A Wild Sheep Chase

The Birth, Rise, and Fall of Junitaki Township

It was an early morning train we took from Sapporo to Asahikawa. I opened a beer as I settled down to the voluminous, slip-cased Authoritative History of Junitaki Township. Junitaki was the township in which the Sheep Professor’s homestead was located. Reading up on its history probably had no practical value, but it couldn’t hurt.

The author was born in 1940 in Junitaki and, after graduating from the literature department of Hokkaido University, was active as a local historian, or so the cover copy said. For being so active, he had only one book to his name. Published in May 1970. First edition, probably the only edition.

According to the author, the first settlers arrived in what today is Junitaki early in the summer of 1881. Eighteen persons total, all poor dirt farmers from Tsugaru, meager farm tools, clothes, bedding, cook pots, and knives being the sum of their possessions.

They passed through an Ainu village near Sapporo, and with the little money they had, they engaged a lean, dark-eyed Ainu youth as a guide. The youth’s name in Ainu translated into “Full Moon on the Wane” (suggesting a tendency toward manic depression, the author hypothesized).

Perhaps the youth was not cut out to be a guide; still, he proved far better than he might have at first appeared. Hardly understanding any Japanese, he led these eighteen grim, suspicious farmers north, up along the Ishikari River. He had a clean picture in mind where to go to find fertile land.

On the fourth day, the entourage arrived at this destination. Endowed with vast waters, the whole landscape was alive with beautiful flowers.

“Here is good,” said the youth. “Few wild animals, fertile soil, plenty of salmon.”

“Nothing doing,” said the leader of the farmers. “We want farther in.”

The youth understood the farmers to believe they’d find better land the farther in they went. Fine. If that’s what they want, off into the interior.

So the entourage continued their march north for another two days. There the youth found a rise where, if the soil was not exactly as rich as the earlier spot, at least there was no fear of flooding.

“How about it?” asked the youth. “Here is also good.”

The farmers shook their heads.

This scene repeated itself any number of times until finally they arrived at the site of present-day Asahikawa. Seven days and one hundred miles from Sapporo.

“What about here?” asked the youth, more uncertain than ever.

“No go,” answered the farmers.

“But from here, we climb mountains,” said the youth.

“We don’t mind,” said the farmers gleefully.

And so they crossed the Shiokari Pass.

Needless to say, there was a reason why the farmers had passed up the rich bottomland and insisted on going deep into the wilderness. The fact was, they were on the lam. They had skipped town, walking out on sizable debts, and wanted to get as far away from civilization as possible.

Of course, the Ainu youth had no way of knowing this. And so naturally his initial surprise at the farmers’ rejection of fertile farmland soon turned to bewilderment, distress, and loss of self-confidence.

Nevertheless, the youth’s character was sufficiently complex that by the time the entourage crossed the Shiokari Pass, he had given himself over to his incomprehensible fate, leading them northward, ever northward. He took pains to choose the most rough trails, the most perilous bogs, to please his patrons.

Four days north of the Shiokari Pass, the entourage came on to a west-flowing river. By consensus, it was decided they should head east.

This tack sent them up horrible trails through horrible terrain. They fought through seas of brush bamboo, hacked their way across fields of shoulder-high grass a half-day at a time, waded through mud up to their chests, squirmed up crags, anything to get farther east. At night, they spread their tarps over the river-bank and kept an ear out for the howling of wolves while they slept. Their arms, scraped raw from the bush bamboo, were beset at every turn by gnats and mosquitoes that would burrow into their ears to suck blood.

Five days east, they found their way blocked by mountains and could go no further. What lay beyond was not fit for human settlement, the youth declared. Upon hearing this, the farmers halted in their tracks. This was July 8, 1881, 150 miles overland from Sapporo.

First thing, they surveyed the lay of the land, tested the water, checked the soil. It was reasonably good farmland. Then they divided the land among the group and erected a communal log cabin in the center.

The Ainu youth came upon a band of Ainu hunters passing through the area. “What is this area called?” he asked them.

“Do you really think this asshole of a terrain even deserves a name?” they replied.

So for the time being, this frontier was without a name. As another dwelling (or at least another dwelling that desired human contact) did not exist for forty miles, the settlement had no need for a name. In fact, when in 1889 an official census taker from the Territorial Government pressed the group for a name, the settlers remained steadfastly indifferent. Sickle and hoe in hand, they met in the communal hut and decided against naming the settlement. The official was literally up a creek. All he could do was to count the falls in the nearby river, twelve, and report the name of Junitaki-buraku, or Twelve Falls Settlement, to the Territorial Government. From then on, the settlement bore the formal appellation Junitaki-buraku (and later, Junitaki-mura, Twelve Falls Village).

The area fanned a sixty-degree arc between two mountains and was cut down the middle by a deep river gorge. An asshole of a terrain for sure. The ground was covered with brush bamboo while huge evergreens spread their roots far and wide. Wolves and elk and bears and muskrats and birds competed in the wilderness for the meager food available. Everywhere flies and mosquitoes swarmed.

“You all really want to live here?” asked the Ainu youth.

“You bet,” replied the farmers.

It is not obvious why the Ainu youth, instead of returning to his own home, chose to stay on with the settlers. Perhaps he was curious, hypothesized the author (who loved to hypothesize). Whatever the case, if he had not remained, it’s doubtful the settlers could have made it through the winter. The youth taught the settlers how to root for winter vegetables, how to survive the snow, how to fish in the frozen river, how to lay traps for the wolves, how to escape the attention of bears before hibernation, how to determine the weather from the direction of the wind, how to prevent chilblains, how to roast bush bamboo roots for food, how to fell evergreen trees in a set direction. Soon, everyone came to recognize the youth’s value, and the youth himself regained his confidence. He eventually took a Japanese name and married the daughter of one of the settlers, with whom he had three children. No more “Full Moon on the Wane.”

Yet, even with the practical knowledge of the Ainu youth, the settlers’ lot was miserable. By August, each family had built its own hut, which being a hurriedly thrown together affair of split logs did next to nothing to keep out the winter wind. It was not uncommon to awaken and find a foot of snow by one’s pillow. Most families had but one set of bedding besides, so the menfolk typically had to sleep curled up by the fire. When their store of food was used up, the settlers went out in search of fish and whatever shriveled-up wild plants they could find deep beneath the snow. It was an especially cold winter. No one died, however. There was no fighting, no tears. Their strength was their inbred poverty.

Spring came. Two children were born and the settlers’ number rose to twenty-one. Two hours before giving birth the mothers were working in the fields, and the morning after giving birth they were working in the fields.

The group planted corn and potatoes. The men felled trees and burned the roots to clear more land. New life came over the face of the earth, young plants bore fruit, but just when the settlers were sighing with relief, they were beset by swarm after swarm of locusts.

The locusts swept in over the mountains. At first, they looked like a giant black cloud. Then there came a rumbling. No one had any idea what was about to overtake them. Only the Ainu youth knew. He ordered the men to build fires in their fields. Dousing their last piece of furniture in their last drop of oil, the men burned everything they could lay their hands on. The womenfolk banged pots with pestles. They did everything in their power, but everything was not enough. Hundreds of thousands of locusts swooped down on their crops and laid them to waste. Nothing was left in their wake.

When the locusts departed, the youth went out into the fields and wept. Not one of the settlers shed a tear. They gathered up the dead locusts and burned them, and as soon as they were in ashes, the settlers continued to clear land.

They went back to eating fish and wild vegetables all through the next winter. In spring, another three children were born. People planted the fields. In summer, they were visited by locusts again. And again all the crops were chewed down to the roots. This time, however, the Ainu youth did not weep.

The onslaught of the locusts finally stopped the third year. A long spell of rain had gotten to the locust eggs. But the excessive rain damaged the crops. The following year saw an unusual infestation of beetles, and the summer after that was unusually cold.

Having read that far, I shut the book, opened another beer, and pulled a box lunch of salmon roe out of my pack.

She sat across from me with folded arms, fast asleep. The autumn morning sun, slanting in through the train window, spread a thin blanket of light over her lap. A tiny moth blew in from somewhere and fluttered about like a scrap of paper. The moth ended up on her breast and stayed there before flying off again. Once the moth had flown off, she looked the slightest bit older.

I smoked a cigarette, then resumed reading the Authoritative History of Junitaki Township.

By the sixth year, the settlement was at last holding its own. The crops were bearing, the cabins refurbished, and everyone had adjusted to life in a cold climate. Sawed-board houses took their place among the log cabins, hearths were built, lamps hung. People loaded up a boat with what little they had in the way of extra produce and dried fish and elk antlers, traveled two days to market in the nearest town, and bought salt and clothing and oil in exchange. Some learned how to make charcoal from the timber felled in clearing fields. A number of similar settlements sprang up downstream and trade was established.

As groundbreaking continued, it became apparent that the settlement was sorely short of hands, so the group convened the village council, and after two days decided to call in reinforcements from the old hometown. The question of the reneged loans arose, but from replies to inquiries carefully couched in their letters home, they learned that their creditors had long since given up on trying to collect. The eldest of the settlers then sent off notes to their old buddies, asking that they join the settlers in working the new land. In 1889, the census was conducted, the same year the settlement was officially named.

The following year, six new families, comprising nineteen new settlers, came to the settlement. They were greeted with upgraded log cabins. A tearful reunion was had by all. The new residents were given land, and with the help of the first settlers they planted crops and built their own houses.

By 1893, four more new families had arrived with sixteen people. By 1897, seven more new families had arrived with twenty-four people.

The number of settlers rose steadily. The communal hut was expanded into a more formal meeting hall, and next to it they built a small shrine. The settlement officially became a village. From Junitaki-buraku to Junitaki-mura. The postman began to make appearances, however infrequently. And while millet was the main diet of the villagers, they now occasionally mixed in real white rice.

Of course, they were not without their share of misfortune. Officials came through to levy taxes and enforce military service. The Ainu youth, by now in his mid-thirties, was particularly upset by these developments. He could not understand why such things as taxes and military service were at all necessary.

“It seems to me things were better off like they used to be,” he said.

Even so, the village kept on developing.

In 1903, they discovered higher ground near the village suitable for grazing, and the village set up a communal sheep pasture. An official from the Territorial Government instructed them in building fences, supplying irrigation, and constructing livestock shelter. Next, prison labor was called in to lay a road along the river, and as time went on, flocks of sheep, bought cheap from the government, were being herded up the road. The farmers had not the slightest idea why the government was being so generous. Well, why not? they thought. After so hard a struggle, this was welcome relief.

Of course, the government was not being generous for nothing, giving them these sheep. Prodded by the military’s goal of self-sufficiency in thermal wool for the upcoming campaign on the continent, the government had ordered the Ministry of Agriculture and Business to increase efforts in sheep raising, and the Ministry had forced these plans on the Territorial Government. The Russo-Japanese War was drawing near.

In all the village, it was again the Ainu man, no longer a youth, who showed the greatest interest in sheep. He learned methods of sheep raising from the territorial official and took on the responsibility of the village pasture. There is no knowing exactly why he became so devoted to the sheep. It may have been the complexities of life brought on by a village population suddenly growing by leaps and bounds.

The pasture became home to thirty-six head of Southdowns and twenty-one head of Shropshires in addition to two Border collies. The Ainu man became an able shepherd, and with each passing year the number of sheep and dogs increased. He came to love his sheep and his dogs with all his heart. The officials were most satisfied. Puppies were farmed out as top sheepdogs to similar sheep farms established nearby.

When the Russo-Japanese War broke out, five village youths were conscripted and sent to the front line in China. Two were killed and one lost his left arm when an enemy grenade exploded in a skirmish over a small hill. When the fighting ended three days later, the other two gathered up the scattered bones of their fellow village youths. All had been sons of first-and second-wave settlers. One of the dead was the eldest son of the Ainu youth-turned-shepherd. He died wearing an army-issue wool overcoat.

“Why send boys off to war in a foreign land?” the Ainu shepherd went around asking people. By then he was forty-five.

Nobody would answer him. The Ainu shepherd broke off from the village and stayed out at the pasture, spending his waking and sleeping hours with the sheep. His wife had died from bronchitis five years earlier, and his two remaining daughters had both married. For his services in minding the sheep, the village provided him with scant wages and food.

After losing his son, the Ainu shepherd grew embittered. He died at age sixty-two. One winter morning, the boy who was his helper found him sprawled out dead on the floor of the sheep-house. Frozen. Two sorry-eyed grandpuppies of the original two Border collies whined at his side. The sheep, oblivious, were grazing away at the hay in their enclosure. The low grinding rhythm of sheep teeth sounded like a chorus of castanets.

The history of Junitaki went on, but history for the Ainu youth ended there. I got up to go to the john and piss two beers’ worth. When I returned to my seat, she was awake and gazing distractedly out the window. Rice fields stretched far and wide. Occasionally there’d be a silo. Rivers drew near, then retreated. I smoked a cigarette, taking in the scenery together with her profile taking in the scenery. She spoke not a word. Once I finished my cigarette, I went back to the book. The shadow of a steel bridge flashed across the page.

After the unhappy tale of the Ainu youth who became a shepherd, got old, and died, the remaining history was rather boring fare. An outbreak of sheep bloat claimed ten head, severe cold dealt a temporary blow to crops, but other than that everything went smoothly with the village. In the Taisho era it was incorporated as a township and newly renamed Junitaki-cho. Junitaki-cho did well, building more facilities, a primary school, a town hall, a postal service outpost. By this time, the settling of Hokkaido was nearly complete.

With arable land reaching its limit, several young men left Junitaki-cho to seek their fortune in the new worlds of Manchuria and Sakhalin. In 1937, the Sheep Professor made his appearance in town.

Read the history: “Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry technical administrator much recognized for his studies in Korea and Manchuria, Dr. _____ (aged 32) took leave of his post due to special circumstances and established his own sheep ranch in a mountain valley north of Junitaki-cho.”

Nothing else about him was written.

The author himself seemed to have gotten bored by the events of the thirties on, his reportage becoming spotty and fragmentary. Even the writing style faltered, losing the clarity of his discussion of the Ainu youth.

I skipped the thirty-one years between 1938 and 1969 and jumped to the section entitled “Junitaki Today.” Of course, the book’s “today” being 1970, it was hardly today’s “today.” Still, writing the history of one town obviously imposed the necessity of bringing it up to a “today.” And even if such a today soon ceases to be today, no one can deny that it is in fact a today. For if a today ceased to be today, history could not exist as history.

According to my Authoritative History of Junitaki Township, in 1969 the population had dropped to 15,000, a decrease of 6,000 from ten years prior, due almost entirely to a decline in farming. The unusually high rate of agrarian disenfranchisement came about in reaction, it stated, to changes within the national infrastructure in a period of rapid industrial growth, as well as to the peculiar nature of cold-climate farming in Hokkaido.

What became of their abandoned farmlands? They were reforested. The land that their forefathers had sweated blood clearing, the descendants now planted with trees. Strange how that worked.

Which was to say that the primary industry in Junitaki today was forestry and lumber milling. The town now boasted several small mills where they made television cabinets, vanities, and tourist-trade figurines of bears and Ainus. The former communal hut was converted into the Pioneer Museum, where the farming tools and eating utensils from early settlement days were kept on display. There were also keepsakes of the village youths who had died in the Russo-Japanese War. Also a lunch box bearing the teeth marks of a brown bear. And even the letter to the old hometown inquiring about the debt collectors.

But if the truth be known, Junitaki today was a dreadfully dull town. The townsfolk, when they came home from work, watched an average of four hours of television before going to bed each night. Balloting ran high, but it was never any surprise who won the election. The town slogan was “Bountiful Humanity in Bountiful Nature.” Or so the sign in front of the station read.

I closed the book, yawned, and fell asleep.

The Further Decline of Junitaki and Its Sheep

We caught the connecting train in Asahikawa and headed north over the Shiogari Pass, traveling by largely the same route the Ainu youth and the eighteen dirt farmers had taken a century before.

The autumn sun shone brilliantly though the last vestiges of virgin forest and the blazing red leaves of the rowan ash. The air was still and clear. So much so just looking at the scenery made your eyes hurt.

The train was empty at first, but midway a whole carload of commuting high school students piled in and we were plunged into their commotion, their shouting and dandruff and body odors and incomprehensible conversations and sexual urges with no outlet. This went on for thirty minutes until they disappeared all at the same station. Once again, the train was empty, with not a voice to be heard.

We split a chocolate bar between us and munched on it as the scenery paraded before our eyes. A tranquil light spilled over the ground. Everything seemed so far away, as if we were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. She whistled snatches of “Johnny B. Goode.” This may have been the longest we two had ever not spoken.

