Mountains Upon Mountains

Winter in the Greater Khingan Mountains: minus thirty-seven degrees, snow up to the knees, and wind like a blunt knife.

Zetao, a member of a forestry bureau's forest survey team in the twenty-first century, fell into a ravine during a blizzard. When he awoke, he had become the son of a hunter in Qingsongtun: a boy who had just turned nineteen, whose father had frozen to death in a snowstorm three years ago, whose mother was frail and ill, whose younger sister was skin and bones, and whose family had been out of food for three days. The original owner had drunk, gambled, and cracked his head in a fall. His fever wouldn't break, and his life hung by a thread.

But he was no longer the original Zetao.