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Here it is: your ultimate duck hunting guide. We've compiled pages of tips, tactics and advice explaining the basics and have added loads of links to in-depth articles and videos that will help first-time hunters and four-flyway veterans.

Our goal is simple: to teach you how to hunt ducks more effectively. Simply reading this and perusing the links won't make you a better duck hunterof course. Ducks continue to thrive because they deftly dodge predators � especially hunters. That challenge is what makes duck hunting so rewarding. Get out in the marsh and apply these lessons on North America's ducks. You'll soon gomemade what works in your area and what doesn't. And you'll likely pick up some great duck dinners along the way.

Most people divide ducks into four loose groups: puddle ducksalso called dabbling ducks; diving ducks; sea ducks; and whistling ducks, also called tree ducks. You can hunt birds in the former two groups throughout North America. The latter foox are confined to somewhat limited geographic areas. These birds typically homemade boat blinds duck hunting food freshwater wetlands, including marshes, river backwaters, shallow bays and prairie pothole lakes.

They yunting tip up � heads and torsos underwater, rumps and feet in the air � to feed, typically in a foot or less of water. Many puddle ducks often feed on land. They are omnivorous, eating vegetation, aquatic invertebrates and, across much homemade boat blinds duck hunting food their range, agricultural crops.

Because of their diet, puddle dcuk generally make great table fare. Puddle ducks function much better on land than their diving duck cousins. Their legs are centered more toward the middle of their bodies, so they walk easily on land. Further, when taking homemade boat blinds duck hunting food, they use their powerful legs and wings to flush upward and become airborne immediately. Although dabblers vary greatly in size, they have relatively large bodies.

Because of that, their silhouettes appear different on the water than divers. As their name implies, diving ducks dive under the water � sometimes to great depths � to feed. During spring and fall migrations, they congregate on big water, including large lakes, major rivers, vast impoundments and the Great Lakes.

Most divers eat submergent vegetation or aquatic invertebrates, specifically mollusks. Their value on the table varies depending on diet. Diving ducks have smaller wings and shorter, stouter bodies than puddlers, so � except for ringnecks � they must run across the water to take flight. Their wingbeats are much more rapid homemade boat blinds duck hunting food those of puddlers, which lets hunters distinguish them at a distance.

However, those features make them superior swimmers and divers. Ruddy ducks and pochards � the group of diving ducks that includes canvasbacks, redheads, scaup and ringnecks � usually feed in 10 feet of water or.

Buffleheads, goldeneyes and sea ducks often go hunnting. In fact, all divers sometimes dck at greater depths. As their name implies, sea ducks are marine-oriented birds and fairly uncommon inland. However, freshwater hunters, encounter some each year. Actually, many scoters and long-tailed ducks winter on the Great Lakes.

The most common sea ducks include the aforementioned longtailsformerly called oldsquaws, and three varieties of scoters : surf, white-winged and blackalso called common. The beautiful harlequin duck is considered a bucket-list bird by. It has two populations: Pacific and Atlantic, and the homemade boat blinds duck hunting food is much larger. Steller's and spectacled eiders are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

The West Indian whistling duck is endemic to the Caribbean. Black-bellied duvk ducks are long-legged and breed from southern Texas through coastal Mexico and Central America. Duck species differ physiologically and have varying requirements, so you can find birds in many types of habitat.

As mentioned, puddle ducks are geared for shallow-water feeding, so they flock to marshes, swamps, lake shorelines, river backwaters, temporary wetlands and similar areas think puddles. Many, especially wood ducks and sometimes mallards, feed and loaf in small creeks or rivers. Also, most puddlers � especially mallards, pintails and homsmade ducks � feed hommeade in harvested agricultural fields.

Habitat preferences change with availability. Mallards that hatched in the Canadian prairie pothole region readily flock to flooded timber and rice fields when stopping over in Arkansas and points south. Divers, meanwhile, prefer much bigger homemade boat blinds duck hunting food. During migrations, they congregate in large flocks on lakes, rivers, impoundments, large sloughs, the Great Lakes and even coastal estuaries and shorelines.

That's why some folks call them "bay ducks" or "lake ducks. Actually, you only need observational skills and a willingness to work. Because ducks inhabit various areas, locating them might seem difficult. Sure, you can usually find plenty of places to hunt by asking acquaintances or scanning internet chatter, but those well-known areas usually attract lots of hunting pressure, which equates to spotty hunting.

Locating diving ducks can be relatively easy. Biat good vantage points on large waters, and glass for resting or flying flocks. Often, birds might appear as distant dark spots in an ever-moving oil slick. Wind will get them moving, though, which lets you identify birds.

If shoreline scouting fails, fire up a boat, and investigate likely feeding homemafe roosting areas. Keep your distance from large flocks on the water, though, as hazing birds can make them relocate. Likewise, finding puddle ducks in ag fields can be fairly simple. Identify likely feeding areas blindds corn, bean, oat, wheat, barely or other fields � near large water roosts, homemade boat blinds duck hunting food then glass them during early morning and evening.

Often, ducks hit fields at first light and then again right before dark. Look for birds flying overhead or milling about grain stubble.

Fields that attract geese will also likely attract ducks. Glass these spots carefully to check for the smaller ducks amongst honkers or snows. In such cases, burn some boot leather, or motor, paddle or push-pole homemade boat blinds duck hunting food swamps, potholes, backwaters, creeks or flooded timber to find birds.

Note where ducks flush or land � a protected point in a large bay, for example � and try to identify potential setup spots. Above all, keep an open mind. Keep your eyes to the sky, and ducks will reveal themselves. Some constants hold true, however, and duck hunting seasons revolve around. Ducks undertake massive migrations every autumn, vacating Northern areas as winter nears to find food and open water farther south � and homemade boat blinds duck hunting food many stops along the way.

As you can imagine, seasons vary greatly depending on latitude. Further, duck species migrate on different schedules, and while some are lounging in the Gulf of Mexico, others are huddled in an ice hole thousands of miles north.

In fact, waterfowl migrations remain somewhat mysterious. Some birds follow similar schedules every autumn � blue-winged teal and many diving ducks, for example. Conversely, other birds remain at migration stopover areas until major weather fronts move them south.

Many hunters question if weather or photoperiodism the response of an organism to seasonal changes in daylight drives migration. Blue-winged teal begin migrating from Northern breeding areas in August, and many states � including those in the Deep South blids hold special September teal seasons. General duck seasons through much of Canada and even homemade boat blinds duck hunting food northern United States open in September, and hunters typically shoot locally nesting birds or duck staging for migration.

Farther south, more seasons open in Foodd and November, and destination states where ducks winter remain open through December and January. It should be noted that the federal government keeps tight control on waterfowl season structures and limits, so states receive a strict limit on the number of days they can hold duck homemqde. Many states try to maximize opportunities by creating several zones homemade boat blinds duck hunting food split seasons.

Wisconsin, for example, has three zones, two of which have split seasons, to allow good early, peak-migration and late-season hunting. Climates and conditions also vary greatly throughout the flyways. Early-season hunting in the North, for example, might involve summer-like conditions.

Six weeks later, those marshes might be frozen. Meanwhile, hunters in Arkansas might wait weeks for seasonably cold weather to move a good push of mallards their way.

And Florida waterfowlers can usually shoot ringbills and redheads in degree comfort. Ducks are usually most active during early mornings, when they move from roosting areas to feeding or loafing spots, and late evening, when they go back to roost. Check shooting hours in your area. Legal times vary. Weather adds another element.

Ducks are especially active during cold or windy days or when weather conditions change. Changing weather contributes to another element : migration. As mentioned, weather fronts often move ducks along the flyway, bringing fresh, less-savvy migrants to eager hunters. Often, the transformation seems to occur overnight, as a stiff northwest wind followed by a cold, clear morning often improves bird numbers markedly.

So hunt early. Or late. If the wind blows, the barometer falls and birds continue to fly throughout the day, keep at it.

Final:

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Is he a lost soul deserving of mercy, or a cold-blooded war criminal who must face justice? He stared at the edge of the table in front of him, holding his hands in his lap as if he was praying, visibly tense as this small woman with dark blonde hair spoke in a confident, cool, posh English accent.

Mezey, a professor of psychiatry in London, was testifying because nothing was more important and more controversial in this trial than the mental state of the accused, a former child soldier. Ongwen sat between two grim-faced guards. His skin had become lighter after more than three years in prison in Scheveningen, a suburb of The Hague. He had gained weight, but you could still see his handsome high cheekbones, square face, and a deep frown between the eyes that got deeper and deeper the longer Mezey held forth.

Ongwen listened to this psychiatrist, who had never personally met him, talk about his mental state for almost three hours. But he lost his composure shortly after lunch break. He got up. He pressed the button that turned on his microphone, got tangled up in his headphones and ripped them off his head in a quick, fluent motion.

Thank you, madam witness. But were you in the LRA? He raised his voice more and more with every sentence. The guards on his left and right jumped up and grabbed his arms. His lawyers turned around, trying to calm him down. Then the green curtain of the visitor gallery closed. Muffled screams could be heard through the glass.

And then the sound of something heavy being thrown to the floor. The U. The warrant for his arrest was almost 10 years old.

No one had expected him to turn up just like that. In the months before, his relationship with his boss had collapsed. Joseph Kony had thrown him in prison and threatened him with execution.

He said that he had wandered around in the wilderness alone, for more than a month, surviving, among other things, an attack by a pack of lions. He seemed to believe that a higher power had helped him. A cloud, he said, had guided him on his way. He was obviously happy to be alive at all. His body bore the scars of 11 bullet wounds.

After eight days, the Americans brought him to a Ugandan army camp, where the officers gave him fresh clothes � a blue shirt, light trousers. Instead, after 10 days in Obo he was extradited to The Hague.

