By the Tung-t'ing Lake, in a reign beset by ten suns and killing storms, lay "a serpent, a thousand feet long" that "devoured human beings", while "wild boars of enormous size" ravaged the eastern kingdom. Against it the Emperor Yao sent his champion, the archer Shên I, who had already shot nine false suns out of the sky and been named "Divine Archer" for transfixing a distant pine at a word. Three months after his first campaign the Emperor ordered him back to finish the "Tung-t'ing serpent", and the killing is told almost curtly: "An arrow in the left eye laid him out stark and dead". The boars were trapped and slain, and Shên I was canonized Marquis Pacifier of the Country.

The single witness wired to served text here is Werner's compilation Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), where the giant serpent is only one episode in the long career of the Divine Archer, folded between his war on the wind-spirit and his marriage to the sister of the water-spirit. Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this "Giant serpent" its number, gathered witnesses far wider than this one — Icelandic and Norwegian, Irish and Jewish, a Toba serpent from South America, a Greenland Eskimo one — but on our shelf those authorities wait unread today, and only the Chinese archer answers.

What lingers is the smallness of the wound against the size of the beast: a thousand feet of monster undone by a single arrow to a single eye. Does the giant serpent live in these tales to be dreaded, or only to be measured against the hero exact enough to end it?