Tokgabi’s Menagerie

Griffis opens this tale by contrasting cats and dogs and imagining a time when cats were less welcome in people’s houses. His account turns that rivalry into a fable; its sweeping claims about national habits are not a description of every Korean household.

The cats in his telling had a hard life among dogs. They yowled, arched their backs, puffed their tails, spat and scratched, or purred and washed their faces like cats anywhere. Expert mouse catchers and bird hunters, they sometimes had to wade through water to escape pursuit. Mother cats told their kittens stories about why the two animals could not get along.

Yet it all came about because one cat long ago laughed when it should not have. It was a crowd of schoolchildren that made the cat laugh, but the dog never forgave her for her silliness. This is how it happened.

Long, long ago, one of the mountain fairies came down from the high peaks and was treated kindly by an old man named Tip Pul, who kept a wine shop. So the fairy called Tokgabi, the goblin, and told him to reward the old fellow with a precious stone. One night Tokgabi dropped the gem into Tip Pul’s long-necked wine bottle, and from then on, strange to say, the wine never ran out. The bottle was always full. Every day Tip Pul sold plenty to his neighbors, and since his wine was good and cheap, he was very popular, and he had no fear of being poor in his old age. He had no wife or children, and his only companions were a dog named Su Nap, or Snap for short, and a cat named Mee Yow. The three of them lived happily together.

But one day the bottle was empty, and when Tip Pul shook it, nothing rattled inside. Somehow the magic stone had vanished. Now poverty seemed certain. The old man could hardly move for grief, and all his neighbors came to comfort him, for they knew they could buy no wine anywhere else as good and cheap as Tip Pul’s in his shop by the river.

Yet the loss of the stone was the making of Tip Pul’s pets. The cat became the busiest kitty ever known. She began at once to search every rat hole she knew of, not only in her master’s house but in every house in the village, looking for the missing stone. The racket she made at night among the rafters and roof beams nearly drove people out of their wits. They said Tokgabi must have got tipsy tasting Tip Pul’s wine, but it was Mee Yow all along. She knocked over tobacco boxes, scratched among the hat covers on the walls, tipped the hanging shelves and upset the dishes in the cupboard over the stove. In short, she got up to every kind of mischief people usually blamed on Tokgabi, the sooty imp.

Yet when anyone climbed up to the attic and peered into the darkness among the rafters, all he could see was a pair of green eyes shining like moons. Poking at the spooky thing with fishing poles or throwing shoes and sticks at it only brought spitting and snarling, so they knew it was a cat and not Tokgabi and went back to bed, laying their heads on their wooden pillows and soon falling asleep. The names the angry sleepers called that cat and its ancestors were dreadful to think of. But for all her trouble, Mee Yow could not find the magic wine stone, and Tip Pul grew poorer and poorer.

The dog could not climb among the rafters and roofs like puss, but he could run fast and had a nose that could smell a tiger a mile away, so he went searching all over the countryside, even crossing the ice of the frozen river. He fought many a dog, chased many a rat into its hole and bothered about a hundred cats. He even dashed into woodsheds and in and out among the cows and horses, but he found nothing. One time, in a stable where a pony was enjoying its supper of bean soup, the bad-tempered beast thought Snap was trying to steal beans from its feed box and kicked him so hard that he limped on three legs for a week.

The long winter passed and the ice melted, though the river water was still cold. One day, while chasing a rat among the rafters in the house of a nobleman, Mee Yow brushed her whiskers against a greenish soapstone box, the kind the king often gave as a present to people he favored. She recognized the smell of her master’s long-lost gem inside and tried her hardest to open the box with tooth and claw, but all her scratching and biting did no good, and the dog could not help at all.