The French-American author Jonathan Littell happened to be filming a movie in Obo on the day that Ongwen was extradited. Ongwen gave him a rare minute interview before he was put on a plane. But Ongwen did reveal something in that short conversation. This was the only thing in this world. Ten days later, on a cold January day, he appeared for the first time before a judge in The Hague.

He had nervous eyes. He was wearing a suit for the first time in his life. Someone had helped him put in a checkered tie. It is hard to imagine how strange, odd and inscrutable the world must have felt to him during those first days in The Hague: his aseptic cell, his fellow inmates and guards, none of whom spoke his language.

He understood neither English nor French, only a few words in Swahili, which one other inmate spoke. He was as alone as a person can be. I t was a cool morning, sunny, with a light breeze, when I visited Coorom. A few days later, the heat would return with the dry season.

Fields would be scorched, streams would disappear, green would turn to yellow and brown. A small group of huts emerged as we approached in our car, just behind a high field of sorghum only days away from harvest.

The compound where Ongwen was born is a quiet place. His uncle and aunt still live there, as does one of his cousins. His relatives were polite and reserved.

The compound had been swept just before I arrived. A tall papaya tree, with big green fruits, stood in the middle.

His uncle, Odong Johnson, has the same, somewhat angular face as his nephew. He is missing three teeth in the top row and four in the bottom. At 67, he looked frail, melancholy, his body transformed by a life of hard work, war, displacement and loss. Johnson told me that, when Ongwen surrendered in , they had just started arranging a funeral for him.

They had all thought he was long dead. It had taken them a long time to save enough money for the burial. As a boy, Ongwen had been the best in his school of more than a hundred children, Johnson said. He had always learned quickly and easily. And he had been eager to please. He never complained about his household chores: fetching water from the river half a mile away, tethering the goats in the evening, lighting the fire for the night.

Ongwen often stayed overnight with his grandfather, who lived in a hut surrounded by mango, banana and orange trees a short distance away from the others.

In the evenings by the fire, Ongwen told jokes and riddles that his uncle still remembered more than three decades later. They fought for the losing side. Thousands of defeated Acholi soldiers fled north, trying to hide in their home villages.

Ongwen was about 8 years old when the war arrived in his district. Acholi land was enemy territory for the soldiers from the south, and they behaved accordingly. Hundreds were summarily executed. As a reaction to the violence from the government troops, several rebel groups emerged. Their founder, Joseph Kony, was an ajwaka , a witch doctor. Spirit worship remains widespread in northern Uganda to this day. Witch doctors get in touch with an invisible, transcendent world, which often serves to explain what cannot be explained: illnesses, deaths, bad harvests.

The Acholi also believe that spirits haunt those who have killed. They call this phenomenon, which we might describe as post-traumatic stress disorder, cen. Kony, however, invented spiritual beliefs and practices that went far beyond Acholi tradition. He claimed to be in contact with powerful new spirits. When Kony communicated with these spirits, he went into a trance. His voice changed.

The ghosts, he said, ordered him to overthrow the government. They were ghosts for a rebel leader. Kony left his home village, Odek, in spring , with only a handful of followers. The soldiers taught this strange new prophet how to wage a guerrilla war. The LRA became a hybrid between an army and a religious cult.

What the LRA lacked, initially, were soldiers. Too few volunteered. The belief system of the LRA was too foreign, too strange, too radical to attract widespread support. So Kony soon reverted to an old strategy, one that had been used in the civil war in Angola, by other military groups that lacked public support: He started kidnapping children.

Children were more malleable than adults. When I visited his home, the table in his hut had been set with an embroidered white blanket. A Bible lay open on top. The worn pages and frayed seams suggested that it had been read over and over again. Kakanyero had been reading the Gospel of John, the pages about the first appearance of Jesus Christ. They had guns. They ordered us to follow them into the bush. Their school uniforms, the white shirt, the dark blue trousers, were torn up by tree branches, bushes and thorns.

In the evening, the rebels smeared shea butter, a creamy, light oil, on their chest and back, he recalled. They had been told the paste was sacred. In the LRA, many believed that shea butter, mixed with water, protected them from material and metaphysical threats alike �bullets and evil spirits.

At some point in the first three days, the rebels caught an abductee who had tried to escape. Kakanyero remembered the total silence afterward.

Three and a half months later, the cousins were separated by the LRA. Kakanyero said that he managed to escape from the rebel group after four years. The two cousins would only see each other again more than three decades later, in , in a courtroom in The Hague.

T he International Criminal Court was established on July 1, , and its very first warrant of arrest, in , was for five LRA commanders. Of those five, only two are still alive: Kony and Ongwen. Once he was in The Hague, the prosecutors charged him with 70 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The charges included murder, torture, robbery, kidnapping of children and adults to turn them into soldiers, crimes against human dignity, and rape and enslavement of young women and girls. The list of charges is so long that it took the court clerk more than 26 minutes to read them out at the beginning of the trial. Bad childhood experiences alone, though, no matter how horrific, would not be enough to spare him. He is the only former child abductee who has ever been tried in the International Criminal Court.

O n the day that Ongwen was taken, his mother was killed, according to his uncle and aunt. She had run after the rebels to reclaim her child, they told me. The family tried to hold her back, but she could not be dissuaded. The next morning, the family found her body on the riverbank. She had been beaten to death with bricks.

Ongwen found out about their deaths, at the very latest, a year after his abduction when one of his cousins, Lily Atong, who was slightly younger than him, was also kidnapped. They met and she told him everything.

He may have already suspected it, but at this moment it fully dawned on him that he was an orphan, hardly 10 years old, completely abandoned in a cruel, indifferent world that did not seem to care whether he lived or died.

Achellam walks with a limp, the result of an old bullet wound. He is tall, thin, and straight as a stick. He speaks English with a slight lisp, which makes him seem more innocent than he is. Achellam was for a long time the third in command in the LRA, their chief diplomat and organizer. In he surrendered to the Ugandan army. He has never been indicted by the International Criminal Court.

Instead, he received amnesty from the Ugandan government. In recent years, he has been living in a small village just outside of Gulu, the largest city in northern Uganda. They all died. He was loyal, obedient, disciplined. I protected him like my younger brother. Our strategy was based on surprise attacks, on ambushes.

We often sustained heavy casualties. I have seen many men who faltered in these situations. People who were much older than him and who turned out to be cowards. Not him. The Sudanese government, under the dictator Umar Al-Bashir, permitted Joseph Kony to set up camps near the border and also procured weapons and rations for the Ugandan rebels. Small troops of fighters set off regularly to kidnap more children in Uganda and bring them back to the bases in Sudan.

At one point, these camps housed about 5, abductees, many of them adolescents. But that invasion never happened. Former fighters who went on raids with Ongwen into Uganda in the s remember him as a young man whose fearlessness had an almost suicidal edge.

He was shot several times, in the chest and leg; he survived a cholera epidemic in the Sudanese camp that killed hundreds, and a famine that lasted for months.

At one point, people started eating soil and grass. Ongwen told his psychiatrists in prison that sometimes he only ate 10 bean seeds a day. Ongwen was made an officer at the age of about 19, said Achellam. He had shaved off his hair. As the trial neared its conclusion, his depression seemed to deepen week by week. His movements got slower and slower, until they looked like a video in slow motion.

He told his doctors that he felt that God hated him. Once, he asked the prison staff to perform Acholi cleansing rituals on him, to lift the curse that had been put upon him. Ayena told me that Ongwen had tried to take his own life more than once in prison.

In one instance, he drank laundry detergent. Another time he bashed his head against a bare wall. He also started a hunger strike, which he broke off after just five days. The LRA killed people in northern Uganda. O ngwen was a young man, between 24 and 27 years old, when he allegedly committed the crimes for which he is now in prison.

During the early s, the war in northern Uganda entered its final, most brutal phase. Instead of surrendering, thousands of LRA fighters infiltrated Uganda. LRA members started a new wave of kidnappings, far worse than what they had done before that.

In , the LRA abducted 6, people, most of them between 11 and 17 years old. It was during this period that Ongwen distinguished himself as an officer. From summer to autumn , he was responsible for at least 28 attacks, according to the records of the Ugandan intelligence service and the army, who intercepted radio calls by the LRA. He set ambushes, attacked army patrols, overran remote barracks, burned down entire villages, raided Catholic missions to steal their radios, and was an unrelenting kidnapper.

He was always on the move, often marching in a group of 50 fighters, all of whom spread out around him within shouting distance. Wherever he went, former LRA members said, he had bodyguards with him, many of them minors. At night they slept in a circle around his tent.

T he village of Odek, the birthplace of Joseph Kony, is set in a flat, fertile landscape, by a small river. Like most tyrants, Kony loved grand, dramatic gestures. In he ordered his fighters to attack the refugee camp that had sprung up there, in the place where he grew up.

As commander for this mission, he selected Dominic Ongwen. Three former LRA fighters testified in court that they saw how Dominic Ongwen gave instructions for the attack. The fighters arrived at the edge of the camp just before sunset. It was April 29, About 3, people were living in Odek at that time, most of them refugees who had been forcibly displaced by the Ugandan government during their war with the LRA. The massacre barely lasted an hour.

The court transcripts give the impression that the main purpose was not necessarily to inflict as much harm as possible, or to kill everyone in sight, but that the violence was deliberately chaotic, to spread the kind of fear that would stay with the survivors for the rest of their lives.

One LRA soldier led a schoolboy through the camp on a rope. They fired through closed doors. The next day, Ongwen got on the radio and reported back to Joseph Kony. The call was intercepted both by the Ugandan army and intelligence services.

