The Beast That Feigns Sleep and Portends Locusts
Yu'e Mountain, in the second eastern guideway, grows catalpa and nanmu above, chaste-tree and wolfberry below. Its beast has a hare's body, a bird's beak, the round eyes of an owl, and a snake's tail; it is called the qiuyu, and its cry sounds like its own name. It has a signature move: 'when it sees a person, it sleeps' — it drops down, closes its eyes, and plays dead. The harmlessness is a false front, for 'when it is seen, locusts ruin the crops': wherever it appears, the swarms rise and the harvest fails.
Within the classic's system of omens, the qiuyu answers to the farmer's most concrete terror. Drought and flood can be waited out; a locust plague devours a year's work in days, in plain sight. A timid animal that faints at the sight of people, yet carries sky-darkening swarms in its wake — the contrast makes this one of the quieter horrors of the eastern catalogue.
The name had a second life. When zoologists needed a Chinese word for the armoured mammals of the Americas, they reached for 'qiuyu': the armadillo's habit of freezing and curling up when startled matches 'when it sees a person, it sleeps' almost clause for clause. Today the word almost always means the American animal, and the hare-bodied, bird-beaked locust omen of the original text survives as a footnote to its own name.
