40: The Snow Gully

The first true snow came on the second day of the seventh moon.

It came in the way an upper-hills snow came — not as a storm but as a slow patient laying-down, by an old country, of a small white sheet across its small patient body. The flakes began at the second hour of the dawn watch, in the small thin kind that gave a man the small false impression that the snow was a passing scatter; by the second cock, the small thin kind had thickened into the small even fall of a snow that had come to stay; by the noon of the day, the small flat place behind the long low ridge was, by every quadrant of Heizi's looking, white.

Tie-zhu had — by the small careful reading of the wind shifts of the past four days — said the day before that the snow would come perhaps tomorrow morning. He had said it at the small late-afternoon meal, with the small specific evenness of the lame boy's voice. He had said: *the wind has been at the northeast for three days now; the air has the small specific dryness; the small spring at the back of the rock face has thickened at the rim by a fraction that I can see; the snow is at most by the second hour of the dawn watch tomorrow.* Heizi had — by the small accumulated trust of the past five months — not, on hearing it, felt any need to verify. The brothers had, at the small fire that evening, made the small final adjustments: the kindling at the back of the lean-to was now eight piles; the dried hares in the rack were twenty-nine; the small grey salt in the small clay jar was, by the small specific pinch, sufficient; the brothers' coats had been mended in the small last places that needed mending; the small water-gourd had been stoppered with a small fresh-cut piece of wood and placed inside the lean-to so it would not freeze.

The first snow came. The lean-to held.

By the noon of the first day, the small thin layer of snow on the new winter roof had begun, by the small specific way the lame boy had drawn at the slab two months ago, to settle slowly into the thatched grey reeds, where it would, in the seventh moon's long steady cold, become a small additional layer of insulation rather than a load.

By the dusk of the second day, the small flat place was held under perhaps a hand's-depth of new snow.

By the morning of the fifth day, perhaps two hand's-depths.

The brothers' work, in the seventh moon, was the small specific work of a household at the start of a winter. They drew water from the small spring at the back of the rock face — slower now, because the spring was running half its summer's pace, and because the small thin layer at the surface had to be broken with a small flat stone before drawing. They cooked small hot portions of dried hare in millet at the noon. They ate slowly. They worked, in the small still cold of the afternoons, on the small inside tasks Tie-zhu had laid out for the winter — small mendings, small whittlings, small re-bindings of the thinner places of the lean-to's interior bracing.

By the noon of the sixth day, the country had laid down its small first careful piece of winter, and the small flat place was, by every reading, held inside it.

At the morning of the seventh day, Heizi went up to the western face of the long low ridge to check the small snare-line.

He had, by the lame boy's small careful warning at the fourth moon, laid the line in the small specific pattern the lame boy had drawn for winter snares — set low, at the small specific places where the hares ran in the snow's small thin under-tunnels along the foot of the brush, with the small specific hempen-cord loops set to take the hare's neck at the small specific running height. The line was, by the small careful arithmetic the lame boy had drawn, a line of perhaps fourteen snares laid along the western face of the ridge, in the small set pattern the lame boy had said would, at the slow rate of a winter's hare-line, take perhaps two hares a week through the seventh and eighth moons.

He went up, on this morning, in the small clear cold light of the seventh-moon dawn.

The walking was slow in the snow. The new sandals — the broad-heeled ones Wei Da-niang had given Tie-zhu, but the brothers had each been made, by the lame boy's small careful work in the third moon, a similar pair to the broad-heel pattern; Heizi's were the third pair, the lame boy had finished them last month — gripped the small fresh snow well. He climbed the small old herders' path slowly. He came up onto the western face of the long low ridge at the second hour of the dawn.

He walked the line.

The first three snares were empty. The fourth had a small grey hare. The fifth, the sixth, the seventh — empty. The eighth had another small hare, a young one. The ninth, the tenth, the eleventh — empty. The twelfth had a small foreshare-snared bird the lame boy had told him about — a winter ground-bird that came down to brush at this season for the small dried seeds.

He took the three small bodies. He laid them in the small hempen sack at his belt.

