A story for kids on a Chinese Fishing Contest

Here is a ‘picture in words.’ The writer has ‘painted in’ much detail that a less keen eye might have missed. Yet they all help us to see the full picture of a Chinese scene.

A CHINESE herb-boy is standing upright on a water buffalo’s back. His feet are bare, and he is wearing nothing but a straw cape, which hangs down to his knees in a tattered state. On his head is a board-brimmed hat of straw which serves both as a screen from the heat of the sun and a protection against rain.

The outline of his figure, bathed in sunshine, stands out boldly against the skyline. Only the boy’s face is in shadow beneath his sun-hat. The light breeze causes his straw cape to sway gently, and bends the tops of the bamboos in the copse where the woodcock finds cover.

In the paddy fields are showing, in orderly clusters, the first green shoots of the rice crop, spaced with careful exactness. A little farther off is a lagoon, surrounded by reedy hummocks, over which flights of wild duck are skimming as the evening draws on. The hovel by the lagoon, with dark smoke rising through the thatched roof, is the home of the herd-boy. In the background are brown hills terraced by the patient labor of many years.

In the lagoon to fisherman are fishing. The one is casting a net the other is employing cormorants. The uncouth, long necked, black-plumaged birds stand behind him, waiting their turn to drive in at the fisherman’s bidding.

The fisherman, whose name is A Kuei, chooses his bird, and before sitting it free into the water places a ring round its throat to prevent the bird from swallowing the fish. The bird swims swiftly under water and seizes fish after fish till its gullet is full. It then returns to its masters, who make it cough up the fish. He keeps the larger ones, and, removing the ring, lets the bird feast on the small fry.

The other fisherman, Yu Lin, has his large net set in a frame hung by numerous strings from a long rod which can be raised and lowered. He silently dips the net among the shoals of fishes till a shoal swims over it, and then as silently raises it from the water with the gleaming fish lying in it.

The two fishermen are rivals and are engaged in a fishing contest, and the herd-boy is watching with his almond-shaped eyes the efforts of the pair, while he sings in a high note some haunting Chinese melody. The herd-boy is the judge of the contest.

As the shades of night are falling, the fishermen cease from their toil and display their catch to the herd-boy. Yu Lin produces a full basket and claims the prize for his crowds of small fish cut in the shallows near the side of the lagoon; but A Kuei has the largest fish, a splendid carp, which his well trained cormorant has brought, struggling in its bill, from the deeper water.

The herd-boy is now seated on the water-buffalo with the air of a judge. Each in turn, the rival fishermen look to the herd-boy for a decision in their favor. Yu Lin proudly displays his multitude of small fishes. A Kuei mocks at them as only fit to feed his cormorants and sings the merits of the carp, which he boasts is as large as the sacred carp in the carp-pond at the red temple of the War-God on the hill-top. Not to be outdone, Yu Lin praises the delicate flavor of his small fish and pronounces them dainty feet for a royal table. The weather-beaten faces of the fisherman are aglow with eagerness, and their bronzed naked limbs seem tense with excitement. Only the fading light at last puts an end to the argument.

The rival fishermen make their way to the village under the hill. A kuei carries his cormorants in two wicker baskets hung from a bamboo rod over his shoulder. Only by Yu Lin’s frequent cries of ‘Intolerable!’ ‘Most miserable!’ can one guess that the herd-boy has judged him the loser.

The judge plods his way home, with his water buffalo snuffling behind him along the narrow dike. The herd-boy is soon in his hovel and the water buffalo in his stall.

– By Capt. Wilmot P.M. Russell