Hour of the Rabbit · Cramped back room of a mountain farmhouse 🔍

Around the Hour of the Rabbit, perhaps two quarters past, I pulled myself upright on the thin sleeping mat spread across the earthen floor of a farmhouse tucked against the lower slope of a pine ridge. The family who took me in — an old man, his daughter-in-law, two small grandchildren — were already awake, the daughter-in-law blowing on the hearth coals with a bamboo pipe, coaxing a thin orange thread of flame. The smell of pine smoke and barley gruel filled the low room. I rolled my single change of hemp clothing tighter inside my oil-cloth bundle and tucked it against the wall. My topknot pin had bent somewhere on the road south, so I wrapped my hair with a strip of dark cloth instead — hardly the look of a man three years into his preparatory studies, but the examiners' halls felt very far away this morning. I accepted a shallow bowl of watery gruel with both hands and drank it standing, watching the mist sit thick and motionless above the millet field outside.

Hour of the Snake · The mountain path fork above Baekun village 🔍

By the Hour of the Snake the mist had burned off and the late-summer sun pressed hard on the back of my neck as I climbed to the path fork above what the old man had called Baekun village — 'white cloud,' though there was nothing white or cloudy about it now, just a scatter of roofless walls and a well someone had been kind enough not to fill in. I stopped and drank from a gourd I'd refilled at the farmhouse, water so cold it made my back teeth ache. From up here the valley road was visible: a thin brown seam between fields of browning millet, and along it, moving very slowly, a line of people carrying bundles on A-frame jigeы and on their heads, heading south. A man resting under a paulownia tree near the fork told me, in a voice scraped flat of feeling, that the road north was not a road anymore — 'just ash and rumor.' I wrote nothing in my pocket journal; my last stick of ink cake had crumbled to dust two days ago. I stood at the fork for a long time, memorizing the valley the way you memorize a face you are not sure you will see again.

Hour of the Rooster · A dry streambed, evening camp 🔍

By the Hour of the Rooster the light had gone amber and long, and I'd found a sheltered bend in a dry streambed where three other travelers had already laid their bundles — a middle-aged man who said he was a craftsman from the north, and two brothers, maybe fifteen and seventeen, traveling alone. We didn't ask one another much. The craftsman had a small iron pot and some dried radish strips; I had the heel of a millet cake the farmhouse daughter-in-law had pressed into my hand at parting. We pooled these and made something barely worth calling a meal, but we ate it slowly, as though the slowness gave it more substance. The sky above the streambed walls turned the color of old brass, then indigo. Someone had lit a small fire of pine branches and the smoke rose straight up — no wind at all. I thought of my mother's house in the city, whether the outer gate still stood, whether the persimmon tree in the courtyard had survived. I thought of the Four Books still half-memorized in my head — all that careful preparation — and felt neither grief nor ambition, only a quiet, animal wish to wake up again tomorrow.