The Hermit and the Dog

The teaching on the field of Kurukshetra had gone on for many days, and Yudhishthira had begun to notice that the questions he asked in the morning were not the questions that kept him awake.

"Grandfather," he said, "I must appoint men. The kingdom is empty of its officers; almost everyone who held a post under Duryodhana is dead, and I have to fill those seats out of whoever is left standing. Some of them are men who served me faithfully in the forest years when there was nothing to gain by it. I am fond of them. I want to raise them high."

"That is not a question," said Bhishma, from his bed of arrows.

"The question is how high," said Yudhishthira. "If a man has been good to me, why should I not give him whatever I have to give?"

Bhishma was quiet for a while. Somewhere out on the plain a dog was barking, one of the hundreds that had come to the field after the war and stayed.

"Listen to that," he said. "That will do. There was once an ascetic who lived alone in a great forest, far from any road. He was a man of enormous penance. He had stood on one foot through summers that killed birds in the air; he had gone without food until the gods themselves grew uneasy watching him. By the time this story finds him, whatever he said aloud simply became true, which is the most dangerous condition a kind man can be in.

And he was kind. That is the whole difficulty. He ate roots and forest fruit and would not harm a leaf that was still growing. The deer of that wood drank at his pool and did not lift their heads when he walked past. Birds nested in the thatch of his hut. He had no enemies, no rivals, no household and no wife, and out of all that mildness he had one small hunger left, which was to be needed by something."

"And something came," said Yudhishthira.

"Something always comes," said Bhishma.

A dog came out of the forest one evening and sat down at the edge of the clearing.

It was a poor thing: lean, its ribs showing like the ribs of a boat, its coat rubbed bare in patches. It did not come close. It sat at the tree line and watched the sage eat, and when he set down a handful of fruit and stepped back, it waited a long time before it took it.

Within a month it slept across his feet. It followed him to the pool and to the wood-gathering and back. When he sat to meditate it lay in the grass with its chin on its paws and its eyes half shut, and the sage, who had spent forty years learning not to want anything, found that he wanted this creature to be happy. It was a very small failure. Most are.

Then, on a hot night, a leopard came down the ridge.

The dog woke and could not even bark. It crawled backward on its belly and pressed itself against the sage's legs, shaking so hard that its teeth knocked together, and it made a thin sound like a puppy, and it looked up at him.

"Do not be afraid," said the sage.

And because he was who he was, and because whatever he said aloud became true, the dog was not afraid. It grew. Its skull broadened and its spine lengthened and rosettes came up through the poor rubbed coat like ink spreading through cloth, and in the space of three breaths there was a leopard standing where the dog had been, thick-shouldered, its eyes catching the moon.

The leopard on the ridge looked at it, and at the smell of it, and decided the clearing was taken, and went away.

The new leopard came back and lay down at the sage's feet, exactly where the dog had lain. Almost exactly. Not quite in the same place. And when it laid its chin on its paws it was no longer looking at the sage. It was looking out, past him, at the dark line of the trees, at everything out there that was still bigger than it was.

A tiger came in the third month.

It did not even hunt them. It walked the far edge of the clearing on its way to the river, unhurried, and it was so much larger than a leopard that the difference was not a matter of degree but of category. The leopard flattened itself in the grass and stayed flat long after the tiger was gone.

Afterwards it came to the sage and pressed its heavy head against his knee and shivered, and the old man, who had never learned to refuse it anything, said the words again. A tiger rose out of the grass in front of his hut.

That was the season things changed. A dog will eat fruit. A leopard, if it is fond of you, will make do. A tiger will not. It stopped touching the roots and the wild figs he set out, and began going into the forest at dusk and coming back at dawn with its jaws dark, and one morning the sage found the small spotted deer that had drunk at his pool for nine years lying opened in the ferns, not eaten, simply killed. He said nothing about it. He told himself it was the animal's nature and not the animal's fault, which was true, and which was not the point.

