A Single Pebble by John Hersey

Author:John Hersey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

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IN ONE day we passed the first two of the twelve peaks of Witches’ Mountain, and we were deep in the gorge. The water level was rising fast. The owner was taut, and the men jumpy and fractious.

We had passed a bleak, filthy village on a narrow limestone ledge, called Peishih, which means “Back to the Rock,” clinging to the cliffs like an Alpinist who has lost his nerve; then soon, not far beyond it, I remember, we saw a mountain stream in whose glen nested a tranquil evergreen grove, a picture almost too delicately composed for this rugged part of China, more like a memory-scene from a Japanese screen. Thus the sudden changes of the gorges.

The head tracker was driving his men with a relentless urgency that was spurred, I suppose, by the rise of the river. He was pressing his men perhaps too hard.

While tracking with the others over an enormous heap of fallen rock, the young farmer boy who was making his first passage as a junkman, the lackluster youth whom the head tracker had thrashed downriver because he had turned over the fish in his bowl, had the misfortune to make a misstep and to slip and wedge his ankle between two boulders, so that he gave himself great pain and, apparently thinking himself dying as he began to faint, let loose a frightful shriek. His echo, fugitive along the faces of the gorge, called pitifully back and back and back to us until it died in the distance.

Hearing the scream, Old Pebble responded with one of those seeming animal reflexes; if he thought at all of what he was doing and would do, it must have been as he moved.

Because of the narrowing of the stream by the heap of rocks the current at that place was rather swift, and the trackers were having to work fairly hard to keep the junk moving—though this was not nearly the strain they were to feel a few days later during certain moments in Wind-Box Gorge about which I must sooner or later speak.

The instant Old Pebble heard the boy’s fearful cry, and long before the last reproachful echoes had faded away, he had slipped the sennit of his harness and was springing, with the most extraordinary elastic bounds and foot-clipping short jumps, like grotesque stage leaps and hops, back over the rocks alongside the fan of trackers toward the boy, who was near the ruck of the group. Before the head tracker could reach the boy, the advance of the other trackers had drawn the boy’s harness tight, and his body had begun to be dragged forward, with his foot still caught in the cleft, with a result that, under the stimulus of stretching and renewed pain, he had revived and was crying out in agony.

The drag of the boy’s harness on the towline meant that his sennit could not be slipped free.

The head tracker, leaping like a rock goat along the way, saw

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