We were not going to get to see any Chinese gorals on that mountain. We had not come across any animal trails and we had seen no sign of life. All that was left there was silence, silence that was only broken by the piercing whistling sound of the wind. The silence was terrifying. On the southern side, there was only freezing bare rock, on the northern side, a never melting mass of snow. The wind on the peak reached up to force 7, bone-chillingly cold. Raising my eyes, I could see a vast expanse of land with the sky crisscrossed by clouds. The rocky cliffs loomed overhead and a sombre chill laid over the land. All of this converged to form a kind of great pressure that made one feel unable to get a foothold. Facing such unwelcoming environment, even Jin Pao, who had experienced many life-and-death encounters in the forest, couldn't bear it anymore and urged me over and over again to go down the mountain as quickly as possible.
During those unforgettable seven days we had conse-quently climbed all five peaks. All we saw were the same piles of Chinese goral dung; all we heard was that same kind of terrifying silence. I was afraid that this is a type of fear that originates from within one's inner being: In the seventies, our country was faced with unprecedented calamity. Challenged with social unrest and contortion of human nature, the culture of the whole race rested in the same terrifying silence that I felt all around me now.
What can I do when such a terrible weight is pressing down on me? Maybe finding and studying a Chinese goral is the only comfort to the guilty conscience of an intellectual. It is also the only thing that I could do.
The real sense in being a zoologist is that zoologists discover and research new species of animals that humans have never heard of. They then share the result of their discoveries with the public, in order to make everyone acquainted with their new wild companion and rightly cherish it. But even if I managed to find a Chinese goral, there was no way for me to take any measures to protect it. And then there were the piles upon piles of Chinese goral dung that I even now find it hard to forget about. I would like to get a biochemist to analyse them properly. Foreign experts have already found proof of industrial pollution caused by humans on Mount Everest at an altitude of 6,000 metres. The pH value of the water there is 5.85 which is close to the pH value of acid rain. Also, there has been a proven presence of heavy metal chemical pollutants including cadmium, mercury and arsenic as well as significant quantities of industrial dust. Does the same fate await Changbai Shan? Since for wild animals and plants, industrial and chemical pollution are the two most ferocious invisible killers.
When my father got to this point, he heaved a heavy sigh. He always was of the opinion that people who care about nature and the land will lead a hard life. This has for generations been a characteristic of Chinese intellectuals. My father is a poet. He often said that Mr. Zhao had the potential to be a poet. In many aspects my father and Mr. Zhao were of one mind. On the day they went to the Xianghai Marsh, they were both utterly disgusted upon finding out what the marsh had been turned into. Some government departments had constructed a holiday village there at will. They were drinking, dancing, playing mahjong and vomiting all through the night. They also organized sightseeing activities for themselves. Pleasure boats that blasted out popular songs were cruising back and forth …
When Jin Pao and I first got a glance of the gleaming snow "mushrooms" , our hope was reignited. The way that these snow mushrooms (also called icemushrooms) are formed is really interesting. When herbivorous animals leave a firm footprint behind in the snow, the comparatively softer snow around the edges of the footprint either gets melted by the sun or blown away by the wind. The more tightly packed snow that makes up the actual footprint, however, stays behind, leaving a ten or so centimetre-high snow "mushroom" .
These footprints were very old which made it hard to tell which animal they belong to. It was also impossible to use them for tracking.
Jin Pao was an expert at tracking animals. He scratched his half bald head over and over again, engrossed in thought. He walked around the snow mushrooms several times, and then crouched down to measure them. In the end he came to the conclusion that these footprints could only have been left behind by two animals: the roe deer or the Chinese goral. He eliminated the possibility of it being the red deer, the river deer (also known as the musk deer) or the wild deer, because the red deer is too heavy, the river deer is too light, and the wild deer's hooves are bigger. But without doubt a herd of middle-sized herbivorous animals had recently foraged around this area of forest for food. They had nibbled off the tender bark of some small trees, thin branches and winter buds. It seemed that they had stopped here for a while and then headed deeper into the forest.
I raised my head to look at the final peak we hadn't climbed. The bottom half of it was covered with a layer of pure white snow. The upper part consisted of a boulder field in the shape of a cone. It was made up of loose boulders of varying sizes. It looked as if it might come crashing down at any moment. The summit was a large slab of glossily smooth basalt that looked like a huge mirror inserted into the top of the boulder field. I wondered: How would the Chinese goral be able to come down to the valley from such a precipitous cliff?
