by Yusuke Kishi
“It’s the real thing,” Satoru said from his seat. “Haythatchers have to make a lot of nests, plus they don’t raise their young, so their nests are always crude-looking. See how this nest is in a place that’s hard to see from above? Most haythatcher nests are really exposed.”
“Also, you can easily tell from the way the edges of the nest look,” Shun added. “Reed warblers stand on the edge to take care of the young, so the edges are flat, whereas haythatchers just leave it the way it is once it’s finished, so the edges are pointy. Also, warblers sometimes use their own feathers to make the nest. Needless to say, haythatcher nests won’t have any feathers in them.”
Since boys often use fake haythatcher eggs to pull pranks on people, it was no wonder they were so knowledgeable about this. Even though none of us had ever been interested in those foul smelling things.
We made a note of where we found the nest along with a simple illustration of it, and continued on our way, keeping an eye out more.
Summer camp wasn’t just fun and games. It was part of our placement for science courses, so each group had to do research while at camp, and present it when they got back. Ours was a really vague topic called “Species Around the Tone River”. Before we left, we had been having a heated discussion about what exactly we should write about, and had just agreed on a starting point (isn’t that enough already?), when Satoru started telling one of his tall tales as an example.
“Blowdogs?” I burst out laughing. “Something that weird couldn’t possibly exist.”
“I’m telling you, they’re real,” Satoru said with a completely straight face.
Since Satoru always reacted so defensively to being doubted, we often laughed at the things he said, just to provoke him. We usually only half-believed his stories anyway, but this time, he was being too unbelievable.
“Some people have seen them recently.”
“Like who?” Maria asked.
“I don’t know their names.”
“See, it’s the same as always. He always insists there are witnesses, but when you ask for a name, he gets all vague all of a sudden,” I said triumphantly, but Satoru ignored me and went on. Why did he get such a kick out of fooling people?
“If you heard his name, you’d probably know who it was. He said that he met a blowdog at the foot of Mt. Tsukuba.”
“What did he go all the way to Mt. Tsukuba for?” Maria fell for Satoru’s story hook, line, and sinker, forgetting all about the problem of who the witness was.
“A job for the Board of Education, like a survey or something. They obviously don’t tell kids all the details. Anyway, when he got close to the mountain, a blowdog came lumbering out of a cave.”
Just as I started looking for holes in Satoru’s story, Mamoru spoke up.
“What did it look like?”
“It was about the size of a dog, completely black, with a fat torso. Its head was barely half the size of a normal dog’s and hung so low that it almost touched the ground.”
“Is that really a dog?”
“Who knows, it might not be.”
“It doesn’t seem particularly dangerous,” Maria said.
“Yeah. But if it gets mad, its body swells up like a balloon to warn its enemy to stay away. But if they provoke it even more…!”
“It puffs up bigger and bigger until it explodes, right? Does that really not sound dumb to you?” I cut in, but Satoru switched tactics in an instant.
“But that’s the problem.”
“Huh?”
“Doesn’t it completely defy common sense? If you wanted to fool a bunch of people, you’d come up with something more believable, right?”
A bunch of objections came to mind, but I kept quiet. If I said anything, it would mean that I was accepting his ridiculous story.
Still, it seems like Satoru felt he had got one over me.
“I’ve heard that blowdogs are messengers from god, but to me they’re just normal animals. There are a lot of animals that try to make themselves look bigger when provoked, blowdogs are just an extreme example. When it blows up, the enemy will likely be killed, or at least seriously injured,” he said.
Shun, who had been listening silently until now, spoke up. “Still, it sounds unbelievable.”
“Why?” Satoru asked sullenly.
“Because if this actually happened, wouldn’t blowdogs die before their enemies did? They’d become extinct in no time.”
It was a simple but irrefutable point. Satoru crossed his arms and pretended to contemplate the problem, but I was sure he wouldn’t be able to come up with anything.
Just when it looked like I was right, he started speaking as if there had never been a break in the conversation.
“…mhm. After he met the blowdog, he also saw an evil minoshiro.”
I almost fell out of my seat. “What do you mean ‘mhm’? Hello? What happened to the blowdog problem?”
“He backed off when he saw it swelling, so it didn’t explode. But who knows, maybe the whole thing about it exploding is fake anyway,” Satoru said, trying to slither out of the conversation like a lizard shedding its tail. “And then as he was climbing up Mt. Tsukuba, he encountered an evil minoshiro,” he opened his eyes wide in a show of surprise.
“Is that the same as a false minoshiro?” Mamoru asked.
“Yeah, at first glance it looks like a minoshiro, but if you look carefully, they’re completely different.”
“But why is it evil?” Maria asked, frowning.
“People who meet an evil minoshiro die before long.”
How absurd.
“So how did that guy die? He didn’t, right?”
“He probably will soon,” Satoru said, not batting an eyelid.
If we just left it here, it would be like every other time Satoru told one of his pointless stories. But Shun made a surprising proposal.
“Why don’t we do this for our summer camp report?”
“The evil minoshiro?” I was surprised.
“That, blowdogs, and other creatures. This is a rare opportunity, so I want to find out whether they exist or not.”
