In Xiangheli, Chenghua District, there was a white dog, magnificent in build and white from head to tail. No one in the neighborhood knew how old it was. Women now in their seventies said that when they were little girls playing in that lane, the dog had already been wandering there. City enforcers tasked with catching strays and layabouts who stole dogs alike had both tried to seize it, only to be bitten for no reason or else injured by one mishap after another. Once enough people had failed, no one dared lay hands on the white dog again.
In the year of the Wenchuan earthquake, on the seventh day of the fourth month, the white dog went mad with barking in Xiangheli, then drew back and whimpered, making a sound like grief itself. The next day the great quake struck, and people all thought the dog had foreknown it. The white dog had no fixed home. Neighbors sometimes took it in, but at most it would stay three or five days before vanishing again. Cats, dogs, turtles, and sparrows often followed it as it moved across the neighborhood’s roofs and wall cracks.
Last year, at last, there came a day when the white dog lay down before a sundries shop in Xiangheli and did not move again. A moment later it was dead. The shop owner was already in his forties and had known the dog since childhood. Saddened, he found a solid wooden crate once used for freight, placed the dog’s body inside, and prepared to take it to the fields of his old home in the countryside for burial. At first the crate felt astonishingly heavy, far heavier than a dog ought to weigh. Halfway there it grew lighter and lighter until at last it seemed empty. When he shook it, something rattled inside. Opening it, he found that all that remained was a jade hound the size of a palm, warm and glossy all over, with liquid light shifting inside it. He dared not keep it for himself. Instead he presented it to the abbot of Hongwasi, where it was placed beneath the seat of Maitreya.