The Little Hunting Dog

Long ago in Shansi there lived a scholar who found other people’s company too noisy, so he went to live in a Buddhist temple. But his room was so full of gnats and fleas that he could not sleep at night.

One afternoon he was lying on his bed after his meal when two tiny knights with plumes on their helmets came riding into the room. They were perhaps two inches tall, mounted on horses about the size of grasshoppers, and on their gloved fists they carried hunting falcons no bigger than flies. They rode around the room at great speed.

The scholar had barely spotted them when a third rider came in, dressed like the first two but carrying a bow and arrows and leading a little hunting dog about the size of an ant. Behind him came a great crowd of soldiers on foot and on horseback, several hundred of them, with hundreds of falcons and hounds as well.

Then the fleas and gnats began to rise into the air, and the falcons struck down every one of them. The hounds climbed onto the bed and sniffed along the walls, tracking the fleas and gobbling them up. Whatever hid in the cracks they followed by its scent and dug out, so that in a very short time nearly all the pests were dead.

The scholar pretended to be asleep and watched. The falcons perched on him and the dogs crept over his body. Soon a man dressed in yellow and wearing a king’s crown arrived, climbed onto an empty couch and sat down. At once all the horsemen rode up, dismounted, and laid all the birds and game before him. They crowded around him and talked with him in a strange language.

Before long the king climbed into a little chariot, and his guards saddled their horses in a flash. Then they galloped away with loud shouts of homage, looking like a handful of scattered beans, with a thick cloud of dust rising behind them.

Nearly all of them were gone while the scholar was still staring after them in fright and amazement, unable to guess where they had come from. He slipped on his shoes and looked, but they had disappeared without a trace. He came back and searched the whole room, but there was nothing to see. Only on a brick by the wall they had left behind one little hunting dog.

The scholar quickly caught it and found that it was quite tame. He put it in his paint-box and looked at it closely. Its coat was very smooth and fine, and it wore a tiny collar around its neck. He offered it a few breadcrumbs, but the little dog only sniffed at them and left them lying. Instead it jumped onto the bed, hunted out some nits and gnats in the folds of the sheets and ate them, then came back and lay down.

When morning came, the scholar was afraid it might have run off, but there it lay, curled up just as before. Whenever the scholar went to bed, the dog climbed in with him and bit to death any pest it could find. Not a fly or a gnat dared to land while it was near. The scholar treasured it like a precious jewel.

But one day he took a nap in the daytime, and the little dog crept into the bed beside him. The scholar woke and rolled over to lean on his side, and as he did so he felt something under him. Afraid it might be his little dog, he jumped up to look. But it was already dead, squashed as flat as if it had been cut out of paper.

All the same, not one of the pests had outlived it.

Where this story comes from

“The Little Hunting Dog” is chapter XLII of Richard Wilhelm’s The Chinese Fairy Book, translated by Frederick H. Martens (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1921), in the section of nature and animal tales.

Wilhelm’s note says the tale comes from the Liau Dschai (“Strange Stories”) of the author named P’u Sung Lang in this edition. He presents it alongside “The King of the Ants” as a parallel that shows the same idea worked out a different way: in both, a scholar watches a whole tiny army ride through his room.

Read the original: The Chinese Fairy Book (Project Gutenberg)

Best for ages 9–12 — a tiny royal hunt and a loyal little dog, with a sudden sad ending.

Reading the story closely

Scale makes the same room feel like two worlds. To the scholar, the visitors are almost invisible; to the tiny hunters, the bed and wall cracks form a hunting landscape. The dog’s useful smallness also makes it vulnerable to an ordinary movement of the person it protects.

Draw the bed from the scholar’s viewpoint and then the dog’s. Mark one feature that offers shelter and one that creates danger. The final sentence remembers the disappearance of the pests, but that practical benefit does not undo the companion’s loss. The death is accidental; the story need not turn it into a claim that loving someone prevents every accident.

Think about it

• What do the tiny hunters hunt, and why is that good news for the scholar?
• How does the little dog show that it is not an ordinary pet?
• How is this story like “The King of the Ants,” and how is it different?

You may also like

• The King of the Ants — the companion tale Wilhelm placed just before this one
• The Flower-Elves — more small magical visitors from Wilhelm’s nature tales
• Retribution — another strange story that ends with a twist