He was at the thirteenth snare — the second-to-last, near the upper end of the line, in a small thin gully that ran up into the small higher country at the western face of the ridge — when he saw the dark.

The dark was at the bottom of the gully. It was perhaps fifty paces below where he was standing, on the snow-covered floor of the gully, where the small thin run-off of the spring ran in summer and was, in this winter, frozen under a small thin sheet of ice and a hand's-depth of snow.

The dark was a shape.

The shape was the size of a man.

Heizi went still.

He did not, for a long moment, breathe.

He looked at the shape. He looked at it for the time it took him to count to twenty, slowly, in the small old method of counting Old Zhang had taught him for testing whether a thing in a field was a man or only a stump that the eye, in the early morning, had taken for a man. The shape did not move. The shape did not — by any small specific change in the small even outline — change.

It might have been a stump.

It was not a stump.

He understood, at the count of twenty, that the shape was the shape of a man laid on his side, with his head pillowed on his folded arm, and that the man was — by the small absence of any breath visible in the cold air around the head — either dead or so close to dead that the breath had thinned to nothing visible.

He went down.

He went down the thin slope of the gully slowly, with the militia knife loose at his belt, with his weight set back so as not to slide the snow into a small avalanche. He came down to the bottom. He came across the small thin ice of the under-stream. He came up to the shape.

The shape was a man.

The man was — by the small specific look of the face, by the small unfamiliar shape of the cheekbones, by the small specific aquiline narrow of the nose — not a man of the country. He was perhaps sixteen. He was thinner than Tie-zhu. He had — by the small specific look of his coat, which was a dark wool patched at the elbow with a different-colored cloth — the dress of a man who had come from far further west than the upper hills of Henan. The wool of the coat was a wool Heizi had not seen before. The patch was a faded indigo, not the village's indigo, of a slightly different bath. The collar was high, in the way of a coat that had been cut for a country with hard winds in the open spaces, not the small valleys of the eastern country.

A western boy.

A Sogdian, perhaps. A traveler from the Hexi Corridor. Heizi had heard of such men once, in his fourteenth winter, when a single small caravan of seven men with two camels had passed through the village's eastern road on its way to a town two valleys east; one of the seven had been a boy of perhaps thirteen, with the same small specific aquiline narrow of the nose, and the small caravan's leader had said — at Old Cui's gate, briefly, in the broken Han of a man who knew it as his fifth language — *we are from the Hexi country; we go to the eastern markets; we will be back in three months.* The caravan had not, that Heizi knew, come back. He had been, at fourteen, fascinated by the camels.

He looked at the boy in the snow.

The boy's lips were dark. The lips were the small specific dark of a man whose blood had stopped, at the surface, from the cold. The eyes were closed. The face was very thin. The skin — under the small thin frost on the upper cheek — was a small grey-pale that Heizi had seen once before, in his eighth winter, on the face of his foster mother's cousin who had been brought back from a road in a snow.

Heizi knelt at the boy.

He laid two fingers very gently at the side of the throat, under the small high collar.

The pulse was there. It was slow. It was so slow he could not, at the first feel, quite be sure of it; he held his fingers very still for a long count. The pulse was perhaps half the rate of his own. The boy was alive. The boy would not, Heizi understood, be alive in another half hour.

He thought.

He thought slowly, with the small specific quickness the country had been teaching him in the past five months. He thought: *not from the country. Not bandit. Not patrol. Sogdian. Younger than me. The patches on the coat say a man whose family lined his coat once and whose coat has been patched twice since by his own hands — a young man who has been on the road alone for some time. By the small thinness of the body, and the small absence of any small bundle near him in the snow, he has been on the road for many weeks, and is at the end of his strength.*

He thought: *I cannot leave him.*

He thought: *the camp.*

He thought: *one and a half *li*. Through the snow. Carrying a body in a coat. The body is — by the look of him — half my own weight, perhaps. I am tired. The snow is hand's-depth. The lame brother's path will not take a carried man.*

He thought: *I cannot carry him alone in this snow. I will need Wang Er. The small lighting of any signal fire that the lame brother could see from the camp — the smoke through the small banked-fire-on-green-wood — would, by the small careful agreement, bring Wang Er to a meeting place in the lower contour we had agreed on, not up here. It would be three hours before Wang Er could be at the gully.*