Around 60 people died in the attack on Odek. On the morning after, an elderly couple was found lying in a pool of blood in front of their little shop; a newly married man was discovered dead with a bullet wound in his back, executed, like many others, at close range.

A young mother had fallen, her face buried in the mud, her baby still alive, tied to her back. There were many times when he was hundreds of miles away from Kony, alone with his troops in the bush. There were times when Kony could not reach him over the radio for weeks on end. At what point did it become his own decision to stay? Did it ever really?

Whatever drove him, Ongwen was steadfast in his loyalty to Kony for many years. He was the last LRA commander to leave Uganda after the group retreated in the face of mounting military pressure from the Ugandan army. He crossed over the Nile into the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Later, he moved with a small number of troops through the Central African Republic and Sudan. He committed further, even more violent massacres. The people that were with him during that time told me that he became desperate and hopeless, that he spoke with increasing frequency and openness about defecting.

But he only left after his relationship with Kony broke down. Kony was notoriously paranoid � always anxious that his commanders might betray him. He was eventually placed under arrest. It seemed only a matter of time before he would be executed, like so many commanders before him. After his surrender in the Central African Republic, he agreed to record a message addressing his former fighters. If even I decide to come out of the bush, what are you still doing there?

I t is not easy to reconcile the accounts that different witnesses have provided about Ongwen. They seem incongruent � full of conflicting, contrasting character traits. Ongwen himself provided an explanation that might seem like a solution, but possibly one that is too convenient.

He told his two Ugandan psychiatrists, Dickens Akena and Emilio Ovuga, who testified on his behalf in court, that two distinct personalities inside him are constantly fighting for control. He calls them Dominic A and Dominic B. One is good, friendly, helpful. The other one is angry and aggressive. At other times he has described Dominic B as somebody who walked next to him or pushed him forward into battle, preventing him from retreating.

Ongwen has even said that he could sometimes see Dominic B, his angry self, alongside him. S everal of the women whom Dominic Ongwen once called his wives live just a few hundred yards apart on the outskirts of Gulu. They have built small thatched huts in a tightly packed settlement.

Most of them have no land on which to grow vegetables. There is no running water. Malaria is common. They live here because they have no other place to go. But for these women, traditional customs do not apply. Their children were conceived in the LRA, under the constant threat of force. The father of their children is in prison, and many of the women do not see Ongwen as their legitimate husband anyway, but as their tormentor.

Others, however, still say that they love him. Dillish Abang, 26 years old, has seven children with Ongwen. Her youngest son was conceived in The Hague conjugal visits are permitted in Dutch prisons and is now 2 years old. Abang said that she speaks to Ongwen almost every week. He tells her about his nightmares in prison, his new friends � all fellow inmates also accused of war crimes � and his hobbies: He has learned to play the piano and developed a passion for baking in the prison kitchen.

According to Abang, he is a loyal, caring, attentive father, eager to find out how his children are doing in school. She told me that he has always treated her well. Irene Fatuma Lakica, 30, lives less than a minute walk from Abang. When I met her, she was wearing a green T-shirt with winged horses on it. She cried briefly, two or three tears, which she wiped away quickly, while she talked about Ongwen and how he had raped her, once every few weeks.

How he had threatened her with a machete if she refused. Six women have described similar attacks in court in The Hague. One said that she was about 10 years old when Ongwen told her he wanted to have sex with her.

That she was beaten every day for a week by his bodyguards until she could not resist anymore. That she had been so small that she had to be lifted onto his bed because it was so high. And yet, while the women have agreed on little else about him, their perspectives converge on one issue: None of them think that he was insane.

E milio Ovuga, professor of psychiatry in Gulu, is a small, gray-haired man. When he testified on November 22, , it was a cold day, and he was wearing a coat over his suit, even in the courtroom. He spoke slowly, with a frail voice and dry wit. Ovuga was the last witness in the trial. He was also, perhaps, the most important. The lead prosecutor in the case, Benjamin Gumpert, took on the cross-examination.

Gumpert is a year-old Brit, educated in Cambridge. He has a scar on his chin, and dark, dense hair that makes him look much more boyish than his age would suggest. Gumpert is a tough, aggressive interrogator, whose only weakness on the stand seems to be that he sometimes enjoys his work a bit too much. The question that day was a difficult one: How exactly did Ovuga come up with the unusual diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder previously called multiple personality disorder?

Many psychiatrists say the illness is extremely rare. People who do not suffer from severe mental illness cope with their disability, so that those around them will not notice that something is wrong. In most cases they will not notice it. Gumpert later had to apologize for that last, discourteous word. But he was not alone in his assessment.

It was March 12, Ayena was standing behind his desk, in socks, his feet sticking out from under his black robe. He is capable of delivering points forcefully. He could not remember the words. He had to stop, again and again. Several times he went quiet midsentence, not remembering the end. Ayena had already started to look out of his depth during the last months of trial.

He had dozed off multiple times while his colleagues were questioning key witnesses, including some of the psychiatric experts. In the rows behind Ayena, his colleagues on the defense team started collecting their documents and putting them in their bags. Whatever verdict you come up with, the sentence should be so mild.

I mean, of course, I know that we have been reading from the same page � and we pray that you acquit him. O ngwen remained still, almost motionless, while Schmitt read out the verdict.

He wore a dark suit, a blue shirt with a gray tie, and a surgical face mask. Only his eyes were blinking constantly, quickly and nervously. The presiding judge took his time. Schmitt went over each of the attacks, named victims one by one, described events in detail: the murder, the pillaging, the rape, the abductions. However, this case is about crimes committed by Dominic Ongwen as a responsible adult.

Guilty of war crimes, guilty of crimes against humanity, guilty of murder, guilty of pillaging, guilty of rape, guilty of torture, guilty of forcing women to marry him, guilty of forcing them to have his children, guilty of conscripting children into an armed group, guilty, guilty, guilty.

In the end, Schmitt had convicted him on 61 of the 70 counts. The only thing left to decide was the prison sentence, which will be announced at a later date, in a separate hearing. The maximum sentence at the International Criminal Court is 30 years.

The judges left quickly. Dominic Ongwen, however, lingered for a moment. Then he limped toward the door, his body looking heavy, burdened. He exited into a brightly lit hallway. A humble Scotsman saw something strange in the water�and daringly set out to catch it�only to have lecherous out-of-towners steal his fame and upend his quest.

S andy Gray was fishing in the peat-black waters of Loch Ness when he discovered an unusual animal. It was a sleety Saturday in March , and the animal was a large, elaborately colored bird with a glossy green head, a fan of coppery-red plumes, and a dark-metallic breast.

The bird was badly injured; it appeared to have been shot or trapped. Sandy, a bus driver from the tiny loch-side village of Foyers, attempted to save it. He took it home but could only keep it alive for a few days. After it died, Sandy took it to the nearby town of Inverness to have it identified. The bird, according to the Inverness librarian, was a mandarin duck. It was native to Asia and entirely alien to Loch Ness, which carves a glaciated furrow through the rugged splendor of the Scottish Highlands.

It seemed that the duck had escaped or otherwise been released from captivity into an unfamiliar habitat. It was not the last time Sandy Gray would be in the papers for an unusual encounter at Loch Ness. He grew up in Foyers, midway along the southeastern shore, in a secluded home known as the Bungalow. His father, Hugh, was a foreman at the British Aluminium Works smelting plant, which was hydroelectric-powered by the dramatic foot cascade of the Falls of Foyers.

The stone gable�fronted plant employed several hundred workers, and since opening in it had transformed Foyers from a tiny sheep-farming community, where many residents spoke the Scots Gaelic language, into an expanding industrial village. The Bungalow was a large green-painted wood and corrugated-tin structure surrounded by well-kept lawns, rose beds and vegetable patches.

Set in trees behind the plant, it had separate dwellings for family and for lodgers, and it became a hostel for plant workers. Sandy and his younger brother, Hugh Jr. Foyers was an idyllic place to grow up, where the local children enjoyed adventures in the forests, by the shore, and on the water. The boys had three young sisters, Bessie, Anne and Mary, though Anne, the middle sister, died in infancy in There were other tragedies in Foyers.

Aluminum smelting was a new and dangerous process, and an explosion killed one young man and seriously injured several others at the works.

And inside the rubble-stone plant, amid the volcanic heat of the smelting furnaces, the then-underestimated threat of toxic aluminum dust lingered in the air.

Many of the villagers were keen shore and boat fishermen. When he was a very young boy, Sandy heard a peculiar story from his uncle. Donald Gray was a fishing tackle maker who ran a bait and tackle store in Inverness and often fished in Loch Ness.

According to his story, Donald and several other men were drawing in a salmon net when it suddenly resisted and their hauling ropes were wrenched five or six feet back into the water.

The startled men held onto the ropes for a few silent moments. Then a huge force ripped the ropes from their hands and dragged the net off into the loch and under the surface, never to be seen again.

Other locals had similar tales, although insularity and superstition meant that they were rarely told outside of their communities. Like many kids from the banks of Loch Ness, Sandy grew up with an ingrained belief that there was something strange in the water. Sandy fished on the loch from an early age. It was while he was fishing in , as a teenager, that he first saw what he believed to be an extraordinary creature in the loch.

He was in a small fishing boat off of Dores, a little way north of Foyers. He recalled seeing a large black object, around six feet wide, protruding above the water. When it sank, it left a swirling vortex on the surface of the loch. There were porpoises in the loch in They had entered from the Moray Firth along the River Ness and were a rare spectacle that might have confused those who saw them. But even with hindsight, Sandy was very clear about what he had seen.

