“…I don’t want Yuki to drop out,” he said, shifting in his chair and contemplating the floor with a serious expression.
Hana took a seat across from him, rested her elbows on the table, and clasped her hands, smiling all the while.
“…Um, back then, you said a wolf did it, right? What did you mean?” She had been wanting to ask him for a long time.
“I meant— Well, you might not believe me.” He lowered his gaze again, like he was struggling to get the words out. “…When it happened, I saw a wolf for a second, and then I was hurt… That wolf was the one that did it…”
He raised his head and continued earnestly.
“What I mean is, Yuki didn’t do anything bad.”
He looked down again, seeming to lose confidence.
“…Everyone says I’m crazy, though…”
When he had finished, he took the glass of juice and drank it through the straw.
“I see… Can I ask you something else?” Hana laced her fingers together. “Do you hate wolves?”
Souhei thought for a minute, then put the juice down on the table. “Not really.”
Relieved, Hana relaxed her hands and giggled. “Hee-hee. Me neither.”
She liked this boy.
Hana didn’t tell Yuki about her conversation with Souhei, but she was confident a boy like him would be a good friend for Yuki. A tremendous weight had been lifted from her chest.
One day, Yuki said she would go back to school. She had really struggled over what to do before finally making up her mind, it seemed.
Can I go back? she had asked.
Of course you can, if that’s what you’ve decided, Hana had replied.
In the morning, Yuki slung her backpack over her shoulder and stepped out the door. Souhei was waiting out front, and Yuki was stiff with nerves.
“Hey, wanna look at it?” he asked. He brought his hand to the gauze on his ear.
She didn’t know how to respond, but before she had a chance to, he’d torn off the gauze.
“…Ouch!” He pressed on his ear, then removed his hand to show Yuki. “Looks pretty cool, huh?”
Yuki stared at the wound. A large scab had formed over it. Quite possibly, the scar would remain forever. Yuki grimaced apologetically.
“Wanna touch it?” he asked, gesturing toward his ear.
Surprised, she hesitated for a moment, but then she timidly touched the scar.
“…It doesn’t hurt?”
“It’s just itchy.”
Souhei stared at Yuki’s hand as she lowered it again. She felt as though he was trying to make sure of something, so she quickly hid it and walked ahead of him.
“Let’s go,” she said, and he followed after her.
Hana had been watching their exchange from the entryway. They’re going to be just fine, she thought as they disappeared down the road. I can leave the rest to them.
Ame squeezed past her out of the house. “I’m heading out,” he said.
Hana watched him go. “Where are you off to?”
“To see Teacher.”
“Who’s Teacher?”
“Teacher is just…Teacher.”
“…All right. Are you okay going by yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
“Don’t stay out too late.”
“I won’t.”
Hana wanted to ask him more questions, but he hurried off before she could. She gave up and simply watched him leave.
That afternoon, Hana stopped at the Nirasakis’ house on her way to go shopping and chatted with Ms. Nirasaki over a cup of tea.
“How’s Yuki doing?”
“She went back to school today.”
“That’s great. What about Ame?”
“He goes some days, and others he doesn’t.”
Grandpa Nirasaki was home for lunch and poked his head into the room.
“And that’s just fine,” he said. “Kids who drop out of elementary school show a lot of promise. Like Edison. And me.”
“There you go being silly again,” Ms. Nirasaki said, exasperated.
Hana watched as he headed back out to work. “Speaking of which, does anyone live up on the mountain?”
“The mountain?”
“Ame said he was going to his teacher’s place. I figured he was talking about some old man.”
“I wonder. Who would be up in the mountains during the busy season?”
Ms. Nirasaki sipped her tea noisily. Hana tried to think of who else “Teacher” might be, but she couldn’t think of anyone.
When Ame came home from his solitary trips to the mountain, he always told her what had happened that day.
The gingko tree had blossomed, now the creeping dogwood. He had witnessed tree-frog eggs hatch. He was starting to be able to walk for a long time without feeling tired. And Teacher was the one who’d imparted all that knowledge to him.
“Teacher knows everything. About the mountains, I mean.”
Hana was surprised to see Ame looking so alive. Her withdrawn, irritable son had never made friends with an adult before. She wasn’t sure, but she even thought he was toughening up—a sight she was glad to see. Still, she wondered who this Teacher was.
“Why don’t you invite him over soon?” Hana suggested one day when Ame was helping her in the garden.
“I’d like to thank him. Plus—”
“Teacher never meets with humans. He doesn’t come down to the village like the boars and bears do.”
“…Huh?”
Hana stared at Ame, stupefied.
“But I think he might meet you,” he added softly.
Hana went with Ame up the mountain.
Almost immediately, he veered off the main trail and straight into the deep forest. He strode up steep trails undrawn on any map as confidently as if he were strolling through the neighborhood. Hana got winded just trying to keep up.
Finally, he stopped on an animal trail crisscrossed with thick tree roots, where Teacher sat at the base of a towering, unruly cedar, and stared at the two humans.
Ame’s teacher was a wild red fox.
“…!” Hana gulped.
“Teacher is the master of this whole area,” Ame explained calmly.
