Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

between two rocks, and he lay faceup on the sandy ground. With a leap, her tail stretched out behind her, she charged again like a yellow blur. At that desperate moment, in less time than it takes to tell, Lü Xiaopo, the youngest member of the hunting team, took aim and fired at the animal’s head. But since it was a moving target, the shot hit her in the abdomen. When she fell, she rolled on the ground, spilling her guts all over the place, a terrifying sight. Though she was a vile predator, it was too terrible to see. By this time, Liu Yong had reloaded his musket and fired at the wolf, which was still rolling in agony. But because of the distance between them, the buckshot sprayed the area and peppered the dying animal in many spots. She stretched out her legs and died.”
    While Qiao was weaving his story, Liu Yong stepped backward, aimed, and fired buckshot into the wolf’s carcass, creating holes with burned edges.
    “So, what do you think?” Qiao asked, smiling proudly. “Whose story do you think people will believe, yours or mine?” He put more gunpowder into the barrel of his musket and said, “You outnumber us, but don’t even think of taking the wolves back with you. We hunters have an unwritten rule: Whenever there’s a dispute over a kill, the hunter with the most buckshot in it keeps it. And there’s another rule. A hunter is within his rights to shoot anyone who walks off with his kill. It’s a matter of retaining his self-esteem.”
    “You’re fucking thugs!” Lan Lian said. “You’re going to be visited by nightmares after this. You’ll pay for taking what doesn’t belong to you.”
    The hunter just laughed. “Reincarnation and retribution are nonsense people use to trick old ladies. I don’t believe them for a minute. But maybe there’s something we can do together. If you’ll help us carry these carcasses to town on the backs of your donkeys, the county chief will reward you handsomely and I’ll give you each a bottle of the finest liquor.”
    I couldn’t take any more of that. Opening my mouth to bare my front teeth, I took aim at that flat head of his. But he was too fast for me. He moved his head away just in time, but I got him by the shoulder. Now you’ll see what a donkey can do, you thug! You people think that only felines or canines, with their sharp claws and teeth, know how to be predators, and that we donkeys, with our hooves, only know how to eat grass and husks of grain. You are all formalists, dogmatists, book worshippers, and empiricists. Well, today, I’m going to teach you that when he’s irritated, a donkey will bite!
    After gripping the hunter’s shoulder in my teeth, I raised my head and shook it back and forth. I tasted something sour, unpleasant, and very sticky. As for the crafty, smooth-talking fellow, well, he was on the ground, bleeding from his shoulder, and unconscious.
    He could always tell the county chief that one of the wolves had bitten him on the shoulder during the fight. Or he could say that when the wolf buried its fangs in his shoulder, he reacted by biting the animal on the back of its head. As to how he’d managed to finish off the wolf, well, he could say what he wanted.
    Our people, meanwhile, saw that things had turned ugly, so they quickly got us on the road home, leaving the wolf carcasses and the wolf hunters on the sandbar.

8

Ouch, Xlmen Donkey Loses a Gonad
A Colossal Hero Arrives at the Estate
    January 24, 1955, was the first day of the first month of the Yiwei Lunar Year. Mo Yan settled on that day as his birthday. During the 1980s, officials who hoped to hold positions for several more years or who wanted to climb the bureaucratic ladder even higher would change their age down and their schooling up, but who would have thought that Mo Yan, certainly no official, would join the fad? It was a fine morning, with flocks of pigeons circling in the early morning sky, their melodic cooing coming first from one direction, then the other. My master stopped working to look up into the sky, the blue half of his face making for a pretty sight.
    Over the previous year, the eight acres of Lan family land had produced 2,800 catties of grain, an average of 350 per acre. In addition, they had brought in twenty-eight pumpkins planted on the ridges between crops and twenty catties of high-quality hemp. He refused to believe the co-op’s announced harvest of 400 catties per acre, and I heard him say to Yingchun more than once, “Do