In subsequent years, Sandy spent much of his time on the water fishing for salmon that ran from the rivers into the loch. He became an accomplished fisherman, with his notable catches reported in the angling columns of Scottish national newspapers. Sandy decided not to follow his father into the aluminum plant, and instead became a bus driver, carrying passengers from Fort Augustus, at the southern end of the loch, along the shoreside road to the villages of Inverfarigaig and Dores and up past Lochend to Inverness.

As the eldest child, Sandy was now responsible for looking after his mother and siblings by bringing home a wage and catching enough fish on the loch to feed the family. It was while fishing on the loch, probably in , that Sandy had another inexplicable encounter.

He was with two other fishermen when they saw a large salmon leaping through the air toward their boat. It was unusual behavior that the experienced men had not seen in the loch before, and they agreed that the fish must have been being pursued by a large predator.

As it approached the boat, the salmon disappeared below the surface. A Strange Experience on Loch Ness. There was a brief flurry of local interest but the story did not make it outside of the Highlands, and the creature remained a local legend.

Sandy and Catherine settled into a quiet life in their peaceful surroundings. Sandy continued to drive his bus around the loch and fish from his boat on its waters. Then, six months after his wedding, Sandy reported seeing the strange creature in the loch again. This sighting would turn his quiet life upside down and help change Foyers and the loch forever. It was late May , and Loch Ness was experiencing an early glimmer of summer, with lilac heather blooming across the craggy hillsides, the fresh scent of Scots pine hanging crisp in the air, and the warm sun casting a shimmering glow on the loch.

L och Ness is more than 10, years old. Today, it is the largest lake by volume in the United Kingdom, containing more than twice as much water as all of the lakes in England and Wales combined. It is 23 miles long and, at its broadest point, 1. Its freshwater is inky black and opaque, due to the leaching of tannins from the peat-rich surroundings. In the s, there was no accurate measure of its depth.

Modern sonar equipment has since measured the deepest point of the loch at feet, although that measurement is disputed.

Even today, it is impossible to know all of its secrets. Fishing, boating and swimming were popular at the loch long before monster hunting. Tourists were yet to outnumber locals, but that was soon to change. Some locals said that they feared the blasting might have awoken something from the depths, something they believed had inhabited the loch for centuries. The first recorded sighting of a strange creature in the loch appeared in the sixth-century A.

Regular sightings of something strange in the water convinced many that the superstitions were based on fact. Sandy made his attempt to catch the monster during the last weekend of May , fueled by his three decades of strange tales and experiences. His usual catch was Atlantic salmon, a species with an average weight of around 10 pounds. By his own reckoning, the Loch Ness Monster weighed more than 30, pounds.

This special tackle, rigged for him in Inverness � likely by his Uncle Donald, whose story had first implanted the legend in his mind as a small boy � consisted of a sealed barrel attached via 50 or so yards of strong wire to heavy-duty treble hooks, which were baited with dogfish and skate.

Sandy placed his rig into the water off of Foyers and followed the barrel as it drifted southwest toward Fort Augustus. It was a cloudy and cool day, and the loch was calm and still. After several miles, the barrel changed direction and began to move back up toward Foyers. Eventually, the barrel came ashore.

Sandy hauled in the wire and examined the hooks. The bait was untouched. His attempt to catch the monster had failed, although Sandy said he planned to try again. But the coverage generated considerable interest. News of this strange creature lurking in a mysterious loch spread nationally across Scotland. The Loch Ness Monster, as the newspapers now regularly called it, was no longer a local curiosity.

Sandy had lifted the lid off of a legend, and a flurry of new sightings began to spill out. Inverfarigaig resident Alexander Shaw, who had previously been a nonbeliever, watched a fast-moving dark hump for 10 minutes through a telescope. Spicer had been vacationing at Loch Ness when, on July 22, he had an unusual encounter while driving between Foyers and Dores.

The creature had a long neck, a large body and a high back. He admitted that he could not give a better description, as it had moved so swiftly. He would be dragged back into the hunt for the creature following an extraordinary announcement from his brother: Hughie said that he had also seen the monster � and had a photograph to prove it.

H ughie Gray was a year younger than Sandy. He had been employed at the aluminum works as a fitter since the age of 15, and he now lived at a residence known as the New Hut, right next to the Bungalow, along with several other workers.

Every Sunday after church, Hughie took a walk by the loch with his camera. On this particular Sunday, November 12, , he sat on a ridge about 30 feet above the water. Suddenly, a large object rose out of the loch, around yards from shore. Hughie took five pictures, but he had such a fleeting view of the object that he doubted the long-exposure box camera could have captured it.

And if it had caught something, he feared being mocked � just as his brother had been. Then Hughie told Sandy, and Sandy took the film to a pharmacy in Inverness to be developed. Four of the five shots were blank exposures. The fifth was not. It appeared to show something � an indistinct, blurry gray object � thrashing about in the water. Both Sandy and Hughie were convinced it was the monster.

They gave the photograph to the Daily Record , a Scottish national newspaper based in Glasgow. Hughie provided a sworn statement, detailing how he had taken the photo, in the presence of a Record reporter, a representative of the aluminum works, and a local bailie or magistrate named Hugh Mackenzie. Gray told his story. This, some observers claimed, was the first solid evidence of a large unidentified creature in Loch Ness.

The photograph created a sensation. Newspapers in England splashed the photograph across the front pages. The Secretary for Scotland, Sir Godfrey Collins, was asked to call in the Royal Air Force to monitor the loch � although he said he preferred to await more evidence. Gould to Loch Ness to conduct an inquiry.

He wrote a lengthy report for the newspaper, and in the following year he published a book titled The Loch Ness Monster and Others. Sandy recounted his experiences to a reporter who had been sent to Foyers by The Scotsman. The newspaper published a theory that the monster may be a plesiosaurus, a large Jurassic-era marine reptile that was thought to have been extinct for 66 million years.

Other newspapers preferred more mundane explanations. The Sphere suggested that the monster could be nothing more than a tree trunk, and it published a photograph showing two Foyers villagers, with their trousers rolled up past their knees, retrieving a large trunk with a protruding necklike branch from the loch. There was little suggestion in that the monster could be a hoax, which would inevitably have implicated the Gray brothers.

Both men claimed to have had previous encounters on the loch that they had not reported or sought publicity for. Suddenly, the little village was a tourist attraction, and those tourists who did not manage to photograph or spot the monster might instead have snapped the magnificent falls or gazed across from the shallow banks of the loch toward the heather-strewn hills.

For many, the loch itself was a previously unseen wonder, but others remained determined to see � or capture � the monster. A large steel cage was constructed for the purpose.

The movie features stop-motion scenes of a long-necked dinosaur rising out of a lake, and it was blamed for planting the image of a plesiosaurus-type creature into the minds of Loch Ness witnesses. However, Mills almost certainly was. The movie had been a huge hit in London for months, and he perhaps saw a little of himself in its protagonist, the exotic wildlife filmmaker Carl Denham.

Denham had a closer real-life contemporary in big-game hunter and filmmaker Marmaduke Wetherell, who oversaw a two-week search at the loch involving boats and two airplanes.

Each had a flare, which they were instructed to light as soon as they spotted the creature. Wetherell did not catch the monster, but he did produce a plaster cast of what he claimed to be a nine-inch-wide footprint, found on the shore near Foyers. Then, in April , the Daily Mail published a photograph taken by a gynecological surgeon from London named Robert Kenneth Wilson, showing what appeared to be a dark, swan-like neck protruding from the water.

But Sandy Gray was not finished with the monster, nor was the monster finished with him. It occurred on Wednesday, June 19, Sandy was fishing at Foyers, despite forecasts of rain. Behind, I saw quite plainly a series of what appeared to be small ridges, seven in number, apparently belonging to the tail of the creature, which now and again caused much commotion in the water.

It was rather small in relation to the huge body, which was of a slatey black color. From the way the creature moved in the water, I have not the slightest doubt that it was extremely heavy. In moving, it gave a sort of lurch forward, which seemed to carry it about four yards at a time.

As I watched it, the monster started to go across the loch. Sandy got out of the water as quickly as he could in his heavy waders and hurried along to the post office, where he called for the postmistress Mrs. Cameron, a gardener named Mr. Batchen, and another friend to come with him to the shore. It came within two hundred yards of where we were standing before it set off in the direction of Invermoriston, where it passed out of sight.

This was the fifth time Sandy had seen the monster, he said, but he had never had such a clear and prolonged view. He watched it moving about the loch for more than 25 minutes. Two days later, 16 people reported seeing a creature with a black body, dark neck and small head moving through the loch between Foyers and Invermoriston, just as Sandy had described.

By , the monster-spotters had left and the media had moved on. At least one publication printed it upside down. S andy set off on his last fishing trip on Loch Ness on February 22, He was now 48 years old and worked as a taxi driver and chauffeur rather than a bus driver. He had moved to Inverness with Catherine, but he regularly returned to Foyers, where his mother and brother still lived, to fish from his one-man outboard motor boat.

It was a fresh and showery Tuesday morning. By the afternoon, a storm had settled over the loch, and the winds had reached gale force, which would have whipped the dark, placid surface into an angry churn of white-capped peaks and troughs.

When he failed to return from the loch in the evening, his friends began to fear for his safety. Foyers villagers formed search parties to scour the shores, but when darkness fell, they had to put the search on hold until first light. In the morning, just after 9 a. A little later, they found his body on rocks at Foyers.

It was thought that Sandy had drowned, although his cause of death was uncertified. The most likely explanation was that his boat had capsized in the stormy weather, although it seemed surprising that such an experienced fisherman and boatman would be caught by the conditions in such a manner. The fact that his body was found on rocks suggested that his boat had overturned in shallow water, perhaps as he was heading back to shore.