“Uh…thank you for looking after Ame,” she said, coming to her senses.
She dug through her bag and pulled out a bundle wrapped in cloth—a ripe peach and some fried tofu she had brought as presents.
With great composure, Teacher climbed down and gave the tofu a quick sniff. Then he picked up the peach in his mouth, jumped lightly down to the tree’s roots, and disappeared between some rocks.
Hana hadn’t noticed Ame had changed into his wolf form until he was climbing up the rocks after the fox. He glanced back once at his mother, as if to say, I’m heading out.
Long after he was gone, Hana remained where she was, dumbfounded and unable to believe what she had witnessed.
Once, the timber wolf at the nature preserve had told Ame something.
I don’t know anything about the woods myself. I’ve lived my whole life in ignorance. I can’t teach you. If I can tell you only one thing, it’s that you shouldn’t spend your time here. If you want to learn, don’t talk to an old wolf in a cage. Venture out into the wild.
Ame had followed his suggestion and gone up the mountain.
At first, he was at a loss for what to do. He spent days wandering the woods without learning a thing, watched the sun set, and went home. He couldn’t find anyone or anything who might give him what he was searching for.
There was not a single wild wolf left in Japan.
Ame was deeply aware of the fact. Japan wasn’t a place he could learn the way of the wolf, because the kind of wolf who would teach him simply didn’t exist.
Instead, he met Teacher.
Teacher was a bit odd, even for a red fox. He had to be, to accept a wolf child as his student. Ame could probably search the whole world w
ithout finding another one willing to take him in. He was very fortunate to have made the acquaintance of this older creature—and when he did, his world expanded overnight.
Teacher knew everything Ame had ever wanted to know, though Ame hadn’t even known what that was before they met. Afterward, the things he was searching for became extremely clear. The more he learned, the more new questions bubbled up inside him.
A fox of few words, Teacher mostly let Ame observe him and the mountain.
But for Ame, each observation was a revelation. Everything was so different from the “ecology of wild animals” he had read about in books at the school library. There was an enormous gulf between “nature” as humans viewed it and wrote about it and the truth of the natural world. Ame took it in through Teacher’s eyes and learned about every nook and cranny.
For example, Teacher had a different name for the beech trees, and the rhododendrons, and the gentian flowers, too. The clouds and wind and raindrops and setting sun. These names comprised a system completely unlike the only one Ame had known to exist, and they held entirely different meanings as well.
Some words could not even be translated into human language. When Ame explained that certain things lacked a corresponding human equivalent, Teacher was flabbergasted. He wondered aloud how one could live without such things. The shock ran through Ame like an electrical current.
An entirely new world surfaced before his eyes.
Before long, he arrived at the true questions that lay at the bottom of his heart.
Why had he been born a wolf? And what did he want to do with his life?
Hana gazed incredulously at her chattering son.
He was excitedly trying to convey to her what he had seen and learned on the mountain. Quite often, he described plants and insects that even Hana had never heard of in her work at the nature preserve. When he searched enthusiastically through their field guides, they were nowhere to be found, so he detailed their characteristics and ecology and habitat to Hana and urged her to take down notes. He bounced happily from one story to the next as if he could never tell her everything, no matter how much he talked.
As she watched his lively profile, Hana felt a sense of fulfillment for herself, too. His truancy might be a problem, but she believed he had discovered something that was even more important for him, all on his own. So long as he was living free and true to himself, it was enough.
Watching her children change and grow was such a joy. Moving to the mountains may have made life a little hard, but she was happy she had done it.
Yuki sat at the dining table after dinner, clearly annoyed.
Ame was being unusually talkative and completely oblivious to the fact that she was trying to get her homework done.
“…Yuki, I think you should study with Teacher, too, so you can get better at hunting. You need to know the trick to running through the woods as fast as you can. And how to read the earth. You’d learn a lot, like how to find streams or sense changes in the weather, and stuff about territories and how animals respect one another—”
“I’d never do that. Obviously.”
“Why not?”
Yuki stopped writing. “Why don’t you go to school?”
“’Cause it’s so cool. The mountain, I mean. There’s so much I don’t know.”
“Stuff you don’t need to know.”
“Why not?”
“Never mind, just come to school.”
“…I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause I’m a wolf,” Ame replied, like it was completely natural.
“You’re a human,” Yuki responded in an attempt to quell his protest.
“I’m a wolf,” he countered decisively.
“—”
Yuki opened her mouth to say something, then stopped. “I’ve decided I’ll never turn into a wolf again,” she finally stated before returning to her homework. The words were more for her own sake than his, an attempt to regain her cool.
Of course, Ame knew full well what she’d just gone through at school. After so much pain for herself and trouble for her mother, she’d finally managed to overcome it. No—every day she went to school she still felt like she was walking on thin ice, but she pressed ahead anyway. Not as a wolf, but as a human. It was so strange that Ame couldn’t take that into consideration. She shouldn’t have to spell it out for him. Yet, there he went, obstinately asking once again:
“Why?”
“—”
“Come on, why?”
“Because I’m a human! Is that good enough for you?! Because I’m human!!”
“But why?”
