The Bone Hunters by Robert J. Mrazek Read Free Book Online Page B

soft wood, she carefully set the legand fastened the stems in place with silk thread. She then entrusted the bird to Me Lei, the ten-year-old daughter of her closest neighbor, showing the girl where the mallard could rest its broken leg in the small spring behind her cottage.
    Wei returned to the job she had been doing, which was cleaning the sweet potatoes she had picked earlier that day from the acreage shared by all the farmers in the village. Her yams should have been plump and mature by now but instead were stunted and soft. The fibrous skin sloughed off as she tried to rinse them in the enamel tub.
    Wei spent the rest of the afternoon preparing the message on note cards for the evening prayer service she would be leading that night at the village meeting hall. Remembering how the mallard had recoiled at the putrid condition of the lake, Wei recalled her early childhood years when the water had been pure, a welcome resting place for migrating ducks, geese, and other waterbirds. She silently vowed that she would help restore those days again.
    Wei had left the village at the age of seven to enroll in the classical Chinese dancing academy in Chengdu. A prodigy, she had become its leading dancer at fifteen. Twenty years later, she had been forced at thirty-five to retire like the other dancers to make way for younger artists.
    Wei decided to return home to her small farming village in Sichuan. By then, her parents had died, their ashes spread on the lake they had once cherished. She moved back into the thatched hut where she had been born and set to work farming their family’s share of the community-owned acreage.
    At forty-seven, she still maintained her proud and lithe dancer’s figure. Her skin was taut and unblemished, her large brown eyes stunning against her polished ivory complexion. Her only concession to vanity lay in keeping her face covered with a broad-brimmed hat when working in the fields.
    Unlike Wei, many of the villagers had recently been beset with a range of serious health problems. The village’s “barefoot doctor” had told Wei that some of the medical conditions, including an alarming number of cases of bone cancer, were probably caused by the fact that many villagers drew their drinking water supply from the lake.
    Wei thought she knew what was happening. Five years earlier, the Dong Tao Chemical Corporation had begun buying up farmland in the area around the lake to the north of the village. Those farmers who refused to accept the company’s purchase offer had had their land confiscated by the local municipal court.
    A few months after moving back to the village, Wei walked the two miles north along the edge of the lake to the site of the factory. As she approached the chain-link fence that surrounded it, the noxious air made her eyes water and her nose run. In the distance, she could see a man wearing a mask in a bulldozer moving material from the factory to a twenty-foot-high pile of waste deposited nearby.
    Examining the terrain, she could see that each time it rained, the waste pile would leach down the hill toward the lake. The trees below it were brown and dying, the bark looking as if it had been burned by fire.
    Wei returned home determined to try to make thefactory stop its actions. Nearly everyone in the village was able to contribute at least a small amount of money to the effort each month. When she felt she had enough, Wei traveled to Meishan and retained a young lawyer to represent them.
    The lawyer quickly learned that the factory manufactured chlorate, which was used in bleach and disinfectant. Its waste products included chromium 6, which was known to cause cancer and respiratory problems. Wei engaged him to bring a suit against the chemical company, alleging that it was polluting the land and water around it.
    Before the action could be brought to the regional court, however, the lawyer suddenly disappeared, and no other lawyer in Meishan would take the case.