The Tiger's Chang

At the foot of Qingya Mountain lay Shiling Village, some twenty households scattered along a bend of the stream. The stream was called Bitter Bamboo Creek — clear to the stones beneath. Yet in the past ten years, the people by its banks had vanished more easily than those stones.

In the village there was a saying: "Rather walk the night mountain road than the bright woods by day." It spoke of the tiger.

This was no ordinary tiger. An ordinary tiger shuns men; this one sought them. First it took Wednesday the herdsman, the next year it dragged off Widow Liu from west of the creek, and last autumn it carried away A-yan, the young man who went into the hills for medicine. A-yan was the cleverest lad in Shiling, who knew a hundred herbs and could whistle on a leaf. The day he left he told his mother, "Ma, I'll find that old wild ginseng and sell it to cure your cough." He never came back; only one straw sandal lay by the creek.

A-yan's soul became a chang. This the villagers had not believed at first. They believed only when the people began, one by one, to disappear. Yet what good was belief? Men must still live, fields must still be planted, and the tiger still crouched on the mountain every day.

The chang, the old folk say, is made from one the tiger has eaten. The body is gone, but a breath of grievance will not disperse, and it is bound by the tiger's own living breath, becoming the tiger's slave. When the tiger would eat a man, the chang goes first to lead him. At night it shows itself, choosing kin and neighbors it knows, drawing them to the ravine where the tiger waits, loosening their packs and stripping their clothes so the tiger may eat at its ease. The saying "to act as the tiger's chang" comes from this. Some say too that the chang leads those it could least afford to wrong in life, or those it least wished to part from. The tiger is cunning and strikes at a man's softest place; the chang, driven by the tiger, leads it to the very thing a man can least bear to lose. So the chang of these hills led only the village's own blood and surname, until suspicion grew even between kin.

The first thing A-yan did as a chang was to lead the tiger to his own uncle.

That night the uncle shouldered two bundles of firewood down the mountain, the moonlight white and eerie. A-yan's shade drifted ahead; the uncle took it for the shadow of his own lantern and suspected nothing. At Eagle-Beak Ravine, A-yan's soul stopped. The wind made his half-transparent body sway. The uncle asked, "Yan-wa, why do you stand here?" — he could see his nephew, yet not see that his nephew was already a ghost.

A-yan opened his mouth but no sound came. When the tiger sprang from behind the ravine, he reached to pull away his uncle's carrying pole — meaning to protect him — but his body would not obey, and instead knocked the pole aside, clearing the tiger's path. The uncle's firewood scattered; he never finished a cry.

The tiger, full, lay on the rock and licked its paws. A-yan knelt by the body, unable to weep — a ghost has no tears. He only gathered the scattered wood, again and again, and it scattered again.

After that, Shiling knew a chang walked the hills. Old Hunter Geng said, "The chang knows us. It leads one, the tiger eats one. Every soul in this village it knows by name." The villagers grew afraid to leave their doors; half the fields lay fallow. From then the village barred its gates at the fall of dark. Children were not let out alone; the herdsman drove his cows home at high noon, and any who passed Eagle-Beak Ravine went in a party of three or five with hoes and staves in hand. Only Zhou-shi's plank gate stood open a crack each night — she would leave her son a way in and out. The neighbors urged her to stop; she only shook her head. "My son knows his own door."

Yet a chang was once a man. A-yan's mother, Zhou-shi, would not believe her son had become such a thing. Each night she burned paper at the creek and called, "Yan-wa, come home." On the seventh night a shape rose on the water — a clean, pale young man standing among the bamboo shadows, silent, only looking at her.

Zhou-shi said, "Yan-wa, are you in pain?"

The shade nodded, then shook its head. It pointed to its own heart, then to the mountain. Zhou-shi understood: he was in pain, yet not free; the tiger in the hills still held him.

"Ma, the chang cannot be shaken off," A-yan spoke at last, his voice as if through water. "While the tiger lives, the chang lives. The tiger dies not, the chang dies not — yet the chang can never return to man. Ma, burn no more paper. The smoke of it only aches my heart the more."

Zhou-shi asked, "That tiger — is it truly unkillable?"

A-yan's shade grew thin. "Old Geng and the others have tried three times. Its hide is thick; blade and arrow scarce bite. It knows the smell of a trap. And the worst of it —" he paused, "it knows the road the chang leads. You set snares, it walks around; but when it would eat, the chang shows the way. Without the chang, the tiger is half-blind."

The first time, Old Geng buried a spring-trap at Eagle-Beak Ravine, and the tiger walked around it. The second, Bian-jiu dug a deep pit by the woods and covered it with grass, and the tiger, scenting the fresh earth, walked around that too. The third, they ringed the mountain with torches; the tiger lay still in a lee ravine, and when the fire died and the men were spent, it burst out at midnight and wounded one of them. After three tries the village was more afraid than ever, saying the tiger was a spirit and mortal means were useless.

When this spread through the village, the looks they gave Zhou-shi changed. Some said, "His Yan-wa led the tiger to eat my brother." Some said, "Best stop the paper, lest the chang bear a grudge." Zhou-shi ignored them, still going to the creek each night, only no longer burning, only sitting a while, speaking of small household things. Once she murmured, "Yan-wa, Widow Wang next door sent a bowl of rice today, said it was your favorite rice-cake when you were little." The shade on the water bent the corners of its mouth, very faintly, into a smile — the very same smile he had worn alive.

