A Wild Sheep Chase (30 page)

After a day of running around, I felt physically drained, but my mind was going a mile a minute. There was no way I could get to sleep. The sound of the river was just another noise to me, and it fastened itself on my brain.

Holding my breath in the darkness, I let images of the town melt and ooze all around me. The houses rotted away, the rails rusted and were gone, weeds overwhelmed the farmland. The town came to the end of its short hundred-year history and sank into the earth. Time regressed like a film running backward. Once again Ainu deer, black bears, and wolves came to live on the plain, thick swarms of locusts filled the sky, an ocean of bamboo grass swayed in the autumn wind, and the luxurious evergreen forests hid the sun.

All the works of man faded into nothingness, yet still the sheep remained. They stood there, staring at me, eyes flashing in the darkness. Saying nothing, thinking nothing, they only stared and stared—directly at me. Tens of thousands of sheep. The monotonous clacking of their teeth covered the earth.

The clock struck two and they were gone.

And then I fell asleep.

The morning was hazy and cool. I sympathized with those sheep. Swimming though the cold disinfectant on a day like this could be brutal. Maybe sheep don’t feel cold? Maybe they don’t feel anything.

Hokkaido’s short autumn season was drawing to a close. The thick gray clouds in the north were intimations of the snows to come. Flying from September Tokyo to October Hokkaido, I’d lost my autumn. There’d been the beginning and the end, but none of the heart of autumn.

I woke at six and washed my face. I sat alone in the corridor, looking out the window until breakfast was ready. The waters of the river had subsided somewhat since the day before and were now running clear. Rice fields spread out on the opposite bank, where irregular morning breezes traced random waves through the ripened, tall grassiness, as far as the eye could see. A tractor crossed the concrete bridge, heading toward the hills, its puttering engine faintly audible in the wind. Three crows flew out of the
now-golden birch woods. Making a full circle above the river and landing on a railing of the building. Perched there, the crows acted the perfect bystanders from an avant-garde drama. Soon tiring of even that role, however, the crows flew off one by one and disappeared upstream.

The sheep caretaker’s old jeep was parked outside the inn at eight o’clock sharp. The jeep had a box-shaped roof, apparently a surplus job if the Self-Defense Forces issue number legible on the front fender was any indication.

“You know, there’s something funny going on,” the caretaker said as soon as he saw me. “I tried to telephone ahead up on the mountain, but I couldn’t get through.”

She and I climbed into the backseat. It smelled of gasoline. “When was the last time you tried calling?” I asked.

“Well, around the twentieth of last month, I guess. I haven’t gotten in touch once since then. A call generally comes in from him whenever there’s something he needs. A shopping list or something.”

“Did you get the phone to ring?”

“Not even a busy signal. Must be a line down somewhere. Not unlikely if there’s been a big snow.”

“But there hasn’t been any snow.”

The caretaker looked up at the roof of the jeep and rolled his head around to crack his neck. “Then we’ll just have to go take a look, won’t we?”

I nodded. The gasoline fumes were starting to get to me.

We crossed the concrete bridge and started up the hill by the same road I’d taken yesterday. Passing the Municipal Sheep Farm, all three of us turned to look at the two poles with the sign over
the entrance. The farm was stillness itself. I could picture the sheep: each staring off into its own silent space with limpid blue eyes.

“You leave the disinfecting to the afternoon?”

“Yeah, well, no real hurry or nothin’. So long’s it gets done before it snows.”

“When does it start to snow?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if it snowed next week,” said the caretaker. With one hand on the steering wheel, he looked down and coughed. “It’ll be into November before it gets to piling up, though. Ever know a winter in these parts?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, once it starts to collect, it piles up nonstop as if a dam’s burst through. By then, there’s nothin’ you can do but crawl indoors and hang your head. People were never meant to live in these parts in the first place.”

“But you’ve been living here all this time.”

“That’s because I like sheep. Sheep are good-natured creatures. They even remember people by their face. A year looking after sheep is over before you know it, and then it starts to add up. In the autumn they mate, spring they lamb, summer they graze. When the lambs get big, in the autumn they’re mating. ’Round and ’round. It all repeats itself. The sheep change every year, it’s only me getting older. And the older I get, the less I want to live in town again.”

“What do sheep do over the winter?” asked my girlfriend.

His hands still on the steering wheel, the caretaker turned around and gazed at her, practically drinking in her face, as if he hadn’t noticed her before. The road was paved and straight and there wasn’t another car in sight; even so, I broke into a nervous sweat.

“They stay put indoors all winter long,” said the caretaker, at last turning his eyes back to the road.

“Don’t they get bored?”

“Do you get so bored with your own life?”

“I can’t really say.”

“Well, the same with sheep,” said the caretaker. “They don’t think about stuff like that, and it wouldn’t do ’em any good if they did. They just pass the winter eating hay, pissing, getting into spats, thinking about the babies in their bellies.”

The hills grew steeper and steeper, and the road started to curve into switchbacks. Pastoral scenery gradually gave way to sheer walls of dark primal forest on both sides of the road. Occasionally, there’d be an opening to a glimpse of the flatlands below.

“Under snow, we wouldn’t be getting through here,” said the caretaker. “Not that there’s any need to.”

“Aren’t there any ski areas or mountaineering courses?” I asked.

“Not here, nothing. And that’s why there’s no tourists. Which is why the town’s going nowhere fast. Up until the early sixties, the town was fairly active as a model for cold-zone agriculture. But ever since the rice surplus, everybody’s lost interest in farming in an icebox. Stands to reason.”

“What happened to the lumber mills?”

