The tanuki announces itself by a hollow, rubbery thump, like a palm slapped on a wet drum, and then by a long gap in which the frogs stop. The thump is the animal drumming its own belly. The silence afterward is the hill waiting to see who has been fooled. I have heard both on four nights out of five in the terraces above Ishiwa Ridgepot, and the order never varies.
The earliest record I can find is a temple ledger kept at Ishiwa, which lists a tanuki that took the form of a tea kettle and was sold to a priest for a small bag of millet. The kettle, the entry says, grew fur on the third boil. Later records, from the lumber years, describe tanuki as road makers: groups of them drew false lanterns along the cedar tracks to turn carters toward the marsh. By the time the charcoal burners came to the slopes, the animals had learned to imitate the sound of a mallet on a wedge, and some burners swore the hills were being worked by night by crews who did not exist.
The present animal is a stocky, low-slung thing the size of a large house cat's heavier cousin, with a barrel belly it uses as a drum. The one I followed for most of a season wears a black mask that runs into its cheeks like soot, and its left ear has a notch cut clean across, as though by a pair of shears. Its fur is the gray-brown of wet bark, but the ruff at its throat is tinted rust. I weighed it by coaxing it onto a feed sack hung from a spring scale at Vetch Hollowfoot Pass, where the grain sellers leave scraps for it. It came to 17 pounds, with the sack subtracted. It ate the grain, then three persimmons, then the sack's string.
People on the ridge keep a rule: a stranger met on the path after dark must be asked to step into the light of a lamp and say the name of the last village he passed. A tanuki can copy a face and a voice but fumbles the names of places. There is also a trade that exists only because of the animal. The shadow walkers of Vetch Hollowfoot are hired by farms to patrol the terrace walls at night, drum on a hollow gourd, and answer any thump from the hill with a different pattern, because a tanuki that hears itself answered will leave. A good walker earns his keep by knowing which thumps are the animal and which are rain in the pipes. What no one on either hill can explain is why the tanuki drums at all, when a drum is the one sound that gives it away. Whom is it calling?
- Classification
- Shape-shifting trickster mammal
- Habitat
- Wooded terraces and cedar hills
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 2 ft long, 17 lb
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Eastern hill country
- Binomial
- Nyctereutes ventrifer
- Diet
- Persimmons, grain, beetles, small fish
- Temperament
- Playful, evasive, vain