Jason Weiser

The man we met last night was smarter than an ox.

Most oxen, anyway.

so it should take less training for you.

Holding up the rope attached to the halter, the butcher said that this rope was so the ox knew which way to go.

Giving a brief tug on the nose ring rope and waiting for Timber Top to stop crying about it, the butcher said that that one was the incentive to follow the leadings of the first rope.

Neither of them wanted him to have to pull on the second rope.

Let's go, the butcher commanded.

And when they made it to market, he could honestly say to the ox's buyer that he had never worked with a more obedient animal.

"'I'm a human man!'

the ox yelled.

But Shin, the stable hand, only heard bellowing.

The rice offerings weren't working.

The innkeeper just kept suggesting bowls of rice.

But Shin began to suspect that that was because he was the one selling rice.

Maybe the heavens weren't listening because he didn't know how to talk to them.

Snapping his fingers, Shin took off in a run.

After he left, several ants helped themselves to his rice."

Asking around, the stable boy found the mundang, what the story calls a fortune teller, but Quick Search says it is something of a practitioner of musok, what's been called Korean shamanism.

When it comes to a blind shaman who claimed to peer into the past and future using different methods to do exactly that, it was pretty much what Shin expected.

He didn't tell the woman what he sought, and she seemed to know when he approached, waiting for him to sit.