“That sounds interesting,” Maria and them agreed immediately.
“Wait, guys, do you even know what you’re saying? If you meet an evil minoshiro, you’ll die.”
As expected, Satoru was trying his hardest to dissuade us from this idea, in fear that his lies would be exposed.
“No one’s going to die,” Maria snickered.
“But how are you going to catch one? I forgot to mention, but cantus doesn’t work on them.”
“What do you mean?”
Who knows what he was saying out of desperation. We all turned to look at him.
“Um, I’m not too sure.”
“Explain it anyway.”
“…”
In the end, Satoru surrendered to our volley of questions. So our camp research topic was decided.
But thinking rationally, there’s no way that you’d be able to find so many rare animals. So we decided to keep the originally vague theme, “Species Around the Tone River”, so that in the case we couldn’t find anything, we could write about normal minoshiro, haythatchers, and stuff like that.
Let’s return to the summer camp. Not ten minutes after finding the warbler’s nest, I let out a little shout.
“Look! There’s a huge nest over there.”
For some reason, Shun raised his eyebrows doubtfully. “It looks like a yellow bittern’s.”
“Yeah. One that big probably is,” Satoru agreed.
It was rare that they had the same opinion, which somehow made this more believable.
“But it’s pretty crudely built.”
The three canoes converged around the nest. It sat a lot lower than the warbler’s nest, but was quite exposed in some areas. Any animal with sharp vision would be able to see it from the opposite bank.
Shun half-rose off his seat and peeked into the nest. “There are five eggs.”
; My heart sped up momentarily when my bare shoulder brushed Shun’s as our boats stopped side by side. I pretended to study the eggs and nest carefully. Yellow bitterns are the smallest in the heron family, but still far bigger than the sparrow-sized warbler. Its nest was almost twice as big around, and the eggs were like bluish miniature chicken eggs.
Shun plucked an egg out of the nest and stared at it carefully. His jaw dropped.
“Woah, that’s surprising. Even though I half-expected it.”
“What?”
“Saki, hold it.”
He picked up the egg between two slender fingers and dropped it in the palm of my hand. It felt pleasantly cool, like ceramic.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“You don’t get it?” He picked up another egg and tossed it at Satoru.
I was surprised at how roughly he was treating them. “Wait, what are you doing? Those poor chicks.”
“Ahh,” Shun smiled slightly. “They’re fake. Look closely.”
He picked out another one and put it on top of a nearby rock. Before I could blink, he smashed it with a paddle.
The shell fractured, revealing no white or yolk, but a black, fetid clump. Even more surprising, an antler-like structure started sprouting out of it, branching off in all directions.
“What is that?”
“‘Devil’s Hand’. You’ve heard of it, right?”
Actually I hadn’t. I pinched a spike with the tip of my finger; it felt as thin as paper.
“Be careful, the edges are really sharp.”
The Devil’s Hand had veins coming from its core that gave it elasticity. And as Shun said, it was sharp, with barbs poking out along the edges.
“It’s usually folded up inside the egg, but when it shell is broken it comes bursting out.”
“Why?”
Satoru answered from behind me, “If a rat snake or rosary snake eats it, the egg will explode it its stomach. And when it tries to cough it back up, the barbs will just dig deeper into the stomach and eventually tear it open. Then the poison inside the black smelly part will leak into the snake’s body.”
How gruesome. Rosary snakes have evolved to eat eggs exclusively, raiding nests and eating all the eggs at once, digesting them later on. Their name comes from the way they look after they have gorged themselves on eggs. If one managed to eat multiple fake eggs, I can only imagine how terrible the aftermath would be.
The eggs did not bring life, but certain death.
I took out my notebook and made a quick sketch of the fake egg.
“There are a lot of fake warbler eggs in Pinewind, but this is the first time I’ve seen a fake bittern egg,” Satoru said wonderingly, holding the fake egg up to the sun.
“To lay an egg of this size, the bird must be pretty big, right?”
“Nope. It’s the same size as a haythatcher,” Shun said.
“How do you know?” Satoru looked at him.
Shun jerked his chin at something in front of us. What we saw surprised us.
There was a tiny face peeking out at us from the thicket of reeds. It looked just like a heron’s, with a beak-full of dried grass. But its eyes were red and lidless, scales covered its face, and the black lines running from the corner of its eyes made it obvious that it was not a bird.
The haythatcher slowly unwound itself, slithering up a thick stalk. Most haythatchers are a blackish or greenish brown, but this one was light green, like a young sprout. Although its beak was almost identical to a bird’s, you could tell that the rest of it had not changed much from its predecessor, the yellow snake.
It was building a new nest, deftly inserting the reeds in its mouth into various places around the nest. The bittern’s nest was built twined around the stalks of the reeds, but the haythatchers nest was more like a warbler’s. It looked similar enough to be deceiving.
“The fake egg might have been the haythatchers, since they have a habit of building multiple nests in the same area.”
I looked around at Satoru and saw him putting the fake eggs into his backpack. There was only one left in the nest.
“What are you going to do with those?” Maria asked.
