Now rain was violently thrashing the surface of the flood, and Kiyoaki considered spending the night in the attic of the Yaos' house. But the emptiness of it frightened him, and for no better reason than that, he decided to row back. The oilcloth would protect the eggs, and he had been wet for so long that he was used to it. He was like a frog hopping in and out of its pond, it was all the same to him. So he got in the boat and began to row.

But now, perversely, the wind was from the east, blowing up waves of surprising weight and power. His hands hurt, and the boat occasionally brushed over drowned things: treetops, wiregraph poles, perhaps other things, he was too jumpy to look. Dead men's fingers! He could not see far in the growing gloom, and as night fell he lost his feeling for what direction he was headed. The rowing boat had a oiled canvas decking bunched in its bow, and he pulled it back over the gunwales, tied it in place, got under it and floated over the flood, lying in the bottom of the boat and occasionally bailing with a can. It was wet, but it would not founder. He let it bounce over the waves, and eventually fell asleep.

He woke several times in the night, but after bailing he always forced himself to sleep again. The rowing boat swirled and rocked, but the waves never broke over it. If they did the boat would founder and he would drown, but he avoided thinking about that.

Dawn made it clear he had drifted west rather than east. He was far out on the inland sea that the central valley had become. A knot of valley oaks marked a small island of higher ground that still stood above the flood, and he rowed towards it.

As he was facing away from the new little island, he did not see it well until he had thumped the bow onto it. Immediately he discovered it was coated with a host of spiders, bugs, snakes, squirrels, moles, rats, mice, raccoons and foxes, all leaping onto the rowing boat at once, as representing the new highest ground. He himself was the highest ground of all, and he was shouting in dismay and slapping desperate snakes and squirrels and spiders off him, when a young woman and baby leapt onto the boat like the rest of the crowd of animals, except the girl pushed off from the tree Kiyoaki had rowed against, weeping and crying loudly, 'They're trying to cat her, they're trying to eat my baby!'

Kiyoaki was preoccupied by the scores of creatures still crawling on him, to the point of nearly losing an oar over the side. Eventually he had squished or brushed or thrown overboard all the interlopers, and he replaced the oars in the rowlocks and rowed swiftly away. The girl and ber baby sat on the boat deck, the girl still whacking insects and spiders and shouting 'Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!' She was Chinese.

The lowering grey clouds began to leak rain yet again. They could see nothing but water in all directions, except for the trees of the little island they had so hastily vacated.

Kiyoaki rowed east. 'You're going the wrong way,' the girl complained.

'This is the way I came,' Kiyoaki said. 'The family that employs me is there.'

The girl did not reply.

'How did you get on that island?'

Again she said nothing.

Having passengers made rowing harder, and the waves came closer to breaking over the boat. Crickets and spiders continued to leap around underfoot, and an opossum had wedged itself in the bow under the decking. Kiyoaki rowed until his hands were bleeding, but they never caught sight of land; it was raining so hard now that it formed a kind of thick falling fog.

The girl complained, nursed her baby, killed insects. 'Row west,' she kept saying. 'The current will help you.'

Kiyoaki rowed cast. The boat jounced over the waves, and from time to time they bailed it out. The whole world seemed to have become a sea. Once Kiyoaki glimpsed a sight of the coastal range through a rent in the low clouds to the west, much closer than he would have expected or hoped. A current in the floodwaters must have been carrying them west.

Near dark they came on another tiny tree island.

'It's the same one!' the young woman said.

'It just looks that way.'

The wind was rising again, like the evening delta breeze they enjoyed so much during the hot dry summers. The waves were getting higher and higher, slapping hard into the bow and splashing over the canvas and in on their feet. Now they had to land, or they would sink and drown.

So Kiyoaki landed the boat. Again a tide of animal and insect life overran them. The Chinese girl cursed with surprising fluency, beating the larger creatures away from her baby. The smaller ones you just had to get used to. Up in the vast branches of the valley oaks sat a miserable troop of snow monkeys, staring down on them. Kiyoaki tied the boat to a branch and got off, arranged a wet blanket on the squirming mud between two roots, pulled the rowing boat's decking off, and draped it over the girl and her baby, weighing it down as best he could with broken branches. He crawled underneath the canvas with her, and they and an entire menagerie of bugs and snakes and rodents settled in for the long night. It was hard to sleep.

The next morning was as rainy as ever. The young woman had put her baby between the two of them to protect her from the rats. Now she nursed her. Under the canvas it was warmer than outside. Kiyoaki wished he could start a fire to cook some snakes or squirrels, but nothing was dry. 'We might as well get going,' he said.

They went out into the chill drizzle and got back in the boat. As Kiyoaki cast off about ten of the snow monkeys leaped down through the branches and climbed into the boat with them. The girl shrieked and pulled her shirt over ber baby, huddling over it and staring at the monkeys. They sat there like passengers, looking down or off into the rain, pretending to be thinking about something else. She threatened one and it shrank back.

'Leave them alone,' Kiyoaki said. The monkeys were Japanese; the Chinese didn't like them, and complained about their presence on Yingzhou.

They spun over the great inland sea. The young woman and her baby were dotted with spiders and fleas, as if they were dead bodies. The monkeys began to groom them, eating some insects and throwing others overboard.

'My name is Kiyoaki.'

'I am Peng ti,' the young Chinese woman said, brushing things off the babe and ignoring the monkeys.

Rowing hurt the blisters on Kiyoaki's hands, but after a while the pain would subside. He headed west, giving in to the current that had already taken them so far that way.

Out of the drizzle appeared a small sailing boat. Kiyoaki shouted, waking the girl and baby, but the men on the sailing boat had already spotted them, and they sailed over.

There were two sailors on board, two Japanese men. Peng ti watched them with narrowed eyes.

One told the castaways to climb into their boat. 'But tell the monkeys to stay there,' he said with a laugh.

Peng ti passed her baby up to them, then hauled herself over the gunwale.

'You're lucky they're just monkeys,' the other one said. 'Up north valley, Black Fort is high ground for a lot of country that hadn't been cleared, and the animals that swam onto it were more than you see here in your rice paddies. They had closed the gates but walls were nothing much to the bears, brown bears and gold bears, and they were shooting them when the magistrate ordered them to stop, because it was just going to use up all their ammunition and then they'd still have a whole town of bears. And the giant gold bears opened the gates and in come wolves, elk, the whole damn Hsu Fu walking the streets of Black Fort, and the people all locked up in their attics waiting it out.' The men laughed with pleasure at the thought.

'We're hungry,' Peng ti said.

'You look it,' they said.

'We were going east,' Kiyoaki mentioned.