A fox aspires to reach his 1000th birthday safely and be rewarded with nine golden tails in this wise and charming fairytale.
By : Kathleen Gray Nelson
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He was a Japanese fox, and although he looked just like any other fox, he knew a few things that his American brothers have never heard about even to this day. One of these things was that if he lived to be one hundred years old without ever being chased by a dog, he could become a beautiful woman; if he lived for five hundred years and never a dog pursued him, he could be changed into a mighty wizard who would know more than any man on earth; but, better than all, after a thousand years of peace he would turn into a celestial fox and have nine golden tails.
Now a beautiful woman does very well in her place and it is a great honor to be a wise man, but a fox with nine golden tails is the most wonderful thing in all the world. For that reason when the fox was very young, only about sixty or seventy-five, he thought he would refuse to be changed into either a woman or a wizard and would wait for his thousandth birthday.
“There are enough pretty women and wise men in the world now,” he explained to his friends of the forest. “The pretty women make the trouble and the wise men try to straighten it out, and they are both kept busy. They don’t have half as much fun as a fox.” But as the years went by he grew so tired of skulking and hiding about, and being nothing but a common, every-day, bushy-tailed gray fox that he almost decided to compromise the matter.
“After all, there are worse things in the world than pretty women,” he said, scratching his ear, “and wise men have their uses.”
What settled the question quite suddenly was a most exciting adventure he had just when he had begun to think he was cunning enough to outwit all the dogs on the Island of Japan. Now, he had had a great deal of experience in this line, and it was no wonder he flattered himself his dodging tactics were perfect. His ear was so trained he could hear a dog barking miles away, and he could smell a pack of hounds even further than he could hear them. Besides, when he looked at their tracks he knew exactly how long it had been since they passed that way, and as he had many acquaintances among the birds and bees and butterflies, they, too, often gave him timely warning.
He had also traveled extensively and knew all the safe places for a fox to stop. At last, after enduring many hardships and sleeping in swamps and on beds of nettles, and sometimes having to run all night and not sleep at all, and being forced to move so many times that he never had any home feeling, he had discovered the most delightful spot imaginable.
It was a beautiful wood toward the north of the island, where the gnarled old trees were so thick and crooked and the weeds so tall that the sun never touched the ground, and it was so dark and gloomy there men said it was the home of gnomes and goblins and no one could be induced to pass through it. Even the little streams gurgled hoarsely and their waters were black, and the great owls couldn’t tell when it was night and so hooted throughout the day, and bats were always flying about with shrill screams.
As many wild creatures looking for peace found their way here and never again went out of the forest, he had much good company. There were foxes, bears, birds, deer, monkeys, rabbits, squirrels, pigeons, ducks, and a host of tiny things like worms, beetles, scorpions, mice, ants, lizards, centipedes, frogs, grasshoppers, eels, snails, crabs and caterpillars, and also a wild hen and her mate, who had a very hard time ever raising a family, a pouyou brought all the way from South America with the initials of a sailor who would never see it again cut on its brown shell armor, crickets that the Japanese call grass larks and that sing more sweetly there than any place in the world, a tortoise so many hundreds of years old he didn’t remember when he was born, a rusty old crocodile who called himself Luxuriant-Thick-Mud-Master and a parrot that had known the misery of living in a cage until once the door was left open. Then he went away without saying good-by and flew straight over the hills and rivers and rice fields until he lit on a tree in this wood. How he chuckled when he knew he had reached the land he had so often heard about, the land the birds call Napatantutu, which in their language means Stay Here Always. And at first he thought it a great joke to scream “Look out,” and a few other human words not so polite, and throw all the animals in a panic. But after he had been there a while he either reformed or forgot how men talked and so bothered them no more.
The tortoise having lived longer than any of the others, had had time to find out more, and he said there was a huge monster in a far-distant part of the wood that was neither man nor beast, but more dangerous than either.
“Its eyes were bright as any glass,
Its scales were hard as any brass,”
he declared, and when it roared the whole earth grew dark with the smoke from its steaming nostrils, and when it laughed a flame came out of its mouth that lit up the sky, and this Terrible Thing was called a dragon. It goes without saying they were all very careful to keep away from the particular place where the dragon was said to live, and as none of them had ever seen it, they were not sure it was there.