“Why, why, why! Why don’t you shut up?”
“You’re a wolf, but you’re still—”
“Shut up!! You don’t know anything!!”
“I know plenty!!”
The next instant, Yuki snapped and slapped him across the face. “You better go to school tomorrow, or else!!”
Ame glared at Yuki, pressing his cheek. Up till now, she had always out-argued him. But today, he didn’t give in.
“I don’t want to!!”
“I’m warning you!!”
“I don’t want to!!!”
Ame shoved the dining table with all his strength, and it toppled over with Yuki pinned underneath. Her mug shattered on the floor.
Ame jumped up, suddenly half-wolf. His eyes brimmed with quiet anger.
Yuki took up a position across the table.
“…You wanna fight?”
Hana, who was drawing a bath, looked up as a loud crash boomed through the house.
“What was that?” She hurried into the kitchen and gasped at what she saw.
The table and chairs were knocked over and scattered around the room. Shards of glass from the china cabinet littered the floor. And among it all, two large animals were tangled in a brutal fight.
Grrrrrrrrr……arrrrrrrrrrrr…!
Fur disheveled, fangs bared, the two beasts took turns tearing into each other amid an exchange of threatening growls.
One of them was Ame. The other was Yuki.
“…Yuki?! …Ame?!”
Yuki was straddling Ame, only to be kicked off and hurled against the wall. When he tried to pounce on her, she dodged him by a hairbreadth and escaped across the sink counter. The dishes and pots that Hana had just finished washing went flying.
Trying to temporarily put some distance between herself and Ame, Yuki darted for the study but crashed into the door. The frosted glass shattered in a hail of tiny fragments, but that didn’t stop Ame from following in hot pursuit. The fight continued in the dark study. Over and over, Hana heard the crack of wood exploding into splinters.
“Stop this immediately, both of you!!” Hana’s desperate shouts fell on deaf ears.
The wooden door closest to the barn slammed down with a loud bang, and Yuki came rolling out of the study as if she had been shoved. Unable to weather Ame’s merciless attacks, she sped toward the back of the sitting room, her paws skittering over the tatami mats. But since she kept looking back over her shoulder, she ended up colliding head-on with the sewing machine, which crashed down heavily and punched into the tatami. When Ame caught up with her, he aimed straight for her throat and sank his sharp teeth in. Yuki yelped in pain. They struggled ferociously from one end of the room to the other.
Yuki had been caught off guard by Ame’s sudden strength, and he completely overpowered her. She didn’t even have a chance to go on the offensive. She couldn’t believe she’d been cornered like this.
She raced down the long porch, but Ame pursued her with surprising speed and pounced. She was forced to flip over and kept rolling, her body bent in half, until she smashed into the sliding door next to the entryway. She tried to escape Ame’s relentless attacks by fleeing into the main room.
“Stop it, Yuki!! Ame!!” Hana screamed pleadingly.
But Ame chased Yuki round and round with terrifying speed, nipping at her heels as if he co
uld neither hear nor see his mother. She fearfully approached them.
“Stop it… Ack!”
Ame had barely brushed her as he ran past, but she went flying onto her backside. She watched as the two wolves banged into the bookshelf in the corner of the main room, and the whole house shook with the tremendous blow. Books were thrown onto the floor, scattering the summer cushions, and the little vase with a buttercup in it fell, along with his driver’s license.
At last, Yuki had no place left to run.
Ame pinned her to the floor with his powerful front paws and bit mercilessly into her throat. Blood soaked her fur as she let out a high-pitched scream.
Still Ame did not loosen his hold. He snapped at her again and again, as if he intended to rip her ears, nose, and legs to shreds.
He was trying to prove his dominance.
“Oh… Oh my god…”
Hana had no words for the horrifying scene. One of her children was tearing into the other with overwhelming violence. It was cruelly evident who was winning.
The suffering Yuki writhed around and managed to crawl away, fleeing with a whimper to the hearth room. She was so shaken, she tripped over the edge of the hearth and pitched disgracefully into the pile of firewood in the corner, sending a curl of smoke up from the ash. When she saw Ame approaching with a measured stride, she dived, terrified, into the bathroom.
The door slammed shut, and Hana heard the lock turn from inside. With that, the fight was over.
“Ame…Yuki…!” Hana arrived belatedly in the hearth room.
“…!”
She froze.
Before the frosted glass of the bathroom door, Ame slowly stood up. His skin was covered in wounds, and his supple muscles rippled powerfully. He had returned to his human form, but the eyes glittering behind his disheveled hair were those of a wild animal.
“…Ame…?”
Hana managed to call her son’s name, but that was all. From a corner of the bathroom, she could hear Yuki weeping softly.
Afterward, Hana cleaned up the house alone, without saying a word to the children.
It looked as if a storm had blown through. Glass was broken, cupboards and doors were toppled, and dishes and pots had been strewn into the oddest places. Yuki’s dress was in tatters. The tatamis were striped with fresh claw marks. To Hana, this was the evidence of the different paths the two siblings had chosen, and she realized they would soon be at the stage where no one could hold them back.
Wolf Children: Ame & Yuki Page 10