The Night the Foxes Tried to Saw Down a Tree / 薰狐者夜遇方巾鬼

A Qing fox-hunter discovers his quarry has retained a scholar-rank ghost as legal counsel

From Notes from the Thatched Study (阅微草堂笔记), Huaixi Zazhi Volume IV — Tale collected by Ji Yun (纪昀, 1724–1805) from Li Yunju (李云举)

Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

[Hook] A Qing fox-hunter is out in the cemetery at night with his fire and his net, hunting in the standard way of the trade. Something comes up out of one of the tombs. It is not a fox. It is a man in a scholar's square cap and the long student gown, who lets out a piercing whistle — the sound, Ji Yun helpfully glosses, that ancient texts identify as a ghost's voice. From every direction the foxes come running. The hunter, suddenly outnumbered and outranked, scrambles up the tallest tree he can find. The scholar-ghost nods politely to his foxes and tells them to saw the tree down.

The Story

The Hunter's Profession

In the eastern Hebei county of Dongguang (东光, a small grain-belt town on the Grand Canal about two hundred li south of Tianjin, in Ji Yun's own home region) there lived a man who made his living xūn hú^{[1]薰狐 (xūn hú, "smoking foxes") was a recognized Qing rural occupation. Hunters lit smoke fires at the upwind entrance of a fox den and stretched nets across the downwind exits; foxes fleeing the smoke ran into the nets and were killed for their pelts. The fur trade between north China and the metropolitan markets was a steady source of income for villages along the Grand Canal.} — driving foxes out of their dens with smoke and fire, and catching them in nets at the entrance. Foxes in the Qing fur economy were valuable: their pelts trimmed the winter robes of officials, and a good winter's hunting could carry a family through to the next planting. The hunter in this story is not named. Ji Yun's source was Li Yunju (李云举), a man known to the family of one of the great scholar-officials of the Qianlong reign, and the hunter is described only by his profession.

He worked the abandoned mounds outside the town — the xū mù^{[2]墟墓 (xū mù) literally combines xū ("ruined settlement") and mù ("grave") — abandoned cemeteries, especially those whose patron lineages had died out or moved away. In late imperial folklore, such places were the typical habitat of fox spirits, ghosts of the unburied, and supernatural creatures generally. A fox-hunter would naturally work them; so would a graveyard ghost.}, "ruined graves" — which were known to harbor foxes among their tumbledown brickwork. He went out in the late evening with a fire-bundle on his back, a coil of rope, and a net.

He had done it for years. The graveyard was, by any working hunter's estimation, a familiar workplace.

What Came Out of the Tomb

On the night this story records, the hunter was crouched in his usual hiding-spot among the burial mounds, waiting for the smell of fox to come up from the entrances. The fire-bundle was banked. He was watching for movement.

Movement came.

The top of one of the larger tombs — the conical earth mound that sat over the burial chamber — opened, the way a man might push aside a screen door. A figure climbed out and stood on top of the mound. He was wearing the fāngjīn^{[3]方巾 (fāngjīn, "square cap") was the soft black cap worn by Ming-Qing civil licentiates as a marker of their degree. To still be wearing one in the afterlife is the storyteller's signal that the ghost in question achieved at least the xiùcái rank before death, and identifies with that achievement strongly enough to carry it across the threshold.} — the soft square cap of a Ming-Qing licentiate — and the long lánshān student robe with its dark border. He looked, in the moonlight, like any of the failed examination candidates one met in the back rooms of provincial schools.

He turned his face up and let out a long, high whistle. Ji Yun, in characteristic philological mode, breaks off the narrative for half a sentence to gloss the sound: the character for this whistle is read lóu*, and the* Shuowen dictionary identifies it as the cry of ghosts. The sound was, in other words, exactly what a Tang or Han antiquarian would recognize as the noise the dead make when they call to each other.

From every direction the foxes came.

They came out of dens, out of burrows, out from behind the broken stelae. They came in dozens. They surrounded the thicket where the hunter was hiding. They bared their teeth. They howled.

What they were howling, the text tells us, was: catch this evil man, and boil him into jerky.

The Tree

The hunter, by his profession, had a working understanding of fox geography. He knew which directions had open ground and which had cover. He bolted from the thicket and made for the nearest tall tree.

He went up the tree the way a man goes up a tree at the end of his life: hand over hand, no looking down. He got to a high branch. He clung to it.

Below him, the scholar in the square cap walked through the foxes like a magistrate walking through his runners. He surveyed the situation. He spoke briefly. He told the foxes to saw the tree down.

The sound came from the base of the trunk almost at once. Hōng hōng — the deep grating two-stroke rhythm of a long carpenter's saw being pulled and pushed through wood. The hunter could not see who was pulling. He could not see what the saw looked like. He could only hear the sound, working its way through the trunk under his feet, while the foxes circled the base of the tree and waited for the inevitable lean.