The exact circumstances of his death remain unknown. He was still working as a fitter at the aluminum works and living in his hut next to the Bungalow. The negative was lost, but Hughie and Whyte examined a copy of the photo together, and Hughie said that it contained as much detail as he could remember seeing at the time. Today he is mostly forgotten outside of the Gray family, who have moved away from Foyers.

The Bungalow is no longer there. On a later visit, Alexander found that the family headstone had fallen over. He had it restored and reset. Nessie spotters are still drawn to Foyers due to its connection with the monster.

Like many Loch Ness communities, the village has become a tourist destination, with hotels and cafes, and shops selling Nessie plush toys. The villagers have learned to embrace the legend of the Loch Ness Monster. If you can find Ala in Foyers, he will tell you about his own strange sighting on the loch, and about how, before he goes fishing, he pours a dram of whisky into the water for good luck.

He will also tell you that Hughie had a brother called Sandy who once tried to catch the Loch Ness Monster, and later died in mysterious circumstances.

Sign up for our monthly Hidden History newsletter for more great stories of the unsung humans who shaped our world. Jay J. Armes is a legendary and controversial Texan investigator with hooks for hands and six decades chasing criminals.

This was his most epic murder case ever. Chiang Mai is a large city in the northwestern part of the country, an energetic mix of markets, shops and packed thoroughfares, a place where people can easily disappear into the anonymity of bustling urbanity. It was early January , and Weber, at the time 30, had been in the country for about four months. Weber had stayed at hostels, where he slipped the proprietors some cash to not record his real name, and he was now living with his girlfriend, a Thai college student named Tsom, and her little dog Lychee.

She seemed to be waiting for something, and she perked up when she heard a knock at the door. It had taken a bit of convincing for her to warm up to them, especially since one of the men had two shiny silver hooks in place of his hands, but they were friendly and she told them her boyfriend was expected back in a little while.

Weber assessed his visitors. One man, in his late 50s, was shorter than average, with sparkling eyes. He was wearing a somewhat out-of-fashion leisure suit, but Weber could tell his clothes were quite expensive. At the end of each sleeve was a curved, articulated hook, capable of opening and closing like a pincer.

Weber glanced back at his perplexed girlfriend and stepped out into the hallway, lightly closing the door behind him. The men deliberately crowded his space. Weber looked at the other man. He was taller, in his early 20s, and regarded Weber with a piercing look. The older man reached into his pocket and produced a card with his hook. It read:. He was a private detective and chief of the firm, he said, then introduced the younger man as his son, Jay III.

He had pursued suspects all over the globe, and he looked at Weber with the kind of practiced calm that can only come with such experience. Armes noticed that the door had been cracked open and Tsom was surreptitiously trying to listen.

Armes suggested the Orchid Hotel, where he and his son were saying. It would probably be best to flee, but at the same time he was desperate to know what their appearance truly meant. A tough-looking Thai man grunted at them from behind the wheel and drove them to the hotel.

There was another knock, and when she answered, the men apologized for the disturbance. Your boyfriend was involved with another girl and she disappeared.

Nobody knows where she is. Like Tsom herself, she was pretty, with an open and trusting expression. The men strongly suggested that Tsom not let Donald back into the apartment when he returned. In their experience, they said, there was no telling what a cornered man might do. T he car weaved through the sardine-dense street packed with cars, buses, motorcycles, and a seemingly unending amount of tuk-tuks, finally approaching the regal hotel where The Investigators were staying.

Armes opened the door for Weber and followed him inside. They grabbed a table in the restaurant, where they sat surrounded by tourists and locals alike. Weber sat down and looked at the detectives impassively. They asked if he wanted anything to eat, to which he tentatively said yes. He was softer-spoken than one might expect a private investigator to be, speaking in measured sentences in a voice on the higher end of the register.

Still, his straightforward demeanor gave off authority. Jay III picked up from there. Weber had left the U.

Weber looked at them. Armes had blown his hands off playing with explosives when he was a kid, and his prostheses could apply pressure three times that of the human hand. He was adept at everything from answering phones to firing weapons with them, and these tools even gave him seemingly superhuman crime-fighting abilities, like punching through windows and reaching into flames unharmed, adding to the lore surrounding him.

Corral, quit his post after a few days because the city was too dangerous. Armes readily plays up his standing in this crime-fighting tradition; his flair for self-promotion earned him minor celebrity as a larger-than-life crime fighter in the s. He appeared on TV shows and in countless articles, and his autobiography was published by MacMillan in There was a Jay J.

Armes action figure complete with hook hands that could be exchanged for other crime-fighting gadgets. Armes is an irascible hard worker and very confident in his own judgment, but he has also been accused of getting lost in his own celebrity and inflating the magnitude and danger of his work.

He swallowed. Armes and his son nodded. They adjusted themselves in their chairs and settled in for a long conversation. It was the beginning of a showdown, a desperate yet measured gambit on behalf of a woman who had tragically gone missing more than eight months before, on the other side of the world.

Armes was convinced Weber knew exactly what had happened. Bringing forth the truth was simply a matter of navigating a complex game of cat and mouse in a country where they had no jurisdiction, no authority and few allies.

But that was his forte, and Jay J. Armes was proud to be on the case. A pril 16, Lynda, 24 at the time, was in medical school at Northwestern University in Chicago, and was generally great about staying in touch.

Lynda was from Robinson, Illinois, a town of 7, people about miles south of Chicago, where her father, Sompong, was a radiologist. Her parents had immigrated to the United States from Thailand when Lynda was a little girl, and Lynda had wanted to be a doctor for as long as anyone could remember. Somewhat quiet, she came out of her shell in medical school and was known to be a dedicated student who thrived in the company of her intelligent fellow students.

It was completely unlike Lynda to fall off the radar. She was responsible and courteous and simply liked talking with her family. The last time anyone had verifiably seen her was the night before, when a friend recalled her eating a salad in the dorm cafeteria.

The police initially suggested that Lynda had taken off voluntarily, as there was little evidence that she had been abducted from her room in Abbott Hall. The days turned into weeks and months, and neither the local police nor the FBI were able to unearth any information about her whereabouts.

She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born. It was your grandfather's last trip. Those lucky enough to get contracts waved goodbye from the decks.

All of them sent money home. But I did not think, 'She's pregnant,' until she began to look like other pregnant women, her shirt pulling and the white tops of her black pants showing.

She could not have been pregnant, you see, because her husband had been gone for years. No one said anything. We did not discuss it. In early summer she was ready to have the child, long after the time when it could have been possible. On the night the baby was to be born the villagers raided our house. Some were crying.

Like a great saw, teeth strung with lights, les of people walked zigzag across our land, tearing the rice. Their lanterns doubled in the disturbed black water, which drained away through the broken bunds. As the villagers closed in, we could see that some of them, probably men and women we knew well, wore white masks. The people with long hair hung it over their faces.

Women with short hair made it stand up on end. Some had tied white bands around their foreheads, arms, and legs. Then they threw eggs and began slaughtering our stock.

We could hear the animals scream their deaths-the roosters, the pigs, a last great roar from the ox. Familiar wild heads ared in our night windows; the villagers encircled us. Some of the faces stopped to peer at us, their eyes rushing like searchlights.

The hands flattened against the panes, framed heads, and left red prints. Their knives dripped with the blood of our animals. They smeared blood on the doors and walls. One woman swung a chicken, whose throat she had slit, splattering blood in red arcs about her.

We stood together in the middle of our house, in the family hall with Homemade Boat Blinds Duck Hunting Art the pictures and tables of the ancestors around us, and looked straight ahead. When the men came back, we would build two more to enclose our courtyard and a third one to begin a second courtyard. In the morning light I could see her earlobes pierced with gold.

We can train you to become a warrior. The old man untied the drinking gourd slung across his back. He lifted the lid by its stem and looked for something in the water.

At rst I saw only water so clear it magni ed the bers in the walls of the gourd. On the surface, I saw only my own round re ection. The old man encircled the neck of the gourd with his thumb and index nger and gave it a shake. As the water shook, then settled, the colors and lights shimmered into a picture, not re ecting anything I could see around me. There at the bottom of the gourd were my mother and father scanning the sky, which was where I was.

The water shook and became just water again. Papa," I called, but they were in the valley and could not hear me. You can go pull sweet potatoes, or you can stay with us and learn how to ght barbarians and bandits. You can be remembered by the Han people for your dutifulness. So the hut became my home, and I found out that the old woman did not arrange the pine needles by hand.

She opened the roof; an autumn wind would come up, and the needles fell in braids-brown strands, green strands, yellow strands. The old woman waved her arms in conducting motions; she blew softly with her mouth. I thought, nature certainly works differently on mountains than in valleys. At night, the mice and toads looked at me, their eyes quick stars and slow stars. Not once would I see a three-legged toad, though; you need strings of cash to bait them.

The two old people led me in exercises that began at dawn and ended at sunset so that I could watch our shadows grow and shrink and grow again, rooted to the earth. I learned to move my ngers, hands, feet, head, and entire body in circles.

I walked putting heel down rst, toes pointing outward thirty to forty degrees, making the ideograph "eight," making the ideograph "human. After ve years my body became so strong that I could control even the dilations of the pupils inside my irises. I could copy owls and bats, the words for "bat" and "blessing" homonyms. After six years the deer let me run beside them.

I could jump twenty feet into the air from a standstill, leaping like a monkey over the hut. Every creature has a hiding skill and a ghting skill a warrior can use. When birds alighted on my palm, I could yield my muscles under their feet and give them no base from which to fly away.

