Party Voucher

2

In late March, Ming was chosen to be a forest ranger. After some guided practice, he became reasonably familiar with the routes in addition to the requirements for his new post.

The day he began to patrol on his own, he felt both lonely and nervous. To overcome fear and loneliness, he brought with him his cheap bamboo flute so he could play it whenever he wanted to. Walking along barely discernible trails and checking around everywhere on a regular basis, he soon developed a deep love for trees and hills. Listening to the wind howling through pine trees surging like sea waves, seeing distant hills rolling with red glows at sunrise or sunset, smelling the fresh air with the flavor of grass or mushrooms, tasting some wild berries as sweet as they were sour and bitter, he came to find his life as a ranger much more enjoyable than he had imagined. Whenever he felt too tired to go on patrolling, he would stop and hide himself among the bushes like a hunter. When it happened to rain cats and dogs, he would hung his big wood-oil-painted paper umbrella on the twigs and made himself a cozy shelter. This was the time he felt most peaceful. For some reason unclear to himself, he liked to take a nap by lying upside down on a grave mound on a sunny afternoon, with his head pillowed on a stone at its bottom and his four limps reaching out straight to make his whole body look like the Chinese character meaning “big”. Once, this favored body posture of his scared a group of young woman passers-by to death. Of course, he never meant to act like a corpse having come back to life, as superstitious villagers tended to believe.

One evening, after he returned to the base, Secretary Shao said to him, “You’ve been doing a quite good job as a new ranger, because you never slack off, though without any supervision. Anyway, we expected nothing less.”

“But…?” Ming asked in a nervous voice.

“Well, you shouldn’t have played your flute or sung any songs while patrolling around. That signaled your presence to potential lumber robbers. Don’t you know better than this?” Shao answered with a rhetorical question. Clearly, he was far from really satisfied with Ming’s work performance.

“Sorry for my oversight!” Ming said, “I’ll try to do a better job.”

After this short conversation, Ming became more attentive to his duties. Instead of enjoying his solitary hikes in treed hills, he now kept a close eye to anything or anybody looking suspicious to him, though he seldom saw a human, not even an animal bigger than a wild chick or rabbit.

On a dark night in early summer, he was stumbling along and groping his way back to his small shed on a hilltop to sleep as usual when he suddenly spotted a pair of eyes sparkling with a greenish light. It must be a wolf, jackal or coyote as other rangers had mentioned. In response, he stopped right away, took a squatting position behind a tree, and fumbled around with his hands for a rock, a broken twig, or something hard he could use for self-defense, but found nothing except grass and dirt. He decided to wait for the animal to turn away and leave of its own accord, yet it showed no intention to budge at all. For God knows how long he and the animal remained still, staring at each other in the darkness like dead enemies, within a distance of approximately four to five meters between them. The thought that the animal might have a much better night vision and thus could see him more clearly than the other way around threw him into an abyss of fear. He did remember a few wushu tricks taught by a friend in high school, but he never practiced them. Moreover, the few movements he did learn well were meant for use on humans rather than wild animals. So, all he could rely on now was the little bodily strength he had acquired as a foster village boy. “Perhaps I could frighten it away somehow,” he thought. With a low but loud voice, which was enhanced by singing at the top of his voice on his recent inspection tours, he believed he could yell the animal away before he had to enter into a close combat. Luckily, after a prolonged hesitation, the animal left the scene reluctantly, and Ming returned to his shelter safe and sound.

However, he was soon to see how civilized humans were much more dangerous and harmful than wild animals. It was a cloudy morning in June. Ming found himself quite lost among gushing mists when he heard noises somewhere half-way down the hill. When he arrived hastily at the scene, he saw three middle aged men cutting down trees with handsaws. Unable to recognize any of them, Ming became strongly suspicious and approached them with caution.

“Hi there! Why are you guys cutting trees here?” he asked.

“Because Director Sun needed some nice wood to build tables and file shelves,” answered one of them in a friendly way, who looked taller, thinner and smarter than others.

Since they knew Sun, the top leader of the farm, the men were evidently locals. To make sure they were not telling lies, Ming went on to ask them if they had any anything written to that effect.

“Sure, come over, and we’ll show you the papers with his signature,” replied a different guy in an encouraging voice.

But hardly had Ming come close to him before the bulky guy swooped upon him and held him with his powerful arms like a bear. Almost at the same time, Ming felt his head or neck hit so hard at the back he lost his consciousness. When he regained it, he found himself tied tightly behind a tall pine with a rope. Unable to see the men behind his back, he heard them moving quickly and leaving the scene without saying another word. By the time he managed to set himself free, all the three men had already disappeared in an unknown direction. Though he could not tell which specific production team they might belong to, he knew for sure that they were illegal tree fellers from the agricultural division of the farm. This was something that had rarely happened when every ranger was equipped with a standard fowling piece. But about two years before, a local ranger used the gun to kill his wife for making him a cuckold and, in consequence, the farm management took back all the pieces. Without any weapon for deterrence or self-defense, every ranger had to rely on his own intelligence and physical power in every dangerous situation they had to face. Young and inexperienced as he was, Ming was doomed to lose in this battle against the “anti-revolutionary elements” as they were commonly called then.

After filing a detailed report on the incident to Secretary Shao, Ming anticipated a harsh criticism for having failed to catch at least one of the bad guys or prevent them from stealing trees, but to his surprise, he received as much praise from Secretary Shao as from Director Sun himself. In their opinion, Ming did his best, for even a well experienced but unarmed adult ranger could not have done better when dealing with several cunning guys alone in the forest. As for the loss of trees, it was minimum since the robbers fled from the scene without being able to cut more trees as they had planned. In Shao’s words, “Ming’s very presence at the scene and determination to investigate the matter had a deterring effect on them.”

A couple of weeks later, he was patrolling among cypress trees when he spotted a small straw-thatched cottage burning close to the foot of the hill. To bring the situation under control and safeguard the forest, he darted to the site and joined the fight against the fire. Though he never mentioned this incident to anyone afterwards, the farm management somehow learned about his heroic deeds and officially recommended him to be one of the handful “red-flagged zhiqing” at the county level.