Child-Rearing (3)
Even raised by Chester and Monia’s hands, Rex was unmistakably one of the People of the Summit. What that meant was simple: he loved strength. He loved hunting things.
“Even a baby who doesn’t know a thing loves hunting… is this pure instinct…?”
“Black Wind comes by to look after Rex sometimes. You don’t think he’s been putting weird ideas into his head?”
“Ruining our kid…!”
“He’s not our kid. He’s Black Wind’s.”
“Parents who raise a child wrong don’t deserve to be called parents!”
The words might have come from Monia’s own experience. Chester could guess as much, so he said nothing. After that, Monia unloaded her grievances on Black Wind.
“In the first place! Why do you handle the child so roughly?!”
It looks rough to us, but for them it’s probably just the right level.
“Haven’t you seen Rex cry when he plays with Black Wind?!”
When she gets angry, the formal speech piles up…
“That wasn’t crying.”
“He cried!”
He didn’t cry. You just mistook it for crying.
Back then Rex hadn’t been crying at all—he’d been having so much fun he was going wild. He just whooped and howled like he was screaming, so Monia still believed he had been shrieking and sobbing while playing with Black Wind.
Monia probably knew the truth was different. Her eyes were simply covered.
She was the same when we first picked up Ant.
If she ever gave birth to a baby of her own, what kind of reaction would she show? Chester felt a faint dread of that future that had not yet arrived.
Even if the future was frightening, that was a matter for later. Chester decided to focus on the present and scanned the surroundings for signs of living creatures.
A broken branch he did not remember. From the height of the break he roughly estimated the creature’s size. He nudged the branch aside with his foot and found droppings that had only just been left in the world.
“Monia.”
“Mm.”
“What do you think?”
On the Floating Island the thick carpet of fallen leaves left almost no footprints. That made it vital not to miss even the faintest remaining traces.
As Chester studied the way the leaves had been scattered and asked the question, Monia examined the signs as well and offered the conclusions she had already formed.
“First of all, it’s not a rabbit. The leaves are too tough—rabbits don’t prefer this kind of forage.”
“Right.”
“I wondered about a turtle, but there are too few traces left around. Turtles are slow and drag their shells along the ground, so they leave big marks. A branch wouldn’t just break like that and be the end of it.”
“Correct.”
“A bird? If it were a bird there wouldn’t be traces at all. Not a carnivore either—there are signs of leaves being eaten. Did it defecate right after eating? Then it’s not a large herbivore either. Not a rabbit, but small in size, yet with jaws strong enough to handle tough leaves, and heavy enough to leave some kind of trail.”
Monia ran through the beasts she knew from the lower levels of the Floating Island one by one. Among them the herbivores, and among those the ones that could eat tough leaves.
While the candidates steadily dwindled, Chester finished examining the continuing trail and calculated which way they needed to move.
“…Could it be this?”
Monia voiced the animal’s identity a little uncertainly. She had been trying to choose between the last two remaining candidates, but she simply could not tell, so in the end she just picked one at random.
What Monia chose was the rabbit-rat. The name Chester had given it—a rat with a body as large as a rabbit’s.
It used its sharp front teeth to snip tough leaves into bite-sized pieces, then crushed them with large, sturdy molars. Because its digestion was so fast, droppings were always left right where it had eaten.
Chester told her the answer was correct and pointed somewhere.
“Rabbit-rats sense vibration with their tails. Especially when they’re eating, they thrash their tails the whole time trying to detect danger nearby. So if you carefully examine a place where a rabbit-rat has fed…”
He pointed to a spot where the leaves were scattered strangely. Beneath the upper layer of leaves, a deeper layer of brown, rotting foliage was slightly exposed, and new leaves had only just begun to pile on top of it.
“You find places like this.”
“Ah.”
“And the fact that this is here means the rabbit-rat is right nearby.”
“If a lot of time had passed, the traces would all be covered by new leaves, right?”
“Exactly. Come on, let’s track it. If we do it right we can take five or six rabbit-rats in one go.”
