The mountain's oldest name was Lupan — the deer that climbs. Later generations called it Liupan, and forgot the deer. The deer did not forget.
Old Ma lived alone at its foot. Ten years a widower; a son driving trucks in Yinchuan, home once a year; three rooms of rammed earth, one of them with a fallen roof. In the courtyard stood an old elm whose shade covered everything, and beneath it two vats — one catching rain, one fermenting sour greens. His mornings had the shape of ceremonies: sweep the elm seeds from the ground, light the stove, stir the morning pot.
Stirring is the whole art of that country. The dish is called jiaotuan — corn or buckwheat flour thrown into boiling water, stirred without pause, because the moment you stop it clots. Old Ma had stirred for decades, and his wrist had acquired a rhythm that was neither fast nor slow, the wooden spoon circling the pot's floor while the porridge thickened and breathed, bubbles breaking and rising like springs in a marsh. When the spoon could stand upright in the pot, it was done.
That morning it was done. He ate slowly — he had always eaten slowly; his wife used to scold him that one bowl took him half the morning. Nobody scolded now. He finished, soaked the bowls, took his carrying pole, and went down to the Jing River for water. The river comes out of the mountain's stone seams, cold enough in June to hurt.
He had dipped the buckets when he saw the deer.
A sika deer, on the far bank, drinking. He went still. Seventy years in these mountains and never so close — close enough to see the pink down inside its ears, close enough to see his own reflection standing bent in the wet of its eye, together with the river, together with the mountain.
The deer raised its head. It was not the look of an animal about to flee. It was the look of something recognizing him — or of something looking at nothing at all.
Then it turned uphill. A few steps. It stopped, and looked back.
The water was overflowing the buckets, running down his trousers, and he did not notice. He set down the pole. He set down the buckets. He followed.
It was no path at all; deer go where men cannot. Thorns drew a thin line of blood across his hand, and he let them. The deer moved and halted, moved and halted; when it halted he leaned on his knees and breathed; when it moved he followed. June on Liupan is green to the point of blackness — pine upon pine, sunlight falling through in broken green coins that stitched themselves like embroidery down the deer's back.
The mountain grew steeper. The pines thinned. Then the trees were gone, and there was only the summit, and wind — not a soft wind but one that struck the face full, so that his eyes filled with tears of nothing but weather.
When he lowered his hand, the deer was gone.
He stood alone on the top of the world: grass, stone, sky; clouds so low they brushed his head. East: the ranges of Pingliang, green darkening into gray-blue into sky. West: the loess of Xihaigu, a thousand gullies and ten thousand ravines, blinding yellow in the afternoon.
He had climbed here once before, forty years ago, when his wife was alive and their son could barely walk. She scolded him the whole way up — a good life at home, and he wants mountains — and at the top she stopped scolding, sat holding the child, and said, with red eyes: this mountain is so large. After that day none of them ever came again.
On the summit he grew hungry — not the emptiness of the stomach, but another hunger, as though the climb had hollowed him and something must be put back. He found wild onions in a crevice, and thyme hugging the stone, and young ferns, and carried them down in the hem of his shirt. As though the deer had led him up for this.
That night he dreamed he was still climbing, the deer ahead, hoofbeats on stone, the path narrowing until there was no path, no deer — only a vast whiteness. Not cloud. Not light. Whiteness like the bottom of a porcelain bowl.
At dawn he swept the courtyard, as always. He did not make jiaotuan. He rolled noodles — buckwheat and wheat, three to seven — and poured over them the hot sour broth with ferns and a spoon of sesame oil, and the oil met the broth with a hiss that filled his face with steam.
He tasted it. And he smiled — not at any thought; just the smile that rises by itself from the corner of the mouth when a bowl of noodles is exactly right.
He did not know where the deer had gone. He did not know why it had looked back, why it had led him up, whether his wife, wherever she was, had seen him standing on the summit. What is not known is not known.
He washed one bowl and one pair of chopsticks, thoroughly — rim, base, tips.
Outside, the Liupan Mountains stood quietly in the morning light, green and green, high past the sight of any top.