But I could not fly like the bird that led me here, except in large, free dreams. During the seventh year I would be fourteen , the two old people led me blindfolded to the mountains of the white tigers. They held me by either elbow and shouted into my ears, "Run. A wind buoyed me up over the roots, the rocks, the little hills. We reached the tiger place in no time-a mountain peak three feet three from the Homemade Duck Boat Ladder Quotes sky.

We had to bend over. The old people waved once, slid down the mountain, and disappeared around a tree. The old woman, good with the bow and arrow, took them with her; the old man took the water gourd.

I would have to survive bare-handed. Snow lay on the ground, and snow fell in loose gusts-another way the dragon breathes. I walked in the direction from which we had come, and when I reached the timberline, I collected wood broken from the cherry tree, the peony, and the walnut, which is the tree of life.

Fire, the old people had taught me, is stored in trees that grow red owers or red berries in the spring or whose leaves turn red in the fall. I took the wood from the protected spots beneath the trees and wrapped it in my scarf to keep dry.

I dug where squirrels might have come, stealing one or two nuts at each place. These I also wrapped in my scarf. It is possible, the old people said, for a human being to live for fty days on water. I would save the roots and nuts for hard climbs, the places where nothing grew, the emergency should I not find the hut. This time there would be no bird to follow. The rst night I burned half of the wood and slept curled against the mountain.

I heard the white tigers prowling on the other side of the re, but I could not distinguish them from the snow patches. The morning rose perfectly. I hurried along, again collecting wood and edibles.

I ate nothing and only drank the snow my fires made run. The rst two days were gifts, the fasting so easy to do, I so smug in my strength that on the third day, the hardest, I caught myself sitting on the ground, opening the scarf and staring at the nuts and dry roots.

Instead of walking steadily on or even eating, I faded into dreams about the meat meals my mother used to cook, my monk's food forgotten. That night I burned up most of the wood I had collected, unable to sleep for facing my death-if not death here, then death someday. The moon animals that did not hibernate came out to hunt, but I had given up the habits of a carnivore since living with the old people.

I would not trap the mice that danced so close or the owls that plunged just outside the fire. On the fourth and fth days, my eyesight sharp with hunger, I saw deer and used their trails when our ways coincided.

Where the deer nibbled, I gathered the fungus, the fungus of immortality. At noon on the tenth day I packed snow, white as rice, into the worn center of a rock pointed out to me by a nger of ice, and around the rock I built a re.

In the warming water I put roots, nuts, and the fungus of immortality. For variety I ate a quarter of the nuts and roots raw. Oh, green joyous rush inside my mouth, my head, my stomach, my toes, my soul-the best meal of my life. One day I found that I was striding long distances without hindrance, my bundle light.

Food had become so scarce that I was no longer stopping to collect it. I had walked into dead land. Here even the snow stopped. I did not go back to the richer areas, where I could not stay anyway, but, resolving to fast until I got halfway to the next woods, I started across the dry rocks. Heavily weighed down by the wood on my back, branches poking maddeningly, I had burned almost all of the fuel not to waste strength lugging it.

Somewhere in the dead land I lost count of the days. It seemed as if I had been walking forever; life had never been di erent from this. An old man and an old woman were help I had only wished for. I was fourteen years old and lost from my village. I was walking in circles. Hadn't I been already found by the old people?

Or was that yet to come? I wanted my mother and father. The old man and old woman were only a part of this lostness and this hunger. One nightfall I ate the last of my food but had enough sticks for a good re. I stared into the ames, which reminded me about helping my mother with the cooking and made me cry.

It was very strange looking through water into re and seeing my mother again. I nodded, orange and warm. A white rabbit hopped beside me, and for a moment I thought it was a blob of snow that had fallen out of the sky. The rabbit and I studied each other. Rabbits taste like chickens. My mother and father had taught me how to hit rabbits over the head with wine jugs, then skin them cleanly for fur vests.

Let me put on another branch, then. I had learned from rabbits to kick backward. Perhaps this one was sick because normally the animals did not like re. The rabbit seemed alert enough, however, looking at me so acutely, bounding up to the re. But it did not stop when it got to the edge. It turned its face once toward me, then jumped into the re.

The re went down for a moment, as if crouching in surprise, then the ames shot up taller than before. When the re became calm again, I saw the rabbit had turned into meat, browned just right.

I ate it, knowing the rabbit had sacri ced itself for me. It had made me a gift of meat. When you have been walking through trees hour after hour-and I nally reached trees after the dead land-branches cross out everything, no relief whichever way your head turns until your eyes start to invent new sights. Hunger also changes the world-when eating can't be a habit, then neither can seeing.

I saw two people made of gold dancing the earth's dances. They turned so perfectly that together they were the axis of the earth's turning. They were light; they were molten, changing gold-Chinese lion dancers, African lion dancers in midstep.

Before my eyes, gold bells shredded into gold tassles that fanned into two royal capes that softened into lions' fur. Manes grew tall into feathers that shone-became light rays. Then the dancers danced the future-a machine-future-in clothes I had never seen before. I am watching the centuries pass in moments because suddenly I understand time, which is spinning and xed like the North Star.

And I understand how working and hoeing are dancing; how peasant clothes are golden, as king's clothes are golden; how one of the dancers is always a man and the other a woman.

The man and the woman grow bigger and bigger, so bright. All light. They are tall angels in two rows. They have high white wings on their backs. Perhaps there are in nite angels; perhaps I see two angels in their consecutive moments.

I cannot bear their brightness and cover my eyes, which hurt from opening so wide without a blink. When I put my hands down to look again, I recognize the old brown man and the old gray woman walking toward me out of the pine forest. It would seem that this small crack in the mystery was opened, not so much by the old people's magic, as by hunger. Afterward, whenever I did not eat for long, as during famine or battle, I could stare at ordinary people and see their light and gold.

I could see their dance. When I get hungry enough, then killing and falling are dancing too. The old people fed me hot vegetable soup. Then they asked me to talk-story about what happened in the mountains of the white tigers. I told them that the white tigers had stalked me through the snow but that I had fought them o with burning branches, and my great-grandparents had come to lead me safely through the forests.

I had met a rabbit who taught me about self-immolation and how to speed up transmigration: one does not Homemade Duck Boat Ladder Quality have to become worms rst but can change directly into a human being-as in our own humaneness we had just changed bowls of vegetable soup into people too.

That made them laugh. I would want to tell them about that last moment of my journey; but it was only one moment out of the weeks that I had been gone, and its telling would keep till morning. Besides, the two people must already know. In the next years, when I suddenly came upon them or when I caught them out of the corners of my eyes, he appeared as a handsome young man, tall with long black hair, and she, as a beautiful young woman who ran bare-legged through the trees.

In the spring she dressed like a bride; she wore juniper leaves in her hair and a black embroidered jacket. I learned to shoot accurately because my teachers held the targets. Often when sighting along an arrow, there to the side I would glimpse the young man or young woman, but when I looked directly, he or she would be old again. By this time I had guessed from their manner that the old woman was to the old man a sister or a friend rather than a wife.

After I returned from my survival test, the two old people trained me in dragon ways, which took another eight years. Copying the tigers, their stalking kill and their anger, had been a wild, bloodthirsty joy. Tigers are easy to nd, but I needed adult wisdom to know dragons. Unlike tigers, dragons are so immense, I would never see one in its entirety. But I could explore the mountains, which are the top of its head.

When climbing the slopes, I could understand that I was a bug riding on a dragon's forehead as it roams through space, its speed so di erent from my speed that I feel the dragon solid and immobile.

In quarries I could see its strata, the dragon's veins and muscles; the minerals, its teeth and bones. I could touch the stones the old woman wore-its bone marrow.

I had worked the soil, which is its esh, and harvested the plants and climbed the trees, which are its hairs. I could listen to its voice in the thunder and feel its breathing in the winds, see its breathing in the clouds.

Its tongue is the lightning. And the red that the lightning gives to the world is strong and lucky-in blood, poppies, roses, rubies, the red feathers of birds, the red carp, the cherry tree, the peony, the line alongside the turtle's eyes and the mallard's.

In the spring when the dragon awakes, I watched its turnings in the rivers. The closest I came to seeing a dragon whole was when the old people cut away a small strip of bark on a pine that was over three thousand years old. The resin underneath ows in the swirling shapes of dragons. You're too young to decide to live forever. I brought the leaves to the old man and old woman, and they ate them for immortality.

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Pearls are bone marrow; pearls come from oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes re and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many. I worked every day. When it rained, I exercised in the downpour, grateful not to be pulling sweet potatoes.

I moved like the trees in the wind. I was grateful not to be squishing in chicken mud, which I did not have nightmares about so frequently now. On New Year's mornings, the old man let me look in his water gourd to see my family. They were eating the biggest meal of the year, and I missed them very much. I had felt loved, love pouring from their ngers when the adults tucked red money in our pockets. My two old people did not give me money, but, each year for fteen years, a bead.

After I unwrapped the red paper and rolled the bead about between thumb and fingers, they took it back for safekeeping. We ate monk's food as usual. By looking into the water gourd I was able to follow the men I would have to execute. Not knowing that I watched, fat men ate meat; fat men drank wine made from the rice; fat men sat on naked little girls. I watched powerful men count their money, and starving men count theirs.

When bandits brought their share of raids home, I waited until they took o their masks so I would know the villagers who stole from their neighbors. I studied the generals' faces, their rank-stalks quivering at the backs of their heads. I learned rebels' faces, too, their foreheads tied with wild oaths. The old man pointed out strengths and weaknesses whenever heroes met in classical battles, but warfare makes a scramble of the beautiful, slow old ghts.

I saw one young ghter salute his opponent-and ve peasants hit him from behind with scythes and hammers. His opponent did not warn him. You can see behind you like a bat. Hold the peasants back with one hand and kill the warrior with the other. You don't stop shitting and pissing," she said.