“Just in case we don’t run into a blowdog or an evil minoshiro, we can write about these for our camp report. Fake eggs that look like bittern eggs are pretty rare.”
“But would taking them be bad for the haythatcher?”
“Since they’re fake, leaving one should be enough. As long as the nest isn’t empty, it should be okay.”
Satoru’s theory sounded okay, but if that really was the case, then wouldn’t the haythatcher only lay one egg to begin with?
At any rate, I thought the snake with the curious face was more cunning than we gave it credit for.
The haythatcher’s strategy for survival was brood parasitism.
Brood parasitism involves the parasitic parent laying its eggs in another animal’s nest. The egg hatches quickly, and the animal pushes the original eggs out of the nest. To me, this is probably the cruelest thing animals do in order to survive. In Africa, there is a kind of bird called the honeyguide, whose chicks are born with hooks on their beaks in order to kill the chicks in the host nest.
According to “The Natural History of the New Japan Islands”, a thousand years ago, there were only a few species of cuckoos that were brood parasites. But now, just within the area we were in, {even though there are animals that actually tended to their own young, even more are looking for a good nest to invade.} The world of birds is one of never ending struggle.
{The haythatcher sets up its convincing fake nest and eggs, and waits for birds to fall into its trap. It periodically patrols its nests, looking for new tributes.}
I thought back to the model of the haythatcher skeleton I one saw in our science class. In order to crush eggs, its precaudal vertebrae are thicker than to other snakes’, almost like a row of molars. It reuses the crushed eggshells as material for its own eggs. Because of the large amounts of calcium in its body, the eggs it lays are hard, like bird eggs, so baby haythatchers need beaks in order to break out.
But I never knew it used the Devil’s Hand as a defense against rat snakes and rosary snakes until today. Maybe I was asleep when the teacher taught us that.
This may be made up in hindsight, but I seem to remember feeling slightly uncomfortable at that time. It was a real-life example of the adaptation and natural selection mentioned in the textbook. In order to survive, even something like the Devil’s Hand could be evolved.
But as we set off up the Tone River again, all my questions and misgivings were blown away by the relaxing breeze.
As the day drew to an end, we steered our canoes toward the bank and went ashore. There were still faint traces of the group before us left on the sand.
The first task was to set up the tents. We dug holes for the bamboo tentpoles, and tied the canvas to them with leather strips. It was surprisingly tiring work. The easiest way was to have one person float the poles and canvas, and another person position them properly.
Next was food preparation. We had over three hundred kilos of supplies in our canoes, so food was plentiful. We gathered dried twigs and kindling nearby and lit a fire with our cantus. In a pot, we put purified water, rice, vegetables, meat, tofu skin and other foods to make rice gruel. Even though the only seasonings we had were miso and salt, everyone had worked up an appetite and we devoured the whole pot in the blink of an eye.
The sun had set while we were eating, and now we sat chatting around the campfire.
That scene is still burned vividly into my mind. I was tired after a whole day of activity and smoke from the fire was making my eyes water. Since this was our first big adventure outside the Holy Barrier, we were all more spirited than usual. As the sky faded from pale to deep blue, the fire lit up our faces with a red glow.
To tell the truth, I can’t remember the first half our conversations. I remember our daytime conversations perfectly well, but the more interesting top
ics we discussed that night continue to elude me. It’s as if those memories had been washed away.
At the time, I was wholly concentrated on the boy on the other side of the fire.
“…you’ve never seen it before, right Saki?” Satoru said all of a sudden.
What was he talking about that I’ve never seen before? Anyway, I’ll just give some noncommittal answer.
“Oh, who knows.”
“Huh? So you have?”
I didn’t have any choice but to shake my head.
“See, there’s no way,” Satoru said assertively.
I wanted to refute him, but since I didn’t know what he was talking about, there was nothing I could do.
“That…that’s it!” Satoru suddenly became very excited for some reason. “Just the other day, Shun and I saw it for the first time, right?”
Across the flames, I saw Shun nod. I couldn’t remember when the two of them had become so close.
“It must be something important, to be so heavily guarded.”
“Seems like it. Anyway, I don’t think any of us happened to see it when we were at Harmony School,” Shun said in his calm voice, smiling slightly. “There’s a wall right behind the door, so even if you open it, you still can’t see the inner courtyard. And the teachers are always really careful about opening and closing the door.”
Does this mean they actually went into the courtyard? I was surprised at their daring. The inner courtyard was a square surrounded by buildings on all sides, like the one in Harmony School, and while students were not explicitly forbidden to enter, there were no windows looking into it and people usually don’t get the urge to enter anyway.
“But twice I happened to get a glance while the Sun Prince was opening the door. And the image of bolts on the inside is burned into my mind.”
What would locks look like a thousand years from now? I can’t imagine. They used to just be pieces of metal with notches on them, and gradually became as sophisticated as the gears of a watch. But in our time, there are very few places that need locks, so their designs have become increasingly simple again.
On the inside of the door were a dozen small bolts, arranged radially. You couldn’t see where they were from the outside, so the only way to unlock the door was to have a picture with all the locations drawn on it or recall it from memory, and unlock them with your cantus.
