“I want her to be whatever she wants—a nurse, a teacher, a baker, anything,” he said.
“I hope she grows up strong. I hope she never has to suffer,” she said.
They promised each other they would watch over her until she was grown.
The snowstorm had lifted, and outside the flakes drifted lightly down.
They named the baby Yuki, after the snowy day when she was born.
She was a healthy, energetic baby. She cried often, but as soon as he picked her up, she would stop. In the evenings, the two of them would bundle her up and walk along the riverbank. They passed lots of other parents pushing strollers, and Hana thought to herself that they were just like any other family.
And for that sense of normalcy, she gave thanks to no one in particular.
Early the following spring, their second child was born.
A boy—they named him Ame, after the rainy day when he was born.
The very next day, Ame’s father vanished.
Hana looked outside, holding the newborn baby close. Beyond the milk bottle full of shepherd’s purse flowers, raindrops rolled down the glass.
She had waited and waited, but he had not come home.
Yuki, now thirteen months old, stood behind her worried mother and clung to her back. Ame was wrapped in several layers of towel, and Hana strapped him to her chest with a strip of cloth. Then, she put on her duffle coat and secured Yuki to her back over it. Hana’s legs were still unsteady from having given birth so recently, but she headed out all the same.
As soon as she opened the apartment door, it bumped into something. Two grocery bags were blocking the way.
“?”
When she crouched down to put some stray canned goods back into the bags, she noticed something else. His thin wallet was among the powdered milk and rice and vegetables.
Had something happened?
Her anxiety swelled.
Staving off the cold spring drizzle with her umbrella, she headed into the city streets.
At the intersection with the main boulevard, where cars whizzed back and forth, she looked in all four directions. She checked beneath each of the umbrellas on the steep streets winding through the residential neighborhood.
He was nowhere to be found.
She kept walking, searching for him, until she came to the little bridge over the stream near her apartment where they had once stood. A city garbage truck was stopped on the promenade along the stream, its lights blinking. Several groups of people carrying umbrellas had stopped to peer down at the shallow stream, and health department employees in raincoats were climbing down the ten-meter-high concrete embankment.
Hana joined the crowd peering down from the bridge, as if her gaze were magnetically drawn.
At the feet of the workers in the streambed, half submerged in the water, lay the dead body of an animal.
The raindrops pelted the thin, bony corpse of a wolf.
A wolf.
Him.
“!”
Familiar dark brown feathers clung to his fur, which was as wet and bedraggled as an old rag. Blood oozed from his head and dissipated into the water.
She never learned what he had been thinking that day. Perhaps an instinct to hunt food for the new baby had awakened. Or perhaps he had wanted to bring Hana something nourishing to eat. His vacant eyes told her nothing.
Two of the workers lifted the wolf’s legs with rubber-gloved hands while a third stuffed the body carelessly into a body bag laid out below. Pheasant feathers fluttered down and drifted off on the surface of the stream.
The bag was then hoisted up to the promenade.
Hana threw down her umbrella and ran toward it. She flung her arms around it, but one of the workers peeled her away, scolding her for touching it. She begged him to let her have it, but he curtly refused.
While she argued with him, another of the workers took the body bag and tossed it roughly into the back of the garbage truck. As the packer panel crushed it down, it disappeared deep into the compactor.
“!!!”
Suddenly, the strength drained from Hana’s body, and she burst into sobs.
The garbage truck faded into the distance until she could see only the yellow blinking of its lights.
Hana stumbled after it, but, of course, she couldn’t keep up. What remaining strength she had slipped away, and she sank to the ground, covered her face, and wept. A man and woman who had been watching the scene unfold held their umbrella over her and asked her why she was crying.
She couldn’t even give him a funeral.
A gentle breeze blew across the meadow.
Hana, wearing the same dress she’d worn that day long ago, realized someone was behind her and turned around.
It was him.
He was smiling and carrying a notebook like he had been that day, dressed in his usual T-shirt with the stretched-out collar.
She smiled and tried to walk toward him. But as she did, he looked at her sorrowfully and turned away. The same instant, her legs froze.
Worried, she called his name.
The wind picked up, drowning out her voice.
His face became half-wolf.
His figure, wearing that familiar fur-collared coat, moved farther and farther away.
Frozen, Hana called his name with increasing desperation.
He took on his wolf form and disappeared beyond the far side of the meadow, as if to return along the same path he had come by so long ago.
Hana shouted his name, but her voice was lost in the wind, reaching no one.
There, in the wide-open meadow, she was alone.
Hana opened her eyes.
She had fallen asleep with her head on the low table, still wearing her duffle coat. The room was dark. It was evening, and outside, a light rain was still falling. The red glow from the electric stove shone on Yuki and Ame, curled up asleep on their futon.
She saw his wallet lying on the table and picked it up. It held only a few bills along with some coupons and receipts, but she noticed his driver’s license in one of the pockets and pulled it out.
His picture was on it.
Realizing this was the only photograph she had of him, she leaned the license up against the milk bottle with the shepherd’s purse in it.
He was smiling.