It was afternoon when we got off the train. Standing on the platform, I took a deep breath and gave myself a good stretch. The air was so fresh I felt as if my lungs were going to collapse. The sun on my arms was warm and sensuous, even as the air was three or four degrees cooler than in Sapporo.

A row of old brick warehouses lined the tracks, and alongside these was a pyramid stack of logs three yards long, soaked and dark from the rain of the previous night. After the train we’d come on pulled out of the station, there was no one in sight, only a flowerbed of marigolds that were swaying in the cool breeze.

From the platform, we could see a typical small-scale regional city. Complete with main street, modest department store, bus terminal, tourist information center. A singularly dull town, if first impressions were any indication.

“This is our destination?” she asked.

“No, not here. We’ve got another train ride from here. Our destination is a much, much smaller town than this.”

I yawned and took another deep breath.

“This is our transit point. Here’s where the first settlers turned eastward.”

“First settlers?”

In the time before our connecting train arrived, we sat down in front of the heater in the waiting room, and I related snippets of the history of Junitaki-cho. The chronology got a bit confused, so I used a page from my notebook to make a simplified timeline based on the summary at the back of the Authoritative History. On the left side of the page, I listed dates and developments in the history of Junitaki-cho and on the right the major events in the history of Japan in the same period. A fairly respectable chronological table.

For example, in 1905 Port Arthur fell and the Ainu youth’s son was killed in the war. And if my memory served me correctly, that was also the year the Sheep Professor was born. Incrementally, history linked up.

“Looking at things this way,” she said, comparing the left and right sides of the chronology, “we Japanese seem to live from war to war.”

“Sure seems that way,” I said.

“How did things ever get like this?”

“It’s complicated. I can’t really say. Not just like that.”

“Humph.”

The waiting room, like most waiting rooms, was deserted and unremarkable. The benches were miserably uncomfortable, the ashtrays swollen with waterlogged cigarette butts, the air stale. On the walls were travel posters and most-wanted lists. The only other people there were an old man wearing a camel-color sweater and a mother with her four-year-old son. The old man sat glued in position, poring through a literary magazine. He turned the pages as slowly as if he were peeling away adhesive tape. Fifteen minutes from one page to the next. The mother and child looked like a couple whose marriage was on the rocks.

“What it comes down to is that everyone’s poor, but we want to believe that if things work out, we’ll be through with poverty.”

“Like the people in Junitaki-cho.”

“Exactly. That’s why they worked themselves to death to break new ground. Even so, most of the settlers died poor.”

“How come?”

“It’s the territory. Hokkaido’s cold country, every few years there’s a killer frost. If their crops die, there’s no food to eat, no income to buy oil. They can’t even buy next year’s seeds. So they put their land in hock and borrow money at high interest. But no agriculture in any region is productive enough to pay off that interest, and in the end the land is taken away from them. That’s what reduces many farmers to tenant farming.”

I flipped through the pages of my Authoritative History and read to her: “By 1930, the number of self-employed farmers had fallen to 46 percent of the population of Junitaki-cho. They had been dealt a double blow, a depressed market compounded by a killer frost.”

“So after all their struggles to clear a new land for themselves to farm, they only got deeper in debt,” she concluded.

As there were still forty minutes before our train, she decided to take a walk around town by herself. I stayed behind in the waiting room, had a Coke, and took up where I’d left off in another book I’d been reading. I was soon bored with it and put it away. I could not concentrate. My head was full of Junitaki-cho sheep chomping up all the print I could feed them. I closed my eyes and sighed. A passing freight train sounded its whistle.

A few minutes before departure time, she returned with a bag of apples. We ate them for lunch, then boarded the train.

The train had surely seen better days. Weak portions of the floorboards were buckled and worn. Walking the aisle was enough to make you sway from side to side. The seat coverings had lost their pile and the cushions were like month-old bread. An air of doom, mixed with toilet and kerosene smells, filled the car. I spent ten minutes trying to raise a window to let in some fresh air, but no sooner did I get it open than some fine sand blew in and I had to spend an equal amount of time closing the window.

The train had two cars. There was a total of fifteen passengers, lumped together by the common bonds of disinterest and ennui. The old man in the camel-color sweater was still reading his magazine. At his reading speed, the issue may have gotten to be three months old. One heavy middle-aged lady was training her gaze at a distant point in space outside, as if a critic listening to a Scriabin sonata.

The children were quiet too. They sat still and stared out the window. Occasionally, someone coughed with a dry rasp that sounded like a mummy tapped on the head with a pair of tongs.

Each time the train pulled into a station, someone got off. Whenever someone got off, the conductor also got off to collect the ticket, then the conductor would get back on. The conductor was so totally without expression he could have pulled off a bank robbery without covering his face. No new passengers ever got on.

Outside, the river stretched forever, muddy brown from the rains. Glinting in the autumn sun, it looked like a spillway of café au lait. An improved road along the river popped in and out of view, and infrequently there’d be a huge truck hurtling westward with a load of lumber. On the whole, though, the road seemed practically unused. Roadside billboards relayed their sponsors’ messages to no one, nowhere. I warded off boredom by looking at each new billboard, noting the sharp, urban appeal. A terrifically tanned girl in a bikini pursed her lips over a Coke, a middle-aged character actor wrinkled his brow at a tilted glass of Scotch, a diver’s watch lavishly splashed with water, a model in the midst of a slick, sophisticated interior, doing her nails. The new pioneers of advertising were carving a mean streak deep into the country.

It was 2:40 when the train reached its destination, Junitaki-cho. Somewhere along the line we had dozed off, apparently missing the station announcement. The diesel engine had squeezed out its last breath, and everything went silent. I woke with a start, the silence tingling on my skin. When I looked around, no other passengers were on board.

I brought our bags down from the rack, roused her with a couple of taps on the shoulder, and we got off. The wind that whisked the length of the platform was already tinged with a late-autumn chill. The dark shadows of the hills crept across the ground like fatal stains. Directly beyond the streets the two ranges of hills on either side of the town seemed to meet, neatly enfolding the town like two cupped hands protecting a match flame from the wind. The hills towered above the narrow station platform.

We stood there, rather at a loss, gazing at the scene for a few minutes.

“Where’s the Sheep Professor’s old homestead?” she asked.

“Up in the mountains. Three hours from here by car.”

“Do we head straight out?”

“No,” I said. “If we set out right now, it’ll be the middle of the night before we get there. Let’s stay here overnight and get a fresh start in the morning.”

In front of the station was a small rotary, which was empty. No one milling about. No taxis picking up or letting off customers. Just, in the middle, a bird-shaped fountain with no water in it. The bird looked vacantly up at the sky with an open mouth and nothing to say. Around the fountain was planted a circular bank of marigolds. One glance told you the town was far more run-down than it had been a decade ago. Almost no one was out on the streets, and the few that were seemed to share the distracted run-down expression of a town on the wane.

To the left of the rotary were a half dozen old warehouses, from the days of shipping by rail. Of old-fashioned brick construction, they had high-pitched roofs and steel doors that had been painted countless times, only to have been abandoned in the end. Huge crows perched in rows along the roof ridges, silently surveying the town. Next came an empty lot under a thicket of weeds that could make you break out in hives up to your shoulder, in the center of which were the remains of two old cars left out to the elements. Both cars were missing tires, their guts ripped out from beneath pried hoods.

The GUIDE TO THE TOWN, posted next to the deserted rotary, was so weathered you could barely make it out. The only discernible words were JUNITAKI-CHO and NORTHERN LIMIT OF LARGE-SCALE RICE FARMING.

Directly in front of the rotary was a small street lined with shops. A street not unlike such streets anywhere in Japan except that the road was absurdly wide, giving the town an impression of even greater sparseness, and chill. On either side of the road was a line of rowan ashes, in brilliant foliage but somehow no less chill. It was a chill that infused every living thing, without regard for human fortune. The listless day-to-day goings-on of the town residents—everything—were engulfed in that chill.

I hiked my backpack up onto my shoulders and walked to the end of the five-hundred-yard-long commercial district, looking for a place to stay. There was no inn of any kind. A third of the shops had their shutters pulled down. A half-torn sign in front of a watch shop banged about in the wind.

Where the street of shops cut off abruptly, there was a large parking lot, again overgrown with weeds. In it were a cream-colored Honda Fairlady and a sports car, a red Toyota Celica. Both brand new. What a picture they made, their mint condition smack in the middle of a deadbeat town.

Beyond the shops, the road ambled down a slope to the river, where it split left and right at a T. Along this road were small one-story wood-frame houses, with dust-gray trees that thrust bram-bled limbs up into the sky. I don’t know what it was, but every tree had the most eccentric array of branches. Each house had, at its front door, identical large fuel tanks with matching milk-delivery boxes. And on every rooftop stood unimaginably tall television antennas. These silver feelers groped about in the air, in defiance of the mountains that formed a backdrop to the town.

“But there’s no inn,” she said worriedly.

“Not to worry. Every town has got to have an inn.”

We retraced our steps back to the station and asked the two attendants there where we could find one. Aged far enough apart to have been parent and child, they were obviously bored silly and explained the whereabouts of the lodgings in distressingly thorough detail.

“There are two inns,” said the elder attendant. “One is on the expensive side, the other is fairly cheap. The expensive one is where we put up important officials from the Territorial Government and hold special banquets.”

“The food is not bad at all there,” said the younger attendant.

“The other is where traveling businessmen or young folk or, well, where regular people stay. The looks of it might put you off, but it’s not unsanitary or anything. The bath is something else.”

“Though the walls are thin,” said the younger.

Whereupon the two them launched into debate over the thinness of the walls.

“We’ll go for the expensive one,” I said. No reason to economize. There was the envelope, still stuffed with money.

The younger attendant tore a sheet off a memo pad and drew a precise map of the way to the inn.

“Thank you,” I said. “I guess you don’t get as many people coming through here as you did ten years ago.”

“No, that’s for sure,” said the elder. “Now there’s only one lumber mill and no other industry to speak of. The bottom’s fallen out of agriculture. The population’s gone way down too.”

“Hell, there aren’t enough students to form proper classes at the school anymore,” added the younger.

“What’s the population?”

“They say it’s around seven thousand, but really it’s got to be less than that. More like five thousand, I’d guess,” the younger said.

“Take this spur line, boy, before they shut us down, which may be any day. Come what may, we’re the third deepest in the red of any line in the country,” the elder said with finality.

I was surprised to hear that there were train lines more run-down than this one. We thanked them and left.

The inn was down the slope and to the right of the street of shops, three hundred yards along the river. An old inn, nice enough, with a glimmer of the charm it must have had in the heyday of the town. Facing the river, it had a well-cared-for garden. In one corner of the garden, a shepherd puppy buried its nose in a food dish, eating an early evening meal.

“Mountaineering is it?” asked the maid who showed us to our room.

“Mountaineering it is,” I answered simply.

There were only two rooms upstairs. Each a spacious layout, and if you stepped out into the corridor, you had a view of the same café-au-lait river we’d seen from the train.

My girlfriend wanted to take a bath, so I went to check out the Town Hall. Town Hall was located on a desolate street two blocks west of the street of shops, yet the building was far newer and in much better shape than I’d expected.

I walked up to the Livestock Section in Town Hall, introduced myself with a magazine namecard from two years before when I’d posed as a freelance writer, and broke into a spiel about needing to ask a few questions about sheep raising, if they didn’t mind. It was pretty farfetched that a women’s weekly magazine would have need for a piece on sheep, but the livestock officer bought the line immediately and conducted me into his office.

“At present, we have two-hundred-some sheep in the township, all Suffolks. That is to say, meat sheep. The meat is parceled out to nearby inns and restaurants, and enjoys considerable favor.”

I pulled out my notebook and jotted down appropriate notes. No doubt this poor man would be buying the women’s magazine for the next several issues. Which, admittedly, made me feel embarrassed.

“A cooking article, I assume?” he stopped to ask once he’d detailed the current state of sheep raising.

“Well, of course that’s part of it,” I said. “But more than that, we’re looking to paint a total picture of sheep.”

“A total picture?”

“You know, their character, habits, that sort of thing.”

“Oh,” said my informant.

I closed my notebook and drank the tea that had been served. “We’d heard there was an old sheep ranch up in the hills somewhere.”

“Yes, there is. It was appropriated by the U.S. Army after the war and is no longer in use. For about ten years after the Americans returned it, a rich man from somewhere used the place for a villa, but it’s so far out of the way that he finally stopped going up there. The house is as good as abandoned now. Which is why the ranch is on loan to the town. We ought to buy it and turn the place into a tourist ranch, but I’m afraid the finances of this township aren’t up to it. First, we’d have to improve the road …”

“On loan?”

“In the summer, our municipal sheep farm takes about fifty head up into the mountains. There isn’t enough grass in the municipal pasture and it’s quite fine pastureland up there, as pastures go. When the weather starts turning bad around the latter half of September, the sheep are brought back down.”

“Would you happen to know when it is that the sheep are up there?”

“It varies from year to year, but generally speaking it’s from the beginning of May to the latter half of September.”

“And how many men take the sheep up there?”

“One man. The same man’s been doing it these ten years.”

“Would it be possible to meet this man?”

The official placed a call to the municipal sheep farm.

“If you go there now, you can meet him,” he said. “Shall we drive there?”

I declined politely at first, but I soon learned that I couldn’t otherwise get to the sheep farm. There were no taxis or car rentals in town, and on foot it would have taken an hour and a half.

The livestock officer drove a small sedan. He passed our inn and headed west, taking a long concrete bridge to cross over a cold marshy area, then climbing up a mountain slope. Tires spun over the gravel.

“Coming from Tokyo, you probably think this is a ghost town.”

I said something noncommittal.

“The truth is we are dying. We’ll hold on as long as we have the railway, but if that goes we’ll be dead for sure. It’s a curious thing, a town dying. A person dying I can understand. But a whole town dying …”

“What will happen if the town dies?”

“What will happen? Nobody knows. They’ll all just run away before that, not wanting to know. If the population falls below one thousand—which is well within the realm of possibility—we’ll pretty much be out of a job, and we might be the ones who have to run out on everything.”

I offered him a cigarette and gave him a light with the sheep-engraved Dupont lighter.

“There’s plenty of good jobs in Sapporo. I’ve got an uncle who runs a printing company there, and he needs more hands. Work comes from the school system, so business is steady. Really, moving there would be the best thing. At least it’d beat monitoring shipments of sheep and cattle way out here.”

“Probably,” I said.

“But when it comes to actually packing up and leaving, I can’t bring myself to do it. Can you see what I mean? If the town’s really going to die, then the urge to stay on and see the town to its end wins out.”

“Were you born here in this town?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, but did not go on. A melancholy-hued sun had already sunk a third of the way behind the hills.

Two poles stood at the entrance to the sheep farm and between them hung a sign: JUNITAKI-CHO MUNICIPAL SHEEP FARM. The road passed under the sign and led up a slope, disappearing into the dense autumn foliage.

“Beyond the woods there’s the sheep house and behind that the caretaker’s quarters. What shall we do about you getting back to town?”

“It’s downhill. I can manage on foot. Thanks for everything.”

The car pulled out of view, and I walked between the poles and up the slope. The last rays of the sun added an orange tinge to the already golden maple leaves. The trees were tall, patches of sunlight filtering down through the boughs and shimmering on the gravel road.

Emerging from the woods, I came upon a narrow building on the face of the hill, and with it the smell of livestock. The sheep house was roofed in red corrugated iron, pierced in three places by ventilation stacks.

There was a doghouse at the entrance to the house. No sooner had I seen it than a small Border collie came out on a tether and barked two or three times. It was a sleepy-eyed old dog with no threat in its bark. When I rubbed its neck, it calmed right down. Yellow plastic bowls of food and water were placed in front of the doghouse. As soon as I released my hand, the dog went back in the doghouse, satisfied, aligned its paws with the portal, and lay down on the floor.

The interior of the sheep house was dim. No one was around. A wide concrete walkway led down the middle, and to either side were the sheep pens. Along the walkway were gutters for draining off the sheep piss and wash water. Here and there windows cut through the wood-paneled walls, revealing the jaggedness of the hills. The evening sun cast red over the sheep on the right side, plunging the sheep on the left side into a murky blue shadow.

