Barking Man Read Free

wakeful as before. Another day of total abstinence would be death, so today I let myself drink a little. A very little, yet already I can feel that chemical agitation running through me. It may be possible to strike some sort of balance. Maybe, but the hope is faint. Soon we must all go mad.
    Wu, who keeps up his seismic trembling under the chips so constantly I’ve almost ceased to notice it, bursts out of the bedding so suddenly now I can hardly focus my eyes on him. Dazedly I stare as he charges at the turning wheel where Li goes on mindlessly rushing, scrambling on and on without progress. Wu rips at the underside of the wheel with his claws, and I see that he must be trying to stop it, stop it at whatever price. Nor do I blame him, for the endless motion, along with its equally endless squealing, has begun to make me almost physically nauseous too. Li keeps on running as if desperate for an important destination, the narrow wedge of his head stretched out flat before him like a racer pressing toward his goal. And for whatever reason, Wu seems entirely unable to stop the wheel. He clings to it and falls, rises to get a fresh grip, is even carried up a little way on the backspin—and falls once more.
    Strange, for Wu is the most powerful of the three of us, without question. Fool , I think, you have only to jump up there with him, knock him out of there, that’s the way to manage it. But what can have come over me, to promote strife among my companions? Even in a thought? Wu has given up, collapsed in the chips below that fretfully spinning wheel, his back disconsolately humped up. Oh, for some word that might cheer him, but I have none. He makes a quarter turn and I just see a red flash in his eyes before with another spring he is on me . Tumbling me over backward and, inexplicably, without the least provocation, sinking his teeth into the thickest meat at the bare base of my tail .
    An involuntary squeak breaks out of me, surprise and pain in equal mixture, and without thinking I whip around and rake at Wu’s broad face with both my forepaws. A mistake, for Wu outweighs me at least an ounce, and moreover he is of the Samurai class and so has martial training, whereas I have none. I’m winded by a rear paw buried in my belly, stunned by a forepaw hammered behind my ear, flung bodily up and out in a giddy arc that stops with a slam into the bars. Even unarmed, Wu is formidable. As I slide down I feel the hot needles of his teeth pierce into my tail again, a little closer to the tip this time. God! God! Buddha! How it hurts me! Tears flood my eyes, and I grip the bars with my forepaws, for I dare not venture any further resistance.
    Perhaps I can reason with him somehow? But this is all so senseless! It’s insanity, of course, I knew it would come, though I never suspected it would take such a form. Cautiously I peer back over my left shoulder. Wu’s eyes, hot rabid red, rise to meet mine for an instant, and he gives my tail an agonizing shake, as if to emphasize some point. He doesn’t want me to look at him? All right, I won’t. As I turn back, fixing my trembling muzzle between two bars to hold it firm and keep from crying, Wu shifts his bite again. I tremble to the core, for this time I think Ífelt one tooth cut through to bone.
    I must set my mind to something else, some distraction, anything. But I can summon no bright work of images to dance for me now; the pain drives everything before it. The interlocking squares, where the Changes are recorded, twirl before my eyes as crazily as Li’s wheel, as I struggle to fix on one of them, it hardly matters which. What was it that ironic draw of Peace was turning into? Wu bites through on a new and narrower section of my tail, and the fresh burst of pain seems to underline it:
The wind drives across heaven:
    The image of The Taming Power of the Small .
    Thus the superior mouse
    Refines the outward aspect of his nature.
    Ohyesohyesohyes … That would seem to be my