Dendera by Yuya Sato Page A

were Matsuki Nagao, Ran Kubo, Kuwa Kure, and Sasaka Yagi, but as none of the victims had been particularly well known to her, this new piece of information did nothing one way or another to affect her already-shattered mental state.
    “It was a bear!” Mei Mitsuya hollered.
    That was the only explanation, of course, for what other creature could have performed such an act of brutality? Still, hearing it spelled out in so many words made Kayu Saitoh shudder. As the Village had been equipped with rifles, bears had simply not been a real issue there, and Kayu Saitoh had never heard of one actually attacking the Village. Bears were supposed to have been responsible for desecrating cemeteries, for killing and eating horses and cows, for attacking people while they harvested vegetables in the field, but that was just rumor, closer to legend than reality. Here, in Dendera, it was reality. Kayu Saitoh realized, once and for all, that she had just understood the crucial, decisive difference between the Village and Dendera.
    Mei Mitsuya looked at the broken wooden spears and then entered the storehouse through the hole in its wall. Kayu Saitoh followed her and, as soon as she entered, saw the chaos inside. The stores of dried fish, potatoes, and beans had been well and truly eaten, with debris scattered around the floor. When Kayu Saitoh realized the implications of the sudden loss of so much of their valuable stores, her fear of the bear was replaced with a sense of despair at how they would possibly survive the morrow.
    “Ludicrous!” Mei Mitsuya banged her staff against the ground. “What the hell is this? It’s ludicrous! Why would it do a thing like this? A bear! What have we ever done to hurt it ? So, you think you can get away with ruining all our plans, do you? You? A mindless beast ? Well, you’re wrong. I’m going to kill you for this! Kill you!”
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    A beast cannot speak the language of men and has no such thing as a name. Nevertheless, as the hair on this particular bear’s back was notably reddish, let us call her “Redback.” Let us say that Redback could speak the language of humans. What would she say if she were given the opportunity to explain herself? No doubt, she would angrily growl that the mountain was her territory, and that the Two-Legs had no right to be here. The reality was that Redback’s ancestors roamed the mountain for many a generation, long before people even arrived on the scene to start calling it “the Mountain.” And yet these Two-Legs had the temerity to appear on the scene and start cutting the trees down with their tools and shaping the mountain according to their will, carving what they called their village into the landscape, preventing Redback from roaming freely around what should have been her birthright.
    Redback knew what a powerful beast she was.
    She knew that she was the strongest, proudest beast in the area, as did the other beasts of the region, who all deferred to her might and kept out of her way. That was the rightful way of things. And yet when the two-legged intruders ignored this natural order, and when Redback decided to teach them a lesson by going to that place that they had claimed for themselves, Redback came across a group of these Two-Legs on the way down the mountain, and they had pointed those strange sticks at her that spat fire, and she felt a pain like no other as her rear leg went limp. After that Redback decided never to appear before the Two-Legs again. That was the law of nature, the logic of beasts. Avoid confrontation with that which is stronger than you.
    Circumstances, however, conspired to cloud Redback’s usually sound animal instincts.
    It was winter. The very fact of a bear roaming the mountains during winter was, in itself, an anomaly. Redback should have been hibernating, as she did most years. Most years she would eat her fill of salmon from the streams, and strawberries and lingonberries from the fields, and then settle into a