Then the elephant came - an old bull in rut, mad with it, red running down his temples, tearing through the sal trees with his head down. Against such a creature a tiger is nothing.

The tiger ran to the hut. The sage saw the terror in it, and did what he had done twice before.

What stood in the clearing afterward was an elephant, tall as the hut's ridgepole, white-tusked, and the bull in rut turned and blundered away into the dark, and the deer that were left did not come to the pool at all that night.

By now the sage had begun to understand something and had not yet let himself say it. Each new shape had been answered within weeks by a larger fear. The fear was not in the shape. He had never once been treating the fear. He had been treating his own discomfort at watching it.

The lion came in the dry season, and after the lion came the thing that eats lions.

The elephant had been drinking at the pool when the lion took the ridge above it and roared, and an elephant is a mountain, but a lion is a decision. The creature that had once been a dog came back through the trees at a run that shook the ground, and stood in front of the sage with its trunk curled tight, trembling in every square foot of its enormous body, and the sage sighed and made it a lion.

After that the forest emptied. Deer left. The birds went out of the thatch. The pool had nothing at its edge in the mornings but a wide pug-mark and blood dried black on the stones. The sage sat alone in a clearing surrounded by silence and told himself he was not lonely.

And then, out of the high rocks where nothing goes, came the sharabha: eight-legged, higher than an elephant at the shoulder, with eyes set in its head like sunken coals, the beast that hunts lions the way lions hunt deer. It came down the slope without hurry, because nothing on earth had ever required it to hurry.

The lion screamed and ran to the only thing it had ever known to be stronger than what frightened it.

And the sage, one last time, said the words.

There were two sharabhas in the clearing then, and the one from the mountain looked at the one that had been a dog, and understood that this was no longer a hunt, and turned and went back up into its rocks, and that was the end of fear in that forest forever.

The creature stood in the wreck of the clearing. It waited to feel the relief it had always felt. It did not come, because there was nothing left to be delivered from, and a thing that has been made entirely out of other people's answers to its fear has nothing else in it at all. It looked at the wet ruin of the pool. It looked at the empty forest. Then it turned its sunken eyes on the thin old man in the doorway, who was the last living creature in that whole wood, and it did not remember him.

It stalked him for three days. It circled the hut at night. It stopped taking the fruit he set out and began lying across the path he used to fetch water, so that he had to walk around it, and it watched him walk around it.

On the fourth evening it came for him openly, straight across the clearing in the last of the light.

The sage did not run, because he was old and there was nowhere to run to, and because he had seen this coming since the first night with the leopard and had simply refused, for a long time, to look at what he was seeing. He stood in his doorway and let it come until he could smell the lion-blood on it.

"You came out of that treeline as a dog," he said. "Everything after that was mine. Not one of those shapes was yours. I did not give you strength; I gave you my own fear of seeing you afraid, and you have worn it until there is nothing of you left underneath it. Be what you are."

And the sharabha collapsed inward like a tent whose pole is pulled, and there in the trampled grass stood a lean dog with its ribs showing and its coat rubbed bare, blinking, entirely bewildered, in a forest that now had nothing in it to eat.

The sage picked up his staff.

"Go," he said. "You cannot stay here. Not because you are wicked. Because I cannot be trusted with you."

And he drove it out of the hermitage, and it went.

On the field of Kurukshetra, Bhishma stopped.

"Rank does not change a nature," he said. "It only removes the reasons a nature had for behaving. Every man you raise beyond his merit you make into something he was not built to carry, and he will not thank you, because gratitude belongs to the person you were fond of, and that person has been dissolved into an office. He will look around from his new height, find that nothing in the kingdom outranks him but you, and understand you as an obstacle. Raise men to what they are fit for and no higher. It is not unkindness. The sage who could not bear to see a dog afraid ended alone in an empty wood with his own affection walking toward him in the dark."