Of course, he must not have suspected he would die that day. He’d wanted to watch over their children as they grew, she knew, and now that wish would go unfulfilled.
That was an incontrovertible fact.
Her chest tightened at the thought, but he kept on smiling gently at her from the photograph. She felt he was asking her to take care of the children for the both of them.
She was ready to cry again, but she bit her lip and held back her tears. Instead, she smiled brightly at him. Leave it to me. I’ll raise them right, she promised.
A new life without him began.
Yuki, now a year and a half old, looked up at Hana. “Mama.” She wanted something to eat.
“I’m making it for you now. Wait a minute,” Hana said. But Yuki didn’t understand.
“Mama!” she called again, waving her arms.
“It’s almost ready,” Hana said.
“Mama!!”
She screamed the word again and again, too hungry to wait. As she grew more upset, two wolf ears popped out from her hair.
“Mama!!!”
“Yuki!” Hana scolded her loudly.
Tears filled the small girl’s eyes, and she turned away, sulking. On all fours now, she kicked a cushion and ran to the far corner of the room. By the time she had turned back around, she had changed into a wolf. She knocked over the waste basket with a well-aimed kick, spilling its contents across the floor, then hid where she knew Hana couldn’t see her. Her mother called and called her name, but Yuki didn’t answer.
Finally, when Hana sighed and said, “Well, what can I do? Go ahead and have a cookie,” and pulled down some snacks from a cupboard, Yuki came running, f
ast as lightning. Back in human form once again, she grabbed the biscuit and grinned happily as she bit into it.
Whenever Yuki got angry or cranky, she would transform into a wolf, her hair standing on end and her ears pricked up. It happened constantly. Sometimes, she even ended up half-wolf, half-human. To Hana, she seemed unable to decide which form she preferred.
In the kitchen, Hana was mashing fava beans and potatoes in Yuki’s bowl. Sometimes she added some of the baby food she kept in a container in the fridge.
She dipped her finger in to taste the mixture. The beans had sweetened the potatoes just right.
Since Yuki couldn’t use a spoon very well yet, she tried grabbing the mashed potatoes with both hands. Most of them fell between her fingers on the way to her mouth, and, eventually, she gave up and just pinched up little bites between her fingers. When she leaned over the table to pick up the pieces she’d dropped, she tipped the whole bowl over, but she didn’t mind. She gobbled down her food anyway. The table was always surrounded by a mess of yogurt and spilled tea and other bits of food.
Despite her small size, Yuki was bursting with energy. The little glutton would cry for food from morning till night. Ame was the complete opposite—a weak, light eater. Still only three months old, he latched on to Hana’s breast but quickly choked on her milk and let go. He drank then rested, drank then rested, over and over, so that feeding him took a very long time. But every time Hana wiped his mouth, he looked up at her with shock. It was so cute she could hardly stand it.
Perhaps Yuki recognized this, because it was only when Hana was feeding Ame that she would climb up her mother’s shoulders by her hair and clothes and ask for a kiss with her drooly mouth.
It took all the time Hana had just to care for the two of them.
She spent her days in a room draped with drying cloth diapers. Of course, it was impossible for her to work. The small nest egg he had saved up paid for all their expenses.
One of the things she learned as she raised her children was that even if they never left the apartment, she could not take her eyes off them for a moment. Yuki was always doing the unexpected.
One day, while Hana was turned away cooking, Yuki started pulling on the tablecloth. She had wanted the jar of jam on top of the dining table. But instead of jam, a large jar of rice teetered at the very edge of the table, and by the time Hana noticed, it was about to fall on Yuki’s head. She let out a loud yelp and caught the jar just in time, escaping disaster by a hairbreadth, but she was deeply frightened. After that, she put the tablecloth away.
Another time, while Hana was ironing laundry, Yuki pulled out the bottom drawer of the cabinet behind her and started climbing. She scrambled into the first drawer and pulled out the second, then climbed into the second and pulled out the third, and so on…until all the drawers had been extracted and the entire cabinet began tilting forward from their weight. By the time Hana finally realized something was going on and turned, it was already at an angle with Yuki underneath.
“Ah!” Hana cried out in alarm. Ame was lying beside her. She rushed to catch the cabinet with her body and, in a split-second decision, laid the iron facedown. She managed to right the cabinet and avert disaster, but she knew that if it had kept falling, it could have squashed little Yuki. And if she hadn’t pressed down the iron, something could have knocked it over onto baby Ame and burned him. After that, she kept the drawers on the cabinet locked (her father’s antique cabinet had locks on all the drawers) and never again ironed near the children.
Hana meticulously got rid of every object that could possibly harm them, but no matter how careful she was, she never knew what Yuki or Ame would do next, so she could never relax her guard.
Yuki especially would run amok in the tiny thirty-square-meter room. In her wolf form, she never tired of tearing stuffed animals to shreds with her teeth, pulling the stuffing out of cushions, chewing on dining-table legs, leaving teeth marks on doors, or pulling Hana’s precious books off the bookshelf and filling the room with shredded paper. Thanks to Yuki, no matter how much Hana tidied up, within five minutes, it was a horrible mess again. Hana could only laugh as she watched her daughter yawn unrepentantly.
