Ryoga Hibiki left the Tendo dojo at four o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon to buy a bottle of soy sauce.

He had been trying to get to Hokkaido. But Kasumi had asked him to stay for dinner, and Akane had smiled at him, and when the soy sauce bottle turned out to be empty, he stood up so fast he knocked over his tea.

"I'll go," he said. "It's no trouble."

"It's three blocks," said Ranma, from where he lay on the floor reading a comic book. "Left at the corner, two blocks down, it's the store with the blue sign. Five hundred yen says you're not back by dinner."

"You're on," said Ryoga.

He turned left at the corner. That was his first mistake. Or the store should have been somewhere else. It was always hard to say afterward exactly where a thing had gone wrong.

By sundown he was walking through a train yard. By midnight he was on the shoulder of a highway with trucks roaring past him, and by noon the next day he could smell the ocean. That was strange, because Nerima is not on the ocean. But Ryoga had learned long ago that the world rearranged itself while he wasn't looking, and the only thing to do was keep walking until it put itself back.

The harbor was full of ships, long gray ones and long red ones, tied to the docks with ropes as thick as his arm. From one of them a ramp ran up from the dock. It looked to Ryoga like a bridge. Bridges went places. Places were where the soy sauce was.

He walked up the ramp, found a quiet spot among a few hundred brand-new cars all parked in rows, and sat down to rest his eyes for one minute.

*   *   *

When he woke up, the floor was moving.

The crew found him two days later, eating crackers behind a minivan. There was a lot of shouting in languages Ryoga didn't speak, and then a tired captain with a gray beard said something to the cook, a big, round, cheerful man who handed Ryoga an apron and a knife and pointed at a sack of potatoes taller than either of them.

Ryoga peeled potatoes for twenty-three days. He was very good at it. He could do one in four strokes, and once, to impress the cook, he did a whole sack in the air without letting a potato touch the counter. The cook taught him English words in return: potato, coffee, more coffee, and, near the end, Texas, which he said with his hand on his heart, like it was a prayer.

Ryoga thought it was a very long bridge. He would later deny there had been any canal.

On the twenty-fourth morning the floor stopped moving, and Ryoga walked down the ramp into air so hot and wet he could have wrung it out like a towel. He thanked the cook, bowed to the captain, shouldered his pack, and opened his umbrella against the sun.

The Tendo dojo, he reasoned, was obviously inland. Everything is inland if you walk far enough. He set off away from the water.

*   *   *

South Texas in August is not like Nerima in August. In Nerima, in August, it is hot. In South Texas in August, it is hot the way the inside of a rice cooker is hot. The trees are mesquite, short and twisted and full of thorns, and they give the kind of shade a chain-link fence gives. Everything that isn't a mesquite is a cactus.

Ryoga walked for six days.

He walked white gravel roads that ran straight for miles and then stopped at a gate. He saw gray cattle with big humps on their necks and ears that flopped like a hound's, and they looked at him like he was the strangest thing they'd ever seen, which he probably was. A long-legged brown bird with a tail like a pump handle raced him down a road for a quarter of a mile and won.

On the third day a herd of small, bristly, gray-black animals with tusks came trotting out of the brush and stopped in the road to look at him. They looked a lot like pigs. Ryoga did not like pigs. Pigs reminded him of things. He went around them very wide, and walked fast for an hour after.

On the fourth day he found a little store with two gas pumps in front of it and a sign full of letters he couldn't read. The woman behind the counter had gray hair piled high on top of her head. Ryoga showed her the note Kasumi had written him in her neat handwriting: the address of the Tendo dojo, and the words soy sauce, 1 bottle.

The woman turned it upside down and back. Then she said, "Hon, I don't know what that says, but you look like you're about to fall over," and she gave him a bottle of red soda pop out of the cooler so cold it hurt his teeth. Drinking it was safe; Ryoga had checked that the hard way years ago. It was the best thing he had ever tasted.