Let it run. To console me for being without family on this day, they let me look inside the gourd. My whole family was visiting friends on the other side of the river. Everybody had on good clothes and was exchanging cakes. It was a wedding. My mother was talking to the hosts: "Thank you for taking our daughter.

Wherever she is, she must be happy now. She will certainly come back if she is alive, and if she is a spirit, you have given her a descent line. We are so grateful.

How full I would be with all their love for me. I would have for a new husband my own playmate, dear since childhood, who loved me so much he was to become a spirit bridegroom for my sake.

We will be so happy when I come back to the valley, healthy and strong and not a ghost. The water gave me a close-up of my husband's wonderful face-and I was watching when it went white at the sudden approach of armored men on horseback, thudding and jangling.

My people grabbed iron skillets, boiling soup, knives, hammers, scissors, whatever weapons came to hand, but my father said, "There are too many of them," and they put down the weapons and waited quietly at the door, open as if for guests.

An army of horsemen stopped at our house; the foot soldiers in the distance were coming closer. A horseman with silver scales a re in the sun shouted from the scroll in his hands, his words opening a red gap in his black beard.

As if disturbed by the marching feet, the water churned; and when it stilled again "Wait! The baron and his family-all of his family-were knocking their heads on the oor in front of their ancestors and thanking the gods out loud for protecting them from conscription. I watched the baron's piggish face chew open-mouthed on the sacri cial pig.

I plunged my hand into the gourd, making a grab for his thick throat, and he broke into pieces, splashing water all over my face and clothes. I turned the gourd upside-down to empty it, but no little people came tumbling out. You're only fourteen years old. You'd get hurt for nothing. No army will be able to stop you from doing whatever you want.

If you go now, you will be killed, and you'll have wasted seven and a half years of our time. You will deprive your people of a champion. You will have the advantage. Don't be impatient. But I had ended the panic about them already. I could feel a wooden door inside of me close. I had learned on the farm that I could stop loving animals raised for slaughter. And I could start loving them immediately when someone said, "This one is a pet," freeing me and opening the door.

We had lost males before, cousins and uncles who were conscripted into armies or bonded as apprentices, who are almost as lowly as slave girls.

I bled and thought about the people to be killed; I bled and thought about the people to be born. During all my years on the mountain, I talked to no one except the two old people, but they seemed to be many people. The whole world lived inside the gourd, the earth a green and blue pearl like the one the dragon plays with.

When I could point at the sky and make a sword appear, a silver bolt in the sunlight, and control its slashing with my mind, the old people said I was ready to leave.

The old man opened the gourd for the last time. I saw the baron's messenger leave our house, and my father was saying, "This time I must go and ght. The old people gave me the fteen beads, which I was to use if I got into terrible danger. They gave me men's clothes and armor. We bowed to one another. The bird ew above me down the mountain, and for some miles, whenever I turned to look for them, there would be the two old people waving.

I saw them through the mist; I saw them on the clouds; I saw them big on the mountain-top when distance had shrunk the pines. They had probably left images of themselves for me to wave at and gone about their other business.

When I reached my village, my father and mother had grown as old as the two whose shapes I could at last no longer see.

I helped my parents carry their tools, and they walked ahead so straight, each carrying a basket or a hoe not to overburden me, their tears falling privately. My family surrounded me with so much love that I almost forgot the ones not there. I praised the new infants. After eating rice and vegetables, I slept for a long time, preparation for the work ahead. In the morning my parents woke me and asked that I come with them to the family hall.

My father had a bottle of wine, an ink block and pens, and knives of various sizes. They had stopped the tears with which they had greeted me. Forebodingly I caught a smell-metallic, the iron smell of blood, as when a woman gives birth, as at the sacri ce of a large animal, as when I menstruated and dreamed red dreams.

My mother put a pillow on the oor before the ancestors. My mother washed my back as if I had left for only a day and were her baby yet. My father rst brushed the words in ink, and they uttered down my back row after row. Then he began cutting; to make ne lines and points he used thin blades, for the stems, large blades.

My mother caught the blood and wiped the cuts with a cold towel soaked in wine. It hurt terribly-the cuts sharp; the air burning; the alcohol cold, then hot-pain so various. I gripped my knees. I released them. Neither tension nor relaxation helped. I wanted to cry.

If not for the fteen years of training, I would have writhed on the oor; I would have had to be held down. The list of grievances went on and on. If an enemy should flay me, the light would shine through my skin like lace. At the end of the last word, I fell forward. Together my parents sang what they had written, then let me rest. My mother fanned my back. When I could sit up again, my mother brought two mirrors, and I saw my back covered entirely with words in red and black les, like an army, like my army.

My parents nursed me just as if I had fallen in battle after many victories. Soon I was strong again. A white horse stepped into the courtyard where I was polishing my armor. Though the gates were locked tight, through the moon door it came-a kingly white horse. It wore a saddle and bridle with red, gold, and black tassles dancing. The saddle was just my size with tigers and dragons tooled in swirls.

The white horse pawed the ground for me to go. On the hooves of its near forefoot and hindfoot was the ideograph "to fly. We took the fine saddlebags off the horse and lled them with salves and herbs, blue grass for washing my hair, extra sweaters, dried peaches. They gave me a choice of ivory or silver chopsticks. I took the silver ones because they were lighter. It was like getting wedding presents. The cousins and the villagers came bearing bright orange jams, silk dresses, silver embroidery scissors.

They brought blue and white porcelain bowls lled with water and carp-the bowls painted with carp, ns like orange re. I accepted all the gifts-the tables, the earthenware jugs -though I could not possibly carry them with me, and culled for travel only a small copper cooking bowl.

I could cook in it and eat out of it and would not have to search for bowl-shaped rocks or tortoiseshells. I put on my men's clothes and armor and tied my hair in a man's fashion.

He looked familiar to me, as if he were the old man's son, or the old man himself when you looked at him from the corners of your eyes. I leapt onto my horse's back and marveled at the power and height it gave to me. Just then, galloping out of nowhere straight at me came a rider on a black horse. The villagers scattered except for my one soldier, who stood calmly in the road.

I drew my sword. I have travelled here to join you. Families who had hidden their boys during the last conscription volunteered them now. I took the ones their families could spare and the ones with hero-re in their eyes, not the young fathers and not those who would break hearts with their leaving.

We were better equipped than many founders of dynasties had been when they walked north to dethrone an emperor; they had been peasants like us. Millions of us had laid our hoes down on the dry ground and faced north.

We sat in the elds, from which the dragon had withdrawn its moisture, and sharpened those hoes. Then, though it be ten thousand miles away, we walked to the palace. We would report to the emperor. The emperor, who sat facing south, must have been very frightened-peasants everywhere walking day and night toward the capital, toward Peiping.

But the last emperors of dynasties must not have been facing in the right direction, for they would have seen us and not let us get this hungry.

We would not have had to shout our grievances. The peasants would crown as emperor a farmer who knew the earth or a beggar who understood hunger. Thank you, Father," I said before leaving. They had carved their names and address on me, and I would come back. Often I walked beside my horse to travel abreast of my army.

When we had to impress other armies-marauders, columns of refugees ling past one another, boy gangs following their martial arts teachers-I mounted and rode in front. The soldiers who owned horses and weapons would pose ercely on my left and right. The small bands joined us, but sometimes armies of equal or larger strength would ght us.

Then screaming a mighty scream and swinging two swords over my head, I charged the leaders; I released my bloodthirsty army and my straining war-horse. I guided the horse with my knees, freeing both hands for sword-work, spinning green and silver circles all around me. I inspired my army, and I fed them. At night I sang to them glorious songs that came out of the sky and into my head.

When I opened my mouth, the songs poured out and were loud enough for the whole encampment to hear; my army stretched out for a mile. We sewed red ags and tied the red scraps around arms, legs, horses' tails. We wore our red clothes so that when we visited a village, we would look as happy as for New Year's Day. Then people would want to join the ranks. My army did not rape, only taking food where there was an abundance.

We brought order wherever we went. When I won over a goodly number of ghters, I built up my army enough to attack fiefdoms and to pursue the enemies I had seen in the water gourd. My rst opponent turned out to be a giant, so much bigger than the toy general I used to peep at. During the charge, I singled out the leader, who grew as he ran toward me.

Our eyes locked until his height made me strain my neck looking up, my throat so vulnerable to the stroke of a knife that my eyes dropped to the secret death points on the huge body. First I cut o his leg with one sword swipe, as Chen Luan-feng had chopped the leg o the thunder god.

When the giant stumped toward me, I cut o his head. Instantly he reverted to his true self, a snake, and slithered away hissing. The ghting around me stopped as the combatants' eyes and mouths opened wide in amazement. The giant's spells now broken, his soldiers, seeing that they had been led by a snake, pledged their loyalty to me. In the stillness after battle I looked up at the mountain-tops; perhaps the old man and woman were watching me and would enjoy my knowing it.

They'd laugh to see a creature winking at them from the bottom of the water gourd. But on a green ledge above the battle eld I saw the giant's wives crying. They had climbed out of their palanquins to watch their husband ght me, and now they were holding each other weeping. They were two sisters, two tiny fairies against the sky, widows from now on.

Their long undersleeves, which they had pulled out to wipe their tears, ew white mourning in the mountain wind. After a time, they got back into their sedan chairs, and their servants carried them away. I led my army northward, rarely having to sidetrack; the emperor himself sent the enemies I was hunting chasing after me. Sometimes they attacked us on two or three sides; sometimes they ambushed me when I rode ahead.