The instant I entered the sheep house, all two hundred sheep turned in my direction. Half the sheep stood, the other half lay on the hay spread over their pen floors. Their eyes were an unnatural blue, looking like tiny wellsprings flowing from the sides of their faces. They shone like glass eyes which reflected light from straight on. They all stared at me. Not one budged. A few continued munching away on the grass in their mouths, but there was no other sound. A few, their heads protruding from their pens, had stopped drinking water and had frozen in place, fixing their eyes on me. They seemed to think as a group. Had my standing in the entrance momentarily interrupted their unified thinking? Everything stopped, all judgment on hold. It took a move by me to restart their mental processes. In their eight separate pens, they began to move. The ewes gathered around the seed ram in the female pen; in the males-only pens, the rams vied for dominant position. Only a few curious ones stayed at the fence staring at me.

Attached to the long, level black ears that stuck out from the sides of the face were plastic chips. Some sheep had blue chips, some yellow chips, some red chips. They also had colored markings on their backs.

I walked on tiptoe so as not to alarm them. Feigning disinterest, I approached one pen and extended my hand to touch the head of a young ram. It flinched but did not move away. Tense, wide-eyed, rigid. Perhaps he would be the gauge of my intrusion. The other sheep glared at us.

Suffolk sheep are peculiar to begin with. They’re completely black, yet their fleece is white. Their ears are large and stick flat out like moth wings, and their luminous blue eyes and long bony noses make them seem foreign. These Suffolks neither rejected nor accepted my presence, regarding me more as a temporary manifestation. Several pissed with a tinkling flourish. The piss flowed across the floor, under my feet, into the gutter.

I exited the sheep house, petting the Border collie again and taking a deep breath.

The sun had set behind the mountains. A pale violet gloom spread over the slant of the hills like ink dispersing in water. I circled around the back of the sheep house, crossed a wooden bridge over a stream, and headed toward the caretaker’s quarters. A cozy little one-story affair, dwarfed by a huge attached barn that stored hay and farm tools.

The caretaker was next to the barn, stacking plastic bags of disinfectant beside a yard-wide by yard-deep concrete trough. As I approached, he glanced up once, then returned to the task at hand, unaffected by my presence. Not until I was in front of him did he stop and wipe his face with the towel around his neck.

“Tomorrow’s the day for disinfecting the sheep,” he said, pulling out a crushed pack of cigarettes and lighting up. “This here’s where we pour the liquid disinfectant and make the sheep swim from end to end. Otherwise, being indoors, they get all kinds of bugs over the winter.”

“You do all this by yourself?”

“You kidding? I got two helpers. Them and me and the dog. The dog does most of the work, though. The sheep trust the dog. He ain’t no sheepdog if the sheep don’t trust him.”

The man was a couple inches shorter than me, solidly built. He was in his late forties, with close-cropped hair, stiff and straight as a hairbrush. He pulled his rubber gloves off as if he were peeling off a layer of skin. Whacking himself on his pants, he stood with his hands in his patch pockets. He was more than a caretaker of sheep; he was rather like a drill sergeant at a military school.

“So you’ve come to ask something, eh?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, do your askin’.”

“You’ve been in this line of work a long time?”

“Ten years,” he said. “If that’s a long time, I don’t know, but I do know my sheep. Before that I was in the Self-Defense Forces.”

He threw his hand towel around his neck and looked up at the sky.

“You stay here through the winter?”

“Well, uh,” he coughed, “I guess so. No other place for me to go. Besides, there’s a lot of busywork to take care of over the winter. We get near to six feet of snow in these parts. It piles up and if the roof caves in, you got yourself some flat sheep. Plus I feed them, clean out the sheep house, and this and that.”

“When summer comes around, you take half of them up into the mountains?”

“That’s right.”

“How difficult is it walking so many sheep?”

“Easy. That’s what people used to do all the time. It’s only in recent years you got sheep keepers, not sheep herders. Used to be they’d keep them on the move the whole year ’round. In Spain in the fifteen hundreds, they had roads all over the country no one but shepherds could use, not even the King.”

The man spat phlegm onto the ground, rubbing it into the dirt with his shoe.

“Anyway, as long as they’re not frightened, sheep are very cooperative creatures. They’ll just follow the dog without asking any questions.”

I took out the Rat’s sheep photograph and handed it to the caretaker. “This is the place in the photo, right?”

“Sure is,” said the man. “No doubt about it: they’re our sheep too.”

“What about this one?” I pointed with my ballpoint pen to the stocky sheep with the star on its back.

The man squinted at the photograph a second. “No, that’s not one of ours. Sure is strange, though. There’s no way it could’ve gotten in there. The whole place is fenced in with wire, and I check each animal morning and night. The dog would notice if a strange one got in. The sheep would raise a fuss too. But you know, never in my life have I ever seen this breed of sheep.”

“Did anything strange happen this year when you were up in the mountains with the sheep?”

“Nothing at all,” he said. “It was peaceful as could be.”

“And you were up there alone all summer?”

“No, I wasn’t alone. Every other day staffers came up from town, and then there’d be some official observers too. Once a week I went down to town, and a replacement looked after the sheep. Need to stock up on provisions and things.”

“Then you weren’t holed up there alone the whole time?”

“No. Summer lasts as long as the snow doesn’t get too deep, and it’s only an hour and a half to the ranch by jeep. Hardly more than a little stroll. Of course, once it snows and cars can’t get through, you’re stuck up there the whole winter.”

“So nobody’s up on the mountain now?”

“Nobody but the owner of the villa.”

“The owner of the villa? But I heard that the place hasn’t been used in ages.”

The caretaker flicked his cigarette to the ground and stepped on it. “It hasn’t been used in ages. But it is now. If you had half a mind to, no reason why you couldn’t live there. I put in a little upkeep on the house myself. The electricity and gas and phone are all working. Not one pane of glass is broken.”

“The man from Town Hall said nobody was up there.”

“There’s lots of stuff those guys don’t know. I’ve gotten work on the side from the owner all along, never spilled a word to anyone. He told me to keep it quiet.”

The man wanted another cigarette, but his pack was empty. I offered him my half-smoked pack of Larks, folding against it a ten-thousand-yen note. The man considered the gratuity for a second, then put one cigarette to his lips and pocketed everything else. “Much obliged,” he said.

“So when did the owner show up?”

“Spring. Wasn’t yet spring thaw, so it must’ve been March. It was maybe five years since he’d been up here. Don’t rightly know why he came after all this time, but well, that’s the owner’s business and none of mine. He told me not to tell a soul. He must have had his reasons. In any case, he’s been up there ever since. I buy him his food and fuel in secret and deliver it by jeep a little at a time. With all he’s got, he could hold out for a year, easy.”

“He wouldn’t happen to be about my age, with a moustache, would he?”

“Uh-huh,” said the caretaker. “That’s the guy.”

“Just great,” I said. There was no need to show him the photograph.

Night in Junitaki

Negotiations with the caretaker went smoothly with supplementary monetary lubrication. The caretaker was to pick us up at the inn at eight in the morning, then drive us up to the sheep farm on the mountain.

“Disinfecting sheep can wait until afternoon, I figure,” said the caretaker. A hard-line realist.

“There’s one other thing that bothers me,” he said. “The ground’s going to be soft from yesterday’s rain, and there’s one place the car might not be able to get through. So I might have to ask you to walk from that point. Not through any fault of mine.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

Walking back down the hill, I suddenly recalled that the Rat’s father had a vacation villa in Hokkaido. Come to think of it, the Rat had said so a number of times years back. Up in the mountains, big pasture, old two-story house. I always remember important details long afterward. It should have struck me the moment I got the Rat’s letter. If I’d thought of it first, there’d have been any number of ways to follow up on it.

Annoyed with myself, I trudged back to town down a mountain road that was growing darker and darker. In the hour and a half I walked, I encountered only three vehicles. Two were large diesel trucks loaded down with lumber, one a small tractor. All three were heading downhill, but no one called out to offer me a ride. So much the better as far as I was concerned.

It was past seven by the time I reached the inn, and the night was already pitch black. My body was chilled to the core. The shepherd puppy stuck its nose out of the doghouse and whined in my direction.

She was wearing jeans and my crew-neck sweater, totally absorbed in a computer game in the recreation room near the entrance of the inn. Apparently a remodeled old parlor, the room still boasted a magnificent fireplace. A real wood-burning fireplace. In addition, there were four computer games and two pinball tables; the pinball tables were old Spanish cheapies, models you’d never be able to find anywhere.

“I’m starved,” she said.

I placed our order for dinner and took a quick bath. Drying off, I weighed myself, the first time in a long while. One hundred thirty-two pounds, same as ten years ago. The extra inch I put on around the middle had been neatly trimmed away over the last week.

When I got back to the room, dinner was laid out. Scooping morsels out of the steaming hot pot and washing them down with beer, I told her about the municipal sheep farm and the caretaker with the Self-Defense Forces background. She kicked herself for missing the sheep.

“Still,” she said, “I think we’re like one step away from our goal.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said.

We watched a Hitchcock movie on TV, crawled into bed and turned out the light. The clock downstairs struck eleven o’clock.

“Maybe not tonight,” I said. “We’ve gotta get up early.”

She didn’t say a thing. She was already asleep, breathing steadily. I set my travel alarm and had a smoke in the moonlight. The only sound was the rush of the river. The whole town seemed to be fast asleep.

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.

An Unlucky Bend in the Road

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.”

I nodded.

“Think you can walk it the rest of the way?”

“Walking isn’t the question. The point is the vibration.”

The caretaker gave one more good hard stamp of his shoe. A split second later came a dull, depressing retort. “It’s okay for walking.”

We returned to the jeep.

“It’s about another three miles from here,” said the caretaker. “Even with the woman, you’ll get there in an hour and a half. One straight road, not much of a rise. Sorry I can’t take you the whole way.”

“That’s all right. Thanks for everything.”

“You thinking to stay up there?”

“I don’t know. I might be back down tomorrow. It might take a week. Depends on how things go.”

He put another cigarette to his lips, but this time before he could even light up he started coughing. “You better watch out, though. The way things look, it’ll probably be an early snow. And once the snow sets in, you’re not gettin’ out.”

“I’ll keep an eye out,” I said.

“There’s a mailbox by the front door. The key’s wedged in the bottom. If nobody’s there, use that.”

We unloaded the jeep under the lead-gray skies. I took my windbreaker off and slipped on a heavy mountaineering parka. I was still cold.

With great difficulty, the caretaker managed to turn the jeep around, bumping into the cliff repeatedly. Each time he hit the cliff, it would crumble. Finally, he succeeded in turning completely around, honked his horn, and waved. I waved back. The jeep swung around the bend and was gone.

We were totally alone. As if we’d been dropped off at the edge of the world.

We set our backpacks on the ground and stood there saying nothing, trying to get our bearings. Below us a slender ribbon of silver river wound its way through the valley, both banks covered in dense green forest. Across the valley broke waves of low, autumn-tinged hills and beyond that a hazy view of the flatlands. Thin columns of smoke rose from the fields where rice straw was being burned after the harvest. A breathtaking panorama, but it made me feel no better. Everything seemed so remote, so … alien.

The sky was weighed down with a moist, uniform gray—clouds that seemed, as one, to blanket all light. Below, lumps of dense black cloud matter blew by, almost within touching distance. The clouds raced eastward from the direction of the Asian continent, cutting across the Japan Sea to Hokkaido on their way to the Sea of Okhotsk with remarkable speed. It all contributed to making us aware of the utter precariousness of where we stood. One passing gust and this whole crumbling curve plastered against the cliff could easily drag us to the bottom of the abyss.

“Let’s get moving,” I said, shouldering my monster backpack. Something awful, whether rain or sleet, was in the air, and I wanted to be near someplace with a roof. I sure didn’t want to get drenched out here in the cold.

We hoofed it away from that “dead man’s curve” on the double. The caretaker was right: the place was bad luck. There was a feeling of doom that first came over my body, then went on to strike a warning signal in my head. The sort of feeling you get when you’re crossing a river and all of a sudden you sink your feet into mud of a different temperature.

In just the three hundred yards we walked, the sound of our footsteps on the road surface went through any number of changes. Time and again, spring-fed rivulets snaked across our path.

Even after we cleared the curve, we did not slow down, trying to create as much distance from the spot as we could. Only after thirty minutes did we relax as the cliff eased back into a less precipitous slope and trees came into view.

Having made it this far, we had no problem with the rest of the way. The road flattened out, and the mountains lost their sharp ridges. Gradually, we were in the midst of a peaceful highland scene.

In another thirty minutes, the cone was completely behind us, and we came onto a plateau surrounded by mountains that looked like cutouts. It was as if the top half of a gigantic volcano had collapsed. A sea of birch trees in their autumn foliage stretched forever. Among the birches were brilliantly hued shrubs and undergrowth, here and there a toppled birch, brown and rotting.

“Seems like a nice enough place,” said my girlfriend.

After that curve, it looked like a nice place indeed.

The road led us straight up through this sea of birches. It was barely wide enough for a jeep and absolutely straight. Not one bend, no steep slopes. If you looked ahead, everything was sucked into one point. Even the black clouds passed directly over that point.

And it was quiet. The sound of the wind itself was swallowed by the grand expanse of forest. The air was split by the cry of a fat blackbird. Once the bird was out of sight, the silence flowed back in, a viscous fluid filling every opening. The leaves that had fallen on the road were saturated from the rain of two days before. The road seemed endless, like the birch forest around it. The low clouds, which had been terrifying only a short while before, now seemed surreal through the woods.

After another fifteen minutes, we came to a clear stream. There was a sturdy birch-trunk bridge with handrails, and nearby, a small clearing. We set down our packs, went down to the stream, and helped ourselves to a drink. It was the best-tasting water I’d ever had. Cold enough to redden my hands, and sweet, with a scant trace of earth.

The clouds kept on their appointed course, but unaccountably the weather was bearing up. She adjusted the laces of her mountain shoes, I sat back on the handrail and smoked a cigarette. Downstream, I could hear a waterfall. Not a very big waterfall from the sound of it. A playful breeze blew in from the left, sending a ripple through the piles of leaves and scattering them.

I finished my cigarette and ground it out with my shoe, only to find another butt right next to my foot. I picked it up. A flattened Seven Stars. Not wet, so it had been from after the rains. Which meant either yesterday or today.

I tried to recall what brand of cigarette the Rat smoked. But I couldn’t remember if he even smoked. I gave up and tossed the cigarette butt into the stream. The current whisked it off downstream in an instant.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I found a fresh cigarette butt, so somebody must have been sitting here having a smoke like me not too long ago.”

“Your friend?”

“I wish I could say.”

She sat herself down next to me and pulled back her hair, giving me the first view of her ears in a long time. The sound of the waterfall grew faint, then came back.

“You still like my ears?” she asked.

I smiled and quickly reached out my hand to touch them.

“You know I do,” I said.

After yet another fifteen minutes, the road suddenly came abruptly to an end, just as the sea of birches suddenly stopped. Before us was a vast lake of a pasture.

Posts set at five-yard intervals surrounded the pasture. Wire connecting them, old, rusty wire. We had, it seemed, found our way to the sheep pasture. I pushed open the well-worn double gate and entered. The grass was soft, the soil dark and moist.

Black clouds were passing over the pasture. In the direction of their flight, a tall, jagged line of mountains. The angle was different, to be sure, but there was no mistaking: these were the same mountains in the Rat’s photograph. I didn’t need to pull out the photograph to check.

Still, it was unsettling seeing with my very own eyes a scene I had by now seen hundreds of times in a photograph. The depth of the actual place seemed artificial. Less my being there than the sense that the scene had been temporarily thrown together in order to match the photograph.

I leaned on the gate and heaved a sigh. This was it, what we’d been searching for. And whatever meaning that search might have had, we’d found it.

“We made it, eh?” she said, touching my arm.

“We made it,” I said. Nothing more to say.

Straight on across the pasture stood an old American-style two-story wood-frame house. The house that the Sheep Professor had built forty years before and the Rat’s father had then bought. Nothing was nearby to compare it to, so from a distance it was difficult to tell how big it was. It was, in any case, squat and expressionless. Painted white, beneath the overcast skies it looked a foreboding gray. From the middle of the mustard, almost rust-colored gabled roof a rectangular brick chimney protruded. Instead of a fence around the house, there was a stand of evergreens which protected it from the elements. The place seemed curiously uninhabited. An odd house the more I looked at it. It wasn’t particularly inhospitable or cold, nor built in any unusual way, nor even much in disrepair. It was just… odd. As if a great creature had grown old without being able to express its feelings. Not that it didn’t know how to express them, but rather that it didn’t know what to express.

The smell of rain was suddenly everywhere. Time to get moving. We made a beeline across the pasture for the house. The clouds blowing in from the west were no longer gentle passing puffs; big threatening rain clouds were on the approach.

