The Green Snake
A shepherd boy spares a green snake from the woodcutter's axe. Years later, when mountain floods sweep him and his mother into the water, the grown snake coils around them and bears them to a tree.
West of Longxi there was a shepherd boy named A Niu, twelve years old, who drove his sheep up the hillside each day. In spring he saw a woodcutter about to hew a green snake; the snake, three feet long, was already struck and writhed crying. A Niu pitied it, gave the woodcutter the cake at his belt, and begged the snake's life. The woodcutter laughed and let it go; the snake slowly entered the grass, and looked back at the boy three times.
Several years later, Longxi had ceaseless rains and the mountain floods broke; village houses drifted away. A Niu was then a young man, and was bearing his mother on his back toward a high mound when the water came suddenly; mother and son were both swept in. A Niu struggled to hold his mother, but the current was too swift to advance, and they were certain to drown.
Suddenly something wound up out of the water, its green scales glinting — the very green snake he had saved years before, now grown to ten feet. The snake coiled about A Niu's arm and around his mother's waist, drew them from the water, and bore them to the fork of a dead tree on the bank. Mother and son climbed the tree and were spared; looking back, the snake had sunk into the muddy waves, leaving only a thread of green light that went off with the water.
When the floods fell, many in the village had drowned; only A Niu and his mother were whole. Whenever A Niu told of it he wept, and from then ate no snake, and when he saw one caught he would ransom and release it.
The Chronicler of the Strange says: A Niu was but a boy, and with a morsel of cake saved a snake's life; the snake held that kindness, forgot it not for years, and at last with its one body of water returned two lives, mother and son. Among men there are many who, in others' extremity, hope for help; yet when another meets extremity, how few will lend a hand? The snake, not a man, still knows to bear gratitude into peril; a man with a heart, yet may shun danger for ease and shrink from peril. Seen against the creature, man may be shamed. Yet thus: kindness must be repaid, but also not lightly received — to receive and forget is worse than the snake.