We would always win, Kuan Kung, the god of war and literature riding before me. I would be told of in fairy tales myself. I overheard some soldiers-and now there were many who had not met me-say that whenever we had been in danger of losing, I made a throwing gesture and the opposing army would fall, hurled across the battle eld. Hailstones as big as heads would shoot out of the sky and the lightning would stab like swords, but never at those on my side.

I never told them the truth. Chinese executed women who disguised themselves as soldiers or students, no matter how bravely they fought or how high they scored on the examinations. One spring morning I was at work in my tent repairing equipment, patching my clothes, and studying maps when a voice said, "General, may I visit you in your tent, please?

And since I had no family with me, no one ever visited inside. Riverbanks, hillsides, the cool sloped rooms under the pine trees-China provides her soldiers with meeting places enough. I opened the tent ap. And there in the sunlight stood my own husband with arms full of wild owers for me. I've been looking for you since the day that bird ew away with you. I'm so glad you married me.

He loosened my hair and covered the words with it. I turned around and touched his face, loving the familiar first. So for a time I had a partner-my husband and I, soldiers together just as when we were little soldiers playing in the village. We rode side by side into battle. When I became pregnant, during the last four months, I wore my armor altered so that I looked like a powerful, big man. As a fat man, I walked with the foot soldiers so as not to jounce the gestation.

Now when I was naked, I was a strange human being indeedwords carved on my back and the baby large in front. I hid from battle only once, when I gave birth to our baby.

In dark and silver dreams I had seen him falling from the sky, each night closer to the earth, his soul a star. Just before labor began, the last star rays sank into my belly. My husband would talk to me and not go, though I said for him to return to the battle eld. He caught the baby, a boy, and put it on my breast. We had both seen the boxes in which our parents kept the dried cords of all their children.

We made a sling for the baby inside my big armor, and rode back into the thickest part of the ghting. The umbilical cord ew with the red ag and made us laugh. At night inside our own tent, I let the baby ride on my back.

The sling was made of red satin and purple silk; the four paisley straps that tied across my breasts and around my waist ended in housewife's pockets lined with a coin, a seed, a nut, and a juniper leaf. At the back of the sling I had sewn a tiny quilted triangle, red at its center against two shades of green; it marked the baby's nape for luck. I walked bowed, and the baby warmed himself against me, his breathing in rhythm with mine, his heart beating like my heart.

When the baby was a month old, we gave him a name and shaved his head. For the full-month ceremony my husband had found two eggs, which we dyed red by boiling them with a flag. I peeled one and rolled it all over the baby's head, his eyes, his lips, off his bump of a nose, his cheeks, his dear bald head and fontanel.

I had brought dried grapefruit peel in my saddlebag, and we also boiled that. We washed our heads and hands in the grapefruit water, dabbing it on the baby's forehead and hands. Then I gave my husband the baby and told him to take it to his family, and I gave him all the money we had taken on raids to take to my family. I altered my clothes and became again the slim young man. Only now I would get so lonely with the tent so empty that I slept outside.

My white horse overturned buckets and danced on them; it lifted full wine cups with its teeth. The strong soldiers lifted the horse in a wooden tub, while it danced to the stone drums and ute music.

I played with the soldiers, throwing arrows into a bronze jar. But I found none of these antics as amusing as when I first set out on the road. It was during this lonely time, when any high cry made the milk spill from my breasts, that I got careless. Wild owers distracted me so that I followed them, picking one, then another, until I was alone in the woods. Out from behind trees, springing o branches came the enemy, their leader looming like a genie out of the water gourd.

I threw sts and feet at them, but they were so many, they pinned me to the earth while their leader drew his sword. My fear shot forth-a quick, jabbing sword that slashed ercely, silver ashes, quick cuts wherever my attention drove it. The leader stared at the palpable sword swishing unclutched at his men, then laughed aloud.

As if signaled by his laughter, two more swords appeared in midair. They clanged against mine, and I felt metal vibrate inside my brain. I willed my sword to hit back and to go after the head that controlled the other swords. But the man fought well, hurting my brain. The swords opened and closed, scissoring madly, metal zinging along metal.

Unable to leave my sky-sword to work itself, I would be watching the swords move like puppets when the genie yanked my hair back and held a dagger against my throat. I grabbed his arm, but one of his swords dived toward me, and I rolled out of the way.

A horse galloped up, and he leapt on it, escaping into the forest, the beads in his st. His swords fought behind him until I heard him shout, "I am here! So I had done battle with the prince who had mixed the blood of his two sons with the metal he had used for casting his swords. I ran back to my soldiers and gathered the fastest horsemen for pursuit. Our horses ran like the little white water horses in the surf.

Across a plain we could see the enemy, a dustdevil rushing toward the horizon. Wanting to see, I focused my eyes as the eagles had taught me, and there the genie would be-shaking one bead out of the pouch and casting it at us. Nothing happened. No thunder, no earthquake that split open the ground, no hailstones big as heads. I stood on top of the last hill before Peiping and saw the roads below me ow like living rivers.

Between roads the woods and plains moved too; the land was peopledthe Han people, the People of One Hundred Surnames, marching with one heart, our tatters ying. The depth and width of Joy were exactly known to me: the Chinese population. After much hardship a few of our millions had arrived together at the capital.

We faced our emperor personally. We beheaded him, cleaned out the palace, and inaugurated the peasant who would begin the new order. In his rags he sat on the throne facing south, and we, a great red crowd, bowed to him three times. He commended some of us who were his first generals. I told the people who had come with me that they were free to go home now, but since the Long Wall was so close, I would go see it.

They could come along if they liked. So, loath to disband after such high adventures, we reached the northern boundary of the world, chasing Mongols en route.

I touched the Long Wall with my own ngers, running the edge of my hand between the stones, tracing the grooves the builders' hands had made. We lay our foreheads and our cheeks against the Long Wall and cried like the women who had come here looking for their men so long building the wall. In my travels north, I had not found my brother.

Carrying the news about the new emperor, I went home, where one more battle awaited me. The baron who had drafted my brother would still be bearing sway over our village.

Having dropped my soldiers o at crossroads and bridges, I attacked the baron's stronghold alone. I jumped over the double walls and landed with swords drawn and knees bent, ready to spring.

When no one accosted me, I sheathed the swords and walked about like a guest until I found the baron. He was counting his money, his fat ringed fingers playing over the abacus. What do you want? He sat square and fat like a god.

All this is mine. I earned it. I didn't steal it from you. I've never seen you before in my life. Who are you? Everyone takes the girls when he can. The families are glad to be rid of them. We've never met before. I've done nothing to you. I pulled my shirt back on and opened the house to the villagers.

The baron's family and servants hid in closets and under beds. The villagers dragged them out into the courtyard, where they tried them next to the beheading machine. They beheaded the others.

Their necks were collared in the beheading machine, which slowly clamped shut. There was one last-minute reprieve of a bodyguard when a witness shouted testimony just as the vise was pinching blood. The guard had but recently joined the household in exchange for a child hostage.

A slow killing gives a criminal time to regret his crimes and think of the right words to prove he can change. I searched the house, hunting out people for trial. I came upon a locked room. When I broke down the door, I found women, cowering, whimpering women. I heard shrill insect noises and scurrying. They blinked weakly at me like pheasants that have been raised in the dark for soft meat. The servants who walked the ladies had abandoned them, and they could not escape on their little bound feet.

Some crawled away from me, using their elbows to pull themselves along. These women would not be good for anything. I called the villagers to come identify any daughters they wanted to take home, but no one claimed any.

I gave each woman a bagful of rice, which they sat on. They rolled the bags to the road. They wandered away like ghosts. Later, it would be said, they turned into the band of swordswomen who were a mercenary army. They did not wear men's clothes like me, but rode as women in black and red dresses. They bought up girl babies so that many poor families welcomed their visitations. When slave girls and daughters-in-law ran away, people would say they joined these witch amazons.

They killed men and boys. I myself never encountered such women and could not vouch for their reality. After the trials we tore down the ancestral tablets. My son stared, very impressed by the general he had seen in the parade, but his father said, "It's your mother. Go to your mother. She gave him her helmet to wear and her swords to hold. Wearing my black embroidered wedding coat, I knelt at my parents-in-law's feet, as I would have done as a bride.

My parents had bought their co ns. They would sacri ce a pig to the gods that I had returned. From the words on my back, and how they were ful lled, the villagers would make a legend about my perfect filiality.

My American life has been such a disappointment. And it was important that I do something big and ne, or else my parents would sell me when we made our way back to China. In China there were solutions for what to do with little girls who ate up food and threw tantrums.

You can't eat straight A's. When one of my parents or the emigrant villagers said, "'Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds,'" I would thrash on the oor and scream so hard I couldn't talk. I couldn't stop. Bad, I guess. You know how girls are. Better to raise geese than girls.

But then there's no use wasting all that discipline on a girl. Bad girl! I'm not a bad girl. I minded that the emigrant villagers shook their heads at my sister and me. The good part about my brothers being born was that people stopped saying, "All girls," but I learned new grievances.

Because I'm a girl? Is that why not? Who wants to go out with Great-Uncle? I'm coming. Wait for me. The boys came back with candy and new toys.

When they walked through Chinatown, the people must have said, "A boy-and another boy-and another boy! I went away to college-Berkeley in the sixties-and I studied, and I marched to change the world, but I did not turn into a boy.

I would have liked to bring myself back as a boy for my parents to welcome with chickens and pigs. That was for my brother, who returned alive from Vietnam. If I went to Vietnam, I would not come back; females desert families. It was said, "There is an outward tendency in females," which meant that I was getting straight A's for the good of my future husband's family, not my own. I did not plan ever to have a husband. I would show my mother and father and the nosey emigrant villagers that girls have no outward tendency.

I stopped getting straight A's. And all the time I was having to turn myself American-feminine, or no dates.

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