From the story shelf
The Fox Wife's Farewell
Long ago, in the country around the old capital, there lived a young man of good family and very little fortune. His father had lost the family lands in a quarrel at court, and the son had nothing left but his name, a box of books, and the habit of courtesy. Once in every month he walked out to a shrine that stood where the fields gave way to a great forest, to pray that his house might one day be restored.
One autumn afternoon, as he was coming down the shrine steps, he heard shouting among the trees and the crash of men running. Out from between the trunks came a fox, white from ears to tail, running low and unsteadily, for she was spent. She did not go past him. She ran straight to him and pressed herself against his legs, in under the hem of his long coat, and he felt her heart going through the cloth like a bird's.
Behind her came the hunters, five of them, with bows.
"Stand aside," said the first. "That fox is ours. A white one is worth a great deal."
"She came to me," said the young man. "I think that makes her my guest."
They did not care for that answer. They told him what a fool he was, and he agreed that he might be, and did not move. When one of them reached down for the fox, he caught the man's wrist. There was a struggle, short and ugly, in the shrine's own gateway, and someone struck him across the head with the end of a bow, and he went down on the stones. When he could see again, the hunters were gone, and so was the fox, and he was alone with a cut above his eye and the evening coming on.
He had made it as far as the shrine's water basin, and was trying without much success to wash the blood out of his eye, when a young woman came along the path from the forest side. She was plainly dressed and walked very lightly, and she knelt down beside him without being asked.
"Let me," she said. She tore a strip from the inside of her sleeve, wet it, cleaned the cut and bound it. Her hands were cool and sure. "You cannot walk home alone like this. Lean on me."
"I do not know your name," he said.
She considered. "I live at the edge of the forest," she said, "where the arrowroot grows over the stones. That will do for now."
She walked him home. She stayed to make him broth, and then to see that he slept, and then, because he was feverish for some days, to nurse him. When he was well again she was still there, sweeping the step in the mornings, and neither of them could quite remember a time when she had not been. Before the new year they were married, very simply, and the young man thought himself the most fortunate person in the province, lands or no lands.
They were happy, and it is worth saying so plainly, since the end of this story is sad. She kept the house so well that it seemed twice its size. She knew when rain was coming a day before anyone else. She laughed easily and was gentle with everyone, though the neighbors' dogs would never come near her, and she did not seem to mind. In their second year she bore a son, a solemn, watchful child who seldom cried and would lie for an hour in the doorway looking at the sky.
The boy was five years old in the autumn when it happened. His father had gone to the town on business. His mother was in the little garden behind the house, where the chrysanthemums were in flower, white and yellow and bronze. She had knelt among them to cut some for the house, and the scent of them and the low sun and the quiet of the afternoon came over her all together, and she forgot herself. Only for a moment. Only as one forgets oneself on the edge of sleep.
The boy, coming around the corner of the house, stopped.
"Mother," he said, with great interest, "you have a tail."
It lay along the ground behind her among the flowers, white and full, the tip of it stirring a little. She looked at it. She looked at her son. Then she gathered her robe about her and stood, and there was nothing behind her but the hem of her dress and a few fallen petals, and she held out her hand and said, "Come inside. It is getting cold."
She did not speak of it, and the boy, being a child, forgot to. They ate their supper. She sang to him as she always did. But when he was asleep she sat a long time by the lamp with her hands in her lap, and then she rose and ground ink.
The young man came home late that night. The house was dark but for one lamp, left burning low. His son lay asleep on the mat with his mother's outer robe folded over him for a blanket. His wife was nowhere.
On the paper screen beside the door, written large and very beautifully in her hand, in ink that was not yet quite dry, was a poem:
If you miss me, come and look for me
in the forest where the fields end,
where the arrowroot turns its leaves
pale side out to the wind,
as if it too were sorry.
He read it many times. Then he woke the boy, gently, and the boy rubbed his eyes and told him about the garden and the flowers and the tail, as one tells a thing that is interesting and not yet frightening.
The young man sat down on the floor with his son in his lap. He found that he was not surprised. He had known for a long time that there was something: the dogs, the rain, the way she would sometimes stand listening at the edge of the trees. He had never needed to know what it was.
"Is she angry?" the boy asked.
"No," said his father. "I do not think she was ever angry in her life. I think she has gone home because she was seen, and that is the rule among her people, as there are rules among ours. In the morning we will go and look for her, as she asks."
They walked out at first light, the man carrying the boy when he tired, past the shrine and on into the forest, until the trees opened onto a slope grown over with arrowroot vines. A wind was coming up the hill, and all the leaves were turning over in it and showing their pale undersides, so that the whole slope seemed to shiver.
"Wife," the young man called. "We have come, as you said."
For a long time there was nothing. Then, at the top of the slope among the leaves, there was a white fox, sitting very upright with her tail around her feet.
"Mother," said the boy, quite calmly, and the fox looked at him.
Some tellers say she came down to them in her woman's shape for the space of a few breaths, and spoke. Some say she only sat and looked, and that what she meant was understood without words. All agree on what was meant: that she had loved them every day she was with them; that she could not live among people now that she had been seen; and that the boy should listen, all his life, to the voices other people did not hear, because some of them would be hers.
Then the wind turned the leaves again, and she went into them, and was gone, and the two of them walked home.
The boy grew up. He was never like other children, and never quite like other men. He studied the stars and the calendar and the old books of signs, and he had a gift for them that his teachers could not account for. He could tell from the flight of birds what the day would bring, and people said, half in jest, that he understood what the crows said to one another on the roof. In time he became the greatest diviner of his age. Great lords sent for him, and it was said that the emperor himself would not fix a day for anything of importance without first asking his advice.
It was whispered of him, behind his back and sometimes to his face, that his mother had been a fox. He never once denied it. And every autumn for as long as he lived, when the arrowroot leaves began to turn, he went out alone to the forest where the fields end, and sat a while on the slope, and listened.
Pieces in the stacks are written under pen names. Personal pieces are composite accounts that gather experiences commonly described by therians and otherkin, and are offered as illustration, not as testimony about any one person. See the editorial principles.