Riding the Iron Rooster

Meanwhile I was bird-watching. It was one of the few places in China where the trees were full of birds. They were tiny flitting things, and very high in the branches. My problem was that I could only use my binoculars with bare hands, so that I could adjust the focus. The temperature was in the minus thirties, which meant that after a few minutes my fingers were too cold to use for adjustments. Yet even in this bitter cold there was bird song, and the whole forest chattered with the tapping of woodpeckers.

"Mr. Tian, can you sing something?" I asked.

"I can't sing Mao's Thoughts."

"Sing something else."

He suddenly snatched his woolly cap off and shrieked:

Oh, Carol!

I am but a foooool!

Don't ever leave me—

Treat me mean and croool...

He sang it with extraordinary passion and energy, this old Neil Sedaka rock-and-roll song, and when he was done, he said, "That's what we used to sing at Harbin University when I was a student!"

There was no wind, and the only sound in the forest was that of the birds—chirping, twittering, pecking the trunks. Mr. Tian and Mrs. Jin saw some smoke on a hill not far away and decided to go investigate it. I carried on plodding and bird-watching. I saw a number of Marsh Tits and three kinds of woodpecker. I was looking for the chicken-sized Great Black Woodpecker. I saw a pair of treecreepers making their way up a trunk, their feathers fluffed out. It delighted me to see these tiny birds were impervious to the cold.

Then I heard the unmistakable crack of a gun going off. I turned around and saw Ying, the driver, rushing into a thicket and retrieving a dead bird. He had a gun! I tramped back along the path just as he was cramming the bird into his pocket.

"What are you doing?"

"Look, a bird," he said, fairly pleased with himself. His rifle was a single shot .22, straight out of a shooting gallery.

"What are you going to do with that bird?"

It was a rosefinch. I had it in my hand now. It was very soft and very tiny, and in this region of dull smoldering cold, the dead bird was still warm. It was like holding an extravagant hors d'oeuvre.

Mr. Ying perhaps detected a hostility in my voice. He did not reply.

"Are you going to eat this bird?"

He looked down and kicked the snow like a scolded child.

There was nothing to eat. I was sure he was killing the birds for the fun of it.

"Why are you shooting birds, Mr. Ying?"

He did not look at me; he was sulking, losing face.

"I don't like killing birds," I said. "This is a nice bird. This is a pretty bird. And now it's a dead bird."

And I was angry, too, because I had not known this gunslinger was behind me, blasting away. I had thought I was in the wilderness. But I had already said too much. Mr. Ying looked as though he wanted to shoot me. I put the tiny rosefinch into his hand and I walked away. When I looked back I saw him stamping on the path, making his way to the road. I could not see Mr. Tian or Mrs. Jin, though I saw what they had been chasing—a tree burning on a hillside, a great thrill, a useless fire.

I went deeper into the forest on my own and saw more birds—great flitting clusters of woodpeckers. You would see as many birds on an average day in Sandwich, Mass., but this was tamed, poisoned, unsentimental and ravenous China, the most populous and domesticated country on earth: on seeing a wild bird the Chinese person invariably licked his lips.

It was an unusual place for China. Pretty birds singing and skittering among tall, thick trees, and no other human in sight.

There was no danger in carrying on here. My footprints in the snow made it impossible for me to get lost. I kept on for another hour or so and saw a plume of smoke. Even when I was near it I could not make out what it was. It seemed to be an underground fire. When I was on top of it I saw that it came from a deep hole in the ground. In the bottom of the hole three Chinese girls were warming themselves over a fire. I said hello and they looked up at a long-nosed barbarian in a silly hat and mittens and a coat bulging with layers of sweaters. They looked truly startled, as though I might be a Siberian who had wandered over the border, which was indeed only about eighty miles away. They emitted the characteristic Chinese gasp, Ai-yaaaah.

"What are you doing?"

"It is our lunch break!"

They climbed out of the hole to look at me. They were wearing padded jackets and felt boots, and scarves over their heads and faces.

They said they were working here, and showed me where they were planting seedlings behind windbreaks. The loggers had come and gone, and whole hillsides had been cut down. The idea was that in another three hundred years or so the forest would be replaced and ready for recutting. With China's record for acid rain this prospect seemed unlikely. But the windbreaks were elaborate, like many rows of hedges lying parallel on the hillside; the overall impression was one of lines on a contour map.