Zhuru

Geng Mountain, in the second eastern guideway, is bare of vegetation, rich in water-green stone, and infested with great snakes. Its beast is the zhuru: in shape a fox, but fitted with the fins of a fish — a furred animal wearing the equipment of the water tribe. Its cry sounds like its own name, and its appearance is a signal: 'when it is seen, there is fear in the state.' Whichever country the beast shows itself in will be gripped by panic.

The omen-beasts of the classic divide the disasters among themselves — drought, flood, pestilence, war. The zhuru's portfolio is fear itself, the state of mind that arrives ahead of any calamity. The text does not say what the panic will be about, only that it will come; the anomalous fox is itself the first anomaly, like the single dead bird before an epidemic. In the second eastern guideway it has company: a few mountains on, Gufeng Mountain keeps the winged bibi, whose appearance brings great drought, and Fuli Mountain the nine-headed, nine-tailed longzhi, which simply eats people.

Foxes later grew into the great shape-shifting clan of Chinese demonology, but the zhuru stands apart from that lineage. It takes no human form and beguiles no one; it is observed and recorded purely as a portent. Illustrated editions usually draw a quiet fox glancing backward, two fish fins at its ribs — a posture entirely at odds with the news it carries.