Ling Chen lived with her parents and seven sisters in a mud house across the creek. They were our only neighbors in the mountain hollow. Like us, they had fled deep into the mountains to evade the family planning policy and try for a son. Uncle Chen had once owned a chicken farm. I heard that he used to live in a two-story concrete house with a color TV, electric fans, and a refrigerator. Now the walls of their house were made of yellow mud. When dry, they looked like thickened scabs. When wet, they sagged like mucus. The roof was covered with tar paper that melted under the sun and drooped from the eaves.

They still kept dozens of chickens. Before dawn each day, the roosters began crowing one after another. During the day, they patrolled the front and back of the house. Whenever we children got too close, they would flap toward us and peck. My mother said a plate of meat was always on their table. Not chicken. Snake meat. Catching snakes was how the family survived. Most of the time Uncle Chen slept, smoked, or drank. He rarely spoke to us. The way he looked at us was like he was studying a snake he had not yet caught.

Ling said snakes were like people. They could not stay still when the air turned heavy. Before rain, when the pressure dropped, snakes crawled out of their holes and lay on rocks, gasping. After rain, when their burrows flooded, they moved in groups, slithering across paths. This mountain hollow held more snakes than people. On rainy days, the soft thing beneath your foot was not always mud.

Sometimes I watched her father skin snakes beneath the trees beside the house. He hung them from a tree branch and slit the skin open from the tail upward. The skin peeled off whole, like taking off a piece of clothing. Ling stood nearby holding a metal basin while he nailed the skin to a wooden board to dry. Once dried, the patterns remained, the scales fitted together like tiles. People in the city used them to make wallets and leather shoes. One large python skin could make dozens of erhus. Snake meat was white. He chopped it into sections and tossed it into a pan to make snake soup. Snake gallbladders were green and soaked in jars of liquor. Beneath their bed sat dozens of jars with snakes floating inside. Snake oil was white, stored in little tins that Ling rubbed on herself every day. Even the bones were not wasted. He simmered them with red dates, goji berries, and slices of ginger into soup. He said every part of a snake was treasure.

“Then what about the snake itself?” I asked.

“The snake itself isn’t treasure,” he said. “The snake is only a snake. We are the ones who use it.”

One sweltering afternoon, Ling invited me to go snake hunting with her father. She wore a red floral dress and moved through the broadleaf forest like a flower. I wore my sisters’ old clothes: a blue shirt and black shorts with a hole torn near the hem. Uncle Chen carried a long pole with a rope noose tied to the end.

The forest was dark beneath the trees.

“Look there,” he said.

I followed the direction of his finger and saw a brown snake coiled on a branch, motionless.

“That’s a rat snake,” he said. “Nonvenomous.”

He stretched the noose forward, looped it over the snake’s head, and jerked hard. The snake fell from the tree and twisted across the dead leaves. He pinned its head beneath his foot, bent down, and gripped it behind the neck.

“Open the sack,” he told me.

I crouched down and pulled the cloth bag open, my hands shaking.

“Don’t shake,” he said. “A snake can sense your fear. It’ll bite you.”

He aimed the snake’s head toward the opening. The snake slid inside on its own. Ling wound the rope around the top and tied a knot. The snake stopped moving.

My mother once said that when people were frightened badly enough, their whole body stiffened, as if frozen solid.

“Like when?” I asked.

“Like when you walk to the bathroom at night and feel something drift past you.”

I laughed at her for being timid. She said that every time I got an injection as a child, my body stiffened like wood.

I lowered my head to look at the sack. The snake was still inside, unmoving. I could not tell whether it was pretending to be dead or had truly been frightened to death.

We continued deeper into the brush. Uncle Chen pointed toward a cluster of shrubs. I followed his finger and saw nothing. Everything was green. The leaves were green. The grass was green.

“There,” Ling said.

She pointed at a branch, but I still could not see it. She plucked a leaf and pressed it against her lips. She blew a note through it, sharp and brief, like a birdcall. Then she stamped her feet in rhythm and kept blowing. The sound echoed through the forest, like a mother bird calling her chicks home for dinner.

