“Kwaaahh!” Pochi cried loudly. He seemed furious with me. You were just about to run off into the fields, weren’t you?
“Pochi, not today! We’ll come again another day! Okay?!” I protested several times while he pecked at me, but eventually, he gave in. So you really were just about to run off, huh?
“That’s...quite the unusual chicken, all right,” Yumoto-san said.
He’s not always like this, Yumoto-san... Please believe me! He’s a good chicken. Uh...whatever that means. I stared into the distance.
Yumoto-san said he’d tell the other farmers about the chickens and that he’d let me know at a later date—probably would take a couple of days, he said.
Pochi kept pecking at me, but anyway, I bought meat and eggs and went home. Look, Pochi, I understand that was probably embarrassing for you, but could you stop pecking me? It hurts, you know. I was lucky I was wearing sturdy work clothes. Pochi didn’t poke any holes in the fabric, but I might have gotten some bruises.
Yuma didn’t seem to mind Pochi pecking me. Now that we were home, she was just lazing around, pecking at the ground.
After finishing my work for the day, I checked my phone to find a message from Aikawa-san. “I can’t stand this weather. How have you been faring?” I wonder if he knows anything about the yamakagashi—he probably knows a thing or two about snakes. I decided to give him a call, not really expecting much. He picked it up after three rings.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Sano-san? How are you doing?”
Aikawa-san was courteous, as usual. I told him about how there had been an unusually large number of yamakagashi around the village and how my chickens had been asked to help with that.
“I wonder if you might have any ideas about why there’re so many of these snakes around.”
“Uh... Sano-san, have you been keeping up with the news lately?”
“The news...?” Is this related?
“The story was about pests in general, not just snakes, but...”
He told me the gist of it: There was a large house in T-Town, which was next to S-Town (the town to the south of the village). The man who’d lived there, a pest control specialist, had passed away last year. His children had gone there to sort through his belongings, and they’d found a large collection of snakes—mostly venomous ones—that their father had kept as a hobby. They hadn’t known how to deal with them. The children and their mother had been releasing the snakes into the mountains little by little, up until about a month ago. Quite ironic that the bereaved family of a pest control specialist would do something like that...
That had gone unnoticed until recently, when a friend of the late father who ran a pet shop had contacted them about it. The children had insisted that they didn’t know the snakes were venomous, but either way, it’d resulted in a lot of trouble for everyone.
“Uh... So, could that possibly also explain why there are so many vipers on my mountain...?”
“It’s certainly a possibility. I saw in the news that they’d been releasing them onto uninhabited mountains. It’s definitely related to the increase in yamakagashi, I think. They say the man kept many of those.”
God, I can’t believe this. No wonder I run into so many vipers.
“Do the villagers know about this?”
“There hasn’t been that much publicity around this incident. A lot of people probably missed the news.”
“Why didn’t they just kill the snakes instead of releasing them...?”
“I agree. We’re talking about venomous snakes here, so releasing them might come with severe criminal implications too.”
There was only one news story about this. I thought maybe I could find out more if I looked it up, but at the end of the day, media was all about views—if no one cared, they would stop pursuing the incident. For me, it was a local happening, which made it all the more worrying.
“Also, Rin caught a habu today.”
“A habu?!”
Habu were venomous snakes native to the southern region of Okinawa. Why the heck are there Okinawan snakes here?
“That...definitely seems related...”
“I’ve got Rin and Ten to keep me safe and catch them, but who knows what might happen if they show up in the village.”
“I’ll let Yumoto-san know. Thanks!”
I ended the call and tried to collect my thoughts. The first thing I did was call Old Man Yumoto and ask him if he’d heard the news—he hadn’t.
“Yamakagashi aren’t that dangerous, but habu are big trouble. We’ll probably look around for a professional, but tell the chickens to stay on standby just in case.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, also, if they have an actual habu, could you ask the guy from the western mountain to show it to us? Just so we know what it looks like.”
“I’ll ask Aikawa-san.”
I called Aikawa-san again. He would be going over to Yumoto-san’s place tomorrow, and he asked me to go with him, which I, of course, agreed to.
I sighed deeply. Who could have imagined something like this was going on? Yuma cuddled up to me, and I petted her wings. I guess the animal therapy thing I hear about really does work.
“Yuma, come here a sec.”
I hugged her tightly. She was still a bit wet from the rain, but it felt nice. Pochi and Tama let me pet them, but there was probably no way they’d let me hug them like this. Such cold chickens.
“Yuma, thanks.”
“Thanks!”
I laughed. “Ha ha! I’m the one who should thank you.”
I was suddenly reminded of Katsuragi-san. Crap. The dragon is probably keeping her safe, but I still need to let her know what’s going on. I quickly called her.
“Whaaat?! Habu?!”
“They were spotted at the mountain to the west...”