Harpoons Against the Swelling Mud

Could three baskets of split eel keep thirty mouths alive if the river drove the clan from the bank before nightfall? Meng Chunhua dug her bare heels into the yellow mud of the drying knoll, hauling a wicker crate away from the brown foam. Behind her, the smoke-frames creaked under the weight of river catch, stilts submerged four inches into the current. She wanted the cured coils lashed into the canoes, every basket secured and every green diver accounted for, before the silt drowned their only winter reserve.

"Drop that lash and I will skin you with an oyster shell, Lu Kaicheng," she barked, not turning around. "Tie the hemp twice around the cross-pole. If a basket slips into the reeds, you dive till midnight to dredge it back."

The boy scrambled through the slop, his thin ribs heaving. "Aunt Chunhua, the current is too fast. Dingyuan’s blood was still slick on the weir-poles when we cut loose. What if whatever took him is swimming under the pontoons?"

"Fish bite what they see, and ghosts bite fools who stand around shivering," Chunhua snapped. She jammed her elk-femur pry-lever beneath a leaning stilt, heaving the soaked frame back from the river's edge. Her right knee burned with an ache from forty seasons of river damp, but she kept her footing. "Dingyuan died because he was slow. Haul the cedar ropes, wrap the wicker tight, and load the stern first."

Two apprentice divers hauled a second wicker hamper toward the waiting dugouts. The two cedar canoes rocked against their stakes, hulls riding high over the shallows.

A sharp snap cracked through the cane brake thirty paces upriver. It was not the hollow pop of splitting bamboo under flood pressure. It was the dry break of timber crushed by weight.

Chunhua froze, her hand sliding down the ash shaft of her spear. At the tip sat the heavy pike-bone harpoon head stripped from Wu Dingyuan’s belt an hour earlier, its three serrated wavy lines lashed with oiled sinew to her hardwood pole. The bone point was balance-weighted, broad enough to split turtle shell and barbed to hold fast against thrashing meat.

Out of the yellow reeds, four marsh wolves stepped onto the mud shelf.

They were not lean hunters from the refuse heaps. Their humps swelled with knotted red runners breaking through hide like crimson earthworms. Along their snouts, pale gristled flaps fluttered in the damp air—soft folds shaped like human ears, quivering with every wet breath. Their eyes were milky, clouded by film, yet their heads turned in unison toward the oily scent of the smoking racks.

The largest of the four, a beast with scarred flanks and half its ribcage bound in creeping flint-barbs, lowered its muzzle. A thick rattle vibrated in its throat, accompanied by a sharp acoustic click that resonated against the hollow reeds.

"Wolves," one of the boys whispered, dropping a coil of cord into the muck. "Grandmother, look at their snouts. They have no eyes."

"Pick that cord up before I break your collarbone," Chunhua said in a flat rasp. She stepped down from the platform, planting both feet wide in the mud. "Kaicheng, take the pine brand from the fire trench. Hold it high. The other two, get those three baskets of cured eel into the dugouts now. Look at your knots, not the grass."

The pack moved with a jerky cadence, joints stiffened by foreign fiber. The alpha took two paces forward, its nostrils flaring as its ear-petals drank the heat rising from the smudge pit.

Kaicheng snatched a smoking branch of pitch-pine from the hearth pit, swinging it in wide arcs. "Stay back, mangy curs! Back into the silt!"

The second wolf lunged without a growl. It disregarded the waving flames entirely, snapping its jaws shut inches from the boy’s hip. Kaicheng yelped, stumbling backward into the sludge, and the burning pine brand slipped from his fingers, nearly landing across the dry grass of his own loincloth.

Chunhua moved before the torch hissed out in the muck.

She closed the distance in two splashing strides, driving the butt of her spear into the wolf’s snout. Hard ash wood cracked against bone. The beast staggered, shaking its head with unnatural persistence, but before it could recover, Chunhua brought the pike-bone tip down in a diagonal sweep. The barbed point caught the beast behind its front shoulder, tearing through hide and slicing the thick cord of its front leg tendon. Black, curdled fluid spattered across her reed sandals.