The pasture was huge. No matter how fast we walked, we seemed to make no progress. I couldn’t get any feeling for the distance. Come to think of it, this was the first level ground we’d walked on, so even things far off seemed within reach.

A flock of birds crossed the course of the clouds on their way north.

When, after hours it seemed, we finally made it to the house, the patter of rain had already started. Up close, the house was bigger and older than it had appeared from a distance. The white paint was blistered and peeling, the flakes on the ground long since brown from the rain. At this point, you’d have to strip off all the dead layers of paint before you could think about putting on a new coat. The prospect of painting such a house—why was I even thinking of this?—made me wince. A house where no one lives goes to pieces, and this house, without a doubt, was on its way there.

The trees, in contrast to the ailing house, were thriving, enveloping it like the treehouse in The Swiss Family Robinson. Long untrimmed, their branches spread wildly.

With the road up the mountain so tortuous, what a feat it must have been for the Sheep Professor to build this house. Hauling the lumber, doing all the work, sinking his entire savings into it, no doubt. To think that this same Sheep Professor was now holed up in a dark room at the Dolphin Hotel! You couldn’t ask for a better (or worse) personification of an unrewarded life.

I stood in the cold rain staring up at the house. Even up close, it showed no signs of habitation. Layers of fine sand had accumulated on the wooden shutters of the high, narrow double-hung windows. Rain had fixed the sand into configurations onto which another layer of sand had been blown, to be fixed in place by yet new rain.

In the middle of the front door at eye level was a four-inch-square windowpane covered on the inside with a cloth. The brass doorknob had been blasted with sand too, and grit crumbled off to the touch. The knob was as loose as an old molar, yet the door wouldn’t open. Made of three planks of oak, it was sturdier than it looked. I knocked loudly on it a couple of times for the hell of it. As expected, no answer. All I did was hurt my hand. The boughs of the huge pin oak swayed in a gust of wind, producing a virtual sandslide.

As the caretaker had said, the key was in the bottom of the mailbox. An old-fashioned brass key, tarnished white where hands had touched it.

“Don’t you think they’re a little careless leaving the key like that?” asked my girlfriend.

“Know any burglars who’d come all this way, steal something, and haul it back down?”

The key fit the keyhole remarkably well. I turned it, there was a loud click, and the bolt unlocked.

It was dim, unnaturally dim. The shutters had been drawn for a long time, and it took a while for my eyes to adjust. There was gloom everywhere.

The room was large. Large, quiet, and smelling like an old barn. A smell I remembered from childhood. Old furniture and cast-off carpets. We closed the door behind us, shutting the sound of the wind out entirely.

“Hello?” I shouted. “Anybody home?”

Of course not. It was clear no one was there. Only the presence of a grandfather clock ticking away beside the fireplace.

For a brief instant, I felt a sense of vertigo. There in the darkness, time turned on its head. Moments overlapped. Memories crumbled. Then it was over. I opened my eyes and everything fell back into place. Before my eyes was a plain gray space, nothing more.

“Are you all right?” she asked worriedly.

“I’m all right,” I said. “Let’s check upstairs.”

While she searched for a light switch, I checked the grandfather clock. It was the kind that had three weights you wound up on chains. Although all three had hit bottom, the clock was eking out its last increments of motion. Given the length of the chains, it would have taken about a week for the weights to hit bottom. Which meant that sometime during the week someone had been here to wind the clock.

I wound the three weights up to the top, then sat down on the sofa and stretched out my legs. An old prewar sofa, but quite comfortable. Not too soft, not too hard, and smelling like the palm of your hand.

A click, and the lights came on. She emerged from the kitchen, sat on the chaise, and lit up a clove cigarette. I lit up one myself. I’d learned to like them from her.

“Seems your friend was planning to spend the winter here,” she said. “There’s a whole winter’s worth of fuel and food in the kitchen. A regular supermarket.”

“But no sign of him.”

“What about upstairs?”

We climbed the stairs next to the kitchen. They careened off at an angle halfway up. Emerging onto the second floor, we seemed to have entered a different atmospheric layer.

“My head aches,” she said.

“Is it bad?”

“Oh, I’m all right. Don’t worry about it. I’m used to this.”

There were three bedrooms on the second floor. One big room to the left of a hallway and two smaller rooms to the right. Each room had a bare minimum of furniture, each room on the gloomy side. The big room had twin beds and a dresser. The beds were stripped down to their frames. Time was dead in the air.

Only in the farther small bedroom was there any lingering scent of human occupation. The bed was neatly made, the pillow with a slight indentation, and a pair of blue pajamas was folded at the head of the bed. An old-model lamp sat on the side table next to an overturned book. A Conrad novel.

Beside the bed was a heavy oak chest of drawers. In it an inventory of men’s sweaters, shirts, slacks, socks, and underwear. The sweaters and slacks were well worn, invariably frayed somewhere, but good clothes. I could swear I’d seen some of them before. They were the Rat’s, all right. Shirts with a fifteen-inch neck, slacks with a twenty-nine-inch waist.

Next to the window were an old table and chair of a singularly simple design you don’t see often anymore. In the desk drawer, a cheap fountain pen, three boxes of ink cartridges, and a letter set, the stationery unused. In the second drawer, a half-used supply of cough drops and various and sundry small items. The third drawer, empty. No diary, no notebook, nothing. He’d done away with all extras. Everything was squared away. Too much. I ran my finger over the desktop, and it came up white with dust. Not a whole lot of dust. Maybe a week’s worth.

I lifted up the double-hung window and pushed open the shutters. Low black clouds were swooping in. The wind had gathered strength, and you could almost see it cavorting through the pasture like a wild animal. Beyond that were the birches and beyond them the mountains. It was the exact same vista as in the photograph. Except there were no sheep.

We went back downstairs and sat on the sofa. The grandfather clock gave a command chime performance, then struck twelve times. We were silent until the last note was swallowed into the air.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“We wait. What else?” I said. “The Rat was here a week ago. His things are still here. He’s got to come back.”

“But if the snow sets in before that, we’ll be here all winter and our time will run out.”

True enough.

“Don’t your ears tell you anything?”

“They’re out of commission. If I open my ears, I get a headache.”

“Well, then, I guess we stretch out and wait for the Rat,” I said.

Which was to say we’d run out of options.

While she went into the kitchen and made coffee, I took a quick once-around the big living room, inspecting it corner to corner. The fireplace, a real working fireplace set in the middle of the main wall, was clean and ready for use. But it had not been used recently. A few oak leaves, having gotten in through the chimney, sat in the hearth. A large kerosene heater stood nearby. The fuel gauge read full.

Next to the fireplace was a built-in glass-paneled bookcase completely filled with old books. I pulled out a few volumes and leafed through them. All were prewar editions, almost none of any value. Geography and science and history and philosophy and politics. Utterly useless, the lot of them, except maybe as documents of an intellectual’s required reading forty years ago. There were postwar editions too, of similar worth. Only Plutarch’s Lives and Selected Greek Tragedies and a handful of novels had managed to survive the erosion of years. This was a first for me: never before had I set eyes on so grand a collection of useless tomes.

To the side of the bookcase was a display shelf, likewise built-in, and on it a stereo hi-fi—bookshelf speakers, amplifier, turntable—the kind popular in the mid-sixties. Some two hundred old records, every one scratched beyond reckoning, but at least not worthless. The musical taste was not as eroded as the ideology. I switched on the vacuum-tube amplifier, picked a record at random, and lowered the needle. Nat King Cole’s South of the Border. All at once the room felt transported back to the 1950s.

The wall opposite had four six-foot double-hung windows, equidistantly spaced. You could see the rain coming down in torrents now. A gray rain, which obscured the line of mountains in the distance.

The room was wood-floored, with an eight-by-twelve-foot carpet in the middle, on which were arranged a set of drawing-room furniture and a floor lamp. A dining table stood in one corner of the room, covered with dust.

The vacant aftermath of a room.

A door, set inconspicuously into the wall, opened into a fair-sized trunk room. It was stacked high and tight with surplus furniture, carpets, dishes, a set of golf clubs, a guitar, a mattress, overcoats, mountaineering boots, old magazines. Even junior high school exam reference books and a radio-controlled airplane. Mostly products of the fifties and sixties.

The house kept its own time, like the old-fashioned grandfather clock in the living room. People who happened by raised the weights, and as long as the weights were wound, the clock continued ticking away. But with people gone and the weights unattended, whole chunks of time were left to collect in deposits of faded life on the floor.

I took a few old screen magazines back to the living room. The photo feature of one was The Alamo. John Wayne’s directorial debut with the all-out support of John Ford. I want to make a grand epic that lingers in the hearts of all Americans, John Wayne said. He looked corny as hell in a beaver cap.

My girlfriend appeared with coffee, and we faced each other as we drank. Drops of rain tapped intermittently on the windows. The time passed slowly as chill infiltrated the room. The yellow glow of the light bulbs drifted about the room like pollen.

“Tired?” she asked.

“I guess,” I said, gazing absently out the window. “We’ve been running around searching like crazy all this time, and now we’ve ground to a halt. Can’t quite get used to it. After all we did to find the scene in the photograph, there’s no Rat and no sheep.”

“Get some sleep. I’ll make dinner.”

She brought a blanket down from upstairs and covered me. Then she readied the kerosene heater, placed a cigarette between my lips, and lit it for me.

“Show a little spirit. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“Thanks,” I said.

At that, she disappeared into the kitchen.

All alone, my body felt heavy. I took two puffs of the cigarette, put it out, pulled the blanket up to my neck, and shut my eyes. It only took a few seconds before I fell asleep.

She Leaves the Mountain; Hunger Strikes

The clock struck six and I woke up on the sofa. The lights were out, the room enveloped in dense evening gloom. Everything from the core of my being to the tips of my fingers was numb. Darkness had spread over my skin like ink.

The rain had let up, the nightbirds sang through the window glass. The flames of the heater cast faint, undulating, elongated shadows on the white walls of the room. I got up and switched on the floor lamp, walked into the kitchen, and drank two glasses of cold water. A pot of stew, still warm, was on the stove. An ashtray held two clove cigarettes, crushed out.

Immediately, instinctively, I knew she was gone.

I stood there, hands on the cooktop, and tried to sort out my thoughts.

She was no longer here, that much was certain. No argument or guesswork about it. She was, in fact, not here. The vacated atmosphere of the house was final, undeniable. It was a feeling I had known well in the couple of months between the time my wife left me and the time I met my girlfriend.

I went upstairs to check. I opened the closet doors. No sign of her. Her shoulder bag and down jacket had vanished. So had her boots in the vestibule. Without a doubt, she was gone. I looked in all the places where she might have left a note, but there was nothing. She was probably already down the mountain.

I could not accept the fact of her disappearance. I was barely awake, but even if I were totally lucid, this—and everything that was happening to me—was far beyond my realm of comprehension. There was almost nothing one could do except let things take their course.

Sitting on the sofa, I felt a sudden hunger. And not an ordinary hunger either.

I went from the kitchen into the provisions cellar and uncorked a bottle of red wine. Overchilled but drinkable. Returning to the kitchen, I cut a few slices of bread, then peeled an apple. As I waited for the stew to heat, I had three glasses of wine.

When the stew was ready, I moved to the living-room table and ate dinner listening to the Percy Faith Orchestra playing “Perfidia.” After dinner, I drank the coffee left in the pot, and with a deck of cards that was sitting on the mantel I dealt myself a hand of solitaire. A game invented and fashionable in nineteenth-century England, it later became less popular and then forgotten due to its complicated rules. A mathematician once calculated the success rate as one in 250,000. I gave it three tries—without success, of course. I cleared away the cards and dishes. Then I finished off the rest of the wine.

Night had come. I closed the shutters and lay down on the sofa to listen to scratchy old records.

Would the Rat ever come back?

I had to assume he’d be back. After all, he’d stocked up on a winter’s supply of fuel and provisions.

But that was assuming. The Rat might have given up on the place and returned to town. Or maybe he’d taken up with some woman. Practically anything was possible.

Which could mean that I was in a fine mess. My one-month time limit, now exactly half over, would soon be past. No Rat, no sheep, just the man in the black suit dragging me into his Götterdämmerung. Even though I was nobody, he’d do it. I had no doubt about it.

In the city, the second week of October is a most urbane time of year. If all this hadn’t happened, I’d be eating omelettes and drinking whiskey now. A beautiful time in a beautiful season, in the evening as the rains lifted, chunks of ice and a solid-wood bar top, time flowing slowly, easily, like a gentle stream.

Turning all this over in my mind, I started to imagine another me somewhere, sitting in a bar, nursing a whiskey, without a care in the world. The more I thought about it, the more that other me became the real me, making this me here not real at all.

I shook my head clear.

Outside, night birds kept up a low cooing.

I went upstairs and made the bed in the small room that the Rat hadn’t been using. Mattress and sheets and blankets were all neatly stacked in the closet by the stairs.

The furniture was exactly the same as in the Rat’s room. Bedside table and desk and chair and lamp. Old-fashioned, but products of an age when things were made to be strong and functional. Without frills.

Predictably, the view from the window at the head of the bed looked out over the pasture. The rain had stopped, and the thick cloud cover was beginning to break. There was a lovely half-moon that illuminated the pasture now and again. A searchlight sweeping over what might as well have been the ocean floor.

Crawling under the covers, still in my clothes, I gazed at the scene that soon dissolved, soon reappeared. A faded image of my girlfriend rounding the unlucky bend in the road, heading alone down the mountain, came to mind. Then that disappeared, to be replaced by the flock of sheep and the Rat taking their photograph. Again the moon hid behind a cloud, and when it reemerged, even they had gone.

I read my Sherlock Holmes by lamplight.

A Find in the Garage; Thoughts in the Middle of the Pasture

Birds of a kind I’d never seen before clung like Christmas ornaments to the pin oaks by the front door, chirping away. The world shone moistly in the morning light.

I made toast in a primitive toaster, the type where you turn the slices of bread by hand. I coated a frying pan with butter, fried a couple eggs sunnyside-up, drank two glasses of grape juice. I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn’t such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.

I washed the dishes, then rinsed the egg yolk from my mouth and brushed my teeth for a full five minutes. After lengthy deliberations, I decided to shave. There was an almost new can of shaving cream and a Gillette razor at the washbasin. Toothbrush and toothpaste, soap, lotion, even cologne. Ten hand towels, each a different color, lay neatly folded on the shelf. Not a spot on mirror or washbasin. True to methodical Rat-form.

The same was pretty much true of the lavatory and the bathroom. The grouting between the tiles had been scrubbed with brush and cleanser. It was gleaming white, a work of art. The box sachet in the lavatory gave off the fragrance of a gin-with-lime you’d get at a fancy bar.

I went into the living room to smoke my morning cigarette. I had three packs of Larks left in my backpack. When those were gone, it’d be no smoking for me. I lit up a second cigarette and thought about what it’d be like without smokes. The morning sun felt wonderful, and sitting on the sofa, which molded itself to my body, was pure luxury. Before I knew it, a whole hour had passed. The clock struck a lazy nine o’clock.

I began to understand why the Rat had put the house in such order, scrubbed between the tiles, ironed his shirts, and shaved, though surely he had no one to meet. Unless you kept moving up here, you’d lose all sense of time.

I got up from the sofa, folded my arms, and walked once around the room, but I couldn’t see anything that needed doing. The Rat had cleaned anything that was cleanable. He’d even brushed the soot from the ceiling.

I decided instead to go for a walk. It was spectacular weather. The sky was feathered with a few white brushstroke clouds, the air filled with the songs of birds.

In back of the house was a large garage. A cigarette butt lay on the ground in front of the old double doors. Seven Stars. This time, the cigarette butt turned out to be rather old. The paper had come apart, exposing the filter.

Ashtrays. I had seen only one in the house, and it had shown no trace of use. The Rat didn’t smoke! I rolled the filter around in the palm of my hand, then threw it back onto the ground.

I undid the heavy bolt and opened the garage doors to find a huge interior. The sunlight slanted in through the cracks in the siding, creating a series of parallel lines on the dark soil. There was the smell of dirt and gasoline.

An old Toyota Land Cruiser sat there. Not a speck of mud on the body or tires. The gas tank was almost full. I felt under the dash where the Rat always hid his keys. As expected, the key was there. I inserted it in the ignition and gave it a turn. Right away the engine was purring. It was the same Rat, always good at tuning his automobiles. I cut the engine, put the key back, then looked around the driver’s seat. There was nothing noteworthy—road maps, a towel, half a bar of chocolate. In the backseat, unusually dirty for the Rat, was a roll of wire and a large pair of pliers. I opened the rear door and swept the debris into my hand, holding it up to the sunlight leaking in through a knothole in the siding. Cushion stuffing. Or sheep wool. I pulled a tissue out of my pocket, wrapped up the debris, and put it in my breast pocket.