“Weren’t enough hands to go around, so they moved to more convenient places. You can still find small mills in a few towns today, but not many. Now, trees cut here in the mountains pass right through town and are taken to Nayoro and Asahikawa. That’s why the roads are in top shape while the town’s going to pieces. A large truck with snow tires’ll get through most any snowblock.”

Unconsciously, I brought a cigarette to my lips, but before
lighting up I remembered the gasoline fumes and returned it to the pack. So I sucked on a lemon drop instead. The result: the uncommon taste of lemon gasoline.

“Do sheep quarrel?” asked my girlfriend.

“You bet they quarrel,” said the caretaker. “It’s the same with any animal that goes around in groups. Each and every sheep has a pecking order in the sheep society. If there’s fifty sheep in a pen, then there’s number one sheep right down to number fifty sheep. And each one knows exactly where it belongs.”

“Amazing,” she said.

“It makes managing ’em that much easier for me too. You pull on number one sheep, and the rest just follow along, no questions asked.”

“But if they all know their place, why should they fight?”

“Say one sheep gets hurt and loses its strength, its position becomes unstable. So the sheep under it get feisty and try for better position. When that happens, they’re at it for three days.”

“Poor things.”

“Well, it all evens out. The sheep that gets the boot, when it was young, gave some other sheep the boot, after all. And when it all comes down to the butcher block, there’s no number one or number fifty. Just one happy barbecue.”

“Humph,” she said.

“But the real pitiful one is the stud ram. You know all about sheep harems, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“When you’re raising sheep, the most important thing you got to keep an eye on is mating. So you keep ’em separate, the males with the males, the females with the females. Then you throw one male into the pen with the females. Generally, it’s the strongest number one male. In other words, you’re serving up the best seed.
After a month, when all the business is done, this stud ram gets returned to the males-only pen. But during the time the stud’s been busy, the other males have worked out a new pecking order. And thanks to all that servicing, the stud is down to half his weight and there’s no way he can win a fight. So all the other males gang up on him. Now there’s a sad story.”

“How do sheep fight?”

“They bump heads. Sheep foreheads are hard as steel and all hollow inside.”

She said nothing, but seemed to be deep in thought. Probably trying to picture angry sheep beating their heads together.

After thirty minutes’ drive, the paved surface suddenly disappeared, and the road narrowed to half its width. From both sides, dark primal forests rushed in like giant waves at our jeep. The temperature dropped.

The road was terrible. It bounced the jeep around like a seismographic needle, agitating the gasoline in the plastic tank at our feet. The gas made ominous sounds, as if someone’s brains were sloshing about, ready to come flying out of their skull. Was I nervous about it? You bet.

The road went on like this for twenty or thirty minutes. I couldn’t steady myself even to read my watch. The whole while nobody said a word. I held tight to the belt attached to the seat, as she clung to my right arm. The caretaker concentrated on holding on to the steering wheel.

“Left,” the caretaker suddenly spoke up. Not knowing what to expect, I turned to see a wall in the dark forest torn wide open, the ground falling away. The valley was vast, and the view was spectacular. But without a hint of warmth. The rock face was sheer, stripped of every bit of life. You could smell its menacing breath.

Back straight ahead on the road a slick, conical mountain now appeared. At the tip, a tremendous force had twisted the cone out of shape.

Hands tight on the steering wheel, the caretaker jutted his chin forward in the direction of the cove.

“We’re headed ’round the other side of that.”

The strong wind that climbed the right slope from the valley sent the thick foliage sweeping upward, lightly spraying sand against the windows.

At some point near the top of the cone, the switchbacks came to an end, the slope on the right changing into volcanic crags, then eventually into a steep stone face. Squeezed on a narrow ledge chiseled into a featureless expanse of rock, the jeep crept along.

Suddenly, the weather took a turn for the worse. The blue-tinged patches of light-gray sky wearied of their fickle subtleties and turned dark, mixing in an uneven sooty black. Imparting a grim cast to the mountains.

In this caldron of a mountain, the winds whirled around, wheezing and moaning awfully. I wiped the sweat from my brow. Under my sweater, I was all cold sweat too.

The caretaker pursed his lips with each cut of the wheel, pulling right, right again. Then he leaned forward as if straining to hear something, slowing the jeep gradually until, where the road widened slightly, he stepped on the brake. He turned off the engine, and we sat, delivered into the midst of a frozen silence. There was only the wind taking its survey of the land.

The caretaker rested both hands on the wheel. A half hour seemed to pass before he got out of the jeep and tapped the ground with the sole of his work shoe. I climbed out of the jeep after him and stood beside him, looking down at the road surface.

“No good,” said the caretaker. “It rained a lot harder than I thought.”

The road did not seem all that damp to me. On the contrary, it looked hard-packed and dry.

“The core is damp,” he explained. “It fools everyone. Things are different in these parts.”

“Different?”

Instead of answering, he took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit up. “How about taking a short walk with me?”

We walked two hundred yards to the next bend. I could feel the nasty chill. I zipped my windbreaker all the way up and turned my collar, but the cold insisted.

Right where the road began to curve, the caretaker stopped. Facing the cliff on the right, cigarette still at his lips, he grimaced. Water, a light clayey brown, was trickling out of the middle of the cliff, flowing down the rock, and slowly crossing the road. I swiped my finger across the rock face. It was more porous than it seemed, the surface crumbling at the slightest touch.

“This here’s one hell of a curve,” said the caretaker. “The surface is loose, but that’s not all. It’s, well, bad luck. Even the sheep are afraid of it.”

The caretaker coughed and tossed his cigarette to the ground. “I hate to do this to you, but I don’t want to chance it.”