He thought: *the boy will not have three hours.*

He thought, then, very quickly: *I carry him. Now. I leave the small hempen sack of the three small bodies in the snow at the gully. I come back for the bodies tomorrow. I do not carry both.*

He laid the small hempen sack in the snow at the foot of a small grey-rock outcrop near the gully's lower edge — out of the small wet of the under-stream, in a place he could find again. He marked, with the militia knife, a small specific cross on the bark of the small stunted pine above the rock — a small mark a passer-by would not see but he would.

He went back to the boy.

He took off his own wadded coat — quickly, without thinking about the cold — and laid it across the boy. He took off his outer shirt also and folded it as a small extra layer between the boy's small grey-pale face and the small thin frost on his own front. He bent and gathered the boy in both arms.

The boy was lighter than Heizi had thought.

He was perhaps two-thirds of Heizi's weight. He was not, by the careful measure, a small body — the boy was tall, perhaps as tall as Heizi himself when he stood — but he was thin in the way a young man who had eaten badly for many weeks was thin. The bones at the upper arm, where Heizi gripped under the coat, were close to the surface.

He stood up. He set the boy across his shoulder, in the small specific carrying-shape Old Zhang had taught him in the village's small autumn-festival wrestling lessons — across the right shoulder, with the small upper body braced against his back, with one of the boy's arms hanging in front and the other behind, with the small light center of the boy's weight set just at the joint of the shoulder so that the carrying did not, at the half-*li* mark, become a thing the muscles of the back could not hold.

He started up the slope of the gully.

The slope was harder to go up than to come down. The snow took his sandal at the first step and gave back only after the second. He set his weight back. He went slowly. He counted the steps.

At the fortieth step he was at the lip of the gully.

At the hundredth step he was on the small old herders' path of the western face.

At the second hundred — he was not, in the carrying, allowing his head to count the snare-line he had walked an hour ago — he had come around the small first bend.

By the small first hour of the carrying, his shoulder had gone past the point where it ached; it had gone into the small specific numbness of a shoulder that had been carrying a body. The cold on his bare upper body, where his outer shirt was no longer, was by now a steady cold that he had — in the first quarter hour — noticed and had — in the second — set aside. The numbness on the shoulder and the cold on the chest were not, on this morning, the things he was paying attention to.

The thing he was paying attention to was the small specific intermittent breath of the boy at his back.

The breath was a small slow thing. He could feel it, at the right side of his neck, where the boy's small thin face was set into the wool of his own coat. The breath was perhaps once every four counts; it was the breath of a body that had been at the small last edge of running out and was now, by the small specific warmth of the carrying, beginning — perhaps; he could not tell — to come back.

He counted the breaths.

He did not count the steps.

At the second hour after the start of the carrying, he came around the last bend of the western face onto the lip of the small flat place behind the long low ridge.

The lean-to stood, at the lee, with the small thin smoke of the morning fire rising thinly at the rock-face hollow.

Wang Er was at the front of the lean-to.

The smith's son saw him at the lip. The smith's son saw — by the small specific shape of Heizi's silhouette against the morning grey, the shape of a young man carrying a body across his shoulder — what he was carrying. Wang Er did not call out. He turned and went into the lean-to. He came back out with a folded blanket and a small handful of dry pine needles. He came across the small flat at the run.

Heizi came down off the lip.

He came across the small flat to the front of the lean-to.

He did not — at the lean-to — speak. Wang Er, beside him, took the small grey-pale boy off Heizi's shoulder slowly. He laid him on the floor of the lean-to on a small layer of dry pine needles. He laid the wadded coat over him. He laid the folded blanket over the coat.

Tie-zhu, who had come out of the lean-to at the first sound, looked at the boy on the floor for a long beat.

The lame boy's face — by the small specific change of the eyes — settled into the small specific evenness of a young apprentice at a piece of work that had to be done.

"Big brother."

"Yes."

"He is alive."

"Yes."

"But not for long, by the small specific look of the lips."

