The Talking Silver Foxes

The silver foxes of this legend look like ordinary foxes, except that their fur is yellow, fiery red or white. They also know how to work their influence on human beings. One kind of silver fox can learn to talk like a person within a year, and these are called talking foxes.

The historical collection describes a mountain southwest of the bay of Kiautschou, at the edge of the sea, shaped like a tower and called Tower Mountain. On it is an old temple with the statue of a goddess known as the Old Mother of Tower Mountain. When children in the nearby villages fall sick, the magicians often tell their families to burn paper figures of the children at her altar or to set little lime statues of them around it. So the altar and everything near it are crowded with hundreds of small lime children. People also bring the Old Mother paper flowers, shoes and clothes, which lie heaped in a jumble of colors.

Pilgrim festivals are held on the third day of the third month and the ninth day of the ninth month, with plays and readings from the holy books, and there is a yearly fair as well. Girls and women from all around burn incense and pray to the goddess. Couples who have no children go there and choose one of the little lime children. They tie a red thread around its neck, or even secretly break off a tiny piece of it, dissolve it in water and drink it, and then they pray quietly for a child to be sent to them.

Behind the temple is a large cave where talking foxes used to live long ago. They would even come out and sit on the tip of a steep rock beside the road. When a traveler came by, they would call out to him: “Hold on a moment, neighbor. Stop and smoke a pipe first!” The traveler would look around in astonishment to see where the voice was coming from, and he would get a terrible fright. Unless he was unusually brave, he would break out in a sweat of fear and run off. Then the fox would laugh, “Hee hee!”

Once a farmer was plowing on the mountainside. Looking up, he saw a man coming along the path in a straw hat and a cape of woven grass, with a pick over his shoulder. “Neighbor Wang,” the man said, “smoke a pipe and rest a bit first. Then I will help you plow.” And he called “Hu!” the way farmers call to their oxen.

The farmer looked more carefully and saw that it was a talking fox. He waited for the right moment and then struck him a hearty blow with his ox-whip. It landed, for the fox screamed, sprang into the air and ran away, leaving his straw hat, his grass cape and the rest lying on the ground. Then the farmer saw that the straw hat was only woven out of potato leaves, and his whip had cut it in half. The cape was made of oak leaves tied together with little blades of grass, and the pick was just the stalk of a kau-ling plant with a bit of brick fastened to it.

Not long afterward, in the story, a woman in a neighboring village was said to be possessed by a fox spirit. A picture of the chief priest of the Taoists was hung in her room, but the evil spirit did not leave. There was no one nearby who could drive out devils, and her family did not know how to help her, so her relatives decided to send to the temple of the God of War for help.

When the fox heard of it, he said, “I am not afraid of your Taoist high priest or your God of War. The only one I fear is your neighbor Wang from the Eastern Village, who once lashed me cruelly with his whip.”

That suited the family perfectly. They sent to the Eastern Village and found out who Wang was. Wang took his ox-whip and went into the woman’s house. “Where are you? Where are you?” he said in a deep voice. “I have been tracking you a long time, and now at last I have caught you!” And he cracked his whip. The fox hissed and spat and flew out of the window.

People had been telling stories about the talking fox of Tower Mountain for more than a hundred years when, one fine day, a skilled archer came to that part of the country. He saw a foxlike creature with a fiery-red coat and gray stripes along its back lying asleep under a tree. The archer took aim and shot off one of its hind feet.

At once it spoke in a human voice. “My love of sleep has brought me into this danger, but no one can escape his fate! If you take me, you will get no more than five thousand coppers for my skin at most. Why not let me go instead? I will reward you richly, and all your poverty will be over.”

But the archer would not listen. He killed the fox, skinned it and sold the pelt, and, just as it had said, he got five thousand coppers for it. From that time on the fox spirit was never seen again.

Where this story comes from

“The Talking Silver Foxes” is chapter XLIX of Richard Wilhelm’s The Chinese Fairy Book, translated by Frederick H. Martens (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1921), the first of his ghost stories.

Wilhelm’s note explains that the silver fox is called “Pi” in Chinese, the same word used for panthers, because this legendary beast shares the nature of both animals, and his note to the nursery tale “The Panther” calls that beast the same creature as this fox. He adds that the Old Mother is really the mother-goddess of the Taischan, though elsewhere she is worshiped mainly as a giver of children, and that charms painted by the Taoist “Master of the Heavens” were thought to have special power against all kinds of sorcery.

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

Best for older readers with an adult — includes spirit possession, whipping, the loss of an animal’s foot, killing and skinning. The historical ritual descriptions are not medical advice.

Reading the story closely

The fox’s apparent authority repeatedly shrinks into ordinary objects: a hat becomes leaves, a pick becomes a stalk and brick. Yet the final prediction about the pelt’s price comes true. The story therefore ends with an uncomfortable mixture of exposed trickery and confirmed supernatural knowledge, rather than a simple proof that the fox was always lying.

List the fox’s offers—conversation, help plowing and a reward for release—beside the humans’ responses. What evidence of danger appears before each attack? The tale’s treatment of the woman and its accounts of shrine rituals reflect its supernatural setting and historical source. Drinking pieces of statues or using threats and violence is not a way to care for illness or distress.

Questions to ask

• What is the fox’s disguise really made of when it falls to the ground?
• Why is the fox more afraid of Wang than of the high priest or the God of War?
• The fox offers the archer riches. Do you think the archer made the right choice?

Related stories

• The Panther — the nursery tale whose beast Wilhelm calls the same creature as this fox
• Fox-Fire — the Wilhelm tale just before this one, about a fox’s glowing ball of fire
• The Halos of the Saints — a fox who teases a scholar about his missing halo