The snail had been heard to stoutly declare he wouldn’t run from it anyway, but as the orang-outang reminded him, it was very easy to be brave before you saw it coming, but he had heard of snails that got in such a hurry they left their houses behind them. The bear asked the very important question: “How many legs has a dragon?” And when the tortoise said it must have at least a million, since a centipede had a hundred, the bear was comforted, for as he wisely told the fox, one need not be afraid of anything if it has more than four legs.
Now there wasn’t much difference between day and night in Napatantutu, for both were happy times, and they could eat when they wished and sleep when they wished, and they didn’t have to do anything unless they liked to do it. Sometimes they would eat and sleep all day, and at night, when the green eyes of the owls shone like lanterns and the fireflies lit up the wood with their little lamps, they would meet in a wonderful dell all lined with moss softer than velvet carpet, and there they would romp and play until morning.
The frogs would sit in a solemn circle on toadstools, the worms, because they wanted to see what was going on, would crawl up on the grand stand, which was the pouyou’s back, the ants would hold wee pink and blue flowers over them for parasols because they tried to be fashionable, the monkey was always the clown, the quiet tortoise the judge and the fox was the mischief maker, but too sly to ever be caught in his tricks.
The frog liked to show how far he could jump, the deer always wanted to run a race, the monkey would put up a target for them to throw at, the bear would dance on his hind legs, while the crickets and the grasshoppers were the band, and when the circus was over the porcupine would invite them to a quill-ting party.
Or if they grew tired of fun and frolic the pouyou would tell them stories about a land far beyond the Sun’s Nest, where the birds and butterflies, the parrots and lizards were redder than red and greener than green; and again of a wide world of water with houses that rocked all the time floating on it, but where these houses came from or where they went he had been too sick to find out, although he had been in one for many sad months.
And when the thunder rumbled and flashes of lightning shot through the leaves, and the owls shut their eyes in terror and the poor little fireflies put out their lights, they would whisper to each other that the dragon was around, and scamper away and hide until morning.
And then when it was daylight they wouldn’t be a bit frightened, and each one would say the other ran first, and he only ran because some one behind pushed him and he couldn’t help it. And they would pooh! pooh! and declare in a chorus they didn’t believe there was any such thing as a dragon. But the fox, who was usually a big talker, never had anything to say except once, when he told them quite seriously he hoped there was a real, true, live dragon. But no one believed him.
They did not know that when he was a baby fox, only about the size of a cat, and lived in the Fertile Plain of Sweet Flags, one cool and dewy night his mother made a bed of leaves behind a log, and as she cuddled him close to her warm bosom she told him how to know if the dogs were anywhere around.
She said when the wind brought him a hot breath out of a cold nose, a breath that smelt like it had a bark in it, he must listen with both ears, and after that if he heard a sound that was neither hungry nor angry, but came full tilt out of a throat just bursting with joy, he would know that the dogs were on his trail, for they only chased animals for the fun of catching them, and because a fox was so cunning, it was great sport to run him down. And if he saw strange tracks, in which had lodged a caterpillar’s hair or an ant’s egg, the dogs had passed the day before, but if the tracks were bare, the feet that made them were not far away.
And she added if he were smart enough to never, never let the dogs get after him, when he was a thousand years old a dragon would give him nine golden tails. It was true no one had ever seen a fox with more than one tail, but in the Kojiri, or Tails of Ancient Things, which was written on the bark of the oldest trees, it had always been told that there would be one fox who would in this way become the hero of his race, and perhaps he would be that very one if he learned to be clever and careful. And as his mother was the wisest fox on earth, he knew that she knew what she was talking about, and he was glad now to hear there was a dragon handy.
In fact, Napatantutu was exactly the kind of a home the fox was looking for, dragon and all, and he was quite sure he could pass a thousand quiet years here without ever hearing the bark of a dog. He no longer jumped at the sound of every crackling twig or put his ear to the ground before he sat down to rest, and often he would lie for hours on some cool knoll licking his paws and thinking up some prank to play on his neighbors. And he grew fat and saucy and lazy, and whisked his one insignificant tail proudly as he walked.
But, alas! there came an end to these delightful days. Late in the afternoon of his hundredth birthday, as he stood watching two ants wage a fierce battle over a grain of rice, close behind him he heard a sound that made his very blood run cold. He raised his head and sniffed the air, then stood trembling.
“The dogs!” he groaned, as a second time, and nearer now, came the awful noise, and he darted like an arrow through the forest.
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