With his chin resting on his front hooves, faint light emanating from his blind eyes, he was sprawled in the cave, the sounds of running water and rustling trees coming from outside.
“What do you think, Old Diao? I’ll do whatever you say.”
He exhaled loudly, the faint light in his eyes now gone. I nudged him. His body was soft; there was no reaction. “Old Diao!” I shouted out of a sense of alarm. “Are you okay? You can’t die on me!”
But he did. Tears sprang from my eyes. I was grief-stricken.
I emerged from the cave and was met by a line of glinting green eyes. A savage glare shot from the eyes of Split Ear, who was crouched in front of the others. I wasn’t afraid. I actually felt totally at ease. With a look of indifference in my eyes, I walked up to him.
“My dear friend Diao Xiaosan is dead,” I said. “I feel just terrible, and I’m willing to abdicate as king.”
That was probably the last thing Split Ear expected to hear, since he had backed up, thinking I was coming for him.
“Of course if you will only be happy by fighting me for it, I’ll happily oblige,” I said.
He just stared at me, trying to figure out what he should do. I weighed over five hundred jin and had a hard head and fearsome teeth. From his point of view, the outcome of a fight with me was anything but certain.
“We’ll do it your way,” he said finally. “But you must leave the shoal immediately and never return.”
I nodded in agreement, waved my hoof at the crowd behind him, turned, and walked off. When I reached the southern edge of the shoal, I stepped into the water, knowing that fifty or more pairs of pig eyes were watching my departure, eyes filled with tears. But I didn’t look back. I started to swim, closing my eyes to let the river wash away my own tears.
35
Flamethrowers Take the Life of Split Ear
Soaring onto a Boat, Pig Sixteen Wreaks Vengeance
About half a month later, the boars living on the shoal were massacred. Mo Yan wrote about the incident in detail in “Tales of Pig-Raising”:
On the third day of January, 1982, a squad of ten men under the command of Zhao Yonggang, an ex-soldier who had distinguished himself in the War with Vietnam, and the highly experienced hunter Qiao Feipeng as an adviser, sailed to the shoal in motorboats. Most hunters stalk their prey by moving stealthily in order to take them by surprise. But not this group; they marched in with clear intentions armed with automatic rifles and armor-piercing bullets that could easily penetrate the hide of a wild boar, armored or not. But the most powerful weapons in their arsenal were three flame throwers, which looked like converted pesticide sprayers once used by farmers on commune fields. They were operated by three battle-tested ex-soldiers in asbestos suits.
Mo Yan continued:
The landing by this squad of hunters was immediately noted by boar scouts. The eyes of Split Ear, newly crowned king, who was eager to go to war with humans to establish his authority, turned red when the report reached him. He immediately called his troops together, two hundred and more of them.
Mo Yan continued with a grisly account of the battle, which was almost more than I, a pig myself, could bear to read:… The battle progressed much like the early encounter, with Split Ear crouching at the head of his force, an echelon of a hundred boars lined up behind him; two additional groups of fifty boars raced to the two flanks to complete the encirclement, with the river as the fourth side. Victory was assured. And yet the humans seemed not to sense the danger they faced. Three of them stood in front, facing east, directly opposite the boar forces and their king, Split Ear. Two men stood to the side, facing south; two more stood on the other side, facing north, opposite the flanking forces. The three men with flamethrowers stood behind the front row, sweeping the area with their eyes, showing no signs of concern. With light-hearted banter they began moving eastward as the boars closed their encirclement. When the humans drew to within fifty yards of Split Ear, Zhao Yonggang ordered his troops to open fire. Assault rifles began shooting at the enemy on three sides. The automatic fire was the sort of military might the boars could never have imagined. At least 140 bullets left seven rifle muzzles within five seconds, felling thirty or more boar warriors, most from head shots, where there was no armor. Split Ear ducked when the first shots were fired, but not in time to keep his good ear from taking a direct hit. Screaming in agony, he charged the hunters straight on, just as the experienced fighters with flamethrowers took three steps forward, sprawled on the ground, and fired, releasing red hot flames and a noise like a hundred geese shitting at the same time. The sticky tips of the flames wrapped around Split Ear and shot ten feet into the air. The king disappeared. The boars to the north and south suffered the same end, thanks in part to the flammabil-ity of the thick layer of pine tar in their armor. Most of the inflamed boars took off running, screaming in agony. Only a few of the smarter ones immediately rolled on the ground instead of running. The remaining boar warriors, those that had escaped both bullets and flames, were paralyzed by fear. Like a swarm of headless flies, they banged and bumped into each other, allowing the hunters to take aim and pick them off one at a time, sending them all down to meet Lord Yama…
Then Mo Yan wrote:
Viewed from the perspective of environmental protection, the slaughter was excessive. The cruelty with which the boars were dispatched cannot be condoned. In 2005, I traveled to Korea and was taken to the Demilitarized Zone, where I saw wild boars frolicking, birds nesting, and egrets soaring above the treetops. I thought back to the massacre at the shoal and experienced deep remorse, even though the boars had been guilty of all sorts of evil. The use of flamethrowers started a fire that consumed all the pine and willow trees on the shoal, not to mention the ground cover. As for the other creatures on the shoal, those with wings flew away, while those confined to the ground escaped either by crawling into burrows or jumping into the river; most, however, burned along with the trees…
I was there among the red willows on the southern bank of the Grain Barge River that day. I heard the pops of rifle fire and the terrifying screams of the wild boars, and, of course, smelled the suffocating fumes that came on winds from the northwest. I knew that if I hadn’t abdicated as king I’d have suffered the same fate as all the other boars, but, strange as it may seem, I was not in a mood to rejoice over my good fortune. I’d rather have died with the boars than live an ignoble life.
After the massacre had ended, I swam back to the shoal, a scene of burned-out trees, incinerated boars, and, along the banks of the river, the bloated carcasses of various critters. My mood vacillated between outrage and grief, with the two emotions gradually coming together, like a two-headed snake attacking my heart from two sides.
I had no thoughts of revenge as overwhelming grief burned inside me, making me as restless as a mentally disturbed soldier on the eve of battle. I swam parallel to the riverbank, following a scent of diesel fuel and the burned hides of wild boars, with the occasional pungent odors of tobacco smoke and cheap liquor mixed in. After a day of tracking the scents, the image of a boat drenched with evil took shape in my head, like a scene emerging from dense fog.
The boat was a dozen yards in length and constructed of steel plates crudely welded together. It was a ponderous, ugly steel monster that was carrying the remnants of a team of ten hunters upriver. The six ex-soldiers who had jobs to return to, having accomplished what they’d come for, had taken a bus back to town. That left the leader, Zhao Yonggang, and the hunters Qiao Feipeng, Liu Yong, and Lü Xiaopo. Thanks to such factors as a population explosion, land scarcity deforestation, and industrial pollution, small game animals had virtually disappeared, and most professional hunters had taken up new trades. These three were the exceptions. They enjoyed an excellent reputation, thanks to their appropriation of the two wolves actually killed by the donkey. The wild boar massacre would add to their prestige and turn them into media darlings. With Diao Xiaosan’s carcass as a trophy, they were steaming upriver to the county town, some hundred or more li away; given the speed of their motorized craft, they could be there that evening. But they chose instead to turn the trip into a victory tour, stopping at every village along the way to give the locals a chance to lay eyes on the body of the Pig King, which they would carry ashore and lay out on the ground for villagers to see. Families of means, those that owned cameras, would invite friends and relatives to have their pictures taken with the dead boar. The tour was followed by print and television journalists sent out from the county town.