It was here at the mouth of Yellow Cat Gorge that I first saw the trackers at work, as we had too little wind to sail against the constricted current; and it was here, therefore, that I first noticed the head tracker. As the lugsail was taken in and the junk was rowed toward the left bank by a squad of trackers, I noticed that one of them, a lumpy, broad-faced fellow with a shaven head, who was dressed in new blue cotton pants and a drab ragged jacket, took the lead in all that was done. From his powerful larynx to his square feet, this man, whom the owner addressed with a nickname, Old Pebble, seemed to be one whole, rhythm-bound muscle. Everything he did had rhythm. As he gave orders on board the junk, he kicked his feet on the slapping unbolted planks of the deck; he punctuated what he said with tongue-clicks; his hands moved in rope-pulling gestures, all in time with his cadenced speech. His head was spherical, and he had the crow’s feet of cheerfulness all the way from his narrow eyes back to his ears. I have never been able to tell with certainty how old a Chinese is; I would guess that this one was in his mid-thirties. At any rate, the “Old” of his nickname was surely an affectionate term; he seemed young and strong. I saw that he wore a silver ring, and although his hands had no more grace than monkey-wrenches, he had let his fingernails grow rather long, in the old style, evidently to show that he was of the boatmen’s nobility.

That evening, after we had made perhaps ten miles between amazing limestone battlements, turrets, and buttresses, towed every inch of the way by the chanting trackers, with the one called Old Pebble out in front, singing weird rhythmic melodies—that evening, when we were securely moored in a little eddying cove at the head of Yellow Cat Gorge, I spoke to the head tracker. He received me openly and without deference.

I began to question him about his life.

“I pull the towline,” he said, and stopped, as if to say: What more is there? What more could there be?

But, I asked, what of the future?

“I have very little,” he said, and he spoke as if having little were the greatest fortune, and the greatest buffer against the future, that a man could wish.

Again I tried to ask him what his goal was.