It’d been a month since I’d begun living on this nameless mountain.
The name’s Shohei Sano—twenty-five, bachelor. No interest in dating. No desire to get married.
The vegetation on the mountain had begun to grow rapidly thanks to the increasingly warm weather. I wish I had some of that energy too.
Well then, the first thing I needed to do was deal with all the overgrown grass. I brought out the electric lawn mower and got to work outside the house.
And I mowed.
And mowed.
And mowed.
But, as usual, there seemed to be no end in sight. Then again, because the chickens grazed around this part of the property, the effort didn’t go to waste.
I had started growing vegetables too. I’d gone over to what used to be the fields, pulled out the weeds one by one, tilled the soil, and planted the seeds I’d been given. Now that the crops were established, I knew they’d be a prime target for insects if I didn’t properly tend to them, so I tried out a recipe for organic pesticide I’d once seen an idol make on TV. While I was preparing it, the smell became so overpowering that the chickens got angry at me. Sorry about that, guys.
Oh, right. Speaking of the dyed chicks I’d bought at the festival—they were fully feathered now, and the color had worn off. All three had grown into healthy chickens.
Kind of big chickens, though. Big enough to make you think, Are chickens even supposed to grow this large?
I found some info on the internet about a breed of large chickens called Brahma, but even those weren’t this big. I’d only had these chickens for a month, and they had already grown over half a meter tall. I measured them yesterday.
From what I’d read, it should usually take more than one month for a chick to grow into an adult chicken. However, one of my chicks, Pochi, already had quite the comb on his head. I thought maybe they’d been a few weeks old when I’d bought them, but when I went down to the village for some shopping and asked how old they’d been, I was told that the chicks sold at the festival stall should have been a week old at most.
That would make them slightly more than five weeks old now. Apparently, broiler chickens reached slaughter weight after about seven weeks, but the chicks sold at the festival were all supposed to be males with little market value. The old man down at the village offered to help if I was going to slaughter them; I politely turned him down. These chickens were my dear pals, and I wanted them to stick around for as long as they could.
Pochi, the one with the large comb, clucked a lot, and you could tell he was a rooster. The other two, Tama and Yuma, seemed like they might be hens. As chicks, they’d all chirped and tweeted, but I’d never heard Tama and Yuma cluck loudly like Pochi did. Well, they were pretty damn freaked out that time I made organic pesticide. Again, sorry about that.
There were a few other things I didn’t quite understand about my chickens.
“Why does this grass have to grow so fast? I wish it would just take it easy. Gah, what a pain.”
“...Whattapain.”
“Whattapain.”
“Whattapain.”
What are you, parrots? Parakeets? I’ve never heard of chickens talking.
“God, what’s going on?”
“...Gawd.”
“Gawd.”
“Gawd.”
Are you guys religious or something?
All of a sudden, Tama moved briskly.
“Whoa?! What is it?”
Held within her beak was a small snake—a viper.
“Ooh...” I marveled. “I can always count on Tama for a surprise, huh? Hold on for a sec.”
I went inside to get a plastic bottle. Then I carefully took the viper from Tama’s beak and put its head through the mouth of the bottle. The snake promptly slid inside. Old Man Yumoto had taught me how to do this. Sometimes, the snake could try slithering out again after going almost all the way inside. You couldn’t let your guard down until it was fully trapped. (Don’t try this at home, kids.)
“Thanks, Tama.”
She raised her head.
Isn’t it weird for chickens to attack snakes, though? Shouldn’t it normally be the other way around?
The next thing I knew, Yuma flapped her wings, went around to the back of the house, and returned with another viper. Way too many of these around here. I’d better watch out for snakes.
“You caught one too, Yuma? Thanks. You guys can eat that if you’d like.”
The three of them started hungrily pecking at the snake. Chickens that prey on vipers... Scary stuff. In any case, I had a strong feeling they could somehow understand what I was saying.
All that commotion had tired me out, so I went into the house to poke a hole in the plastic bottle so the viper could breathe.
This was about what an average day in my new life looked like.
Now, as previously mentioned, this mountain didn’t have a name. It did, however, have a nickname of sorts. There was a river flowing near this house, and the mountain was abundant with water, so they called it Brook Mountain.
Locals said that back in the day, there used to be a small settlement here with five or six houses besides mine, which had been the village head’s house. As the population had grown older, they’d moved away to other places, like the village at the foot of the mountain and other nearby towns. It seemed the other houses had been built on land that the village head had developed and leased, so there weren’t any land ownership issues to deal with.