When he pointed to the note again, she pointed out the door. "San Antonio's thataway," she said. "Big city. Somebody there'll be able to read it."

He thanked her with a deep bow, walked out the door, and turned the other way.

*   *   *

On the sixth afternoon he came to a windmill.

It stood in a pasture, creaking around in the hot wind, over a round metal tank as big as a backyard pool, brimming with water it had pulled up from somewhere deep under the ground. Ryoga folded his umbrella, set down his pack, and leaned over to splash his face. Then he stopped, and looked at the water, and thought about it.

It was then that he heard the snort.

The bull was gray, with a hump the size of a sofa cushion, and it had been lying in the only shade for a mile, behind the tank. It stood up. It lowered its head.

Ryoga Hibiki had fought Ranma Saotome more times than he could count. He was not afraid of any bull. He set his feet and raised one fist.

The bull did not care about any of that. It hit him at full speed, right in the middle, and Ryoga sailed up over the edge of the tank and came down in the exact center with a splash that sent water over the side in a sheet.

Well water. Deep well water, from far down where the sun never reaches. Cold.

A moment later a very small black pig with a yellow bandana around its neck came paddling furiously to the edge of the tank, scrambled out over the rim, and dropped into the mud. The bull leaned down and sniffed it. The pig sneezed. The bull, satisfied, went back to its shade.

P-chan lay in the mud next to his own pack, his own umbrella, and his own clothes, and stared up at the sky, which was huge and white and had not one single cloud in it.

Then he heard a truck.

It was an old pickup, white once, bouncing across the pasture in a cloud of dust. An old man in a straw hat got out to check the tank, and out of the other door jumped a girl about ten years old, with brown braids, cutoff jeans, and a pair of rubber boots three sizes too big.

She saw P-chan, and her mouth fell open.

"Grandpa! Grandpa, there's a pig!"

"That's a javelina, Cassie. Get back in the truck."

"It is NOT, it's got a bandana on!"

Before P-chan could even get his feet under him, she had scooped him up out of the mud and was holding him up in front of her face, nose to nose. Her eyes were very big and very brown.

"Hi," she said. "I'm gonna name you Pepper."

Seven thousand miles from home, dangling in the arms of a stranger, P-chan closed his eyes and thought very hard about soy sauce.

~ end of Chapter 1 ~

The Zellmer place was a white frame house with a tin roof, set in a ring of live oaks at the end of two miles of caliche road. It had a porch on three sides, a swamp cooler in the front window that roared like a jet engine, a barn with a horse named Domino in it, two cattle dogs who were not allowed in the house and came in anyway, and a vegetable garden that Roy Zellmer watered every evening at six o'clock, rain or shine. Mostly shine.

Roy was seventy-five. He had worked cattle on that land since he was younger than Cassie, Cassie had lived out there with him since she was six, and there was not much left in the world that surprised him. A ten-year-old girl walking into the kitchen with a little black pig in a bandana surprised him a little.

"Somebody's pet," he said. "Got loose from a trailer, I bet. We'll call around."

"Nobody's gonna call," said Cassie. "Nobody's gonna come. He's mine now."

"Cassie."

"He LIKES me, Grandpa, look."

P-chan, being held upside down like a baby, did his best to look like he liked her. It was not hard. She was the first person who had been nice to him since the cook.

Roy went back out to the tank that evening and found a backpack the size of a footlocker sitting in the mud, a pile of clothes, and a red umbrella. He figured some hitchhiker had cut across his place, left his gear to go for water, and would be back. He tried to put the umbrella in the truck. He couldn't lift it. He tried again with both hands and his back and said a word he would not have said in front of Cassie. In the end he hooked a chain to it and dragged it up into the truck bed with the come-along, and the truck's back end sat down three inches.

He hung the pack and the clothes in the tack room in the barn, leaned the umbrella against the wall, where it cracked a board, and said nothing about it at supper.

