The wind, in this telling, has a keeper. The one witness wired here, Myths & Legends of China (the 1922 compilation), opens on ruin: "terrible calamities began to lay waste the land", ten suns scorching the crops, and "dreadful storms uprooted trees and overturned houses", while near the Tung-t’ing Lake a serpent a thousand feet long devoured men. Behind the weather stands a person. Shên I, the "Divine Archer", is sent by the ruler Yao to slay the monsters plaguing the land; he climbs a mountain to study the tempests and finds their source in a spirit — "the Spirit of the Wind, who blew them out of a sack".

The wind-spirit is named Fei Lien, and the shape the record gives the encounter is not a killing but a surrender. The conflict ends in "Fei Lien suing for mercy and swearing friendship to his victor", "whereupon the storms ceased". The wind is not destroyed, only bound over to peace — a violence kept in a sack until some hand loosens the neck of it. The same bow that will soon shoot nine false suns out of the sky is, at this first test, turned only against a spirit who, once beaten, would sooner be a friend than a foe.

Thompson filed wind-spirits widely — German, Livonian, Jewish, a Greenland Eskimo telling and a Yukon one among the rest — but on this shelf only the Chinese witness is wired to served text; the northern weather-spirits wait unread. If a storm is something a spirit pours from a sack, is the sky ever merely weather, or always somebody’s temper let loose?