The Negotiation

The hunter — and this is the part Ji Yun lets the reader savor — negotiated.

He called down, into the chorus of saw-noise and fox-yowling, in the voice of a man bargaining for his life:

"If you would spare me, I swear I will never set foot on this ground again."

The foxes did not stop.

The saw noise, the text says, grew louder.

He called down a second time. The same offer. The same sentence. The saw kept going.

He called down a third time.

The scholar in the square cap, who had until this point been simply supervising, raised his hand. The saw paused. He looked up at the man in the tree.

"If you mean it," he said, "you may swear an oath."

The hunter swore the oath. The exact form of the oath is not preserved — Ji Yun's source did not record the wording — but it was binding enough.

The moment the words finished, the ghost was gone. The foxes were gone. The saw was gone. The tree, which a moment before had been a few cuts away from coming down, stood as it had always stood.

The hunter climbed down. He went home. He never again carried his fire-bundle into the xū mù outside Dongguang.

Ji Yun, in the half-line he allows himself for a closing, observes only: this ghost and these foxes — both, one might say, brought the matter to a satisfactory close.

Translator's Reflection

What I love about this one is how managerial the ghost is.

Other Qing supernatural stories give you the spectacular variety. The fox-hunter would normally die: foxes would tear him to pieces, or the scholar-ghost would reveal a face of decomposing flesh, or the saw would actually fell the tree and the foxes would feast. Ji Yun does none of this. He gives you a scholar who has clearly been running this graveyard for years, who responds to a working-class threat with a coordinated counter-operation, and who accepts a sworn oath as a satisfactory resolution.

The ghost has a cap. He has a robe. He is recognizably a member of the licentiate class — a man who, in his living years, passed the prefectural examination and earned the right to be addressed as a xiucai. He is also dead. And in death he has taken up something like a managerial role in the local fox community. The foxes treat him as a magistrate. The two species — ghosts and foxes — have organized themselves into a working coalition. The hunter, in this telling, is the trespasser. He is the one violating the local zoning.

The detail that does it for me is the saw. Ji Yun does not tell us what is doing the sawing. He does not show us small fox paws clutching a carpenter's tool. He just lets you hear the sound — hōng hōng — coming up through the trunk while the hunter clings to the branch above. The horror is in the auditory ambiguity. The foxes have a saw. That is a sentence the human imagination is supposed to refuse, and the story refuses to elaborate on it, and that is exactly why it works.

The oath ending is — to a modern reader — almost comic. Three rounds of negotiation, terms settled, both parties dematerialize. It reads like a contract closing. But this is exactly Ji Yun's signature move. Where Pu Songling^{[4]蒲松龄 (Pú Sōnglíng, 1640–1715) was the author of Liaozhai zhiyi (聊斋志异, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio), the other great Qing-era collection of supernatural short fiction and Ji Yun's most-discussed predecessor and rival. Where Pu wrote long, romantic, often elegiac stories of fox-women and lonely scholars, Ji Yun deliberately wrote short, dry, often administrative-toned anecdotes. The contrast was sharp enough that Ji Yun, in his preface to Yuewei, gently criticized Pu for stretching anecdotes into fully developed fiction; the two collections are now read side by side as the twin peaks of Qing biji (笔记) supernatural writing.} would have written a longer, more lyrical story about the fox-spirits' tragedy or the hunter's repentance, Ji Yun writes the short administrative version. The point is not the moral. The point is the jurisdictional settlement: the foxes had a grievance, the hunter had a profession, a competent intermediary brokered a binding agreement, and everyone went home. This ghost and these foxes — both, one might say, brought the matter to a satisfactory close. That sentence, in Ji Yun's mouth, is praise of the highest order. He is, in effect, applauding the negotiation as a piece of competent dispute resolution.

What the story leaves out is what I keep returning to. The hunter does not become a vegetarian. He does not convert to Buddhism. He does not lecture his sons about respecting fox-life. He simply moves his operations. The next morning, presumably, he packs his fire-bundle and his net and goes to the cemetery on the other side of town. The oath was about this specific patch of ground. He swore not to return here. The agreement does not extend a foot beyond the boundary of this particular ruined graveyard.

That is the cold realism that runs underneath Ji Yun's whole project. People are who they are. A fox-hunter hunts foxes. The supernatural world, when it interferes, can only protect what is in its immediate territory. The rest is open season. The fox-spirits in the next graveyard over are on their own.

There is something almost bureaucratic-utopian about it. In the Confucian theory of the spirit world, the dead participate in their own civil administration. They form local councils. They negotiate with the living through proper channels. They accept oaths as binding instruments. This story is the rare case where that theory works out for the foxes. They have organized. They have allies in the gentry. They have a vector for redress.

I find that strangely cheering.

Next tale: The Magistrate Who Bowed to His Own Wax Doll — a Qing official's life-sized mechanical lady-in-waiting wanders the study at night, learning who is afraid of her. → [Coming soon]