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[Pg 6] 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[Pg 7] 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[Pg 8] 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[Pg 9] 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[Pg 10] 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[Pg 11] 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[Pg 12] 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 ha............