I couldn’t understand why the Rat hadn’t taken the car. The fact that the car was in the garage meant that he had walked down the mountain or that he hadn’t gone down at all. Neither made sense. Up to three days ago the cliff road would have been easy to drive. Would he abandon the house to camp out up here?

Puzzled, I shut the garage doors and walked out into the pasture. There was no reasonable explanation possible from such unreasonable circumstances.

As the sun rose higher in the sky, steam rose from the pasture. The mountains seemed to mist over, and the smell of grass was overwhelming.

I walked through the damp grass to the middle of the pasture. There lay a discarded old tire, the rubber white and cracked. I sat down on it and surveyed my surroundings. From here the house looked like a white rock jutting out from the shoreline.

In this solitary state, the memory of the ocean swim meets I used to participate in when I was a kid came to me. On distance swims between two islands, I would sometimes stop mid-course to look around. To find myself equidistant between two points gave me the funniest feeling. To think that back on dry land people were going about business as usual was pretty peculiar too. Unsettling, that society could go on perfectly well without me.

I sat there for fifteen minutes before ambling back to the house. I sat down on the living-room sofa and continued reading my Sherlock Holmes.

At two o’clock, the Sheep Man came.

The Sheep Man Cometh

As the clock struck two, there came a knocking on the door. Two times at first, a two-breath pause, then three times.

It took me a while to recognize it as knocking. That anyone should knock on the door hadn’t occurred to me. The Rat wouldn’t knock, it was his house. The caretaker might knock, but he certainly wouldn’t wait for a reply before walking in. Maybe my girlfriend—no, more likely she’d steal in through the kitchen door and help herself to a cup of coffee. She wasn’t the type to knock.

I opened the door, and standing there, two yards away, was the Sheep Man. Showing markedly little interest in either the open door or myself who opened it. Carefully inspecting the mailbox as if it were a rare, exotic specimen. The Sheep Man was barely taller than the mailbox. Four foot ten at most. Slouched over and bow-legged besides.

There were, moreover, six inches between the doorsill, where I stood, and ground level, where he stood, so it was as if I were looking down at him from a bus window. As if ignoring his decisive shortcomings, he continued his scrutiny of the mailbox.

“CanIcomein?” the Sheep Man said rapid-fire, facing sideways the whole while. His tone was angry.

“Please do,” I said.

He crouched down and gingerly untied the laces of his mountaineering boots. They were caked with a sweet-roll-thick crust of mud. The Sheep Man picked up his boots with both hands and, with practiced technique, whacked them solidly together. A shower of hardened mud fell to the ground. Then demonstrating consummate knowledge of the lay of the house, he put slippers on and padded over to the sofa and sat down.

Just great, his face was saying.

The Sheep Man wore a full sheepskin pulled over his head. The arms and legs were fake and patched on, but his stocky body fit the costume perfectly. The hood was also fake, but the two horns that curled from his crown were absolutely real. Two flat ears, probably wire-reinforced, stuck out level from either side of the hood. The leather mask that covered the upper half of his face, his matching gloves, and socks, all were black. There was a zipper from neck to crotch.

On his chest was a pocket, also zippered, from which he extracted his cigarettes and matches. The Sheep Man put a Seven Stars to his mouth, lit up, and let out a long sigh. I fetched the washed ashtray from the kitchen.

“Iwannadrink,” said the Sheep Man. I duly went into the kitchen and got a half-bottle of Four Roses and two glasses with ice.

He poured whiskey over the ice, I did the same, we drank without a toast. As he drank, the Sheep Man mumbled to himself. His pug nose was big for his body, and with each breath he took, his nostrils flared dramatically. The two eyes that peered through the mask darted restlessly around the room.

When the Sheep Man finished his whiskey, he seemed more at ease. He put out his cigarette and with both hands rubbed his eyes under his mask.

“Woolgetsinmyeyes,” said the Sheep Man.

I didn’t know how to respond and said nothing.

“Youcamehereyesterdayafternooneh?” said the Sheep Man, rubbing his eyes some more. “Beenwatchingyouthewholetime.”

The Sheep Man stopped to pour a slug of whiskey over the half-melted ice and downed it in one gulp.

“Andthewomanleftalonethisafternoon.”

“You watched that too, did you?”

“Watchedher?Wedroveheraway.”

“Drove her away?”

“Surestuckourheadthroughthekitchendoorsaidyou

bettergohome.”

“Why?”

That threw the Sheep Man into a pout. “Why?” was obviously not the way to phrase a question to him, but before I could say anything else, his eyes slowly took on a different gleam.

“ShewentbacktotheDolphinHotel,” said the Sheep Man.

“Did she say so?

“Didn’tsaynothing.ButwheresheisistheDolphinHotel.”

“How do you know that?”

Again the Sheep Man refused to speak. He put both hands on his knees and glared at the glass on the table.

“But she did go back to the Dolphin Hotel?” I said.

“UhhuhtheDolphinHotel’sanicehotel.Smellslikesheep,” said the Sheep Man.

Silence again.

On closer inspection, I could see that the Sheep Man’s fleece was filthy, the wool stiff with oil.

“Did she say anything by way of a message when she left?”

“Nope,” the Sheep Man said, shaking his head. “Shedidn’t sayanythingandwedidn’task.”

“When you told her she’d better leave, she up and left without a word?”

“Right. Wetoldhershe’dbetterleavebecauseshewaswantingtoleave.”

“She came up here because she wanted to.”

“Wrong!” screamed the Sheep Man. “Shewantedtogetoutbutshe herselfwasconfused.That’swhywechasedherhome.

Youconfusedher.” The Sheep Man stood up and slammed his right hand down flat on the table. His whiskey glass slid two inches.

The Sheep Man froze in that pose until gradually his eyes lost their zeal and he collapsed back into the sofa, out of steam.

“Youconfusedthatwoman,” the Sheep Man said, this time more calmly. “Notaverynicethingatall.

Youdon’tknowathing.Allyou thinkaboutisyourself.”

“You’re telling me she shouldn’t have come here?”

“That’sright.Shewasn’tmeanttocomehere.

Youdon’tthinkabout anythingbutyourself.”

I sat there speechless, lapping my whiskey.

“Butstillwhat’sdoneisdone.Anywayit’soverforher.”

“Over?”

“You’llneverseethatwomanagain.”

“Because I only thought about myself?”

“That’sright.Becauseyouthoughtonlyaboutyourself.

Justdeserts.”

The Sheep Man stood up and went to a window, forced up the window frame with one hand, and took a breath of the fresh air. No mean show of strength.

“Gottaopenwindowsonnicedayslikethis,” said the Sheep Man. Then the Sheep Man did a quick half-turn around the room and stopped before the bookcase, peering over the spines of the books with folded arms. Sprouting from the rear end of his costume was a tiny tail. In this position, he looked like a sheep standing up on its two hind legs.

“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” I ventured.

“Areyou?” said the Sheep Man, back to me in total disinterest.

“He was living here. Up to a week ago.”

“Wouldn’tknow.”

The Sheep Man stood in front of the fireplace shuffling the cards from the mantel.

“I’m also looking for a sheep with a star mark on its back,” I pressed on.

“Haven’tseenit,” said the Sheep Man.

But it was obvious that the Sheep Man knew something about the Rat and the sheep. His lack of concern was too affected. The timing of his response too pat, his tone false.

I changed tactics. Pretending I’d given up, I yawned, taking up my book from the table and flipping through the pages. A slightly vexed Sheep Man returned to the sofa and quietly eyed me reading the book.

“Readingbooksfun?” asked the Sheep Man.

“Hmm,” I responded.

The Sheep Man bided his time. I kept reading to spite him.

“Sorryforshouting,” said the Sheep Man in a low voice. “Some timesit’slikethesheepinmeandthehumaninmeareatoddsso

Igetlikethat. Didn’tmeananythingbyit.

Andbesidesyoucomeonsayingthingsto threatenus.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Toobadyou’llneverseethatwomanagain.Butit’s

notourfault.”

“Hmm.”

I took the three packs of Larks out of my backpack and gave them to the Sheep Man. The Sheep Man was taken aback.

“Thanks.Neverhadthisbrand.Butdon’tyou needthem?”

“I quit smoking,” I said.

“Yesthat’swise,” the Sheep Man nodded in all seriousness. “They’rereallybadforyou.”

He filed the cigarette packs away carefully in a pocket on his arm. The fleece buckled out in a rectangular lump.

“I’ve absolutely got to see my friend. I’ve come a long, long way here to see him.”

The Sheep Man nodded.

“The same goes for that sheep.”

The Sheep Man nodded.

“But you don’t know anything about them, I take it?”

The Sheep Man shook his head forlornly. His fake ears flapped up and down. This time his denial was much weaker than before.

“It’saniceplacehere,” the Sheep Man changed the subject. “Beautifulscenerygoodcleanair.You’regonnalikeithere.”

“Yeah, it’s a nice place,” I said.

“It’sevennicerinthewinter.Nothingbutsnowallaround,

everything frozenup.Alltheanimalssleepingnohumanfolk.”

“You stay here all winter?”

“Uhhuh.”

I didn’t ask anything else. The Sheep Man was just like an animal. Approach him and he’d retreat, move away and he’d come closer. As long as I wasn’t going anywhere, there was no hurry. I could take my time.

With his left hand the Sheep Man pulled at the fingers of his black right glove, one after the other. After a number of tugs, the glove slipped off, revealing a flaking blackened hand. Small but fleshy, an old burn scar from the base of his thumb to midway around the back of his hand.

The Sheep Man stared at the back of his hand, then turned it over to look at the palm. Exactly the way the Rat used to do, that gesture. But no way was this Sheep Man the Rat. There was a difference in height of eight inches between them.

“Yougonnastayhere?” asked the Sheep Man.

“No, as soon as I find either my friend or the sheep, I’m leaving. That’s all I came for.”

“Winter’snicehere,” repeated the Sheep Man. “Sparkling white.Everythingallfrozen.”

The Sheep Man snickered to himself, flaring those enormous nostrils. Dingy teeth peered out from his mouth, the two front teeth missing. There was something uneven to the rhythm of the Sheep Man’s thoughts, which seemed to have the whole room expanding and contracting.

“Gottabegoing,” the Sheep Man said suddenly. “Thanksfor thesmokes.”

I nodded.

“Hopeyoufindyourfriendandthatsheepbeforetoolong.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Let me know if you hear of anything.”

The Sheep Man hemmed and hawed, ill at ease. “Umwellyes surething.”

I fought back the urge to laugh. The Sheep Man was one lame liar.

He put his glove back on and stood up to go. “I’llbeback.Can’t sayhowmanydaysfromnowbutI’llbeback.” Then his eyes clouded. “Noimpositionisit?”

“You kidding?” I threw in a quick shake of the head. “By all means, I’d love to see you again.”

“WellI’llbeback,” said the Sheep Man, then slammed the door behind him. He almost caught his tail, but it slipped through safe and sound.

Through a space in the shutters, I watched the Sheep Man stand staring at that peeling whitewashed mailbox, exactly as he had when he first appeared. Then wriggling a bit to adjust the costume better to his body, he took off fleetfoot across the pasture toward the woods in the east. His level ears were like a diving board of a swimming pool. In the growing distance, the Sheep Man became a fuzzy white dot, finally merging into the white of the birches.

Even after the Sheep Man disappeared from view, I kept staring at the pasture and birch woods. Had the Sheep Man been an illusion?

Yet here were a bottle of whiskey and Seven Stars butts left on the table, and there on the sofa were a few strands of wool. I compared them with the wool from the backseat of the Land Cruiser. Identical.

As a way to focus my thoughts, I went into the kitchen to fix some Salisbury steak. I minced up an onion and browned it in the frying pan. Meanwhile, I defrosted a chunk of beef from the freezer, then ground it with a medium blade. The kitchen was what you might call compact, but even so it had more than your typical run of utensils and seasonings.

If they’d only pave the road here, you could open a mountain-chalet–style restaurant. Wouldn’t be bad, windows wide open, a view of the flocks, blue sky. Families could let their kids play with the sheep, lovers could stroll in the birch woods. A success for sure.

The Rat could run it, I could cook. The Sheep Man could be good for something too. His costume would be perfect up here in the mountains. Then for a practical, down-to-earth touch, the caretaker could join us; you need one practical person. The dog too. Even the Sheep Professor could drop in.

While browning the onions with a wooden spatula, I tossed these ideas around in my head.

But my beautiful-eared girlfriend—was she lost to me forever? The thought depressed me, though what the Sheep Man said was probably right. I should have come here on my own. I should not have … I shook my head. Then I took up where I’d left off with the restaurant.

Now, if we could get J to come up here, I’m sure things would work out fine. Everything should revolve around him, with forgiveness, compassion, and acceptance at the center.

While waiting for the onions to cool, I sat down by the window and gazed back out at the pasture.

The Winds’ Own Private Thoroughfare

Three uneventful days passed. Not one thing happened. The Sheep Man didn’t show. I fixed meals, ate them, read my book, and when the sun went down, I drank whiskey and went to sleep.

The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler. Day by day, the bright golden leaves of the birches turned more spotted as the first winds of winter slipped between the withered branches and across the highlands toward the southeast. Stopping in the center of the pasture, I could hear the winds clearly. No turning back, they pronounced. The brief autumn was gone.

Without exercise and without smoking, I had quickly gained six pounds. So I started to get up at six and jog a crescent halfway around the pasture. That took off a couple of pounds. It was tough not smoking, but with no store around for twenty miles, what was one to do? Each time I felt like smoking, I thought about her and her ears. Compared to everything I’d lost this far, losing smoking was trivial. And indeed it was.

With all this free time, I cooked up a storm. I made a roast beef. I defrosted a salmon and marinated it. I searched the pasture for edible vegetables and simmered my findings with bonito flakes and soy sauce. I made simple cabbage pickles. I prepared a number of snacks in case the Sheep Man showed up for a drink. The Sheep Man, however, never came.

Most of the afternoons I would pass looking out at the pasture. I soon began seeing things. A figure emerging from the birch woods and running straight in my direction. Usually it was the Sheep Man, but sometimes it was the Rat, sometimes my girlfriend. Other times it was the sheep with the star on its back.

In the end, though, nobody ever materialized. Only the winds blowing across the pasture. It was as if the pasture were the winds’ own private thoroughfare. The winds raced across the pasture, never looking back, on missions of utmost urgency.

On the seventh day after my arrival on the mountain, the first snow fell. The winds had been unusually calm from morning, the skies overcast with dense lead-gray clouds. After my morning run and shower, as I settled down to coffee and records, the snow started. A hard snow. It struck the windowpanes with a battery of dull thuds. The wind had picked up, driving the snow down at a thirty-degree angle. Rather like the slanting lines of some department-store wrapping-paper pattern. Soon the storm intensified and everything outside was awash in white. The entire mountain range and woods were obscured. This was no pitiful snow as sometimes falls in Tokyo. This was the real thing, an honest-to-goodness north-country snow. A snow to blanket everything and freeze deep into the heart of the earth.

The snow was blinding. I drew the curtain and curled up to read by the heater. The record ended, the needle lifted, and all was silence. The sort of silence that follows in the wake of the death of all living things. I set down my book and for no particular reason felt the urge to walk through the house. From the living room into the kitchen, checking the storeroom, bath and cellar, upstairs to open the doors of each room. There was no one, of course. Only silence which rolled like oil into every corner. Only silence which changed ever so slightly from room to room.

I was all alone. Probably more alone than I’d been in all my life.

I’d been dying for a smoke the past two days, but as there were no cigarettes, I’d been drinking whiskey straight. One winter like this and I’d end up an alcoholic. Not that there was enough liquor around to do the trick, though. Three bottles of whiskey, one bottle of brandy, twelve cases of canned beer, and no more. Obviously, the same thought had occurred to the Rat.

Was my partner, my former partner, that is, still hitting the bottle? Had he managed to put the company in order, turn it back into a small translation firm, as I suggested? Maybe he’d done exactly that. But could he really make a go of it without me, as he worried? Our time together was up. Six years together, and now back to square one.

The snow let up by early afternoon. Abruptly, just as it had begun. The thick clouds tore off in places as grand columns of sunlight thrust down to play in the pasture. It was magnificent.

The hard snow lay sprinkled on the ground like candy. Solidified into pellets as if to defy melting away. Yet by the time the clock struck three, the snow had all but melted. The ground was thoroughly wet, the twilight sun enfolding the pasture in a soft light. The birds sang as if set free.

