ONE does not always count the gilded days of summer in the mountains. It
might have been a month, a week, or a few days in which the Tojin-san
and the fox-woman wandered over Atago Yama. But the season of Little
Heat passed into that of the Great Heat, and they did not know it.
The mountains were cool; there was a green wonder world about them. Soft
shadows flickered across the sun-burned paths; intangible breezes fanned
them with their scented breaths. They trod a carpeted paradise that was
all beauty, all harmony. They felt like the birds which blew over them,
or came shyly, timorously at her calling to share her morsel of rice and
berries.
Even had he desired to do so, the Tojin could not have found his way
back to the city. Seven-eighths of the province is mountain land, and
she had led him over paths she alone knew, and indeed had made—narrow,
hidden little paths that traced their unending way in and out the
densest portion of the wooded mountains.
They passed no humblest lodge, no smallest temple even, though he knew
that there were many in the mountains, and the music of their bells
reached them at times like the tingling call of a familiar voice very
far away.
She knew every secret corner of the mountains. The purest springs,
hidden pools and lakelets, caves of unbelievable wonder and beauty, she
showed now to the Tojin-san.
Clouds of sacred pigeons followed her as if they knew her. They were of
her own Temple Tokiwa, she told him, and were part of her heritage from
the ancestors of her mother who had founded the temple. She knew them
all—every single bird, so she told him proudly; knew, too, why they were
wandering thus far from home. They were seeking her, their guardian, who
had been gone for so many, many days.
For the first time she recoiled from him when he suggested that they
utilize the birds for food. Up till then they had depended entirely upon
the seemingly inexhaustible stores of rice she seemed to have hidden in
a hundred different places in the mountains, and upon the fish trapped
in the streams, the fruit and wild vegetables which were plentiful
enough. She had never dreamed of the pigeons as an addition to their
diet, and her expression was quite tragic and piteous.
“They are of the temple,” reverently she said. “The gods love them, and
I—I may not eat the forbidden meat.”
“Forbidden meat?”
She looked at him timidly with a new expression in her face. It was as
if a flame had crept into her eyes and set its touch upon her lips. She
had crossed her hands upon her bosom.
“I, too, am Ni-no ama, like unto my mother,” she softly said. “For both
our sin I got mek thad atonement unto Buddha!”
He regarded her in a spell-bound silence. There was something about her
words, her actions, withal their simplicity, that held a sacredness.
She, against whom the hostile hands of an entire Buddhist community had
been raised, a priestess of the Buddha! It was impossible, preposterous!
She had been but a child when her parents were killed. What could they
have taught her thus early?
She seemed to realize from his silence his doubts, and suddenly she
stepped back, raising her hands high above her head, bringing the tips
of the fingers together. A moment she stood with her face upraised, her
eyes closed.
“For you, oh Tojin-san, I will danze! It is as my mother have tich me
the danze for the gods. Haiken suru!” (Adoringly look).
From side to side she swayed, her small, exquisite hands moving in the
languorous motions of the dance. Never in even the greatest temples of
Kioto or Nikko had he seen a priestess perform as she was doing. He
thought of the glittering robes of the hundred nuns chanting their
splendid ritual before some gorgeous altar, of their impassive, stony
faces, their ebony hair, their narrow, inscrutable eyes. But she, with
her unbound hair of gold, her bosom and face of snow!
Yes, they were right, they of Fukui! She was an incarnation of the Sun
Goddess, tripping like the Spring upon the earth, and inspiring in the
hearts and eyes of all who saw her sensations of adoration, and of those
who dared not look, of fear—fear and hatred!
She had stolen the face and vestments of the goddess, so they had said;
but her soul was that of a fox!
There burst upon him suddenly a realization of the impassable gulf
between them, and with the knowledge came an overwhelming sense of
revolution, the mad, irresistible passion of the primitive man who knows
only his desires.
But a moment later she was at his feet, her pure, trusting face smiling
appealingly up at him.
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