*   *   *

Cassie had a plan for Pepper. She explained it at supper, between bites of fried okra.

"The county fair's in October," she said. "I'm in 4-H this year. I can show a pig."

Roy looked down at P-chan, who was asleep in a mixing bowl on a dish towel by the stove. "Mija, a show hog's gonna weigh two hundred and fifty pounds by fair time. That one weighs about four."

"Then I'll feed him."

P-chan opened one eye.

"Every day," Cassie said. "Twice a day. Corn and sweet feed and all your leftover biscuits. He's gonna be the biggest pig in the whole county." She leaned down over the bowl. "Aren't you, Pepper? Aren't you gonna be a great big hog?"

P-chan closed the eye again and thought about Akane, who had only ever wanted him to be cute.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, seven thousand miles away, Akane Tendo set a small bowl of food out on the porch, the way she had every night for weeks.

"He'll turn up," said Ranma, from the roof. "He always does."

"You don't even like P-chan."

Ranma didn't answer that. When Akane went inside, he lay back on the roof tiles with his hands behind his head and looked up at the city sky, where you could see about six stars on a good night. Ryoga had been gone a month. That was a long time, even for Ryoga. Ranma told himself he was only thinking about it because Ryoga owed him five hundred yen.

Down in the kitchen, Kasumi was still waiting on the soy sauce.

*   *   *

The next morning was Saturday, and Cassie decided Pepper needed a bath.

"You're all over mud," she told him, carrying him into the kitchen. "We can't show you like that. Judges notice." She put the big enamel dishpan in the sink, set a kettle on the stove, and turned the burner up high. "Don't worry. It'll be nice and warm, just like a hot tub."

P-chan watched the kettle the way a man in an old movie watches the fuse on a stick of dynamite.

Ryoga had only been a pig since yesterday afternoon, and he had already made up his mind about three things. First, he needed hot water. Second, he could not, under any circumstances, get it in front of this nice little girl, in her grandfather's kitchen, with her grandfather drinking coffee at the table. And third, he had to get his clothes back from the barn before anything else happened to him.

The kettle began to whistle. Cassie reached for it.

P-chan went straight off the edge of the counter, hit the linoleum running, shot between Roy's boots, through the screen door, which slapped shut behind him, off the porch and under the house. Both cattle dogs came tearing around the corner to see what was going on, saw a pig, and went crazy.

It was a very long morning.

*   *   *

By afternoon the dogs had given up, Cassie had given up, and P-chan had made his way, one bush at a time, to the barn. The tack room door stood half open. Inside, in the cool, dusty dark, his pack hung on a nail. His clothes hung over a saddle. His umbrella leaned against the far wall with a cracked board behind it. He nearly cried.

Now all he needed was hot water. In this country, he thought, that should be the easiest thing in the world to find. It was 104 degrees in the shade. The water in the horse trough was warm. The water in the cattle tanks was warm. It was only the deep well water that was cold, and that, he decided, was just his luck.

He had settled down in an old saddle blanket to think, when he heard Cassie's boots outside.

"Pepper? Pepper, I know you're in there. I'm not mad." She sounded worried. She sounded like she might have been crying a little. "I just thought you were hot. You look so hot all the time with that black hair. I'm sorry about the bath."

P-chan lay still in the blanket and felt about two inches tall, which, as a pig, was about right.

"Grandpa says if you're hot I can cool you off with the hose," Cassie said. Something dragged across the dirt. He heard the squeak of a faucet. "Here. This'll feel good, I promise."

She came around the door with the garden hose in both hands, the green rubber one that had been lying coiled in the sun beside the barn since noon, smiling at him.

A garden hose that has been lying in the South Texas sun all afternoon in August holds most of a gallon of water, and that water is not cold. It is not cool. It is not even warm.

It is hot.

~ to be continued in Chapter 3 ~