"No."

"We will — we will warm him. The small banked fire's small heat — at the front of the lean-to, just inside the south face — will not — it will not be enough for a man this cold. We need a hot stone. A flat stone, heated in the embers, wrapped in a small folded cloth. Two stones. Three. The smith's son and I will heat them. The big brother — the big brother will sit beside him and rub his hands and his feet, and his arms — slowly, slowly, no fast rubbing, that brings the cold back to the heart."

He paused.

"And the big brother. Take a coat. The big brother is — by the small clear sight — without a coat or a shirt and the day is cold."

Heizi looked down at himself. He had, in the carrying, forgotten. The cold on his upper body had — in the small heat of the lean-to's interior — become, suddenly, again, the cold it actually was. He had — he understood now — gone past one of the small specific lines he had been told by Old Zhang once to be careful of, and was beginning to shake.

"Big brother. The lean-to has a folded coat at the western corner. Take it. Eat the small portion of warm millet at the small clay pot. Sit by the boy. Rub his hands. The lame brother and the smith's son will manage the stones."

Heizi nodded.

He went, slowly — the legs were a small specific mineral kind of tired — to the western corner. He took the folded coat. He pulled it on. The wool of the coat was the small dry warmth of a coat that had been lying in a closed lean-to for a quarter of an hour. He sat down beside the boy on the floor. He took up the small clay pot of the morning's millet — Wang Er had banked it before going out for wood at first cock — and ate a portion, slowly.

He took the boy's small thin hand in his own.

The hand was cold. It was the cold of a hand that, at the small still rate of the body's pulse, had been on the small last edge of giving up its small last warmth into the air. He began, very slowly — at the lame boy's instruction — to rub the hand.

The boy's eyes did not open.

The boy's small thin breath, at the right side of his face, was at the same slow rate it had been on Heizi's shoulder.

Tie-zhu and Wang Er, at the small fire ring, were heating the first flat stone in the embers.

Heizi rubbed the small thin hand.

He thought, for one beat — only one beat — about why he had brought the boy back to the camp.

He thought: *there is no reason. There is no plan. I do not know who he is. I do not know whether he will live. I do not know whether the household has, in the small specific arithmetic of the seventh moon, room for a fourth mouth that, until the spring, will not be able to do its share. I have no answer to any of these.*

He thought: *I have only the small specific thing the bones said in the gully. The bones said: take him.*

He had taken him.

The country, at the small flat place behind the long low ridge in the upper hills of Henan, was a country that — for the past five months — had been receiving him and the brothers. It had given them snares. It had given them the lean-to. It had given them salt. It had given them, by the small generous arrangement of small ledger-keepers across two months of road, an unbroken passage into a country that had been willing to keep them.

It had not, until this morning, asked anything of them.

Today it had asked.

It had laid a young man in the snow at the foot of a small thin gully, half a *li* from the camp, on the morning of the seventh day after the first true snow.

Heizi had, by the small accumulating ledger he had been keeping, no choice but to answer.

He rubbed the small thin hand.

The hand was, by the small specific warmth of his own slow steady rubbing, beginning — perhaps — to receive a small fraction of warmth back into its pale skin. It was not, Heizi understood, a thing the rubbing alone could finish. The hot stones, in the embers, would do the work. The small rubbing was only the first small step.

The first step was, however, his.

He continued.

Outside the lean-to, in the small fire ring, Wang Er and Tie-zhu were turning the first flat stone in the embers, slowly, with the careful even rotation of two boys who had become, in the small unhurried way of an upper-hills household, the small specific household-team for any small specific work of warming.

The boy on the floor of the lean-to did not, in the first quarter hour, open his eyes.

The breath at Heizi's right side, where he leaned to rub the small thin hand, came at the same slow rate it had come on his shoulder.

Heizi rubbed.

He did not file the morning yet.

The filing — the deciding what kind of moment this was, in which catalog it belonged, dark or light — would be a thing for tomorrow, or for the day after, or for the day the boy on the floor opened his eyes and either lived or did not.

For now, he rubbed.

The country had asked. He had answered.

The work of the seventh moon's small first received life had begun.