“I wanna go to preschool!”
She jumped up and down, just like when she was little. For a cheerful, curious child like Yuki, it was a completely logical demand, but Hana worried they would be exposed as wolf children and was dead set against letting them go.
“Absolutely not,” she replied firmly.
“I wanna go!”
“Nope!”
“I wanna go I wanna go I wanna gooo!” Yuki loped around the huge living room on all fours before stamping her feet in frustration.
While they were eating, she rolled on the floor kicking her arms and legs.
“I wanna go to preschool! I wanna go I wanna go I wanna go!”
Her tantrum continued until Hana had finished cleaning up from dinner.
“I know it’s a secret. I promise I’ll be good!”
“I know you will. But I still can’t.”
Yuki squeezed herself between the cupboard and the garbage can and hugged her knees.
“I promise…,” she mumbled.
The next month, things weren’t so busy in the fields, and Ms. Nirasaki started coming by to visit more often.
After a while, she started to bring her husband along, too, and in the course of their chats over tea, Hana found herself regularly helping him keep the books for the village farmers’ cooperative that he managed. Accounting wasn’t at all hard for her once she learned a few tricks, but he was hopeless at math and immensely grateful for the help.
“These are last month’s receipts.”
“Got it.”
Hana efficiently performed the calculations. Her work assisting him had taught her firsthand how full-time farmers planned their crops and managed their costs. There were many tips and tricks she could apply to her own garden.
Suddenly, Ms. Nirasaki stopped writing down figures in her ledger and looked toward the garden. Her husband’s hand stopped, too, and he followed her gaze.
Noticing that something had caught their attention, Hana raised her head and gave a start.
Wolf Yuki was peering in at them from the garden, her dress wrapped around her neck.
…Yuki!
“Hana, you got a dog?”
“Oh, yes…well…” As Hana floundered, wolf Yuki pointedly cleared her throat and howled.
AWOOO!
Struck dumb, Ms. Nirasaki pulled on her husband’s sleeve. “…Is that a wolf? It is, isn’t it, honey?”
Hana broke into a cold sweat. “Oh, no, um, it’s—”
“Don’t be silly,” Nirasaki’s husband interrupted. “You think there are still wolves in Japan? That’s some sort of a German shepherd mix. How ’bout it, Hana? Did I get it right?”
He leaned forward, grinning. Hana groped for an answer. “No, it’s, um…”
“Huh? It’s gone! Where did it go?”
Ms. Nirasaki craned her neck in search of the dog. Just then, Yuki came in through the back door. In the blink of an eye, she had changed back to her human form.
“Hi, Ms. Nirasaki,” she said.
“Hello, Yuki! You’re very friendly today.”
“Awww, you and the doggy have matching clothes. How cute!” Nirasaki’s husband commented.
Yuki winked slyly at Hana and jumped off the porch. A moment later, wolf Yuki paraded through the garden.
Yu… Yuki! Hana mouthed silently.
She was beside herself with worry that the Nirasakis would become suspicious, but in fact, the only thing they seemed suspicious of was her own odd behavior.
“What’s wrong, Hana?” Ms. Nirasaki asked, eyeing her curiously.
“Ha…ha-ha-ha…”
All Hana could do was try to deflect the question with a nervous laugh.
As the mountain air grew chillier in the mornings and evenings, the leaves around Hana’s house erupted into their many colors seemingly overnight.
She dug her hoe into the ridge several times, lifting up the soil, then grabbed a yellowed stem and pulled as hard as she could. A perfect cluster of potatoes burst to the surface.
“Wooow!”
Amazed, Yuki and Ame followed along next to Hana, giddy over their harvest. They copied her, pulling on the stems until comically huge clusters of potatoes broke the soil. After drying them for a while in the shade, they brushed off the clumps of dirt and placed them in buckets. There were so many, all the buckets Hana could find in the barn weren’t enough.
