Yamamoto Heikichi Looks Back in Anger
Yamamoto Heikichi, the man who had at last brought down the beast, was known as a lover of drink. He was in and out of debt and would regularly have to pawn his gun and take a break from hunting. He did not hear of the bear’s repeated appearances at the Ikeda house in November or the incident on the 9th.
Heikichi had got it into his mind to go for a hunt, and on the approach to Sankebetsu he heard about what was happening. Tensions were high: some thought that if Heikichi had known what had happened in November, the tragedies on the 9th and 10th might not have occurred. Late on the night of the tenth Heikichi joined the hunters out for the bear.
Heikichi, it was said, could bring down an Ezo grouse or a Hokkaidō red squirrel with a single shot. When he was young, he had stabbed a bear dead with a short sword on the island of Sakhalin (now part of Russia). Because of this he had been given the nickname “sword-brother.” According to his grandson, Yamamoto Shōkō, Heikichi was a matagi hunter who would spent the whole year out in the wilderness. Some said that in the course of his life he had bagged over three hundred bears. Though sometimes drink would drive him crazy, he was often exceedingly kind and caring. Heikichi’s favorite gun, which he used daily, was his own rifle from the Russo-Japanese War, and he was never far from his trademark military cap. He died in 1950, at the age of ninety-two. He often walked the mountains around Onishika and stayed oftentimes at the house of Kawamura Jirobei, where he would look forward chilled sake. In that neck of the woods Heikichi was called the “sword of Sōya.”
Heikichi was revived at the protagonist of a novel, television show, and play based on the incident called The Bear Storm. In The Bear Storm, he was portrayed as a stubborn but earnest old matagi hunter by the name of Ginshirō who silently devotes himself to hunting the bear single-handedly.