From time to time I went out onto the veranda but not a sound came up from the bottom of the cliff. It was as if nobody was down there. There was no sign of any smoke. There was only the lonely sound of the accumulated snow slipping off from the nearby shrubbery. Although the dark sky hung low over the tops of the groves, which were shrouded by a cloudlike mist, in the snow, scattered about or lying piled in silvery, gleaming drifts, the garden was everywhere a shadowy brightness that was more than mere twilight. After I had lunch with my mother, another short while went by. I was slightly tired of waiting, and also starting to feel a sort of heartweariness. All of a sudden, there was an indescribably piteous shriek, followed by a triumphant shout of many people. Almost kicking down the paper doors, everyone rushed from the house onto the veranda. From what I heard later, the fox, suffocated by the smoking sulfur, had timorously stuck its head out at the mouth of the hole. Seigoro, waiting for it with his axe, had struck the animal a single blow. It was a lucky hit. The blade had split the fox's head right between the eyes, and the fox had dropped dead on the spot. My portly father in the vanguard, carrying his great bow, then Tazaki and Kisuke between them shouldering the long pole from which the dead fox dangled by its paws, and Seigoro and Yasukichi bringing up the rear, an orderly procession appeared at the top of the cliff. As it tramped through the snowdrifts, I was reminded of the long file of warriors, the Treasury of Loyal Retainers, which I'd seen in my picture book. How manly and heroic they all looked, I thought. Tazaki, the intrepid student-houseboy, advanced toward me and in his usual high-flown, classical manner announced, "Young master. Thus it goes. Heaven's net is wide and slow, but lets none escape." With that, he thrust the fox right under our noses. When I saw the axe-cleft skull, the muddy drops of life's blood that dripped from between the clenched fangs onto the snow, I had to hide my face behind my mother's soft sleeve.
It was decided to hold a great sake banquet in the house that afternoon. Because the heavy snowfall had prevented the fish dealer from laying in supplies, my father resolved to regale the servants and regular tradespeople with some of our freshly killed chickens. Everyone was in a great good humor. In the little yard where the fox had crept in by stealth, they grabbed two chickens and openly dispatched them. The previous fall, those two black-and-white mottled hens, chicks then, had chirped to me each day as I set out for school and when I got back. Their bodies had been enfolded in fluffy golden wings like cotton puffs. Tossing them feed and giving them small plants to eat, I'd cherished them. By now they had grown into splendidly plump mother birds. Both of them, alas, with the same pathetic squawk, had their necks wrung by the hands of Tazaki. Their feathers were plucked by the hands of Kisuke, their stomachs were cut open and the guts pulled out by the hands of Yasu. The flushed faces of the feasters, who sat up until late at night drinking sake and licking and smacking their lips, seemed to me like those of the goblins that I'd seen in my picture book.
In bed that night, I thought, Why did those people hate the fox so? Saying it was because it had killed the chicken, they had killed the fox and two more chickens besides.
From the struggle of the snake and the frog, Turgenev in his child's heart had doubted the benevolence of God. As soon as I'd begun to read literature, I doubted the meaning of the words "trial" and "punishment," as they are used in the world. Perhaps it was that killing of the fox in the distant past. Perhaps those memories had, without my knowing it, become the source of my doubt.
The light, at about two o'clock in the July afternoon, bore down intensely everywhere on the wide parade grounds. Along the earthen outer wall of a barracks that stood at the western edge of the grounds ran an uneven road. Like the dried up, irregular channels of a stream bed, in several places it had been pounded into two or three ruts by wagon wheels, horses' hooves, and men's feet, in other places flowing together into one. If you stood there and looked east, far away in the gently undulant landscape the tops of a dark forest faintly appeared and disappeared. They were like the eastern edge of the enormous grounds. To the north and south also, large groves of tall and short trees stood in lines that, shimmering in the heat, linked up with the forest on the remote eastern side. Within these borders, aside from the summer grasses that, barely surviving the hobnailed boots of soldiers, grew here and there in islands of lifeless green, there were hardly any trees. The blue sky, saturated with the blazing light, trembling with its fever, glared down at the red dirt grounds wherever you looked. They were like two faces, each growing angry at the other's obduracy, each browbeating the other with swollen, sullen grimaces. There was not a breath of air. Unless something came between them and made peace, there would be war between these two any minute now ... no small birds, of course, but not even big birds dared to fly across the sky. Instead the cicadas, an insect kind relying on its numbers, from the deep, leafy shade of the surrounding groves, drew out their long, monotonous song of the hot, stuffy smell of grass, the irritable, heat-mirage ague of summer, a song with a touch of mockery. Even the blue-tail lizard, as if its pride and joy, the tail that gleamed blue and then green, were too much for it, left it limply extended as it stuck its head under the meager shade of the grass, its silvery white belly pulsing as if out of breath. Some very energetic ants, lugging around the body of a dragonfly left half-uneaten by a praying mantis on their black, shiny, little backs, were hard at work even in this heat. As for human beings, there were none to be seen anywhere. But no, there was just one, the arsenal sentry standing guard on the wall of the barracks. Of course, even though he was a man, anything like human mental activity had come to a halt in him. His brain simmering steadily like gray soup, he stood bolt upright. Even if the arson of the sun, like a red-hot iron, had touched off a tremendous explosion in the arsenal, surely he would not have budged an inch ...
Just then a certain young man, on his way to see a friend who lived on the far side of the parade grounds, took off his hat in the suburban trolley and let the warm wind that fitfully blew in at the window fan and tease his soft crew cut. His business being somewhat urgent, he had braved the blazing heat, but he dreaded the long walk across the parade grounds.
Suddenly at the southeast corner of the grounds, a cloud of reddish-brown smoke or dust arose. As he looked, it fanned out and hid all the view behind it. Quickly spreading across the field, it created patterns of light and shadow, spiraled about like a tornado and rushed this way like a tidal wave. In less than a minute it had swept across the parade grounds and invaded the grove on the north side. Hit head on, the trees, waving their heads and soughing in wavelike rhythms, were simultaneously deluged with red dust. At the same instant the attacking dust storm was thrown back by the earth wall on the west side, somersaulting as it danced up into the air. Caught by another blast of wind, it whirled crazily and was hurled against the barracks.
Just then the young man, having gotten off the trolley, happened by. Coming up against this wall of dust at the corner where he'd meant to turn onto the grounds, he instantly clamped down his hat and spun right around so that his back faced the wind. His summer kimono and haori over it were plastered to his body so that his rear outline down to the knot of his obi was clearly shown. Any looseness in his clothes was at once blown out streaming and flapping in front of him. His body was bent from the waist in the shape of a bow. But while leaning back into the wind, he was trying hard to straighten up again. (In a print by Hokusai, a man in a strong wind is also bent over like a bow. But that is a pictorial exaggeration.)
"Puh. It's too much." Just as he thought this, he was blown downwind two or three steps. The next-moment, made fun of by the wind he'd been leaning against, he staggered backward. As it reversed itself, the wind flung dust and sand in his face. Self-defensively he'd shut his eyes tight. Even so ... "This is awful!"
After listening intently to the sound of the wind's retreat, he slowly turned around and looked out over the parade grounds. Often while crossing this field, he had run into little dust flurries, but never before this kind of hurricane-force gale. He felt a curiosity, as if now he would be able to see something absolutely new to him. Like ripplets that rise in the wake of