Cursed Bunny(23)

The man was taken aback. At the same time, he noticed that from the fox’s ankle where the snare dug in, a shining liquid flowed. The fox bled not blood but something that resembled gold. The surrounding snow had made it hard to notice at first, but now he saw the area around the snare was splattered with the glittering substance, some of it hardened in the cold snow.

The man picked up one of the hardened lumps and peered at it closely. He bit down on it.

Gold. It was unmistakable.

Taking great care, the man assiduously scraped up every bit that was around the fox. Then, with even more care, he packed the fox inside his bag, someone else’s snare and all, and took her home.

Once home, the man hid away the fox deep in his shed. He gave the fox water and food, keeping it alive. The snare was never taken off. Rather, the man would occasionally shake the snare or wound the fox again with a sharp weapon so that her injuries never healed. Whenever he did so, the fox barked or whined in resentment. But the only time she spoke like a human was when the man had first discovered her.

The man let the liquid that flowed from her wounds set before selling it little by little. Cunning as he was, he knew very well what would happen if a peasant like him suddenly showed up with fistfuls of gold in his pockets. He deliberately carried small dribbles of it instead of big ones, going from town to town, selling so little as to never attract much attention. With the money from the gold he sold, he bought grains, salt, leather, and timber—ordinary goods that he could sell in his own village’s market.

There were days when business was good and days when it was bad. The price of goods went down sometimes, up in others. But the man didn’t care. In his shed at home was a hidden treasure that nobody knew about; never again would he have to start over from nothing. Whether he made a good profit or a small one, he always had a leisurely smile on his face, successfully selling all manner of things at the market.

The people around him considered the man an easy-going and hardworking fellow. His reputation grew among both his customers and the people who provided him with his wares. Like everyone else, he seemed to have ups and downs with his business, but the thing about this man’s work in particular was that he always managed to turn a profit in the end. He became known as an old hand in the art of market-selling. His credit grew as did his fortune, and the man eventually built a large house and married a beautiful woman.

When he built the house, the man knocked down his shed and erected a sturdy warehouse instead, keeping the fox chained to a corner of it. Her constantly open wound and her blood being drawn at regular intervals made her listless, but she was still alive. The skin around the wound, having been ground down and cut again and again, had peeled back to reveal the bone, and was now so calloused that no amount of cutting and piercing drew blood. Now skin and bone, the fox would snarl at the man whenever he came toward her, but that was all she could do. She had long lost the energy to bark or bite.

In the third year of the man’s marriage, the fox finally died. The man regretted it deeply, but because he had extracted so much gold from her and business was going well, he thought he would be able to get by. He skinned the dead fox and had her fur made into a scarf. The fox had lost much of its hair during her imprisonment and her fur was not much to look at anymore, but the man’s ignorant wife was happy to receive the fox-fur scarf as a gift.

Not long after that, the man’s wife became pregnant. As they had been childless for the three years since their wedding, both man and wife were overjoyed at the prospect of a child. Ten months later, the man’s wife gave birth to twins: a son and a daughter. The boy came out first, the girl second. Gazing at the faces of their new-born children, the man and his wife felt they had reached the pinnacle of all happiness under heaven.

Aside from the fact that they were fraternal twins, the two children were not that different from most siblings. But one day, around the time they were learning how to walk, the man’s wife suddenly heard one of them scream in the other room. When she ran in, she saw that the boy was attacking the girl, biting her. Thinking it was a common fight between siblings, the man’s wife separated the two and scolded the boy while consoling the girl. She was too concerned with the wound on the girl’s neck to notice that the boy was busily licking away at the blood underneath his fingernails and around his mouth, as if trying to lap up every drop of it.

In the evening, the wife fed her children and put them to bed before letting the man know about the children’s fight when he came home. As she was telling the man, they heard another bloodcurdling scream. The couple rushed into the children’s room. As the little girl shook in fear and struggled to get free with all her might, the boy bit into the wound scratched onto his sister’s neck earlier that day, clawing at it with his little fingernails and rapidly licking away at the blood that flowed from her neck.

The man’s wife got in between them and held her daughter away from the son. Jumping at her, the boy bit down on his mother’s arm. She was taken by surprise, but despite her pain she kept her daughter aloft and reflexively shoved the boy away. Her fingernail grazed his forehead.

As the man tried to keep his son from his wife, he noticed something glistening on his son’s forehead.

Oozing out of the long wound was a familiar glob of gold-colored liquid.

His wife tried to console their bleeding daughter as the man held onto his son and probed his son’s wound with his fingers. The wound wasn’t deep; the gold liquid slightly seeped out before stopping altogether.