The Dream Hunters

CHAPTER FOUR

At first, the monk believed the fox was dead. Then, as he squatted beside her. he perceived that she was breathing, so shallowly and slowly that one could scarcely tell that she was breathing at all, but still, she was alive.

The monk took the fox into the little temple, and set her down beside the bra zier, to warm herself. Then the monk said a silent prayer to the Buddha, for the life of the fox, «For she was a wild thing," thought the monk, «but she had a good heart, and I would not see her die.»

He stroked her fur, as soft as thistledown, and felt the weak beat of her heart.

«When I was a boy," said the monk to the unconscious fox, «before my father's disgrace, I would, from time to time, run away from my nurse and from my teachers, and I would go to the market, where they sold live animals: in bamboo cages I saw all manner of beasts — foxes and dogs and bears, small monkeys and pink–faced monkeys, hares and crocodiles, snakes and pigs and deer, herons and cranes and bearcubs. When I saw them it made me happy, for I loved the animals, but it also made me sad, for it hurt me to sec them imprisoned like that.

«One day, after the merchants had packed their wares and gone for the day, I found a broken cage, and in it, a baby monkey, too scrawny even to have been sold for the pot, for it was dead — or so somebody must have thought. But I perceived that it lived, and so I concealed it in my breast and made my way to my father's house.

«I kept the monkey in my room, and I fed it scraps I saved from my own meals. He grew, my little monkey, until he seemed almost as big as I was. He was my friend. He would sit in the persimmon tree outside our house waiting for me to return. My father tolerated the monkey, and all went well until the day a certain lord came to the house to see my father.

«The monkey seemed to go mad. He refused to let the lord approach my father. Instead he swung down and barred his way, baring his teeth and show ing his chest, acting as if the lord were a rival from another tribe of monkeys.

«The lord gestured to one of his retainers, who pulled out his bow and put an arrow through the monkey's chest, although I begged him not to. I carried the monkey out of the house, and he looked into my eyes as he died.

«Later, when my father was disgraced, it was through the machinations of that selfsame lord. And sometimes I think that the monkey was not a monkey, but a spirit sent by Amida Buddha to protect us, and protect us it would have done if only we had listened and seen. This was long ago, little fox, before I was a monk, in a life that is dead to me, but still, we learn.

«And perhaps, with all your fox tricks, perhaps you also wished to protect me.»

And then the monk said a prayer to Amida Buddha; and another prayer to Kishibojin, who was a demon before she encountered the Buddha, and who guards children and women; and to Dainichi–Nyorai; and, lastly, he said a brief prayer to Binzuru Harada, who was the first of the Buddha's disciples, whom the Buddha had forbidden to enter Nirvana. He said his prayers to all these entities, imploring their aid and their intercession for the little fox.

And at the end of all his praying, the fox still lay, limp and still on the matting, like a dead thing.

There was a village at the foot of the mountain, almost half a day's travel away. «Perhaps," thought the monk, «there will be a doctor or a wise woman in the village, who can help the fox.» And without a second thought he picked up the limp fox and began to carry her down the mountain track that would even tually take him to the village.

It was chilly, and the monk shivered in his thin robes. Large flies, the last and oldest and most unpleasant flies of the year, buzzed about him, following him down the track, doing their best to annoy him.

Half the way down the mountain the mountain stream became a small river, and there was a bridge over this river. As the monk approached the bridge he saw an old man coming up the track toward him. The old man had a long white beard, and long, long eyebrows, and he leaned on a tall, carved stick as he walked. There was an air about him of wisdom and of serenity, but there was also an air of mischief, or so it seemed to the monk.

The old man waited on the bridge for the monk to reach him.

«The maple trees arc very beautiful," said the old man. «So many colours, and so soon they will be gone. Sometimes I think that the autumn can be equally as beautiful as the spring.»

The monk agreed that this might be so.

«Now, what is that that you are carrying?» asked the old man. «It looks like a dead dog. Is that not an unclean thing for a monk to be carrying?»

«It is a fox," said the monk, «and she is not dead.»

«And do you go to kill her?» asked the old man, gruffly.

«I go to seek a cure for her," said the monk. The old man looked very stern, and he raised the stick he carried and with it he hit the monk — once across the side of the head and once across the shoulders.

«That! is for deserting your temple," said the old man, with the first blow of the stick. «And that! is for meddling in the affairs of fox spirits.»

The monk bowed his head. «You may be right to hit me," he said, «for it is as you say. I am not in my temple, and I am carrying a fox. But still. I believe I am doing the right thing, in trying to seek a cure for her.»

«The right thing? The right thing?» And once again the old man hit the monk with the stick, this time prodding him in the chest with it. «Why, you ninny, you thoughtless creature. The right thing would be to return to your temple with the fox, and to sleep, with a token of the King of All Night's Dreaming beneath your head, for it is in dreams that your little fox–girl is trapped.»

«If I can ask this, without receiving a commensurate blow to my person," said the monk, hesitantly, «where would I find a token of the King of All Night's Dreaming?»

The old man stared at the young monk, and then he looked at his carved stick, and then he sighed, long and loudly, like a very old man trying to cool hot soup. He reached into his sleeve and pulled out a strip of paper with something written upon it, and this paper he pressed into the monk's hand.

«There," grumbled the old man, «but you arc still a fool, for the fox will die, or you will, and there is not a thing you can do on this earth or off of it that would change this, whether or not your motives are pure.»

The monk was going to protest, to ask why the old man had given him the token if it could do no good, when he realised that he was alone on the bridge, and indeed, alone upon the mountainside.

«Then that old man must have been Binzuru Harada," thought the monk, for Binzuru Harada is often depicted as an old man with a white beard and long eyebrows; and he will do good on this Earth until one day the Buddha permits him to move on.

Still, the monk wondered why Binzuru Harada would have helped someone as insignificant as himself; and he took little comfort in recalling that it was for breaking his vow of chastity that Binzuru Harada was denied Nirvana.

The fox had weighed almost nothing on the journey down the mountainside, but as the monk turned to walk back up the mountain he found the body seemed to get heavier and heavier. A soft mist had descended upon the mountainside, blurring the edges of things. The monk placed one foot in front of the other, and he walked back up the mountain.

He wondered if he were doing the right thing, helping the fox. He did not know, but he knew that he could not abandon her. He had to try.

It was late in the afternoon by the time the monk reached the temple he had left early that morning. Autumn mists hung like cobwebs, or strands of raw silk, across the mountainside, and the encroaching twilight made the world feel doubly dreamlike.

Even the temple, in which the monk had spent the last eight years, seemed ghostlike as he entered it, as if it were somehow now an imaginary place. The brazier was almost cold: the monk added charcoal to it, and he cooked his rice over it, roasting some thinly–sliced gourd to accompany it.

Then he made his evening devotions, although he made them with slightly less enthusiasm than usual. It is one thing to pray; it is another to pray to entities who might not only be listening, but who will search you out on the road and beat you across the head with sticks if you say something that offends them.

In the flickering light of the brazier, the monk experienced a strange illusion — it occurred to him that a scrap of his shadow was missing, gone as if it had been torn away.

The fox slept like a dead thing.

The fox was so small. He ran his hand across the softness of her fur. Then he inspected the strip of parchment that Binzuru Harada had given him. He could not read what was written there: the characters seemed to twist and shimmer as he looked at them, like characters in a dream.

The monk put the fox in his robe, so the heat of his body would keep her warm, and perhaps keep her alive. He lay down on his sleeping mat, and placed the slip of paper beneath his pillow, and, worn out from his walk first down the mountain and then up the mountain, he slept.