Folktale of Korea

Folktales of Korea (6) : Dog's Repay

Riding a palanquin, Ipunni was on the way to her marriage ceremony from her home. The unforgettable house was seen far away as the palanquin went ahead. Magpies, frogs and sparrows were saying good-bye to her in their own way.

As is generally known, in those days, a woman who got married, rarely came back to her home after her marriage. Therefore, she gradually got into a sorrowful mood.

As there was a long distance between her home and her bridegroom's house, the palanquin bearers hurried on their way to get their destination before dark.

"Well, can you run more slowly?" said Ipunni hesitantly. But they didn't care about her request at all and speeded up their pace so that the palanquin shook up and down more violently. Unable to put up with the violent shaking of the palanquin, "Stop now!" she cried out and they stopped.

Utterly exhausted by the shaking, she crept out from the palanquin and lay down under a tree.

A comfortable wind blew toward her as if encouraging her, so she gradually became refreshed.

Opening her eyes, she found a little white dog lying down beside her. The dog seemed to be very much exhausted and starving so that its ribs stood out on its body. The dog looked up at her eyes with its dog-tired look.

"Where do you come from? Didn't you eat anything?" she asked the dog but it made no answer.

"Come with me, baby." Ipunni took the dog up in her arms and got on the palanquin with the dog.

Ipunni hadn't any friend or good adviser at all because the place she was going to was unknown to her. Her only friend was the white little dog, which she named Monchi.

Ipunny always treated Monchi with loving care and fed it well so that Monchi grew up and bore five babies.

When Ipunni took off the lid of a rice-cooker off to serve rice to her family, Monchi got the habit of sitting down in the kitchen to keep a watch.

One day, When Ipunni tried to take off the lid of the rice cooker, Monchi suddenly stood up and leaped and ran over the rice-cooker again and again. Ipunni was surprised at this and said, "What are you doing? Don't do it, Monchi!"

When she lifted up a rice-scoop to warn Monchi against doing that, the dog stopped. But Monchi leaped again when she stopped warning it.

Ipunni thought that Monchi was doing mischief to attract her attention, but Monchi didn't stop the same thing even on the next day. Therefore, her husband got angry with it and said, "What an ungrateful dog it is! I'll kill it next morning."

In the night, a wayfarer was to stay at their home for a night. He was a fortune-teller who had mysterious power to understand what animals were saying.

He was refreshing himself on the veranda after dinner, when he heard Monchi's voices talking to her babies.

"This is the last time to give you my breast. Suck as much milk as possible from my breast, babies."

"Why, mam?"

"I'm going to be killed next morning."

"Why is that?"

"How stupid human beings are! There is a monster of a centipede, which lives in the roof and tries to poison our owner's meal from above whenever the lid was taken off. So I prevented the poison from falling on the rice from above. But they couldn't make out what I was trying to do and are going to kill me."

The guest looked at Monchi's back, and found the terrible condition of her poisoned back. Her hair was almost gone and her skin suppurated badly.

Then, the guest told what he saw and heard to Ipunni's family. They immediately broke the roof to find what was going on there. Unexpectedly, they found a monster centipede, which might have lived there for many years. They killed it by pouring boiling water on it.

Monchi was about to be killed once, but after all she was treated very well and lived long together with Ipunni while all family members called the dog "life-saver."

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