Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [38]
During the night, Ah-Fat awoke to find Red Hair sitting up holding on to one of the tent struts, his eyes glittering brightly. “What’s up?” he asked in surprise. “Do you want to take a piss? Do you want me to help you outside?” Red Hair shook his head. He turned towards Ah-Fat and said something into his ear. His voice was so weak that Ah-Fat did not understand at first. Red Hair said it again: “Fiddle.” “What do you want the fiddle for?” asked Ah-Fat. “It’s the middle of the night.” “I’m giving it to you, the fiddle…” Red Hair started coughing weakly again and said nothing more.
Red Hair died that night. When they woke up the next morning, the tent stank. Red Hair had pissed on his mat. When they tried to shake him awake, they found his body was stiff.
They hurriedly wrapped Red Hair in one of the sleeping mats and carried him outside. It was snowing so heavily the sky seemed to be falling on them. Great, fat snowflakes hit them silently in their faces, almost blinding them so that they could not make out each other’s features. It was impossible to dig a hole to bury Red Hair, so they tied the bundle up with twine and laid it down under a tree, weighted down with stones.
They stumbled back to the tent. “It’s cold enough to freeze your piss today,” said someone. “Red Hair won’t start to rot in this weather for couple of weeks or more.” Ah-Lam gathered up Red Hair’s soiled clothes. “Who knows how many of us’ll live,” he said with a sigh. “Better wait a few days and bury all the bodies together. It’ll save digging a hole for each one.” This possibility had occurred to all of them but only vaguely. By speaking the thought out loud, Ah-Lam gave it a terrible clarity. It faced them squarely, and there was no getting away from it. When they lay down again, the tent felt strangely roomy. The space Red Hair’s body had been crammed into was tiny, but now that he was gone, it seemed like a yawning gap. As they listened to the thunderous drumming noise from the trees above the tent, they trembled in fear.
Their hunger had numbed them. But the dog meat soup they had gulped down yesterday aroused the hunger pangs again, acute and fierce. When they lay down to sleep, they felt terrible gnawing pains. They did not dare close their eyes for fear they would never wake up again, like Red Hair. The cook, who had lain down for a moment suddenly sat up again. “I’m going to eat snow!” he said. “I’ve heard just drinking water can keep you alive for two weeks.”
There were desperate shouts and they all sat up and crawled outside. They scraped up the snow with their bare hands and ate it. They stuffed themselves with it until they felt they would burst, stood up to piss and ate again. After three rounds of eating snow and pissing, they staggered back to the tent and lay down again, still hungry but this time with full bellies.
Finally they could not stay awake any longer and drifted into a lethargic sleep.
Ah-Fat was the first to hear it—he was awakened by a strange noise from neighbouring tents. It was a little like the wind rustling in bamboos or a rope dancing in mid-air. It was the sound of someone whistling, he realized.
“The pack horses! The pack horses!” someone screamed.
When the snow stopped, Ah-Fat took them to bury Red Hair.
When they scraped away the snow, they discovered that the twine had been gnawed through. The mat had come undone and Red Hair was missing two fingers. Another finger was broken