After dinner, I borrowed two books from the Rat’s room, Bread Baking and the Conrad novel, then made myself comfortable on the living-room sofa. One-third of the way into the novel, I came across a four-inch-square newspaper clipping the Rat had been using for a bookmark. No date, but from the color of the paper it must have been recent. It was local news, a symposium on aging and society to be held at a Sapporo hotel, a rally at a train station near Asahikawa, a lecture on the Middle East crisis. Nothing to grab the Rat’s interest, or mine. On the reverse, classified ads. I yawned, shut the book, went to heat up the leftover coffee.

I suddenly realized that this was the first time, in what now seemed like years, that I had seen a newspaper, and that I’d been left behind an entire week from the goings-on of the world. No radio or television, no newspapers, no magazines. A nuclear missile could have destroyed Tokyo, an epidemic could have swept the world, Martians could have occupied Australia, I wouldn’t have known. Of course, the Land Cruiser in the garage had a radio, but I discovered that I had no pressing desire to go listen after all. If something could take place without my knowing, it was just as well. I had no real need to know. I, in any case, had plenty on my mind already.

Something gnawed at me. Something that had passed before my eyes but which I’d been too dense to notice. All the same, on an unconscious level, it had registered. I deposited my coffee cup in the sink and returned to the living room. I took another look at the newspaper clipping. There it was on the reverse:

Attention: Rat

Get in touch. Urgent!

Dolphin Hotel, Room 406

I put the clipping back in the book and sank into the sofa.

So the Rat knew I was looking for him. Question: how had he found the item? By accident, when he’d come down off the mountain? Or maybe he’d been searching for something through several weeks’ worth of papers?

And why didn’t he contact me? Had I already checked out of the Dolphin Hotel by the time he came across it? Had his telephone line already gone dead?

No. The Rat could have gotten in touch if he wanted to, he just didn’t want to. Because I was at the Dolphin Hotel, he figured I’d find my way up here, so that if he wanted to see me, he had only to wait, or at least leave me a note.

What it boiled down to was this: for some reason the Rat didn’t want to face me. Even so, he wasn’t rejecting me. If he didn’t want me here, he could have shut me out any number of ways. It was his house, after all.

Grappling with these two propositions, I watched the second hand sweep slowly around the face of the clock. After one full circumgyration, my reasoning had made no progress. I couldn’t figure out what lay at the center of all this.

The Sheep Man knew something. That much was certain. Someone who had monitored my arrival on the scene was sure to know about the Rat’s living here for six months.

The more I thought about it, the more difficult I found it to escape the feeling that the Sheep Man’s actions reflected the Rat’s will. The Sheep Man had driven my girlfriend from the mountain and left me here alone. His showing up here was undoubtedly a harbinger of something. Something was progressing all around me. The area was being swept clean and purified. Something was about to happen.

I turned out the lights and went upstairs, climbed into bed, and looked out at the moon and pasture. Stars peeked through a tear in the clouds. I opened the window and smelled the night air. Among the rustling leaves I could hear a call in the distance. A strange cry, neither bird nor beast.

I woke and went for my run in the pasture, showered, and ate breakfast. A morning like the others. The sky was overcast like the day before, but the temperature had risen a bit. Not much chance of snow.

Into jeans and a sweater and a jacket over that, then tennis shoes, and I was off across the pasture. Heading for the woods to the east where I’d seen the Sheep Man disappear, I made my way into the thicket. There was no real path to speak of, no sign of human life. Occasionally, there’d be an old birch toppled over.

The forest floor was flat, except for a long, yard-wide trough, like a dried-up streambed or an abandoned trench. The trough wound its way through the woods for miles. Sometimes sunken deep, sometimes shallow, ankle-deep in dead leaves.

The ditch gave on to a ridge trail, both sides of which sloped down to dry hollows. Plump birds shuffled across the path through the leaves, losing themselves in the undergrowth. Here and there, brush azaleas blazed bright red.

I walked around for an hour and lost all sense of direction. At this rate, I was hardly going to find the Sheep Man. I roamed the bottom of one dry hollow until I heard the sound of water. I sought out the river, then followed it downstream. If my memory served me correctly, there had to be a waterfall and near it, the road we’d walked up.

After another ten minutes, I came across the waterfall. Splashing as it struck the rocks in the gorge below, lapping into frozen pools. There was no sign of fish, though a few fallen leaves traced slow circles on the surface of the pools. I crossed from rock to rock, made my way down below the falls, then crawled up the slippery opposite bank. I had reached the road.

Seated on the edge of a bridge, watching me, was the Sheep Man. A big sailcloth bag of firewood was slung over his shoulder.

“Wanderaroundtoomuchyou’llbebearbait,” said the Sheep Man. “There’sboundtobeoneaboutinthesepartsyouknow.

Yesterdayafter noonIfoundtraces.

Ifyouhavetowalkaroundyououghttoputabellon yourhiplikeus.”

The Sheep Man shook a little bell fastened to his hip with a safety pin.

“I’ve been looking for you,” I said after catching my breath.

“Iknow,” said the Sheep Man. “I’veseenyousearching.”

“Well then, why didn’t you call out?”

“You’retheonewhowantedtosearchmeout. So I held back.”

The Sheep Man took a cigarette out of his pocket and smoked it with great pleasure. I sat down next to him.

“You live around here?”

“Hmm,” said the Sheep Man. “Butdon’ttellanybody.Nobody knows.”

“But my friend knows all about you.”

Silence.

“You know, it’s a very important matter.”

Silence.

“And if you’re friends with my friend, that makes us friends, no?”

“Iguessso,” said the Sheep Man cautiously. “Iguessitprobably does.”

“And if you’re my friend, you wouldn’t lie to me, would you? Think about it.”

“Errno,” answered one perplexed Sheep Man. He licked his parched lips. “Ican’ttellyouI’mrealsorryIcan’ttellyouIcan’t.I’mnot supposedto.”

“Someone’s put it to you to keep quiet?”

The Sheep Man clammed up. The wind whistled through the barren trees.

“Nobody’s around to hear,” I whispered.

The Sheep Man looked me in the eye. “Youdon’tknowathing aboutourwaysheredoyou?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Welllistenthisisnoordinaryplacewegothere.

Thatmuchyoushould keepinmind.”

“But just the other day you told me this was such nice country.”

“Forusyes,” said the Sheep Man. “Forusthisistheonlyplacetolive. Ifwewerechasedoutofherewe’dhavenoplacetogo.”

At that, the Sheep Man shut up. He would not say another word on the subject. I looked at his sailcloth bag filled with firewood.

“That your heating for the winter?”

The Sheep Man nodded silently.

“But I didn’t see any smoke.”

“Nofireyet.Nottillthesnowsetsin.Butevenafteritsnows

youwouldn’t beabletoseethesmokefromourfire.

Wegotaspecialwayofbuildingfires.” He grinned, self-satisfied.

“So when will the snow begin to pile up around here?”

The Sheep Man looked up at the sky, then looked at me. “The snow’llcomeearlythisyear.Maybeanothertendays.”

“In another ten days the road will freeze over?”

“Probably.Nobodycomingupandnobodygoingdown.

Wonderful timeofyear.”

“And you’ve been living here how long?”

“Longtime,” said the Sheep Man. “Reallongtime.”

“What do you eat?”

“Tubersshootsnutsbirdswhateverlittlefishandcrabs

Icancatch.”

“Don’t you get cold?”

“Winter’ssupposedtobecold.”

“If you need something, I’d be glad to share whatever I’ve got.”

“ThanksbutI’mfinejustnow.”

The Sheep Man suddenly stood up and started walking off in the direction of the pasture. So I got up to follow him.

“Why’d you take to hiding out up here?”

“You’dlaughifItoldyou,” said the Sheep Man.

“No, I wouldn’t laugh, I swear,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what there’d be to laugh about.

“Youwon’ttellanyone?”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“Ididn’twanttogoofftowar.”

For the next few minutes, we walked on without a word between us.

“War with whom?” I asked.

“Dunno,” coughed out the Sheep Man. “ButIdidn’twanttogo. Anywaythat’swhyI’masheep.

Asheepwhostayswherehebelongsup here.”

“You from Junitaki-cho?”

“Uhhuhbutdon’ttellanyone.”

“I won’t,” I said. “You don’t like the town?”

“Thetowndownthere?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’tlikeitatall.Toofullofsoldiers,” the Sheep Man coughed again. “Whereyoufrom?”

“Tokyo.”

“Heardaboutthewar?”

“Nope.”

At that the Sheep Man seemed to lose all interest in me. He remained silent until we reached the entrance to the pasture.

“Care to stop by the house?” I asked the Sheep Man.

“Gottalayinwintersupplies,” he said. “Realbusy.Maybenext time.”

“I’d like to see my friend,” I said. “I’ve got something I have to see him about next week.”

The Sheep Man shook his head forlornly. His ears flapped. “Sorry butlikeIsaidbeforeit’snotuptous.”

“Well, then, pass the word on if you can.”

“Hmm,” said the Sheep Man.

“Thanks a lot,” I said. I turned to leave.

“Ifyougooutwalking,” the Sheep Man called out as he departed, “makesureyoudon’tforgetthebell.”

I headed straight back for the house as the Sheep Man disappeared into the woods to the east, the same as before. A winter-dark wordless green pasture stretched between us.

That afternoon I baked bread. The Rat’s Bread Baking proved to be a thoughtfully written cookbook. On the cover was written: “If you can read, then you can bake bread.” It was no exaggeration. The smell of bread filled the house, making it warm all over. For a fledgling effort, it didn’t taste too bad either. There was plenty of flour and yeast in the kitchen, enough for bread the whole winter long, if it turned out I had to stay. And more rice and spaghetti than I cared to think about.

That evening, I had bread and salad and ham and eggs, with canned peaches for dessert.

The next morning I cooked rice and made a pilaf of canned salmon and seaweed and mushrooms.

For lunch, it was cheesecake from the freezer and strong milk tea.

At snacktime, I treated myself to hazelnut ice cream topped with Cointreau.

In the evening, broiled chicken and a can of Campbell’s soup.

I was putting on weight again.

Early in the afternoon of the ninth day, as I was looking through the bookcase, I noticed one volume that seemed like it may have been read recently. It was the only one without dust on it, its spine protruding a bit farther out than the rest.

I pulled it out and sat on the chaise longue to flip through it. The Heritage of Pan-Asianism. A wartime edition. The paper was cheap and gave off a stink when I turned the pages. The contents, as expected from a wartime publication, terribly one-sided. Real boring too; stuff to yawn over every three pages. On some pages, words had been crossed out. There was not a single line on the February 26th Incident.

Tucked into the book, toward the end, was a sheet of white notepaper. After the yellowing pages, that white sheet came as some kind of miracle. It marked, on the right page, an addendum to the book. A list of names, birthdates, and permanent residences of all the so-called Pan-Asianists famous and unknown. I scanned the list from top to bottom, and there around the middle was the Boss. The very same “sheeped” Boss in whose name I had been brought here. His permanent residence, Hokkaido—Junitaki-cho.

In a daze, I set the book down in my lap. Words did not even form in my head. It was as if someone, or something, had given me a solid whack from behind.

How could I not have figured it out? It should have occurred to me first thing. The moment I learned that the Boss was from a poor farming background in Hokkaido I should have checked up on it. No matter how skillfully the Boss had managed to rub out his past, there would have been some way to search out the facts. That black-suited secretary would surely have looked it up for me.

Well no, maybe not.

I shook my head.

No way he wouldn’t have looked that up himself. The man was not so careless. He would have checked every possible angle, complicated or not. Just as he had done his homework on me.

So he already knew everything.

That was indisputable. And yet, he had gone to great lengths to convince me, or rather to blackmail me, in order to get me up here. Why? If it was something that needed doing, surely he was in a better position to do it and to do a crack job of it. And if I were for some reason to be a pawn, why wouldn’t he have told me the name of the place from the beginning?

As I sorted through my confusion, I started to get mad. More and more, this had turned into one grotesque comedy of mishaps, and I didn’t think it was funny. How much did the Rat know? And while we’re at it, how much did the man in the black suit know? Here I was, smack in the center of everything without a clue. At every turn, I’d been way off base, way off the mark. Of course, you could probably say the same thing about my whole life. In that sense, I suppose I had no one to blame. All the same, what gave them the right to treat me like this? I’d been used, I’d been beaten, I’d been wrung dry.

I was ready to get the hell off the mountain, but somehow that offered no satisfaction. I had gotten in too deep. It would have been so easy if only I could have cried. But crying wasn’t an option, because I felt that far ahead of me there was something really worth crying about.

I went into the kitchen and got the bottle of whiskey. I could think of nothing to do but drink.

Things the Mirror Shows, Things the Mirror Doesn’t

The morning of the tenth day, I decided to forget everything. I had already lost what I was supposed to lose.

In the middle of my morning run, it began to snow again. This time an opaque snow, a sticky, wet sleet edging toward ice flakes. Unlike the first loose snow, this one was nasty. It stuck to the body. I cut short my run, returned to the house, and drew a bath. While the bath was coming to temperature, I plunked myself down in front of the heater, but still I couldn’t get warm. A damp chill had seeped into me. I couldn’t bend my fingers and my ears burned and felt brittle, as if they would drop off any second. All over, my skin felt like cheap pulp paper.

A thirty-minute soak in the tub and hot tea with brandy finally brought my body back to normal, although for the next two hours I suffered from intermittent chills. So this was winter on the mountain.

The snow kept falling straight through until evening, covering the entire pasture in white. The snow let up just as night cloaked the world in darkness, and once again a profound hush drifted in like mist. A hush I could do nothing to deny. I put the record player on automatic repeat and listened to White Christmas twenty-six times.

The snow did not stick for long. As the Sheep Man had predicted, the ground would not freeze for a while yet. The following day, my eleventh, was bright and clear. The prodigal sun bided its time, leaving the pasture a patchwork of snow, which gleamed in the sunlight. The snow that had collected on the roof’s gables came sliding down in would-be icebergs that broke up on the ground with an unnerving thud. Melting snow dripped outside the windows. Everything sparkled. Each droplet clinging to each tip of every oak leaf shone.

I dug my hands into my pockets and stood by the window, gazing out. There things unfolded entirely apart from me. Unrelated to my existence—unrelated to anybody’s existence—everything was flowing. The snow fell, the snow melted.

I decided to do some housecleaning, accompanied by the sounds of snow dripping and tumbling. Holed up as I was on account of the snow, my body needed to do something; besides, wasn’t I a guest in someone else’s house? I have never been one to object to cleaning and cooking.

Still, cleaning a large house proved a lot harder work than I had imagined. Jogging ten miles was easy in comparison. I dusted every nook and cranny, then went around with the large vacuum cleaner to suck up the dust. I damp-mopped the wood floors, then got down on my hands and knees to wax them. It left me half out of breath, but thanks to having quit smoking, the other half of my breath managed to hold its own. None of that terrible rasping and catching in my throat.

I went into the kitchen for a glass of cold grape juice and finished straightening up what remained in one bout of cleaning before noon. I threw open the shutters, and the newly waxed floors glittered. There was a wonderful, nostalgic melding of the rich earthy scent of the country and the smell of the wax.

I washed out the rags I’d used to wax the floors, then put a pot of water on to boil. For the spaghetti, into which I mixed cod roe, plenty of butter, white wine, and soy sauce. A great lunch, complete with a woodpecker calling from the nearby woods.

I made short work of the spaghetti, washed up the dishes, then returned to the chores. I scrubbed the bathtub and washbasin, cleaned the toilet, polished the furniture. Thanks to the Rat, nothing was very dirty to begin with; a spray of furniture polish was about all that was needed. Next I pulled out a long hose and rinsed down the windows and shutters. With that, the whole house freshened up. After I washed the windows, my cleaning was done. I spent the remaining two hours before evening listening to records.

As I headed up to the Rat’s room to borrow another book, I noticed the full-length mirror at the foot of the stairs. I’d overlooked it, and it was filthy. I wiped it down with a cloth, but no amount of wiping or glass cleaner would do the trick. I couldn’t understand why the Rat would let this one mirror stay so dirty. I hauled over a bucket of warm water and worked on the mirror with a nylon scrub, cutting through the hardened grease. There was enough grime on the mirror to turn the bucket water black.

The crafted wooden frame told me it was an antique, probably worth a pretty sum, so I was careful not to work too enthusiastically.

