The head tracker and the cook walked with stilted, formal pace, like that of dancers, to the very bow. The head tracker seemed priest, the cook his acolyte. Old Pebble, who was unusually heavy-bearded for a Chinese, had not shaved since the start of our journey, and his whole gay head seemed to bristle with a quarter-inch stubble, all over his chin and cheeks and shorn crown. The two men moved with grotesque stateliness, each gesture a studied caricature of a gesture, their wrists twisting unnaturally, their knees slightly bent as if they were stalking something elusive. All the time they grinned at each other like a pair of practical jokers preparing a malicious hoax. The head tracker stamped his foot and clicked his tongue, to show that even ritual has rhythm. The owner and Su-ling came out of their cabin and stood at the after end of the deckhouse arch, watching. The nearby rapids roared.

Suddenly, with a magician’s flourish, the cook drew from the cotton girth that held up his trousers a short knife and handed it to the head tracker, who braced himself to take it as if it were some mighty Emperor’s many-battled sword, and then giggled at his own buffoonery.

This was strange worship! The priests were laughing at the rite and at themselves; yet surely it was devoutly intended, for all were evidently in awe of the rapids and would understandably want any supernatural aid they could wangle for the ascent. Stranger yet was the god, about whom Su-ling had told me one day downriver. The river-guarding god, Chien-chiang Wang Te, was not, it seemed, a being imagined by river folk in mystery, fear, and yearning, but was in fact the apotheosis of a human rascal, the deification of a twelfth-century pirate of the Great River whose only claim to divinity, Su-ling had told me, was unending success; he could not fail in his mischievous undertakings—until, at last, meeting defeat in very old age, he plunged into the waters of Tungting Lake and drowned himself. So perhaps these roguish priests were suitable after all; and perhaps, it occurred to me, this wanton traffic on the wild rapids and in the profound gorges of the Great River was a kind of mischief, and perhaps it was fitting to ask success in it from a master knave.

The cook, swiftly passing his hand over the comb and hackle of the cock, fixed his broad right thumb onto the end of the bird’s beak and doubled back the head until it nested on the back-feathers between the wings.

The head tracker stepped forward and, making an exaggerated face of care, slit the crimson throat.