So they made a bargain with the rats. Snap and Mee Yow promised to leave every rat and mouse alone for six months if the rats would gnaw open the box. Delighted at the thought of half a year of peace, especially while the grain was ripening, the rats and mice worked together until they had gnawed a hole in the box, hard and polished as it was, and got the magic stone out. They carried it in their paws and dropped it where their old enemies, now so peaceful, could find it. At once the dog took the gem in his mouth and ran to the river, with Mee Yow close behind.

“Now, Kit,” said Snap, “climb on my back and hold tight to my neck fur with your claws while I swim across. I’ll need to breathe hard, so you hold the gem in your mouth. And mind you don’t open your mouth, or yawn, or laugh, until we’re across. Do you hear?”

Mee Yow wagged her tail and gripped the wine stone firmly in her mouth to show she meant to bring it safely to her master. But all the while she was planning to jump ashore and run to Tip Pul while the dog was shaking the water out of his coat, so that she would get the credit for finding it.

It was a long, hard swim, and the dog was nearly worn out when he was only two-thirds of the way across, but the cat was happy, for all she had to do was hold on and keep her feet dry. All went well until they were close to the far bank.

Just then a crowd of children, let out of school and ready for fun, caught sight of the odd pair. They had never seen anything so funny in their lives, and they burst out laughing. Snap was too serious to pay them any attention, but Mee Yow, already pleased with herself, grew downright silly. She joined in with the children and laughed so hard that she shook Snap’s body until his nose nearly went under and he almost drowned them both. That made the giddy, conceited cat laugh all the more, until at last she let out a great guffaw, and the gem dropped out of her mouth and sank to the bottom of the river.

That was too much for the dog, to see all his hard work wasted. Thinking only of his master, faithful, serious Snap dived to the bottom of the river and tumbled Mee Yow off his back, though you may be sure there was plenty of scratching and clawing before puss let go and swam to shore.

Alas, the dog could not find the precious gem. When he got to land, he shook himself dry and rushed at the cat to give her a good shaking. But Mee Yow scrambled up a tree, and though she was half frozen after her icy bath, she kept up her growling as long as the dog went on barking.

In the story’s fanciful explanation, after that cats and dogs stopped being friends, and they would not even speak to each other. Wild and unloved, the cat counts among the bad animals in Tokgabi’s menagerie, while the dog is the faithful friend of people.

About this story

“Tokgabi’s Menagerie” is retold from William Elliot Griffis’s Korean Fairy Tales (1922), where it is subtitled “Cats and Dogs”. It explains the animals’ quarrel through a lost magic stone, a river crossing and a cat who laughs while carrying the treasure.

Tokgabi, now usually spelled dokkaebi, is the Korean goblin, and his “menagerie” is the collection of animals he sends out to reward or punish people. In this telling the stone stays at the bottom of the river, leaving the owner’s loss unresolved.

Read the original: Korean Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg)

Best for all ages — a dog and a cat hunt high and low for their master’s magic wine stone, until one of them laughs at the wrong moment.

Both partners have already helped

The cat searches where the dog cannot, finds the box and recruits the rat to open it. The dog supplies the strength for the river crossing. Her plan to claim the whole reward hides that dependence, but her later mistake does not erase her earlier work. Nor does the dog’s anger recover the stone: Tip Pul’s poverty remains unresolved.

Make a contribution map

Draw the box on one side of a river and Tip Pul’s home on the other. Add the cat, rat and dog beside the tasks each completes. Write a fair account they could have given their owner if the stone had arrived safely. Then mark where their cooperation breaks down. The final animal feud is a story explanation, not a reason to treat real cats as bad or unloved.

Talk about it

• How did the dog and the cat each search for the magic stone?
• What bargain did they make with the rats, and why did the rats agree?
• Was Mee Yow’s laughing the only thing that went wrong? What was she secretly planning?

Related stories

• Tokgabi and His Pranks — more about the mischievous goblin of the flues
• The King of the Sparrows — another Korean tale where animals reward kindness
• The Cat on the Dovrefell — a very different kind of “cat” from Norway