The two wolves in the forest had slowly approached them. While his teacher had snapped a thick branch off a tree and brandished it in the wolves’ path, yelling loudly, he had run off toward the village, scared out of his wits, running with all his might. He worried the wolves would go around his teacher and come after him; he worried he would run into another wolf on his way. He ran heaving into the village. Several men assembled with hunting rifles, and he went back with them to look for his teacher. They found him lying in a pool of blood and slush, half of his leg and most of his arm bitten off. His teacher took his final breath on the way to the town hospital, and he saw his teacher’s eyes in a ray of torchlight. A large chunk of his cheek had been bitten off and he was unable to speak, but his eyes expressed an urgent plea, one that he’d understood and remembered.

After he graduated from middle school, he had turned down a promising opportunity to work in the town’s municipal government. Instead, despite having no family or friends there, he returned directly to the mountain village, to the village primary school that his teacher had pleaded with him to save. By the time he returned, the school was abandoned, having had no teacher for several years.

Not long before that, the Board of Education had begun enforcing a policy that replaced community teachers with state-supported teachers. Some community teachers were able to obtain state support by taking a test. He passed that test and got his teaching certificate, and when he found out he was a licensed, state-supported teacher, he was happy, but that was the extent of his reaction. Other members of his cohort had been elated. But he didn’t care whether he was a community teacher or a state-supported teacher; he only cared about the classes of children who would graduate from his primary school and go out into the world. Regardless of whether they left the mountains or stayed, their lives would be different in some way from the lives of children who had never gone to school.