The shrubs rustled. A dark green snake slid out from the leaves. Its eyes were horizontal slits. It lifted its head, black tongue flickering, and slithered toward Ling. I bit my finger until I tasted blood. Ling kept blowing.

The snake paused beside the red bucket. Ling bent down and tilted the bucket toward it. The snake slid inside. Coiled at the bottom, it looked like a living piece of jade.

She handed me the leaf. “Try.”

“I don’t know how.”

“It’s okay.” She grinned, showing the gap where her two front teeth were missing. “Just keep telling it in your heart to crawl into the red bucket.”

Uncle Chen tipped the snake into the sack with the first one.

At last we went down to the creek. I took the leaf Ling’s lips had touched and held it to my own. Something moved among the cracks in the rocks by the water, something with a red tail. I blew hard. All I heard was the sound of my own breath, ridiculous and sputtering.

A small emerald snake swam toward me. It slid across the top of my foot, cool and slick like a wet ribbon. Then it climbed my calf, curling around it like a vine around a stick.

“Don’t stop,” Ling said, pulling the red bucket closer.

I kept blowing. Puh, puh, puh.

The snake slipped into the bucket. My mouth ached. My lips stung from rubbing against the leaf. My mouth tasted green.

Ling wore red plastic sandals with straps crossing over the tops of her feet, her toes exposed. Her feet were clean. She washed them after walking the mountain paths. Washed them again after returning home. Again before bed. I lowered my head to look at my own feet. My slippers were faded, with a crack across the strap. They were too large, leaving half my foot exposed. Mud clung to my soles. Black grime filled the spaces between my toes. My heels were split with dry cracks that hurt when I walked.

I edged closer to her until my toes brushed against her sandal. The texture felt like snake scales. Ling slipped her foot away.

Her father walked ahead carrying the long pole, farther and farther into the trees until the shadows swallowed him. Ling and I followed behind.

“Isn’t your dad afraid the snakes will take revenge?” I asked. “Climb into the chicken coop and eat the eggs and chicks?”

Ling said that once a python had crawled into their coop. Her father had not killed it. Instead, he carried four hens over and placed them in front of its mouth. The python returned several more times after that. Each time, he fed it chickens.

She said a plague wiped out all her father’s chickens. The villagers wanted to buy the dead chickens cheaply, saying he could never sell them anyway, but he refused. One night, long after dark, people climbed over his wall and stole dozens of the dead birds. The next day, the whole village ate braised chicken. He said nothing. He loaded the remaining chickens onto a handcart and pushed them into the forest.

“Did he bury them all?” I asked.

Ling shook her head. Her arm twisted through the air like a snake moving through grass.

“He offered them to the snakes as a feast.”

I nodded and looked down at the snake inside the bucket. Maybe the snakes remembered. Maybe they had come back to repay him. Ling’s hand holding the red bucket looked pale and smooth. I wanted to hold the bucket with her, to move closer to her hand. That smoothness.

One morning after a typhoon, sunlight pushed through the clouds and spread across the ground. My mother shook me awake and said something had happened at Ling’s house.

“What happened?” I asked, running barefoot toward the door.

Across the creek, their house was still standing, though one corner of the tar-paper roof had been ripped away.

“All the chickens are gone,” my mother said.

“Blown away by the wind?”

“No. Taken by snakes.”

Ling’s father was walking toward us in black rain boots. He waved his hand. It was swollen like a steamed bun.

“Bit by a bamboo pit viper,” he said, showing the yellow teeth stained by years of smoking. “Third time. It’ll heal in three days. Snake venom can’t kill me.”

As he spoke, his tongue moved between his teeth like a snake flicking its tongue.

I stuck out my tongue too. The wet air touched it first.

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Huina Zheng holds an M.A. with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach. Her creative work has been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other literary journals. She has received multiple honors, including nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.

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