On the mountain

This is from a NYT report by Andrew Jacobs in Baihuatan, China.

Fu Hong, a 19-year-old horse breeder, came trudging from the other side, his face gaunt and his clothing wet and smeared with dirt.

After the earthquake buried seven of his friends, he scrambled to the top of a mountain and hunkered down in the forest. For three nights he sat numb, impervious to the rain. “At least up there, nothing could fall on my head,” he said.

In the end, hunger drove him back to Yingxiu, but he was haunted by the death all around him; an elementary school had collapsed on 400 children, and the constant rumbling of aftershocks made it impossible to sleep. “I had to get out of there,” he said as he passed by. “My family must think I’m dead.”