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THE SKY WAS a beautiful clear blue. The sun hadn’t yet made an appearance, but the chaotichorizon on that early-winter morning was infused with a blinding red light when Old Geng shotat a red fox with a fiery¹ torch of a tail. Old Geng had no peers among hunters in Saltwater Gap,where he bagged wild geese, hares, wild ducks, weasels, foxes, and, when there was nothing elsearound, sparrows. In the late autumn and early winter, enormous flocks of sparrows flew overNortheast Gaomi Township, a shifting brown cloud that rolled and tumbled above the boundlessland. At dusk they returned to the village, where they settled on willows² whose naked, yellowinglimbs drooped³ earthward or arched skyward. As the dying red rays of the evening sun burnedthrough the clouds, the branches lit up with sparrows’ black eyes shining like thousands ofgolden sparks. Old Geng picked up his shotgun, squinted⁴, and pulled the trigger. Two sparrowscrashed to the ground like hailstones as shotgun pellets tore noisily through the branches.
Uninjured sparrows saw their comrades hit the ground and flapped their wings, rising into the airlike shrapnel sent flying high into a lethargic⁵ sky.
Father had eaten some of Old Geng’s sparrows when he was young. They were delicious.
Three decades later, my older brother and I went into the sorghum⁶ field and engaged some craftysparrows in a heated battle. Old Geng, who was already over seventy by then and lived alone as apensioner, was one of our most revered⁷ villagers. Asked to speak at meetings to air grievancesagainst the old order, he invariably stripped to the waist onstage to show his scars. ‘The Japsbayoneted me eighteen times,’ he’d say, ‘until you couldn’t see my skin for all the blood. But Ididn’t die, and you know why? Because I was protected by a fox fairy. I don’t know how long Ilay there, but when I opened my eyes all I could see was a bright-red light. The fox fairy waslicking my wounds.’

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