blindfolded, in part because the fragrance of apricot blossoms came to me on winds from the west but mainly because it was my home. So I struck out, walking along the narrow but comfortably smooth bank of the river, heading west. Uncultivated fields stretched out south of me, nothing but scrubland to the north.

When I reached the one-point-six-acre plot belonging to Lan Lian, I planted my hooves in the ground, having chased the moon westward to my destination. I looked off to the south, where Ximen Village Production Brigade land surrounding Lan Lian’s tiny strip was blanketed with mulberry trees, under whose lush foliage women were picking mulberries in the moonlight, and the sight stirred my emotions. I could see there were changes in farming