The rope handler and two or three of the trackers clapped down their bowls and stood up.

“Bastard!”

“Turtle!”

“Idiot!”

The men were in great earnest, and they showed considerable fear. One of the trackers spat on the boy.

I saw that the owner and Su-ling had come forward.

“He took it and lifted it up and turned it over,” the head tracker cried, his frenzy still at a high pitch, acting out as he shouted the motions of turning over a pan fish in a bowl with a pair of chopsticks.

There were murmuring and agitation among all the trackers.

“It’s done now,” the owner said in a calm voice.

“It’s done, but what’s done!” the head tracker screamed in fury, as if the owner had now aligned himself with the boy and deserved to have his throat squeezed.

“There is no way,” the owner sadly said.

“There is no way! There is no way!” the cook, joining the head tracker’s side, cried in mockery. “Look what’s done! Look what the bastard has done!”

“The boy is a farmer,” the owner said. “He did not know what he was doing.”

“Now tell me,” the cook sarcastically suggested, “that the boy did not know that the river is rising!”

The owner’s eyes turned as if involuntarily toward the riverbank. Then he looked back squarely at the cook and said, as if accepting a dare, “I tell you that the boy did not know the river is rising.”

“Then the boy has balls instead of eyes in his head,” the head tracker retorted.

“The Great River rises every year,” the owner said with a terrible sadness, as if this well-known disastrous fact would calm the men. “Call in the other shift to eat,” he said, to put an end to the undignified debate.

It did not escape me, during these exchanges over the river’s rise, that I had been wrong and blind—that these men, who had seemed so unfeeling, so indifferent, in the face of the river’s awesome terrains and hinted terrors, were, after all, responsive to those things; that they were, moreover, conscious of their progress up the river, and anxious to go a little faster, for they obviously feared the rise of the waters and what might happen to them if they did not reach Wanhsien before the real freshets of spring.

I confess I reflected their anxiety; I had only to look at the floodline far overhead to feel a chill.

Still I was puzzled over the head tracker’s violent reaction to the overturning of the fish, and later I asked Su-ling to explain it to me.

Pale, clearly distressed herself, she answered me in a low voice, “Capsize fish—capsize boat.”