During the game, the owner talked with his wife about business matters; this was a sort of nervous habit with him. Mostly he complained in advance of bad luck he expected to have. With a really profound pessimism he catalogued the setbacks he would surely encounter.

“After this trip our Noise Suppressor is going to leave us,” the owner gloomily said, among other things, to Su-ling.

“Has he told you that?” she asked. I saw a brief flicker of alarm and dismay in her eyes—but I had seen all the way up the river what skill she had in hiding her feelings; and in a moment there was no sign of what the Old Big’s words had done to her.

“He has said nothing; I feel it.”

“Because of what? Does he think we give him bad rice?”

“It’s not that.”

“Doesn’t he like us?”

“He likes us,” the owner said, with an unpleasant squint, bearing down harder than he needed to on the plural pronoun.

“Perhaps it is just a mood that will leave him in a few days,” Su-ling said, and she looked hastily at me, and I knew what she meant—that Old Pebble would be all right as soon as I got off the junk.

“No, this is not a passing mood.”

“What is it?” Su-ling asked.

“He is tired of the river. He hates the Great River.”

I was so surprised to hear the owner say this, for I thought him very wrong, that I found myself blurting out some kind of contradiction.

“What do you know about the river?” he asked, turning on me.

I said, not much, but that I knew a little about people, and that I had been spending a great deal of time watching the head tracker on this trip, and that he seemed to me a rarely happy man.

Just then the junk trembled, the bells called, and instead of running forward the owner responded with a thrust of anger at me. “I hear you have mad ideas about putting a mountain into a gorge and interfering with the Great River,” he said. I looked quickly at Su-ling, who must have told the owner about my idea of a dam in Witches’ Mountain Gorge; she innocently regarded me, with the face of a child who remembers only virtuous acts. With a terrible scorn the junkmaster threw a question at me: “What makes you think you could lift a mountain?”

“In my country we have machinery…,” I humorlessly began, but he cut me off, addressing Su-ling.

“Our Noise Suppressor has had enough. He wants to be a farmer now. He wants to watch yellow rape blow in the wind. He wants to get wet only up to his ankles”—in rice paddies, I supposed the owner meant.