"Pick the fire up, you useless lump of river scum!" she roared at Kaicheng, hauling the spear back with a spray of dark sludge. "Keep the flame between them and the canoes!"

Kaicheng scrambled on his knees, clutching the smoldering brand with both hands and thrusting it straight into the face of a third wolf flanking the dugout. The beast recoiled from the stinging sparks, snapping blindly at the smoke.

The alpha did not flinch from the fire. It stepped past its crippled pack-mate, belly skimming the mud. The creature was heavy-boned, its chest distended where red briers wrapped tight around the ribcage. It locked its milky gaze onto Chunhua.

The mud shelf was treacherous; a direct charge would carry her backward into deep water, where her stiff knee would fail against the suction. Ten paces to her left, an old cypress stump rose from the shallows, roots notched deep into riverbed clay.

Chunhua retreated three deliberate steps, splashing through rising foam until her left heel struck the petrified root. She dropped her hips, seating the rounded butt of her ash spear into a groove carved into the stump’s heartwood. She lowered the point, angling the barbed pike-bone straight toward the beast's chest, her forearm locked against her hip.

The alpha launched itself across the mud shelf with the violent propulsion of a released spring. Its jaws parted wide, revealing black gums and teeth tangled with crimson filaments.

Chunhua held the line, anchoring her weight against the solid wood behind her and adjusting the spear’s elevation by two inches.

The wolf’s own hurtling weight did the butchering.

The carved pike-bone point took the beast directly in the left eye socket. The force of the impact jarred up Chunhua’s arms, rattling her collarbones and sending a jolt through her bad knee, but the cypress stump absorbed the brunt of the momentum. The point punched through the eye orbit, cracking through the rear skull plate with a wet crunch.

The beast let out no bark, no yelp of pain. Its heavy body slammed down over the ash shaft, pinning the spear point into the clay. Black marrow bubbled out around the barbed bone head.

Chunhua planted her right heel against the beast’s jaw and shoved with all the strength left in her thighs. The harpoon tore free with a wet suction noise.

"Load the last hamper!" she shouted over the river roar. "Into the canoes, all of you!"

The two remaining wolves, seeing their pack leader twitching in the mire, turned and vanished into the high reeds, their red runners trailing through the water like broken fishing lines.

Kaicheng and the two apprentice divers hoisted the third heavy wicker basket over the cedar gunwale, tumbling into the canoes behind the provisions.

"Aunt Chunhua, get in!" Kaicheng cried, extending an ash paddle toward her. "The channel is spilling over the banks!"

Chunhua waded through the rushing current, water reaching her waist as she reached the stern of the leading canoe. With a grunt that tore from her chest, she hoisted herself over the cedar rim, dragging her spear and hide pouch into the hull. The two canoes caught the main flow, drifting away from the inundated mud shelf toward the deeper water of the mid-channel.

Three baskets of smoked eel sat secure under tight hemp lashings. The canoes were whole, the four fishers alive.

Chunhua rested her chin on the cool wood of the gunwale, catching her breath in ragged draws. Her palms were blistered from the ash shaft, and river mud dried into a crust along her neck.

Behind them, the dead alpha lay pinned against the cypress root, half-submerged in the swirling yellow foam.

The river current lifted the wolf’s limp flank, rocking the carcass against the wood. As muddy water poured into its opened, brier-choked chest cavity, the trapped air was forced upward through the lacerated throat.

From within the dead beast’s muzzle came a sound.

It was not a beast's dying rasp. It was a thin whimper, rising and falling with the rhythm of the river swell. A child’s weeping voice, wet with phlegm and hoarse with cold, crying out the two-note syllables of a name Chunhua had not spoken aloud since the winter floods took her grandson.

Chunhua’s knuckles turned bone-white against the ash paddle. She did not look back. She dug the blade into the brown water and pulled with all the fury left in her aged arms, driving the canoe into the rain-slick dark.