Fabulous Foxes (McGraw-Hill Books / Myths)
The Chinese felt that foxes were apt to be sorcerers in disguise, and vice versa. Fox magicians had human weakness. Their perspectives on life apt to be a little odd, as certain tales attest.
Once a peasant in the province of SHANTUNG looked up from his hoe to see a cultivated lady stumbling toward him over the furrows. At first he though she might have lost here way. There was a redness in her eyes, however, which alerted him to her fox nature. It seemed that she had come to make an midnight appointment with him.
They were to meet, she said, at the door of his bachelor hut between the fields. That night in bed, the peasant found the girl delightful but curiously downy; her whole body was fuzzed with light brown hair. He gave her all the satisfaction he could.
As she was leaving, he said, "Wonderful creature that you are, you can surely relieve the terrible poverty under which I suffer!" With that they parted, and he stumbled blearly-eyed into the fields to work. Next night, the fox lady returned. The peasant again asked her for money. She said she had forgotten it. This went on for some weeks. The peasant was losing his health, owing to the well-known propensity of fox ladies to feed on the energy of their human lovers.
He had almost resolved to turn the fox lady away when she finally came with a couple of coins. The coins looked like silver but were only pewter. The peasant complained of this.
"Everyone has a destiny," she explained, "Yours is definitely inferior. Did you expect gold?"
"I had always heard fox ladies were surpassingly beautiful," the peasant responded. "You yourself are not. To tell the truth. You are very plain and ordinary looking. Why is that?"
The lady replied, smiling, that her kind always did their best to
adapt themselves to present company. This mild quarrel signified
the end of the affair.
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