She packed her basket and disappeared into the woods.

Angelica returned to the clinic. She’d walked a lot today, but apparently she’d just been circling around the clinic. Blue Mountain, Blue Village, the old doctor Lin Baoguang, the publisher of the medical journal, Blue and her husband . . . Angelica tried to link them together, but she couldn’t find a way to do that. For some reason, the beautiful young woman she met on the bus kept appearing in her mind. Was she an insider, too? Angelica felt her blood boiling. She was transforming her life. A cause was opening up before her and waiting for her to join in. She’d been searching for this for years, hadn’t she? Look at that acacia: Wasn’t it sending her noontime’s message?

Little birds with black crests chirped merrily.

Once more, Angelica heard the voice which she had thought was Dr. Lin’s.

“When you enter the mountains, hold your head high as you walk ahead.”

The sound echoed at the window, and Angelica saw the acacia tree nodding.

Angelica thought that she could not break out and arrive at Blue Village because she didn’t have the faith that she could do so. If she had lived like Blue and her husband, perhaps she would have been sitting in the Blue villagers’ homes and chatting with the villagers. She had been a little indecisive since childhood. This time she had surprised her mother by going away from home. What kind of life were Blue and her husband leading? Angelica couldn’t tell, but she knew that they were very different from her. Angelica wasn’t sure whether she would eventually fit in at Blue Village. She wished so much that old Dr. Lin Baoguang had appeared before her.

Angelica stared at the window, but the voice stopped.

In her imagination, the people in Blue Village were cooking dinner, and the cooking smoke was curling up from the kitchen chimneys in the valley. It was a bucolic scene of a farming village. She made up her mind: at sunrise the next day she would take one direction and charge into the mountains with her head held high.

Dusk came, and all kinds of little birds hopped about among the branches. The copperwood looked very lively, but the acacia tree was a little sleepy.

“Who wants to come in?” cried Angelica mischievously.

No one answered. She took the dry food out of her knapsack and laid it on the table. Then she filled a glass of water (she believed it was spring water) from the faucet in the room. She was about to sit down to dinner.

“What a wonderful life!” she sighed.

Then she remembered Blue’s husband sitting by the roadside playing with stones. She thought, Late-stage liver ascites disease was nothing to a Blue villager. A feeling of fearlessness came over her.

14
Kay Comes to Yun Village

“Just now I saw a star fall down. I think it was him.”

“So shall we go to the county seat?”