Yes, this variable work was obviously a delight to the head tracker. Yet I saw him, more than once, in those days, after a meal or in the early evening, altogether composed, huddled up like a great-grandmother, with a pensive face and a hint of easy-paced melancholy in his eyes. I found him one evening before dark lying on his stomach on the deck lining up a dozen peach pits, which he had been drying for the sake of their almond-like meat, in a row, and with a single chopstick flipping one over the others along the row, in a kind of tiddlywinks, and he seemed satisfied quite alone with this game for more than an hour. Yet I found that he was amazingly cultured, for he owned somewhat the same rather disturbing fund of folklore and history and myth as Su-ling; I suppose what made me persist in thinking him simple in spite of this education was the fact that his learning had all been acquired orally. I guess I thought book-learning the only true enlightenment. I remember sitting by one evening while Su-ling taught him some lines by a poet of the T’ang dynasty, Tu Fu, entitled Unable to Visit Judge Wang Owing to Rain. Taught him? She recited the poem once, then he perfectly repeated it, and some time later, asking her if he still had it right, pronounced it again to her without a single mistake. His mildness was deceptive. It made him seem nerveless and phlegmatic—until various crises arose, such as that when, doubling as pilot, he had tended toward the wrong sluice at New Rapids, or such as an incident which occurred a few days later in Witches’ Mountain Gorge, when the young farmer boy slipped and got his foot caught between two boulders; during these crises the head tracker gave way to explosions of swiftness and violent motion, which then seemed to me mere animal reflexes, but which I now regard as having been examples of almost perfect concord between perception and action. What could be more civilized than that harmony? I remember now that he was a hypochondriac, with many a quaintly expressed anxiety about decaying muscles and shriveling tendons, but then I saw him only as a package of wonderful rhythmic power. He had a strange, halting grace, and I loved to watch him fill, tamp, light, and smoke his pipe, with its tiny brass bowl and a stem nearly three feet long—of such a length, he once said, that he could take a light from a passing junk.