She went down to the village, a bag stuffed with potatoes in each arm, and knocked on the Nirasakis’ door. She wanted Grandpa Nirasaki to be the first to see them, but no one answered her calls from the entryway. She peeked in the barn, too, but he wasn’t there.
“…I wonder where he could have gone.”
She finally gave up and headed to the Hosokawas. Mr. Hosokawa greeted her from his elegant house surrounded by a grove of trees.
“Ooh, that’s a nice harvest.”
“I couldn’t have done it without everyone’s help,” Hana said.
He picked up a potato to inspect its quality, then disappeared into the barn with the bag.
“Your potatoes are a real lifesaver. We lost our whole crop,” he said as he returned.
“What do you mean? Lost to what?”
“Boars.” He held out an armful of enormously fat daikon radishes. “Here, take as many of these as you want,” he said, pushing them into Hana’s arms.
Next, she visited the Yamaokas.
Standing near the power shovel in the front yard of their sprawling house, Mr. Yamaoka gratefully accepted Hana’s potatoes.
“These darn boars can dig up a whole field early in the morning without making a sound. I heard they made it all the way down to the Sakais’ paddy this year,” he said.
He chatted on for a while before giving Hana three thirty-pound bags of rice.
“A little something in return. Careful, they’re heavy!”
A few days later, the Horitas and the Dois stopped by Hana’s house with vegetables to share and stayed for tea.
“You know, your field is the only one the wild animals didn’t get into.”
“It’s so strange, since you’re way out here in the mountains.”
“You must have some technique you’re not telling us.”
“Everyone wants to know how you did it.”
Hana couldn’t think of anything special. “Nope, no secrets.”
The truth was, she’d simply done as Grandpa Nirasaki and Mr. Hosokawa and the others had told her. As Ame shyly asked what a technique was from his spot behind Hana’s back, Yuki ran up from the garden and jumped onto the porch.
“Gotta pee!”
The visitors watched, smiling, as she sped off toward the bathroom.
“That girl has so much energy!”
“…Uh-huh,” Hana said absently. A thought had just occurred to her. The secret that kept the boars away was none other than Yuki and Ame’s own.
“What’s wrong, Hana?” Mr. Doi said, eying her curiously.
“Oh…nothing.” She forced a smile and shook her head.
Another day, after the trees on the mountain had dropped their leaves in preparation for winter, Ms. Nirasaki brought Hana a stack of cardboard cartons full of fertile eggs.
“Wow, thank you!”
“It’s nothing! Thank you for the potatoes.”
“I haven’t had eggs in ages.”
“Then I’m glad I brought them. Let me know when you run out.”
Hana opened the refrigerator and tried to find a place for the eggs. The kitchen floor was already littered with gifts of food that wouldn’t fit in the fridge. Ms. Nirasaki poked her head in from the living room.
“Oh my,” she said. “Well, isn’t that adorable?”
“Huh?” Hana turned around to look at her, then back toward the little refrigerator.
Adorable? Her refrigerator?
That evening, Ms. Nirasaki’s husband and her son pulled up in their truck and unloaded a midsize refrigerator from the back.
“One, two
, three!” they called as they heaved it off.
“I can’t possibly accept this,” Hana protested.
She desperately tried to dissuade the man from giving it to her. While she was grateful for his kindness, she felt it would be wrong to take such an expensive present. But he just smiled and continued toward the entryway.
“Just take it, really! This old thing’s been in our barn forever,” he said.
“But…”
“Take it. If we bring it back home, we’ll be in big trouble with Grandpa.”
“Grandpa?” Hana echoed.
Still gripping the refrigerator, father and son nimbly slipped off their shoes in the entryway.
“Hana this, Hana that. You’re all he ever talks about!” commented the father.
“He’s really fallen for you,” his son added.
“Don’t be silly. He’s ninety!”
“Come on, he’s always bugging everyone to look after her.”
“Nice going. You know you weren’t supposed to tell her!”
