No Easy Task for the Exterminators
–Night of December 10th–
The more than fifty villagers who had been tasked with destroying the animal—the exterminators—had sensed something was awry and had already encircled the Miyoke house two or three thick.
“Rikizō! Kanakura! Hisano!” Grievously wounded, Yayo cried out for her children.
Yayo had briefly sought shelter at the home of Nakagawa Magoichi, who lived upriver, but her concern for her children had brought her back. Though the men pleaded with her to stay quiet, Yayo, half-crazed, continued to call out the names of her children. Three of Yayo’s children— Rikizō, Kanakura, and Hisano—had been left behind inside the house, along with Saitō Take and her two sons, Iwao and Haruyoshi.
Not one of the brave-hearted youths would set foot inside, nor fire within. Nobody had any idea where the bear was. The house, pitch-dark, betrayed nothing but sounds: the voices of women and children crying out for help; moans of dying agony; the eerie echoing of bones crunching and breaking. Just when it seemed like the clamor had come to an end, there would come moaning or babbling. They had already written off everybody inside the house. And since they had seen no sign of the bear escaping, the party continued to nervously shift this way and that around the house.
So passed a long, anxious hour.
The men were of two minds. “Burn the house down!” bellowed some, where others wanted to go in guns blazing. As they no longer believed there to be anybody alive, their methods were reckless. The only voice of dissent came from the wounded Yayo. “There’s a chance somebody might be alive!” That scant hope managed to persuade the crazed men from their paths of action. But they were riled up, eyes bloodshot.
The dying screams ripped into the hearts of the villagers outside, who were standing by and doing nothing. They stared up at the sky, aware of the cruelty of their inaction. “Is there no god?” some men asked. Time passed agonizingly slowly.
At last the death throes faded to nothing, leaving only the sounds of the brown bear groping about the house. Sure that the beast was about to leap out into the open, the capable shooters among the men positioned themselves to one side of the door. Their positions finalized, Tani Kihachi fired two shots into the night sky. They should have a perfect bead on the bear. It would burst out of the house, spooked, and appear right in front of the closest matagi hunter to the door.
They couldn’t have asked for a more perfect setup.
The hunter, a bald matagi who had come up from the south, pulled his trigger. However, his weapon misfired. The bear, shooting a backwards glance at the stunned exterminators, turned its back on the house and lumbered off into the darkness. The sharpshooters did not fire, for fear of hitting anybody still alive in the house.
Rikizō recalled later that he heard loud voices saying, “Any survivors, come out!”
The rescue party lit torches of gampi flowers and rushed together into the house. And this was how Rikizō, miraculously having avoided harm by concealing himself in the rice, and Hisano, having fainted, were rescued.
There was not a single inch of the floor not covered in blood, guts, or gone. The spray of blood reached beyond the ceiling, and the scent of death was everywhere. It looked like a scene out of hell. The party lied Saitō Take, Haruyoshi, and Kanakura in a row and covered them with whatever was on hand: sacks of rice, futons, mats. They had already breathed their last, and they had been so devoured—from the right shoulder to the right chest, the stomach, and the right thigh respectively—that there was little left to see. The fetus was loosely attached to the mother, and by some miracle it had been unharmed and survived for an hour. All of them were totally naked, leaving the bear’s cruelty on full display.
“Awful! Look what this god-damned bear’s done to the women and children!”
“That bear is the devil! We won’t rest until he’d dead!”
The party ground their teeth at the grisly massacre before them, shedding manly tears* as though they were each alone.
Just when the party had gathered up the bodies and prepared to head down the road, they heard a loud shout from the rear of the house: “Mommy! Catch me a bear!” The party had overlooked a single survivor.
But the members of the party only vacillated; nobody wanted to head into the dark, gory scene a second time. In the meantime, the Russo-Japanese war veteran Horiguchi Kiyosaku had raced alone inside, discovered Iwao clinging to life beneath the mat, and gotten him help, earning him the admiration of all present.
But nobody wanted to venture back into that hall of carnage. The men looked at each other. Eventually, the Russo-Japanese war veteran Horiguchi Kiyosaku ran inside alone. He discovered Iwao clinging to life beneath the mat and brought him out, to the adulation of the exterminators.
It was difficult to even look at the young Iwao, so severe were his wounds. His bones were showing from his left thigh to his buttocks, his skin coiled about them like a tattered rag.
*I feel obliged to point out that this is a direct translation.