The Tiger Matchmaker

At the foot of Green Cliff Ridge lived Old Cui. All his life a hunter, he had grown stiff in the legs with age and opened a small herb plot at the ridge's foot, gathering Solomon's seal and eleuthero to sell the apothecary. His wife died early, leaving one daughter, A-ling, who at sixteen took a fever and did not survive. Old Cui buried her in the pines halfway up the ridge and lived on alone.

Years before, Old Cui had done a deed of mercy. On the ridge he came upon a great striped tiger, a bone lodged in its throat, sprawled gasping; seeing a man it did not flee, only watched him with its eyes. Cui steeled himself, reached into the great maw, and worked the bone free. The tiger swallowed, regarded him a long moment, then turned and vanished into the trees, never looking back. He told no one.

The first winter after A-ling's burial, a tiger came to the ridge — yet harmed no one, only lay by the girl's grave, half a day at a stretch. The town feared to climb, but Cui went twice with food, setting steamed cakes on the grave stone; the tiger would not touch them till he had gone, then carry them off. In time even Cui grew used to it, and every first and fifteenth he steamed one cake extra to bring.

The next twelfth month brought a snow unseen in years. Yu Sheng, a young herb peddler from beyond the ridge, greedy to make distance, lost his way in the storm and sank into a snow hollow, near frozen. In a fog he felt himself taken by the armpits — not a hand, something — lifted from the ground, wind roaring past, a hot rank breath at his ear. He thought himself finished.

He woke in Cui's herb shed. He lay on the kitchen threshold, the snow beaten from him, his pack of dry herbs still tucked inside his coat. Cui said he had stepped out at night and found a tiger setting him gently at the door; it turned and left, leaving great plum-blossom tracks in the snow, leading up to A-ling's grave.

Yu Sheng mended over a few days and could stand. He meant to take leave, but Cui kept him: "The snow has sealed the pass; you'll not walk twenty li. Stay, and give an old man a hand." Yu Sheng stayed, helping dry herbs, split wood, clear snow. A quiet, decent young man, he said little but worked well; Cui watched, and came to count him half a son.

When spring thaw came, Yu Sheng spoke again of leaving. That day Cui spoke plain: "I'll not hide it. My dead daughter A-ling, had she lived, would be just your age. That tiger — it carried you here to keep me company. It stands as matchmaker for my dead girl: to take you in as a son-in-law, to tend my old age in her stead. If you will, I'll truly call you son-in-law; if not, count it a chance meeting, and I'll see you well supplied."

Yu Sheng thought of the hot breath in the snow that had borne him yet not harmed, and of the tracks at the grave, and his eyes warmed; he knelt and called Cui father. Cui had long kept A-luo, a neighbor's girl entrusted to him — A-ling's cherished sworn sister in life, now of marriageable age. On an auspicious day Yu Sheng wed A-luo. Cui set A-ling's tablet above the table and said: your sister is watching.

The tiger came down no more. Only each year around A-ling's death day, a long call would rise from the ridge — not loud, not harsh, drifting, as if asking: are you all well? Cui would face the ridge and pour a cup of wine, saying nothing.

Yu Sheng later took the herb plot and fathered two children. Once his little daughter pestered him about the tiger on the ridge; he pointed to the tablet on the altar and said: "That is your eldest aunt. What the tiger entrusted to the mortal world was not only her father, but the warmth of this whole house."

The Chronicler remarks: the tiger could not read, yet knew to repay a kindness; men often recite the classics and forget their root. Cui spared a tiger, and the tiger spared Cui's house — in the giving and the returning, a strange marriage was made. It seems the surest matchmaker between heaven and earth need not be human at all.