The Horse Spirit

Apricot Hollow nestles in a fold of Wildgoose Gate Mountain. By October the wind carries the acrid smell of flax fields and slips down the collar of your coat. Old Ke is just past sixty, his back bent, his left leg shortened by a rockfall in his youth, so he walks with a lurch. He lives alone in the stone courtyard at the village's end; his wife has been gone eight years, and his son settled in the provincial city, coming home once a year.

In the crooked thatch shelter of the yard is tethered an old horse. Redwind — its chestnut coat faded to grey-brown, a white film over the right eye, a slight lameness in the left foreleg, its body dipping with every step. Thirty years ago Old Ke carried it home from the fair in his arms, no bigger than a sheep, ribs showing through the skin; the trader said it would not survive the winter. Ke fed it spoonfuls of scorched rice broth, and it lived, and it remembered the kindness.

In its prime Redwind was the hardest-working beast in the hollow. One spring thaw his woman was seized by pains in the night, snow falling thick as goose feathers, the roads sealed. Ke laid her across the horse's back, took the reins, and waded the snow ahead; Redwind carried her step by step to the clinic ten miles off. The doctor said half an hour later and she would have been lost. After that Ke tended the horse like family.

Late that summer a new stockman named Qian moved into the hollow and set his eye on Redwind. Qian arrived in a pickup, in leather shoes, his speech humming with a city accent. He offered to buy the horse, to haul it to a slaughterhouse up north; the price would have mended Ke's roof three times over. Ke squatted on the threshold, rolled a cigarette, and said nothing. Qian raised his offer; Ke stubbed the cigarette out. "She saved my woman's life," he said. "Your money won't move her."

Qian left. Ke went to the shelter to comb Redwind's coat, and the horse laid its great head on his shoulder, breath warm in the hollow of his neck.

After the autumn turn Redwind ate less and less, then could hardly rise. On a frost-heavy dawn Ke found it lying on the dry straw, eyes half shut, already cold. He told no one. He borrowed a neighbor's barrow, carried the horse up the east slope, and dug a grave on the gentle rise where Redwind had loved to roll as a young thing. Packing the earth down, Ke's hands came away muddy; he patted the soil as he would pat a sleeping child's back.

When the first snow fell, the hollow was so still you could hear your own heart. Past midnight Ke woke to a soft clatter of hooves — not a dream, the iron shoes striking frozen ground, tick, tick, coming from the ridge and stopping outside his courtyard gate. He threw on his coat and stepped out. The moon was white as water; the yard was clean except for a line of fresh hoofprints in the snow, bowl-sized, plum-shaped, circling the shelter once before turning back toward the east slope.

The next day he asked Old Fan, the peddler who kept a stall at the village head. Fan drew on his pipe and squinted. "There's a horse spirit in this mountain," he said, "the longing of the beasts that wore themselves out in their masters' hands. It walks only before those who kept the old bond." Ke said nothing. He went home and filled the empty manger with fodder, and set a bucket of warm water by the trough.

After that, on every snowing night, the hooves came. The water dropped sometimes, the hay was nibbled shorter, yet no one ever truly saw the horse. As Ke grew older and more bent, so long as he heard those hooves on the ridge, he knew his old partner still remembered the way.

Last winter the hollow's children chattered that a red horse often stood on the snow slope, lowering its head before the old folk. Ke listened, and went to fill the manger a little higher.