XIX
One does not always count the gilded days of summer in the mountains. It might have been a month, a week, or a few days in which the Tojin-san and the fox-woman wandered over Atago Yama. But the season of Little Heat passed into that of the Great Heat, and they did not know it.
The mountains were cool; there was a green wonder world about them. Soft shadows flickered across the sun-burned paths; intangible breezes fanned them with their scented breaths. They trod a carpeted paradise that was all beauty, all harmony. They felt like the birds which blew over them, or came shyly, timorously at her calling to share her morsel of rice and berries.
Even had he desired to do so, the Tojin could not have found his way back to the city. Seven-eighths of the province is mountain land, and she had led him over paths she alone knew, and indeed had made—narrow, hidden little paths that traced their unending way in and out the densest portion of the wooded mountains.
They passed no humblest lodge, no smallest temple even, though he knew that there were many in the mountains, and the music of their bells reached them at times like the tingling call of a familiar voice very far away.
She knew every secret corner of the mountains. The purest springs, hidden pools and lakelets, caves of unbelievable wonder and beauty, she showed now to the Tojin-san.
Clouds of sacred pigeons followed her as if they knew her. They were of her own Temple Tokiwa, she told him, and were part of her heritage from the ancestors of her mother who had founded the temple. She knew them all—every single bird, so she told him proudly; knew, too, why they were wandering thus far from home. They were seeking her, their guardian, who had been gone for so many, many days.
For the first time she recoiled from him when he suggested that they utilize the birds for food. Up till then they had depended entirely upon the seemingly inexhaustible stores of rice she seemed to have hidden in a hundred different places in the mountains, and upon the fish trapped in the streams, the fruit and wild vegetables which were plentiful enough. She had never dreamed of the pigeons as an addition to their diet, and her expression was quite tragic and piteous.
“They are of the temple,” reverently she said. “The gods love them, and I—I may not eat the forbidden meat.”
“Forbidden meat?”