Even after she gave the children their bath and finally put them to bed, Hana’s day wasn’t over. Since she couldn’t ask anyone around her for advice, she had no choice but to search for answers in books. She sat up under the desk light until late at night alternating between books about child-rearing and books about wolf ecology, comparing one against the other in her quest to find the best approach to raising wolf children. It went without saying that it would be impossible to find any record of a mother raising children with both wolf and human forms.
When she thought about how any mistake could endanger their lives, how she had to stay strong, how she was all they had, Hana knew she had no time for rest. But each night, not long after she began her studies, the exhaustion of the day would bear down on her, and she would start to nod off, pen in hand. When she jerked awake, she would try again to concentrate on the book before her, but soon, her eyelids would droop, and she would collapse forward onto the desk as if in a faint.
All the same, the instant Ame cried, she would jump up to hold him and rub his back, murmuring reassurances.
Although Ame was a quiet, easy baby during the day, he wailed all night long. If Hana held him and rocked him for a while, he would fall back to sleep, but as soon as she put him down, he would start to cry again, over and over. He had to be nursed every two hours, day and night, and whenever he nursed properly, he was in a good mood. When he refused to take the nipple, Hana soaked cotton wool with breast milk and had him suck from that. When he refused both, she didn’t know what to do, so she’d rub his back all night long.
This very quickly wore her down. She nodded off standing up while doing laundry, and once, her head almost ended up inside the washbasin. But she was able to sleep even for the shortest stretches, such as when Ame was nursing. And when Yuki called for her, she was able to open her eyes right away and answer with a smile.
The biggest challenge was when the children got sick.
From birth, Yuki had been an extremely resilient child. Still, she often had minor fevers and the like, and these mild illnesses would plunge Hana into a dilemma. Should she take her to the doctor? If she did, should she go to the pediatrician or the veterinarian? Would the doctor know what to do for a wolf child? Would the vet treat a children’s illness with medicine for animals? Or the reverse? And her biggest worry was that someone would notice that the children were unusual.
Once, when Hana was anxious and upset, he had persuaded her not to do much at all.
“She’ll be fine. Even if she’s a little under the weather, just give her something warm and some gentle caresses. She’ll get better.”
His advice had calmed her then, and now, after he was gone, she often recalled what he had said and tried not to worry too much.
But Ame was not like Yuki. He was fragile and weak, and his fevers often lingered. Sometimes, Hana felt she had no choice but to give him medicine of some kind, and so she would compare books about pediatric and veterinary medicine in order to find a cure that worked for both children and animals. Very carefully, she would give him the smallest possible dose. The health of the children rested entirely upon her judgments.
Every day she wished there was someone—just one person—she could go to for advice. In the end, though, she had to make her decisions on her own. In the case of illnesses, she could read up and prepare to a certain extent in advance, but that was not the case with accidents.
One fall night, she had a real shock. She heard a strange keff keff, as if someone was coughing. At first, she didn’t know what it was. She lost a good deal of time just figuring out that it was Yuki. When she peered under the dining table, she found her collapsed in half-wolf, half-human form. Next to her was the packet of desiccant that had been in the cookie box, with clear tooth marks where Yuki had bitten into it
. Gluey droplets of vomit dotted the floor.
“Yuki!!!”
Something deep inside her skull went numb. She scooped Yuki up in her arms and ran out into the dark city.
She was in a panic, desperate for someone to save her. She ran with no thought for how she must have looked to the strangers she passed. When she got her wits back, she was standing at an intersection with a pediatric clinic on one side and a vet on the other.
She had stood in that very spot many times before, but as always, she found herself unable to knock on either door. She wavered for a moment, then went into a phone booth and called both offices.
“My daughter accidentally swallowed some desiccant… She’s two. Yes. She threw up. There wasn’t any blood.
“It said silica gel on the package. Isn’t it dangerous…? What? Her appetite?”
She looked at Yuki at the prompting of the doctor across the street.
With a burp, Yuki announced, “Hungry!”
Then she burped again, very loudly. On Hana’s back, Ame peered over her shoulder at the noise.
The doctor told her that silica gel wasn’t itself poisonous and that if she didn’t notice any unusual changes in Yuki, she should just give her lots of water and keep an eye on her. If she was hungry, she was probably fine. Hana felt momentarily relieved, but as she thought of all the years ahead, she sighed. She wished she had asked their father more about his own childhood.
“Walk.”
Yuki often asked to go on walks.
“Walk!”
And when the weather was nice, she begged especially hard.
“Walk!!”
Her fur would stand on end, and her ears would pop out in excitement. Hana worried about people seeing her like this, so she usually limited their outings to nighttime. But…
“Walk!!!”
…Yuki wouldn’t listen.
“Okay, okay! You win!” Yuki had finally worn Hana down—on one condition. “You can’t become a wolf when we’re out.”
Yuki pulled in her ears right away. Hana slipped on the hooded coats that hid the children from head to toe, and the three of them left for their outing.
Wolf Children: Ame & Yuki Page 3