The mirror reflected my image from head to toe, without warping, almost pristinely. I stood there and looked at myself. Nothing new. I was me, with my usual nothing-special expression. My image was unnecessarily sharp, however. I wasn’t seeing my mirror-flat mirror-image. It wasn’t myself I was seeing; on the contrary, it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the real me. I brought my right hand up in front of my face and wiped my mouth. The me through the looking glass went through the same motions. But maybe it was only me copying what the me in the mirror had done. I couldn’t be certain I’d wiped my mouth out of my own free will.

I filed the word “free will” away in my head and pinched my ear with my left hand. The me in the mirror did exactly the same. Apparently he had filed the word “free will” away in his head the same as I had.

I gave up and left the mirror. He also left the mirror.

On the twelfth day, snow fell for the third time. It was snowing before I woke up. An awfully silent snow, this one neither hard nor sticky wet. Pirouetting down slowly from the sky, melting before it amounted to anything. The kind of tranquil snow that makes you close your eyes, gently.

I pulled the old guitar out of the trunk room and, after tuning it with great difficulty, tried my hand at some old tunes. I practiced along with Benny Goodman’s “Air Mail Special,” and soon it was noontime. I made a sandwich of thick slices of ham on my homemade, already rock-hard bread, and opened a can of beer. After thirty minutes more of guitar practice, who should show up but the Sheep Man.

“IfIbotheryouI’llleave,” said the Sheep Man through the open front door.

“No, not at all. I was getting kind of bored anyway,” I said, setting the guitar on the floor.

The Sheep Man whacked the mud off his boots the same as before, then came in. His body seemed to have filled out his thick sheep costume. He sat on the sofa opposite me, hand on the armrest and snuggled into position.

“It’s not going to stick yet?” I asked.

“Notyet,” answered the Sheep Man. “There’ssnowthatsticksand snowthatdoesn’t.Thisisnonsticksnow.”

“Hmm.”

“Thestickingsnowcomesnextweek.”

“Care for a beer?”

“Thanks.ButI’dreallyratherhaveabrandy.”

I went to the kitchen, got him his brandy and me a beer, and carried it all back into the living room together with a cheese sandwich.

“Youwereplayingguitar,” said the Sheep Man with interest. “Welikemusictoo.Can’tplayanyinstrumentthough.”

“Neither can I. Haven’t played in close to ten years.”

“That’sokayawplaysomethingforme.”

I didn’t want to dampen the Sheep Man’s spirits, so I played through the melody of “Air Mail Special,” tacked on one chorus and an ad lib, then lost count of the bars and threw in the towel.

“You’regood,” said the Sheep Man in all seriousness. “Proba blyloadsoffuntoplayaninstrumenteh?”

“If you’re good. But if you want to get good, you have to train your ears. And when you’ve trained your ears, you get depressed at your own playing.”

“Nahc’monreally?” said the Sheep Man.

The Sheep Man took dainty little sips from his brandy snifter, while I drank my beer from the can.

“Iwasn’tabletopassonyourmessage,” said the Sheep Man.

I nodded.

“That’sallIcametosay.”

I glanced over at the calendar on the wall. Only three more days until the time limit, the date marked in red. But what did that mean anymore?

“Things have changed,” I spoke up. “I’m very, very angry. Never in my entire life have I been angry like this.”

The Sheep Man sat there, snifter in hand, and said nothing.

I picked up the guitar by the neck and smashed it back against the bricks of the fireplace. With the crash came a loud, cacophonous twang of strings. The Sheep Man flew out of the sofa, his ears trembling.

“I’ve got a right to be angry,” I said, addressing this fact rather to my own attention. Well, I did have the right to be angry.

“IfeelbadthatIcouldn’tcomeacrossforyou.

Butyoumustunderstand. Wereallydolikeyou.”

The two of us stood there. We looked at the snow. The snow was fluffy, like stuffing spilling out of a torn cloud.

I went into the kitchen for another beer. Each time I walked past the stairs, there was the mirror. The other me had apparently gone for another beer too. We looked each other in the face and sighed. Living in two separate worlds, we still thought about the same things. Just like Groucho and Harpo in Duck Soup.

Behind me the living room was reflected in the mirror. Or else it was his living room behind him. The living room behind me and the living room behind him were the same living room. Same sofa, same carpet, same clock and painting and bookcase, every last thing the same. Not particularly uncomfortable as living rooms go, if not in the finest taste. Yet something was different. Or maybe it was simply that I felt that something was different.

I grabbed another blue Löwenbrau and on the way back to the living room, can in hand, I looked once more at the living room in the mirror, then looked over at the living room. The Sheep Man was on the sofa, lazily gazing out at the snow.

I checked the Sheep Man in the mirror. But there wasn’t any Sheep Man in the mirror! There was nobody in the living room at all, only an empty sofa. In the mirror world, I was alone. Terror shot through my spine.

“Youlookpale,” said the Sheep Man.

I plopped down on the sofa and, saying nothing, pulled the ring off the beer can and took a sip.

“Probablycaughtcold.Winterinthesepartscangettoyou

ifyou’re notusedtoit.Air’sdamptoo.Youshouldgettobedearlytoday.”

“Nope,” I said. “Today I’m not going to sleep. I’m going to wait up for my friend here.”

“Youknowhe’scomingtoday?”

“I know,” I said. “He’ll be here tonight at ten o’clock.”

The Sheep Man looked up at me. The eyes peering through his mask had literally no expression.

“Tonight I’ll pack, tomorrow I’ll be gone. If you see him, tell him that. I don’t think it’ll be necessary, though.”

The Sheep Man nodded comprehendingly. “Surewillbelonely whenyougo.Can’tbehelpedthoughIguess.

BythewaycanIhavethat cheesesandwich?”

“Sure.”

The Sheep Man wrapped the sandwich in a paper napkin, slipped it into his pocket, then put on his gloves.

“Hopewemeetagain,” said the Sheep Man as he was leaving.

“We will,” I said.

The Sheep Man left across the pasture to the east. Eventually, the veil of snow took him in. Afterward all was silent.

I poured an inch of brandy into the Sheep Man’s snifter and downed it in one swallow. My throat burned, and gradually my stomach burned, but after thirty seconds my body stopped trembling. Only the ticking of the grandfather clock pounding inside my head.

Probably I did need to get some sleep.

I fetched a blanket from upstairs and slept on the sofa. I felt totally exhausted, like a child who’d been wandering around in the woods for three days. I closed my eyes and the next instant I was asleep.

I had a terrifying dream. A dream too terrifying to recall.

And So Time Passes

Darkness crept in through my ear like oil. Someone was trying to break up the frozen globe of the earth with a massive hammer. The hammer struck the earth precisely eight times. But the earth failed to break up. It only cracked a little.

Eight o’clock, eight at night.

I woke with a shake of the head. My body was numb, my head ached. Had someone put me in a cocktail shaker with cracked ice and like a madman shaken me up?

There’s nothing worse than waking up in total darkness. It’s like having to go back and live life all over from the beginning. When I first opened my eyes, it was as if I were living someone else’s life. After an extremely long time, this began to match up with my own life. A curious overlap this, my own life as someone else’s. It was improbable that such a person as myself could even be living.

I went to the kitchen sink and splashed water on my face, then drank down a couple of glasses quickly. The water was as cold as ice, but still my face was burning hot. I sat back down on the sofa amid the darkness and silence and began gradually to gather up the pieces of my life. I couldn’t manage to grasp too much, but at least it was my life. Slowly I returned to myself. It’s hard to explain what it is to get there, and it’d undoubtedly try your interest.

I had the feeling that someone was watching me, but I didn’t pay it any mind. It’s a feeling you get when you’re all alone in a big room.

I thought about cells. Like my ex-wife had said, ultimately every last cell of you is lost. Lost even to yourself. I pressed the palm of my hand against my cheek. The face my hand felt in the dark wasn’t my own, I didn’t think. It was the face of another that had taken the shape of my face. But I couldn’t remember the details. Everything—names, sensations, places—dissolved and was swallowed into the darkness.

In the dark the clock struck eight-thirty. The snow had stopped, but thick clouds still covered the sky. No light anywhere. For a long time, I lay buried in the sofa, fingers in my mouth. I couldn’t see my hand. The heater was off, so the room was cold. Curled up under the blanket, I stared blankly out. I was crouching in the bottom of a deep well.

Time. Particles of darkness configured mysterious patterns on my retina. Patterns that degenerated without a sound, only to be replaced by new patterns. Darkness but darkness alone was shifting, like mercury in motionless space.

I put a stop to my thoughts and let time pass. Let time carry me along. Carry me to where a new darkness was configuring yet newer patterns.

The clock struck nine. As the ninth chime faded away, silence slipped in to fill its place.

“May I say my piece?” said the Rat.

“Fine by me,” said I.

Dwellers in Darkness

“Fine by me,” said I.

“I came an hour earlier than the appointed time,” said the Rat apologetically.

“That’s okay. As you can see, I wasn’t doing anything.”

The Rat laughed quietly. He was behind me. Almost as if we were back-to-back.

“Seems like the old days,” said the Rat.

“I guess we can never get down to a good honest talk unless we’ve got time on our hands,” I said.

“It sure seems that way.” The Rat smiled.

Even in absolute lacquer-black darkness, seated back-to-back, I could tell he was smiling. You can tell a lot just by the tiniest change in the air. We used to be friends. So long ago, though I could hardly remember when.

“Didn’t someone once say, ‘A friend to kill time is a friend sublime’?”

“That was you who said that, no?”

“Sixth sense, sharp as ever. Right you are.”

I sighed. “But this time around, with all this happening, my sixth sense has been way off. So far off it’s embarrassing. And despite the number of hints you all have been giving me.”

“Can’t be helped. You did better than most.”

We fell silent. The Rat seemed to be looking at his hand.

“I really made you go through a lot, didn’t I?” said the Rat. “I was a real pain. But it was the only way. There wasn’t another soul I could depend on. Like I wrote in those letters.”

“That’s what I want to ask you about. Because I can’t accept everything just like that.”

“Of course not,” said the Rat, “not without my setting the record straight. But before that, let’s have a beer.”

The Rat stopped me before I could stand up.

“I’ll get it,” said the Rat. “This is my house, after all.”

I heard the Rat walk his regular path to the kitchen in total darkness and take an armful of beer out of the refrigerator, me opening and closing my eyes the whole while. The darkness of the room was only a bit different in hue from the darkness of my eyes shut.

The Rat returned with his beer, which he set on the table. I felt around for a can, removed the pull ring, and drank half.

“It hardly seems like beer if you can’t see it,” I said.

“You have to forgive me, but it has to be dark.”

We said nothing while we drank.

“Well then,” said the Rat, clearing his throat. I set my empty back on the table and kept still, wrapped in my blanket. I waited for him to start talking, but no words followed. All I could hear was the Rat shaking his can to check how much was left. Old habit of his.

“Well then,” said the Rat a second time. Then downing the last of his beer in one chug, he set the can back on the table with a dry clank. “First of all, let’s begin with why I came here. Is that all right?”

I didn’t answer. The Rat continued to speak.

“My father bought this place when I was five. Just why he went out of his way to buy property up here I don’t know. Probably he got a good deal through some American military route. As you can see, the place is terribly inconvenient to get to and, aside from summer, the road is useless once the snow sets in. The Occupation Forces had planned on improving the road and using the place for a radar station or something, but the time and expense involved apparently changed their mind. And with the town being so poor, they can’t afford to do anything about the road. It wouldn’t help them to upgrade the road either. Which all makes this property a losing proposition, long since forgotten.”

“How about the Sheep Professor? Wouldn’t he be thinking to come back home here?”

“The Sheep Professor is living in his memories. He’s got nowhere to go home to.”

“Maybe not.”

“Have some more beer,” said the Rat.

“Fine for now,” I said. With the heater off, I was nearly frozen through. The Rat opened another can and drank by himself.

“My father took a liking to this property, carried out some road improvements on his own, fixed up the house. He put a lot of money into it, I believe. Thanks to which, if you had a car, you could lead a fairly good life here, at least during the summer. Heat, flush toilet, shower, telephone, emergency electrical generator. How on earth the Sheep Professor lived here before that, I don’t know.”

The Rat made a noise that was neither belch nor sigh.

“Until I was fifteen, we came here every summer. My folks, my sister and me, and the maid who did the chores. When I think of it, those were probably the best years of my life. We leased the pasture to the town—still do, in fact—so when summer rolled around, the place was full of the town’s sheep. Sheep up to your ears. That’s why my memories of summer are always tied up with sheep.

“After that, the family almost never came up here. We got another vacation house closer to home for one thing, and my sister got married for another. I wasn’t counting myself in the family much anymore, my father’s company was going through hard times, and well, all sorts of things were going on. Whatever, the property was abandoned. The last time I came up here was eleven years ago. And that time I came alone. By myself for a month.”

The Rat lingered for a second, as if he were remembering.

“Were you lonely?” I asked.

“Me, lonely? You got to be kidding. If it was possible, I would have stayed on up here. But no way that could have happened. It’s my father’s house, after all. You wouldn’t have caught me doing my old man the service.”

“But what about now?”

“The same goes,” said the Rat. “I got to say that this was the last place I wanted to come back to. Yet when I came across the photograph of this place in the Dolphin Hotel, I wanted to see it one more time. For sentimental reasons. Even you get that way at times, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. There was my shoreline that got filled in.

“That’s when I heard the Sheep Professor’s story. About the dream sheep with a star on its back. You know about that, I take it?”

“Indeed I do.”

“So to put it simply,” said the Rat, “I heard that story and hurried up here wanting to spend the whole winter. I couldn’t shake the urge. Father or not, it didn’t matter to me anymore. I pulled together my kit and came up. Like I was being drawn up here.”

“That’s when you ran into the sheep?”

“That’s right,” said the Rat.

“What happened after that is difficult to talk about,” said the Rat.

The Rat took his second empty can and squeezed a dent into it.

“Maybe you could ask me questions? You already know pretty much what there is to know, right?”

“Okay, but if it makes no difference to you, let’s not start at the beginning.”

“Fire away.”

“You’re already dead, aren’t you?”

I don’t know how long it took the Rat to reply. Could have been a few seconds, could have been … It was a long silence. My mouth was all dry inside.

“That’s right,” said the Rat finally. “I’m dead.”

The Rat Who Wound the Clock

“I hanged myself from a beam in the kitchen,” said the Rat. “The Sheep Man buried me next to the garage. Dying itself wasn’t all that painful, if you worry about that sort of thing. But really, that hardly matters.”

“When?”

“A week before you got here.”

“You wound the clock then, didn’t you?”

The Rat laughed. “Damn, if that’s not a mystery. I mean the very, very last thing I did in my thirty-year life was to wind a clock. Now why should anyone who’s about to die wind a clock? Makes no sense.”

The Rat stopped speaking, and everything was still, except for the ticking of the clock. The snow absorbed all other sound. We were like two castaways in outer space.

“What if …”

“Stop it,” the Rat cut me short. “There are no more ifs. You know that, right?”

I shook my head. No, I didn’t.

“If you had come here a week earlier, I still would have died. Maybe we could’ve met under warmer, brighter circumstances. But it’s all the same. I would have had to die. Otherwise things would have only gotten harder. And I guess I didn’t want to bear that kind of hardship.”

“So why did you have to die?”

There was the sound of his rubbing the palms of his hands together.

“I don’t want to talk too much about that. It would only turn into a self-acquittal. And there’s nothing more inappropriate than a dead man coming to his own defense, don’t you think?”

“But if you don’t tell me, I’ll never know.”

“Have some more beer.”

“I’m cold,” I said.

“It’s not that cold.”

With trembling hands, I opened another beer and drank a sip. And with the drink in me, it really didn’t seem as cold.

“Okay, if you promise not to tell this to anyone.”

“Even if I did tell someone, who’d believe me?”

“You got me there,” said the Rat with a chuckle. “I doubt anyone would believe it. It’s so crazy.”

The clock struck nine-thirty.

“Mind if I stop the clock?” asked the Rat. “It makes such a racket.”

“Help yourself. It’s your clock.”

The Rat stood up, opened the door to the grandfather clock, and grabbed the pendulum. All sound, all time, vanished.

“What happened was this,” said the Rat. “I died with the sheep in me. I waited until the sheep was fast asleep, then I tied a rope over the beam in the kitchen and hanged myself. There wasn’t enough time for the sucker to escape.”

“Did you have to go that far?”

“Yes, I had to go that far. If I waited, the sheep would have controlled me absolutely. It was my last chance.”

The Rat rubbed his palms together again. “I wanted to meet you when I was myself, with everything squared away. My own self with my own memories and my own weaknesses. That’s why I sent you that photograph as a kind of code. If by some accident it steered you this way, I thought I would be saved in the end.”

“And have you been saved?”

