The cook whirled and bent and aimed the pulsating spurts of blood, darker than the bird, at the top of the beam across the junk’s swim-headed bow, till the arching crimson issue diminished and became a dribble and the red bundle held in the cook’s firm grip let up its spasmodic struggle against the inevitable.

Then, while the cook still held the body, the head tracker tugged at a tail feather as if it were a bamboo hawser with a junk at the far end of it, and in a thin, barely audible whine hummed a snatch from a tracking song, till the feather gave way; he pasted it into the blood on the stem beam. He took others and did the same, until the whole beam was gay with two reds, of death and good luck.

The cook retired to his open-air galley and with astonishing dexterity plucked and gutted the fowl and threw it into an already boiling pot, and when the meat was done he brought helpings in a bowl and offered them to the owner, who declined, and to Su-ling, who with the same decisiveness turned the offer down, and even to me, and I was not so stupid as to accept, for I could see that some formula was being worked out. So the cook and the head tracker sat down then alone to their tender portions of graft, and washing down the sweet flesh with rice brandy at what must have been barely seven o’clock in the morning, they guffawed and got drunk over a rollicking hearty breakfast.

—

AFTERWARDS Su-ling came to me and said that the Old Big had decided to disembark the entire cargo of the junk and have it portaged around the rapids, and that he had ordered her to walk around and to take the foreigner, me, with her.

I was glad to hear this. I would have the pleasure of Su-ling’s company all day, and I would be relieved of playing a rôle in the ascent, about which, I confess, I had been none too easy myself. I supposed that the owner’s sending me ashore was more to get rid of a possible source of bad luck than to bestow security on a person of some worth.