The Ox Spirit
Old Zhou lives alone in a remote mountain hollow. A calm black ox with an almost human gaze comes home with him one spring. The beast senses rain and finds him when he collapses on the trail. For ten years they work the terraced fields together. One dusk it stands thin as mist by the stream; next morning it is gone, halter still on the post. Zhou farms alone now, yet each evening he glances toward the empty shed. The following spring a black calf appears, gazing at him with the same quiet eyes.
Old Zhou lives at the far end of Green Creek Hollow, in a mud-walled house with three thin acres clinging to the hillside. Past sixty, his back already bent, he lost his wife years ago and has no children; he gets by alone.
That spring, a family in the next village wanted to sell an ox. The beast was solid black, its horns short and blunt, and its eyes were strangely like a person's—calm, unhurried, meeting a man's gaze without flinching. Zhou had little money, but he scraped some together and led the ox home, naming it Black Gu.
Black Gu was no ordinary ox. In the fields it found the furrows by itself; Zhou never raised the whip, and it never shirked. Strangest of all, when rain was coming it would stand on the ridge and sniff at the sky, rumbling low in its throat as if muttering. At first Zhou paid it no mind, but after a few times he noticed: whenever it did this, rain fell within the hour. So he learned to trust it, and hurried to gather his grain off the threshing ground before the storm.
One summer, Zhou was hauling a bundle of firewood home along the mountain path when a pain seized his chest and he collapsed in the shade, gasping. Black Gu had been grazing below, yet somehow it slipped its halter and came looking, nudging Zhou onto level ground with its head, then lying beside him and pressing its wet nose to the back of his hand until his breath returned. The villagers laughed when they heard: Old Zhou, your ox must have turned to spirit. Zhou said nothing, only piled Black Gu's fodder extra high. He understood well enough—some bonds in this world need no explaining.
Black Gu stayed with him for the better part of ten years. It aged slowly, though its coat lost its shine day by day. One evening, coming home from the fields, Zhou found it standing at the stream to drink. In the slanting light its shape seemed thinner, as if wrapped in a wisp of mist. It turned and looked at him, calm and unhurried, exactly as on the day they first met. Something in Zhou's chest went hollow all at once, though he could not have said why.
At dawn the next day, Black Gu was gone. The shed stood empty, the halter still hung on its post. Zhou searched the whole hollow and found nothing. He sat on the threshold, not weeping, only lost in a long stillness.
After that, the fields of Green Creek Hollow were the same few acres, and Zhou plowed and reaped alone. Yet each evening he would glance toward the shed, as if he could still hear Black Gu's low rumble in the wind—soft, neither near nor far.
The next spring, someone found a calf at the mouth of the hollow: solid black, horns not yet grown, eyes startlingly bright. When it looked at a person, it was calm and unhurried, like an old acquaintance. Zhou led it home.