The younger man winced at his father’s scolding.
“…Oh yeah. I forgot.”
Hana gazed up at the sky far above.
Grandpa Nirasaki was making his solitary rounds of the paddies.
He fixed crumbled sections of stone walls and earthen banks and scooped dead leaves out of irrigation canals—all the little tasks that had to be completed before winter buried everything in snow. When he finished his work for the day, the sun was already setting.
Hana was waiting for him on the farm road. She bowed to him, then smiled.
“I finally realized why I needed that extra field,” she said.
All summer, she’d been so confused, but now it all made sense. Her harvest was not for her and the children alone. It was for the whole village, to be shared by everyone. Through growing her garden, she had come to understand the ways of the village. She had been taught—by Grandpa Nirasaki.
But he just looked down and tugged off his right glove.
“I can’t stand it,” he muttered.
“Huh?”
He shoved the glove in the pocket of his well-worn foreign-made coat and looked up with a disgruntled expression.
“Why do you always have that phony smile on your face?”
Before she could stop herself, Hana burst out laughing. “Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee…!”
“Stop laughing.”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…!”
Of course, she knew she was being rude. But the more she thought about how rude she was being, the more the laughter bubbled up inside her.
Hana adored Grandpa Nirasaki. If she adored him, though, why did she think he was so funny? She laughed until she had to hold her stomach. She couldn’t remember laughing this much since he was alive.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, spreading his hands questioningly and staring at this odd young woman and her fit of hilarity. Finally, he let out a perplexed sigh.
The two of them remained standing there for a long time under the clear winter twilight.
That night, light snow began drifting down.
After Hana put the children to bed, she poured a cup of tea and reflected quietly on all that had happened since spring.
“I thought I was coming here to hide…and now here we are, completely in debt to all the villagers.”
She had found a tough mentor to teach her how to grow vegetables. She had made older friends who looked after her as if she was one of their own relatives. She had made younger friends with whom she could talk about raising the children. Her house was no longer isolated and neighborless but host to constant visitors.
Despite all this, Yuki and Ame had managed to keep their secret.
She pictured the faces of all the generous, immensely kind people she had met and silently thanked each one of them.
“It was hard at first, but I think we can make it out here,” she said, looking at his driver’s license.
He smiled warmly back at her.
When Hana and the children woke the next morning, the world was covered in snow.
“Ooooooooh!” All three of them cheered out loud.
Crazy with excitement, Yuki leaped off the porch and landed in the snow with arms and legs outstretched.
Whomp!
It was incredibly soft and comfortably cold. She could feel the delicate ice crystals melting against her skin with a faint popping sound, a brand-new sensation. A primal sort of laughter bubbled up from her belly.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
She rolled around everywhere her instincts carried her.
Ame set out carefully across the snow, one foot in front of the next, but he quickly lost his balance and tumbled into a face-plant.
“Oof!”
He widened his eyes in surprise, shaking his snow-covered face.
Hana filled her chest with the fresh, cold air and surveyed the snowy landscape, realizing that she felt much more at ease than she had in a long while. She could return to her own childhood, she felt, and the second it occurred to her, she dived with a shout toward the children and hugged them to her chest in the snow. She felt their warmth and breathed in their smell. Nothing could ever replace them. There’s no greater joy than this.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
She lay on her back and belly laughed, and the other two joined her.
Yuki started running, barefoot and still in her pajamas. As she passed through the little woods, she changed from wolf to human and back again in a flash. Ame chased her on all fours and then on two feet, then on all fours again. The transformation was so fast his pajamas fell away, until he was left wearing just his scarf.
Hana followed after them in her duffle coat, picking up the clothes on her way. They ran away from her gleefully.
The sky overhead was pure blue.
The two wolf children circled down the hill with its lone tree all covered in fresh snow. Wolf Yuki slid down the slope and then sped up for a jump, and the wind seemed to carry her into the air, her long scarf flapping behind her. Her heart danced at the flying sensation. When she landed, she disappeared in a huge puff of snow.