That spring a tiger-hunter came down from the county, surnamed Bian, a lame ex-soldier who said he had killed wolves on the frontier. Hearing of the chang, he sneered: "A tiger is but a beast. A chang but a ghost. Men fear the tiger for never having met a true blade."

Bian-jiu took his firelock, iron fork, and torches soaked in tung oil, and asked Old Geng to guide him into the hills. A-yan's shade drifted ahead; Old Geng could see it — ghost sees ghost, man sees not, yet Geng's half-life of hunting had weighed him with yin, and he could make out a dim shape.

"Yan-wa," Geng said low, "tell us true: where is the tiger now?"

A-yan's shade pointed to Black Pine Gulch to the east.

They watched two days in Black Pine Gulch; no tiger. At noon on the third day A-yan's shade grew suddenly urgent, wheeling before Geng and pointing west. Geng understood and pulled Bian-jiu westward. Half up the slope they found the tiger lying in the ravine, gnawing some wild deer.

Bian-jiu raised the firelock. The tiger's ear lifted. In that instant A-yan's shade flung itself upon the tiger's eyes — a ghost has no weight and could not hold, yet the tiger blinked, hesitant. The lock roared. Lead struck the tiger's shoulder; it reared, and Bian-jiu's torch touched it, tung-oil flame licking its hide; the tiger fled wounded into the trees.

Not dead.

That night the tiger came for revenge and took the thatched hut where Bian-jiu stayed. Bian-jiu's lame leg could not run; the tiger broke it. Geng fired from afar and the tiger withdrew.

Those nights A-yan's shade drifted the whole night over Bitter Bamboo Creek, now gathering, now scattering, as if undecided. Zhou-shi went again to the creek and asked, "Yan-wa, do you mean to help that tiger?"

The shade shook its head fiercely, then pointed to its own neck — there a faint mark, the tiger's bite.

Zhou-shi understood: "You fear that when the tiger dies, you will scatter with it?"

The shade said nothing, and slowly nodded.

Mother and chang, after all, are joined at the heart. Zhou-shi sighed: "My son, you became a chang because you could not choose; your mother keeps you because she cannot let go. Yet to drift half-man half-ghost, leading the tiger to eat men — that pains your mother more than if you were simply gone. Decide for yourself."

A-yan's shade wavered on the water a long while, and at last, very faintly, nodded.

The next day Old Geng thought of a plan: not to kill the tiger in the hills, but to draw it into the village. By the old well at the village mouth he set a drop-net smeared with the juice of sleep-herb — A-yan had said the tiger coveted the cool of that well's water. He had Bian-jiu lie behind the stone mill beside the well, firelock primed.

A-yan's shade went to Black Pine Gulch and showed itself before the tiger. The tiger saw its chang and followed. That a chang leads the way is the way of heaven and earth; the tiger never doubts. A-yan led it all the way to the old well, and there placed himself in the very center of the net's mesh.

The tiger sprang at the figure by the well — a decoy A-yan had deliberately condensed. The net fell; sleep-herb juice soaked the tiger's whole body; it struggled twice and went slack. Bian-jiu's firelock at the tiger's skull showed no mercy this time; the lead went through.

At the moment the tiger breathed its last, a wind rose over Bitter Bamboo Creek, and A-yan's shade rose from the heart of the water, brighter by three parts than before. He bowed once to Zhou-shi, his lips moved as if to say, "Ma, I'm going," and then scattered into mist across the whole creek, bit by bit, gone.

Shiling knew no tiger trouble after. The fields were planted again; by the creek women washed clothes and pounded cloth. Only Zhou-shi, passing the old well, would look once more at the water, as if the clean young man still stood among the bamboo shadows. The next spring, bitter-bamboo shoots broke again by the creek. Zhou-shi set the tablets of her brother and her son side by side in the hall and burned a stick of incense each day. Someone asked if she hated the chang. She said, "What I hate is the tiger. The tiger gone, the chang is gone too — my son was only tied by the tiger, with no choice in the matter." The word reached the county; the sheriff sighed and remitted half a year's mountain tax for Shiling.

Old Geng later said to others: "The tiger dead, the chang scattered. Yet before it scattered, it led the tiger into the net itself. This chang had more heart than men."

The Chronicler says: Those who speak of the chang all say "to act as the tiger's chang," as if the basest thing under heaven were to lead a tiger to eat men. Yet look closer: the chang does not do it gladly. Its body having been devoured, its soul is bound by the tiger; driven, it must go forward; led, it must endure. That it leads kin and neighbors is not forgetfulness of feeling, but inability to refuse. When the tiger is slain, the chang may scatter — and in scattering still looks back at its mother. A ghost, yet with a human heart.

And yet — are the "chang" of this world only tigers' chang? Whoever is enslaved by another and driven to harm his own kind, he too is a chang. The one who enslaves need not be a tiger, yet the grief of the enslaved is the same as A-yan's. One asks: since the chang knew the tiger could be slain, why did it not lead it to the pit earlier? The answer: it had not yet met an Old Geng, nor heard a loving mother's word. Were every chang in the world to have one who leads him toward good and grants him his own choice, then though the tiger live, the chang might be freed. It is a pity that those who enslave men are many, while those who ferry them across are few.