The Pig Spirit

At the foot of Qingscreen Mountain lived a widow, Ahe, whose husband had died three years before. She kept house for her half-blind mother-in-law, old Zhou, and raised her little daughter, Ling'er. With no fields to speak of, she bred two or three pigs each year and sold them at winter's end for medicine and rice.

Late that autumn a butcher had bound a small black pig to drown it in the river, for it was thin and would never fatten. Ahe, passing the market with a load of firewood, saw the hog hanging by its bound hooves; its eyes were clear as rinsed spring water, and a single white hair lay on its brow, curved like a fresh crescent. Her heart moved, she paid three hundred coins and carried it home, naming it "Snow Slave."

Snow Slave was unlike the other pigs. It never fought for the trough, never fouled its pen, and each day came to lie beneath the eaves, listening to the women's talk as if it understood their grief and joy. Old Zhou, nearly blind, knew its voice better than any, and once laid her withered hand on its head and told Ahe, "This creature is quick with spirit. Do not sell it at year's end, or you will rue it." Ahe laughed at her mother-in-law's dotage and would not promise.

Then came a winter of ten straight snows, and the stream turned to ice. Ling'er, five years old, chased a sparrow along the bank and slipped into a hole in the ice. By the time Ahe pulled her out, the child's face was blue and her breath a thread. Ahe held her and wept; old Zhou, trembling, pointed at the hearth—but the charcoal was spent, and the room was colder than a cellar.

At the second watch that night the snow cleared and the wind fell still. Ahe sat by the child's bed, her tears spent to blood, when she heard a rustling in the yard, as of someone splitting wood. She rose and peeped through the door's crack. Moonlight lay like a bolt of white silk; a brown-clad youth with a white hair on his brow was chopping broken branches, drawing well water, and brushing the snow from beneath the eaves—all the tasks Ahe could not manage by daylight. She was about to cry out when the youth turned, and his eyes were clear, no different from Snow Slave's. A wind passed the bamboo; the figure thinned like breath on cold air, and already the pig in its pen had begun to snore—the youth had been Snow Slave.

Not long after, the village's old herb-woman was startled from sleep by a knock at her window. She opened the door and saw a pig standing on her step, its neck stretched toward the mountain, then gone. Fearing some omen, she tramped through the snow to Ahe's house, poured ginger broth into Ling'er, and burned mugwort at her navel. After a long while the child cried, and lived. The old woman asked who had summoned her; Ahe only shook her head.

Then old Zhou wept and told the tale: in a year of great floods, Ahe's late father-in-law had freed a sow caught in a hunter's pit, and the sow had bowed its head three times and left. The white hair on Snow Slave's brow, and its coming to them, were the repayment of that old grace across a lifetime. Ahe, hearing this, wept against the pig's neck.

Afterward Snow Slave grew sleek, yet Ahe could never bear to sell it. On the day before New Year's Eve she opened the pen and let it go. Snow Slave lingered below the step, looked back three times, and vanished into the bamboo's shadow.

And ever since, on each New Year's Eve, something is left upon the stone step of the yard gate: a frosted mushroom, or a foot-long carp, or fresh chestnuts, clean as if freshly washed. Ahe gathers it to set before old Zhou, and though the old woman is blind, she gropes for a smile and says, "An old friend has come." The villagers marveled, but Ahe never told them the truth.

[The Chronicler's Comment] The world is full of those who repay kindness—some walk through fire, some give their lives, and we are struck and moved. But Snow Slave showed no wonder by daylight; only on a windy, snowbound night did it take a shape to do the work a person could not, and save what a person could not save, repaying a debt no one knew was owed. When its grace was spent, it swished its tail and entered the hills, leaving not a word. Alas! We who receive a single meal's kindness engrave it on our lips; yet a pig, bearing a grace of three lifetimes, walks it out in silence. A pure, untroubled bond is found precisely between presence and absence. Let those who wear caps and forget their roots look upon this pig—and feel no shame?