Wolf Ame copied her by jumping into the air, too. Surprised at how far he flew, he kicked his legs in panic and landed shakily. Snow sprayed up and showered down over his entire body.
Not to be outdone, wolf Yuki jumped even farther, elegantly spinning as she soared through the air. The two of them jumped again and again, competing with each other and sending up flurries of powder each time. Hana chased after them into the clouds of countless tiny crystals in their gorgeous dance against the blue sky.
AWOOOOOOO, Yuki howled.
AWOOOOOOOOOOOO, Ame howled.
AWOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, Hana howled.
The three of them collapsed into the snow with arms and legs outstretched, and their voices echoed deep into the mountains. Yuki had returned to her human form. Eventually, her panting gave way to laughter.
“Huff…puff…ha-ha-ha-ha!”
When he heard her, the sweat-drenched Ame started laughing, too.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
The three of them rolled around in their mirth. The snow crystals sparkled in the sun. The breeze provided a refreshing chill for their warm bodies. Hana opened her eyes and looked at the sky, pleasantly tired. Clouds drifted slowly by.
It happened on the way home.
Wolf Ame suddenly froze beneath the thin veil of clouds and pricked up his ears.
He heard running water.
Alone, he made his way down a slope toward the sound and discovered a peaceful snowy landscape amid a circle of trees with a stream running through the middle. He suspected this was the place where Yuki caught the cormorant.
Suddenly, he spotted a crested kingfisher sitting on a branch. He was sure that’s what it was—he had seen one in the encyclopedia.
The kingfisher dived into the water, sending up barely a splash. A moment later, it shot upward again with a small fish in its mouth and alighted on a
snowcapped rock in the middle of the stream. Every movement was full of grace, and the black-and-white speckles on its wings were so beautiful.
Ame was seized with a desire to examine its wings more closely. He crept toward it, hiding himself in the shadow of a rock. For a long time, he crouched there, breathing evenly and waiting for the right moment.
The kingfisher repositioned the fish in its mouth. Just before gulping it down, however, it sensed something behind it and turned its head. That was the moment Ame leaped.
In a stroke of luck, his front paws caught the bird’s tail. As the bird flapped its wings and tried to escape, Ame moved around the rock and managed to pin it down. The bird struggled for a few moments but finally grew still, only blinking its eyes.
It was Ame’s first hunt.
He hadn’t expected it to go so well right from the start. Perhaps the reason his heart was still pounding was the excitement of success. But after it was all over, he felt let down.
When he replayed the events in his mind, it seemed easier than he had expected. He wondered why he had waited so long to try. In any case, he was eager to bring the bird back to show his mother and Yuki. What would they do when they saw it? Would their eyes grow wide with surprise? Would they gush over his catch?
Just as these thoughts were running through Ame’s head, he stepped on his scarf, lost his balance, and slipped into the stream.
A column of water rose up with a splash, and the kingfisher escaped and flew off out of sight.
The stream was surprisingly deep, cold, and swift. He couldn’t believe it had looked so peaceful from the land. He tried to grab on to a nearby rock, but it was impossible.
“Mo… Mommy!” He writhed desperately, switching back and forth from wolf to human.
When she heard him calling, wolf Yuki returned to where Ame had left them. She slid down the slope to the stream as fast as she could, screaming to Hana.
“Ame! Mommy, it’s Ame!!”
Hana whipped her head around at the sound of Yuki’s unusually shrill call.
“?!”
Every hair on her body stood on end.
“Ame!”
She hurtled ahead through the snow. Her foot caught on something, sending her to the ground, but she got up and kept running.
“Ame!!”
Although she couldn’t see him, an image of Ame reaching for help floated before her mind’s eye. She knew with as much conviction as if she were standing beside him that he was on the verge of death.
Wolf Children: Ame & Yuki Page 7