Barking Man Read Free Page A

only choice for the moment. Clearly there is not the least thing I can do to change this circumstance. But oh, let me bear it with patience, with fortitude. I will let nothing forth from me but the gentlest acceptance, check Wu only with my meekness. Such is The Taming Power of the Small . And already, far out beyond the razor edges of this pain, I can envision the gently lapping borders of a great placid sea of calm.

    It’s been five days, or is it six, since last I was able to consult the oracle. The torment so steadily administered by Wu has kept my attention fully occupied. So painfully that at times I’ve been tempted to wonder what offense I could possibly have committed to bring such a punishment down on me. Though that question is itself inspired by decadent, almost barbaric thinking.
    Surely, it must be karma.
    But for most of last night, and all of today, Wu has left me in relative peace. Peace , if you like to call it that. He’s tunneled back into the chips again, and now rarely emerges even to eat or drink. While Li still rattles and scrapes interminably along the infinite curve of his wheel. How he keeps it up I can’t conceive … As for me, I have remained wedged here in this corner of the cell for the most part, reluctant to move because movement hurts my poor tail terribly. My tail, so recently a fine and flexible whip of flesh, is swollen to several times its normal size, and covered from base to tip with red-ringed puncture wounds, some still bleeding a little, most already beginning to fester. These last few hours the pain has dimmed to a dull ache—small comfort, since all it means is that amputation will doubtless soon be necessary. I cannot even flex it, though I can’t be sure if the relevant tendons have been completely severed, for any attempt in that direction makes me half faint from pain. To drag it limply behind me as far as the food dish or water spout is excruciating enough.
    In default of all else, I gather my sticks and laboriously calculate the Changes. Never mind that it’s broad daylight. Never mind that the “Boy” has come and that he’s watching me, has opened his notebook and is boring furiously into it with his pen. He’ll never comprehend the significance of my action anyway, so why should I trouble to conceal it?
On the mountain, a tree:
    The image of Development .
    Thus the superior mouse abides in dignity and virtue
    In order to improve the mores.
    Dignity and virtue, what droppings, what owl pellets, indeed. This superior mouse is abiding in agony and idiocy, like it or not. Of course, it is true that the mores around here could bear a little improvement. Screek screek goes that demented wheel, so that I can barely string a thought together, and for one delirious instant I’m overwhelmed by the thought of how delicious it would be to fling Li down from it and gnaw some intimate part of him clear to the bone. But I must calm myself—
Six in the second place means:
    The wild goose gradually draws near the cliff …
    Blah blah blah , six in the second place means nothing of much interest to me. On with it—
Nine in the fifth place means:
    The wild goose draws gradually near the summit.
    For three years the woman has no child …
    Incomprehension. Sterility. Isolation. All perfectly appropriate to our condition now. And the second hexagram?
    Decay . I have no energy to examine the commentary on that; the one word says it all. And tumbles me, finally, into complete despair. Decay . Yes, decay.
    Throughout my life, ever since I first uncurled from my original bald, blind mouseling being and opened my eyes to the great world around me, I have had, it seems, only one truly serious fear. Put aside those dreams of owls and snakes, for death must come to all mice finally, in one form or another. No, what I fear far more deeply is chaos. A suitable bête noire , I suppose, for a mouse of my education, a Scrivener and expert in the Changes. Suppose that (as the barbarian mice