The Snow Tiger (Patreon)

I wrote the original version of this story for a friend on a lark when he told me to "tell him a story" in a chat. Forty minutes later, I had created a myth. The style here is different than my usual style, but I enjoy creating fables like this that could be told by a storyteller. This story is an expanded version of the original.

A long time ago, there was a tiger named Yuki who lived way up in the mountains in a remote valley. He lived a simple life, hunting and tending his small field of crops. Yuki had a beautiful coat of orange fur, black stripes that gave him a distinguished look, and a smile warm like the sun. He lived by himself, higher up in the mountains than anyone else, but he was not often alone.  The tiger was well known to travelers passing through the mountains to the cities on the temples on the other side. One of the few roads in the mountains traveled through Yuki’s little valley and passed right by his hut. To weary wayfarers, he was a welcome sight, and many would stop and rest at his house.

His small wooden hut always had a fire going in the winter, and in the summer, Yuki could be found in the evenings sitting outside cooking, offering warmth and light for any who might be needing to spend the night on the road. His jovial manner and quick wit were well loved. The glow of warm orange the tiger brought to people was legendary and many a villager from down in the river valley found reasons to travel up into the mountains to see Yuki. Some of these reasons were quite flimsy, but Yuki did not mind. Often, they brought food to share with the tiger, and had to make his own excuses to travel down to the village.

One year, the weather ran hot and no rain came. There was a drought in the summer and the stream that watered Yuki's field ran dry. The only way he could survive was to hunt, so Yuki hunted. Villagers stopping by his hut found it empty. They would wait for him, but sometimes he would be gone for days as he hunted all over the mountains, from the distant peeks to the river valley. The villagers worried about him, and left things for him, but when he did see them, he assured them he would be fine. The drought in the low valley was even worse than it was in the mountains, and as it wore on, fewer and fewer visitors came. Those that did had little they could spare for the tiger.

Eventually, when the weather started to cool down the rains came to end the drought. A whole summer’s worth of rain fell within two weeks. It was more rain than anyone could remember seeing in years. The river flooded and the steams in the mountains ran wild, and yet still the rain came. Those in the village who lived right by the river saw their huts washed down stream in torrents of water. The fields by the river that had stayed green flooded, drowning the crops. The villagers worried about the coming winter so they too hunted for game, and when they were too tired to hunt, they fished. Yuki had no crops at all, and the stream by his house was too small for it to contain fish he could eat, so he kept hunting, from the distant peeks all the way down to the river valley.

Finally, the rains slacked off. For a few weeks, things seemed to be getting back to normal. Then it turned cold and the snow came. Some winters winter starts slowly, but this winter the snow came on strong. One day it was fall, and the next, the ground was covered in snow that did not melt. Yuki had managed to build up his larder with dried meat, but with how rough the summer had been, he wasn’t sure how strong this winter would be. He decided to make one more hunting trip before the deep snow of winter set in and made travel in the mountains difficult. Two days after he left on his last excursion is when a blizzard came like no one had ever seen before.

The foxes in the low river valley have a long memory and they had nothing in a thousand years of oral history that they could remember like this. To this day, the villagers still talk of this blizzard. For seven days it snowed in the river valley and did not stop. The wind howling like an angry wolf mad with grief. Up in the mountains it was worse, much worse. Yuki had been out to the distant peeks when the blizzard started. For five days he battled the storm, tail freezing and paws ice cold. Tigers are a hardy and tough group and Yuki was one of the toughest. He was not going to let a blizzard stop him. Onward he went, determined to return home, even as the storm raged on. When the snow blocked his way home for the tenth time though, with powder so deep he could not scale the ridges that would take him home, even Yuki knew he had to get out on the mountains and seek some form of shelter. Desperately, Yuki fought his way down the slopes.

On the seventh day, the storm broke, and almost frozen to death Yuki staggered into the village in the low river valley seeking warmth and hoping to trade for a hot meal with his friends in the village. He had little to offer them, but he had helped them when they became lost in the mountains, but now he needed their help. Yet as he walked into town no one seemed to recognize him. They all looked at him like he was a ghost, and they greeted him as a stranger. In confusion he raised his hand to great his old friends and that’s when he saw it. All the orange in his fur had frozen out, and turned white. Only his stripes remained. It wasn’t just his hand that had frozen in the cold, his feet and his tail had frozen too.

He cried out in panic, and fell down in shock, there in the snow. The villagers upon hearing his voice recognized him, and they brought Yuki into one of their homes and sat him down by the fire, but try as they might, they could not bring back the orange into his fur. It was gone, and no one could understand why, least of all Yuki. And that my dear friends, is where white tigers came from.