A Wild Sheep Chase (29 page)

“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.

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.