A people paint a dog on a screen each new year and bow to it as the ancestor who won their first war — and behind the rite lies a strange love-story. The record's witness for this worship is Werner's Myths & Legends of China (a 1922 compilation of Chinese myth), whose compiler, E. T. C. Werner (1864–1954), says the legend was "related to me on the spot" near Foochow, among the Jung tribe, one of the aboriginal hill peoples. A Chinese chief, badly beaten in war, promised his daughter to whoever brought him the head of the enemy chief of the West. The promise was overheard by "a fine large white dog" belonging to one of his generals; it crossed to the enemy camp at midnight, "carried his head off in his mouth", and laid it at its master's feet at dawn, where it "waited for his reward."

Then the awkward bargain. "But how," the chief protests, "can I possibly marry my daughter to a dog" — until the dog offers to change into a man. He asks only to be "placed under a large bell", untouched, "for a space of 280 days"; but on the last day the chief's curiosity breaks the spell, and the dog is found "changed into a man" — "all except his head". So the tribe's father is "a man with a dog's head", wed beneath "a red mantilla" (a veil) that hid the groom's face, and his descendants keep the covering to this day. "This legend explains the dog-worship of the Jung tribe," the witness says: at the old New Year they "paint a large figure of a dog" and "worship it," calling it "their ancestor who was victorious" over the invader from the West.

Only the Chinese witness is wired to text; the apparatus files a Jewish authority and a reference-work entry beside it that wait unread. It is a myth that turns a taboo — a woman promised to a beast — into the proud root of a whole people: what does a tribe gain by tracing its blood to the animal others would be ashamed of?