“Yeah, I’ve been saved all right,” said the Rat, quietly.

“The key point here is weakness,” said the Rat. “Everything begins from there. Can you understand what I’m getting at?”

“People are weak.”

“As a general rule,” said the Rat, snapping his fingers a couple of times. “But line up all the generalities you like and you still won’t get anywhere. What I’m talking about now is a very individual thing. Weakness is something that rots in the body. Like gangrene. I’ve felt that ever since I was a teenager. That’s why I was always on edge. There’s this something inside you that’s rotting away and you feel it all along. Can you understand what that’s like?”

I sat silent, wrapped up in the blanket.

“Probably not,” the Rat continued. “There isn’t that side to you. But, well, anyway, that’s weakness. It’s the same as a hereditary disease, weakness. No matter how much you understand it, there’s nothing you can do to cure yourself. It’s not going to go away with a clap of the hand. It just keeps getting worse and worse.”

“Weakness toward what?”

“Everything. Moral weakness, weakness of consciousness, then there’s the weakness of existence itself.”

I laughed. This time the laugh came off. “You start talking like that and there’s not a human alive who isn’t weak.”

“Enough generalities. Like I said before. Of course, it goes without saying that everybody has his weaknesses. But real weakness is as rare as real strength. You don’t know the weakness that is ceaselessly dragging you under into darkness. You don’t know that such a thing actually exists in the world. Your generalities don’t cover everything, you know.”

I could say nothing.

“That’s why I left town. I didn’t want others to see me sinking any lower. Traveling around alone in unknown territory, at least I wouldn’t cause problems for anyone. And ultimately …,” the Rat trailed off for a bit.

“Ultimately, because of this weakness, I couldn’t escape the specter of the sheep. There was nothing I myself could do about it. Probably even if you had shown up at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. Even if I’d made up my mind to go down from the mountain, it would have been the same. I probably still would have come back up in the end. That’s what weakness is.”

“What did the sheep want of you?”

“Everything. The whole lock, stock, and barrel. My body, my memory, my weakness, my contradictions … That’s the sort of stuff the sheep really goes for. The bastard’s got all sorts of feelers. It sticks them down your ears and nose like straws and sucks you dry. Gives me the creeps even now.”

“And for what in return?”

“Things far too good for the likes of me. Not that the sheep got around to showing me anything in real form. All I ever saw was one tiny slice of the pie. And …”

The Rat trailed off again.

“And it was enough to draw me in. More than I’d care to confess. It’s not something I can explain in words. It’s like, well, like a blast furnace that smelts down everything it touches. A thing of such beauty, it drives you out of your mind. But it’s hair-raising evil. Give your body over to it and everything goes. Consciousness, values, emotions, pain, everything. Gone. What it comes closest to is a dynamo manifesting the vital force at the root of all life in one solitary point of the universe.”

“Yet you were able to reject it.”

“Yes. Everything was buried along with my body. There remains only one last thing to do in order to see it buried forever.”

“One last thing?”

“One last thing. And that I have to ask you to do. But let’s not talk about it now.”

We both took sips of beer. I was warming up.

“The blood cyst works kind of like a whip, doesn’t it?” I asked. “For the sheep to manipulate the host.”

“Exactly. Once that forms, there’s no escaping the sheep.”

“So what on earth was the Boss after, doing what he was doing?”

“He went mad. He probably couldn’t take the heat of that blast furnace. The sheep used him to build up a supreme power base. That’s why the sheep entered him. He was, in a word, disposable. The man was zero as a thinker, after all.”

“So when the Boss died, you were earmarked to take over that power base.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“And what lay ahead after that?”

“A realm of total conceptual anarchy. A scheme in which all opposites would be resolved into unity. With me and the sheep at the center.”

“So why did you reject it?”

Time trailed off into death. And over this dead time, a silent snow was falling.

“I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas—if I like these things, why should I apologize. The same with having a beer with you …” The Rat swallowed his words. “I don’t know why.”

What could I say.

“Somehow or other, we have created two completely different entities out of the same ingredients,” said the Rat. “Do you believe the world is getting better?”

“Better or worse, who can tell?”

The Rat laughed. “I swear, in the kingdom of generalities, you could be imperius rex.”

“Sheeplessly.”

“You bet, sheeplessly.” The Rat threw back his third beer in one chug, then clunked the empty can down on the floor.

“You’d better be heading down the mountain as soon as you can. Before you get snowed in. You don’t want to spend the whole winter here. Another four, maybe five days, the snow’ll start to collect, and listen, it’s a real trick traveling down frozen mountain roads.”

“And what will you do from now on?”

The Rat let go a good, jolly laugh from off in the dark. “For me there is no ‘from now on.’ I just fade away over the winter. How long it takes depends on how long this one winter is. I don’t know. But one winter is one winter. I’m glad I got to see you. A brighter, warmer place would have been nicer, of course.”

“J sends his regards.”

“Give him my regards, too, would you?”

“I also saw her.”

“How was she?”

“All right. Still working for the same firm.”

“Then she’s not married?”

“No. She wanted to hear directly from you whether it was over or not.”

“It’s over,” said the Rat, “as you know. Even if I was unable to end it on my own, the fact is it’s over. My life had no meaning. Of course, to borrow upon your venerable generalities, this is to say that everyone’s life has no meaning. Am I right?”

“So be it,” I said. “Just two last questions.”

“Okay.”

“First, about our Sheep Man.”

“The Sheep Man’s a good guy.”

“But the Sheep Man, the one who came visiting here, was you, right?”

The Rat rolled his neck around to crack it a couple of times. “Right. I took his form. So you could tell, could you?”

“Midway on,” I said. “Up until then, though, I had no idea.”

“To be absolutely honest, you surprised me, breaking the guitar. It was the first time I’d seen you so angry, and what’s more, that was the first guitar I ever bought. A cheapie, but still …”

“Sorry about that. I was only trying to shake you up enough to show yourself.”

“That’s all right. Come tomorrow, everything’ll be gone anyway,” said the Rat dryly. “So now your other question is about your girlfriend, right?”

“Right.”

The Rat said nothing for a long while. I could hear him rub his palms together and sigh. “I didn’t want to deal with her. She was an extra factor I hadn’t counted on.”

“An extra factor?”

“Uh-huh. I meant this to be an in-group party. But she stumbled into the middle of it. We should never have allowed her to get mixed up in this. As you know very well, the girl’s got amazing powers. Still, she wasn’t meant to come here. The place is far beyond even her powers.”

“What happened to her?”

“She’s okay. Perfectly well,” said the Rat. “Only there’s nothing that you’d find attractive in her anymore. Sad, but that’s how it is.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s gone. Evaporated. Whatever it was she had, it’s not there anymore.”

I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.

“I know how you must feel,” continued the Rat. “But sooner or later, it was bound to disappear. Me and you, these girls with their certain somethings, we’ve all got to go sometime.”

I thought about his words.

“I better be going,” said the Rat. “It’s getting on time. But we’ll meet again, I just know it.”

“Sure thing,” I said.

“Preferably somewhere brighter, maybe in summer,” said the Rat. “But for now, one last request. Tomorrow morning at nine, I want you to set the grandfather clock, then connect the cords behind the clock. Connect the green cord to the green cord and the red cord to the red cord. Then at nine-thirty I want you to get the hell out of here and go down the mountain. I’ve got a rendezvous with a fellow at twelve o’clock sharp. Got it?”

“Good as done.”

“Glad I got to see you.”

A moment’s pause came between us.

“Goodbye,” said the Rat.

“See you,” said I.

Still snug in the blanket, I closed my eyes and listened. The Rat’s shoes scuffed across the floor, the door opened. Freezing cold air entered the room. Not a breeze, but a slow-spreading, sinking chill.

The Rat stood in the open doorway for a moment. He seemed to be staring at something, not the scenery outside, not the room interior, not me, some completely other thing. The doorknob or the tip of his shoe, something. Then, as if closing the door of time, the door swung shut with a click.

Afterward all was silent. There was nothing else left but silence.

Green Cords and Red Cords; Frozen Seagulls

After the Rat disappeared, an unbearable cold spread throughout the house. I tried to throw up, but nothing would come, only gasps of stale breath.

I went upstairs, took off my sweater, and burrowed under the covers. I was swept by alternating waves of chills and fever. With each wave the room would swell and contract. My blanket and underwear were soaked in sweat, which congealed into a cold, constricting skin.

“Wind the clock at nine,” someone whispers in my ear. “Green cord to green cord … red cord to red cord … get the hell out by nine-thirty.”

“Don’tworry,” says the Sheep Man. “It’llgofine.”

“The cells replace themselves,” says my ex-wife. She is holding a white lace slip in her right hand.

My head rocks.

Red cord to red cord … green cord to green cord …

“You don’t understand a thing, do you?” accuses my girlfriend.

No, I don’t understand a thing.

There comes the sound of waves. Heavy winter waves. A lead-gray sea specked with whitecaps. Frozen seagulls.

I am in the airtight exhibition room of the aquarium. Row upon row of whales’ penises on display. It’s hot and stuffy. Someone better open a window.

Someone opens a window. Shivering cold. Seagull cries, sharp piercing voices ripping at my flesh.

“Remember the name of your cat?”

“Kipper,” I reply.

“No, it’s not Kipper,” the chauffeur says. “The name’s already changed. Names change all the time. I bet you can’t even remember your own name.”

Shivering cold. And seagulls, far too many seagulls.

“Mediocrity walks a long, hard path,” says the man in the black suit. “Green cord via red cord, red cord via green cord.”

“Heardanythingaboutthewar?” asks the Sheep Man.

The Benny Goodman Orchestra strikes up “Air Mail Special.” Charlie Christian takes a long solo. He is wearing a soft cream-colored hat.

Return Visit to the Unlucky Bend

Birds were singing.

Sunlight spilled in stripes across the bed from between the shutter slats. My watch lying on the floor read 7:35. My blanket and shirt were as wet as if they’d been soaked in a bucket of water.

My head was still fuzzy, but the fever had gone. Outside, the world was a snowswept landscape. The pasture gleamed positively silver in the new morning light. I went downstairs and took a hot shower. My face was pale, my cheeks stripped of their flesh overnight. I coated my entire face with three times the necessary amount of shaving cream, and I proceeded to shave methodically. Then I went and pissed so much I could hardly believe it myself.

I was so exhausted from the piss that I collapsed on the chaise longue for fifteen minutes. The birds kept on singing. The snow had begun to melt and drip from the eaves. Occasionally in the background there’d be a sharp creaking.

It was almost on eight-thirty by the time I got up. I drank two glasses of grape juice, ate a whole apple. Then I picked out a bottle of wine, a large Hershey bar, and two more apples from the cellar.

I packed my things. The room took on a forlorn air. Everything was coming to an end.

Checking with my watch, at nine o’clock I wound up the three weights of the grandfather clock. Then I slid the heavy timepiece around and connected the four cords behind. Green cord to green cord, red cord to red cord.

The cords came out of four holes drilled in the back. One pair above, one pair below. The cords were secured with twists of the same wire I’d seen in the jeep. I pushed the grandfather clock back in place, then went to the mirror and bid farewell to myself.

“Hope all goes well,” I said.

“Hope all goes well,” the other I said.

I crossed the middle of the pasture the same way as I had come. The snow crunched beneath my feet. The pasture looked like a silver volcanic lake. Not a footprint anywhere. Only mine which, when I turned around, led back in a trail to the house. My tracks meandered all over the place. It’s not easy to walk in a straight line.

From this far off, the house looked almost like a living thing. Cramped and hunched over, it twisted to shake the snow down from its gabled roof. A block of snow slid off the roof and dashed to the ground with a thud.

I kept walking across the pasture. On through the endless birch woods, across the bridge, around the base of the conical peak, onto the unlucky bend in the road.

Miraculously, the snow on the curve had not frozen to the road. No matter, I was sure that as carefully as I stepped, I would get dragged to the bottom of that sheer drop. It was an effort just to keep walking until I cleared that curved ledge clinging to the crumbling cliff face. My armpits were soaked with sweat. A regular childhood nightmare.

Off to the right were the flatlands. They too were covered in snow, the Junitaki River glistening right down the middle. I thought I could hear a steam whistle in the distance. It was marvelous, actually.

I took a breath and hitched up my backpack, then set off down the gentle slope. At the next bend was a brand-new jeep. In front of the jeep, the Boss’s black-suited secretary.

The Twelve-O’clock Rendezvous

“I have been waiting for you,” said the man in the black suit. “Albeit only for twenty minutes.”

“How’d you know?”

“The place? Or the time?”

“The time,” I said, setting down my backpack.

“How do you think I got to be the Boss’s secretary? Diligence? IQ? Tact? No. I am the Boss’s secretary because of my special capacities. Sixth sense. I believe that’s what you would call it.”

He was wearing a beige down jacket over ski pants and green Ray-Ban glasses.

“We used to have many things in common, the Boss and I. Things that reached beyond rationality and logic and morality.”

“Used to?”

“The Boss died a week ago. We had a beautiful funeral. All Tokyo is turned upside down now, trying to decide a successor. The whole mediocre lot of them running around like fools.”

I sighed. The man took a silver cigarette case out of his jacket pocket, removed a plain-cut cigarette, and lit up.

“Smoke?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“But I must say you did your stuff. Much more than I expected. Honestly, you surprised me. At first, I thought I might have to help you along and give you hints when you got stuck. Which makes your coming across the Sheep Professor an even greater stroke of genius. I almost wish you would consider working for me.”

“So I take it you knew about this place here from the very beginning?”

“Naturally. Come now, who do you think I am?”

“May I ask you something, then?”

“Certainly,” said the man, in top spirits. “But keep it short.”

“Why didn’t you tell me right from the start?”

“I wanted you to come all this way spontaneously of your own free will. And I wanted you to lure him out of his lair.”

“Lair?”

“His mental lair. When a person becomes sheeped, he is temporarily dazed out of his mind and goes into retreat. As with, say, shell shock. It was your role to coax him out of that state. Yet in order for him to trust you, you had to be a blank slate, as it were. Simple enough, is it not?”

“Quite.”

“Lay out the seeds and everything is simple. Constructing the program was the hard part. Computers can’t account for human error, after all. So much for handiwork. Ah, but it is a pleasure second to none, seeing one’s painstakingly constructed program move along exactly according to plan.”

I shrugged.

“Well then,” the man continued, “our wild sheep chase is drawing to a close. Thanks to my calculations and your innocence. I’ve got him right where I want him. True?”

“So it would seem,” I said. “He’s waiting for you up there. Says you’ve got a rendezvous at twelve o’clock sharp.”

The man and I glanced at our watches simultaneously. Ten-forty.

“I had better be going,” the man said. “Must not keep him waiting. You may ride down in the jeep, if you wish. Oh yes, here is your recompense.”

The man reached into his pocket and handed me a check. I pocketed it without looking at it.

“Should you not examine it?”

“I don’t believe there’s any need.”

The man laughed, visibly amused. “It has been a pleasure to do business with you. And by the way, your partner closed down your company. Regrettable. It had such promise too. There is a bright future for the advertising industry. You should go into it on your own.”

“You must be crazy,” I said.

“We shall meet again, I expect,” said the man. And he set off on foot around the curve toward the highlands.

“Kipper’s doing fine,” said the chauffeur, as he drove the jeep down. “Gotten nice and fat.”

I took the seat next to the chauffeur. He was a different person than the man who drove that monster of a limo. He told me in considerable detail about the Boss’s funeral and about his Kipper-sitting, but I hardly heard a word.

It was eleven-thirty when the jeep pulled up in front of the station. The town was dead still. Except for an old man shoveling away the snow from the rotary and a gangly dog sitting nearby wagging its tail.

“Thanks,” I told the chauffeur.

“Don’t mention it,” he said. “By the way, have you tried God’s telephone number?”

“No, I haven’t had time.”

“Since the Boss died, I can’t get through. What do you suppose happened?”

“Probably just busy,” I suggested.

“Maybe so,” said the chauffeur. “Well now, take care.”

“Goodbye,” I said.

There was a train leaving at twelve o’clock sharp. Not a soul on the platform. On board only four passengers, including myself. Even so, it was a relief to see people after so long. One way or another, I’d made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre it might be, this was my world.

The departure bell sounded as I chewed on my chocolate bar. Then, as the ringing stopped and the train clanked into readiness, there came the sound of a distant explosion. I lifted the window all the way open and stuck my head out. Ten seconds later there was a second explosion. The train started moving. After three minutes, in the direction of the conical peak, a column of black smoke was slowly rising.

I stared at it until the train cut a curve to the right and the smoke was out of sight.