Chester and Monia began following the rabbit-rat’s trail.
Rabbit-rats lived in burrows. Not only rabbit-rats and ant-wolves—many of the animals on this island dug burrows to live in. To endure the island’s violently changing weather, the best option was to dig down into the earth where the climate’s effects were milder.
On top of that, because food was so abundant, competition for it was rare—not as rare as on the upper levels, but still rare enough that strange situations often arose. Sometimes two or three species, or even four or five, would be found sharing a single burrow system.
Tracking the signs was not easy. As he had been saying all along, the island’s nature made traces vanish quickly. But Chester had lived more than a year on this island and had learned how to track animals in a way that matched the Floating Island.
Before long he found an “entrance” formed by branches and stones piled up and naturally covered by leaves.
Just as birds gather twigs to build nests and beavers gather wood to build dams, the animals that wanted to dig burrows through the thick leaf layer first had to do this kind of construction work at the surface.
When Chester jerked his chin, Monia and Ant naturally began searching for other entrances. Monia found one; Ant found three. They set to work at once.
How do you catch creatures that live in burrows? First you block every tunnel they have dug and leave only one open. They brought fairly heavy stones, set them a little past the mouth of each entrance, right where the tunnel began, and sealed the holes with ease.
Next they lit a fire. The important thing was to make sure the flames never jumped to the leaf layer and set the forest ablaze.
Chester packed living leaves thickly onto the end of a long wooden pole, lit them, confirmed that smoke was billowing out, then aimed the pole at the open entrance and thrust it deep inside.
A short while later, thick smoke began pouring from both the entrance where Chester waited and the ones blocked by stones.
At first the animals inside the burrow fled toward other exits to escape the smoke. When they found those exits sealed by stone, they despaired once—then had no choice but to try escaping through the dangerous hole where the smoke had just begun.
— Squeee! Tsweee!
The instant one rabbit-rat burst from the burrow with a scream, Chester’s machete sliced the air.
The rabbit-rat, still charging, slammed into the blade and went flying, spraying blood.
More rabbit-rats began pouring out. Chester pointed at one of them with a finger, just as he had a moment before.
“Yeah!”
Rex answered with delight, swung his arm, and hurled the stone he was holding. The stone struck the fleeing rabbit-rat in the side.
— Kyaak!
While one rabbit-rat collapsed under Rex’s stone, Chester whirled his sling and loosed a shot, then pointed at another rabbit-rat.
The stone Chester had thrown spun through the air, curved around a tree when its path was spotted, and struck its target. Another stone from Rex smashed the skull of a rabbit-rat nearby.
While they took four, one rabbit-rat managed to flee farther away.
Chester considered drawing his bow, then tossed a stone to Rex and pointed at the rabbit-rat’s ears.
Rex sprang up, planted his feet on Chester’s shoulder and head, caught the stone Chester had thrown, and—exactly the way Chester had taught him—put his whole body into the throw.
The rabbit-rat ran with everything it had. Hearing the dying cries of the rest of its family, it fled and fled for its life.
When it had run far enough to think it was safe and felt a flicker of relief that it had survived, a stone from behind shattered its spine. The rabbit-rat’s consciousness sank into darkness.
“…Hmm.”
After taking the last rabbit-rat, Chester looked around.
“What do you think?”
He asked Monia, who had stepped back a pace to watch the hunt unfold.
“Uh, well.”
Momentarily flustered, Monia glanced at Rex and said,
“I think he’ll be a lot more help than I am.”
At the slightly deflated tone of her assessment, Chester told her it was fine and pulled her into his arms.
“No. You’re more help.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Really? For real?”
“Yeah. For real.”
As Chester suddenly hugged Monia and murmured to her, Rex, who had been watching quietly, broke into a huge smile and wrapped both arms around Mommy’s and Daddy’s heads.
“Wuv you!”
In clumsy words he spoke the phrase he had heard most often from his parents since the day he was born.
“Oh!”
“…!”
Startled by Rex’s sudden confession of love, Chester and Monia looked at each other—and burst out laughing.