Chapter 7
Sandy Bottom Bay
As one of the sailors from the Iemitsu Maru held the longboat steady, the smith Arinobu stepped into the knee-high water at the landward end of Sandy Bottom Bay, then turned.
“Umako, hand Haru-chan to me.” She picked up their son, and Arinobu hoisted the boy onto his shoulders. “Wait, I’ll come back for you.”
He carried Harunobu—Haru-chan was what his mother and father called him—to the beach, and set him down there. “Don’t move!”
Arinobu then went back to fetch Umako. She was wringing out the bottom of her kimono—while she had hitched it up in preparation to enter the water, a stray wave had caught her—when an unfamiliar samurai approached him.
It was plain that he had been living in the wilderness for a long time. His hair had grown over his ears and there was stubble along his chin. There was also a poorly repaired rip on one of the knees of his sea-blue hakama.
Well, Arinobu knew better than to call attention to the sartorial deficiencies of a samurai.
“You are Arinobu, the smith?”
“I am,” said Arinobu. He bowed. “And whom do I have the honor of addressing?”
“I am Oyamada Isamu. I am in command here. When Haru-san arrived here, he told me about you. I am very pleased you came. With you here, we can do more than mine iron, we can make it into tools and weapons.”
“That is why the Date clan’s agents recruited me.” Arinobu didn’t elaborate. Some months ago, Arinobu had gone to Sendai, the capital of the domain ruled by the Date clan, to petition on behalf of his younger brother. The younger brother had been found guilty of selling stolen goods. He claimed that he hadn’t known they were stolen, but the thief was a known friend of his, and, under torture, the thief had accused him of confederacy. Like most crimes that disturbed the Tokugawa sense of order, it carried the death penalty. The smith pleaded for leniency on account of the brother’s age—he was only fifteen—the small value of the sale the brother had made, and the bad influence of the friend. Magistrates in Japan had a great deal of discretion in deciding what punishment to impose for a crime.
But those supposed extenuating circumstances proved less important than what Arinobu could offer the Date clan as recompense. Date Tadamune, who was ruling the domain in Date Masamune’s absence, offered Arinobu a deal; he would commute the brother’s sentence to exile from Sendai Domain provided that Arinobu served in New Nippon for five years. Arinobu agreed. And here he was, with his family, in the most remote finger of New Nippon.
You seem lost in thought,” said Isamu.
“My apologies,” said Arinobu, bowing his head. “I was. You should know that I can’t get the iron out of the ore; you need Tetsue and his people for that.” Tetsue was the murage, the smelter foreman, recruited by Terasaka Haru.
“Yes, I know. Tetsue came ashore about an hour ago. We were going to take him to the huts we have set up as temporary housing for the colonists, but he wanted to see the mine first.”
Arinobu laughed. “That sounds like Tetsue. But since it will be a while before I have any iron to work with, I’d like to see where we’ll be living. Do you know when our belongings will be brought ashore?”
“No. My authority ends where the water begins, I fear. You’d have to ask one of Captain Fukuzawa’s mates. But I can take you to where you’ll be living, at least for the next few days.”
Isamu excused himself to talk to one of the sailors, and Arinobu and his wife studied what they could see of their new home. The tide was going out, and it left behind some tidal pools, whose denizens fascinated young Harunobu. There were anemones, crabs, sea stars, snails, fish, and even an octopus. The tidal pools also attracted the attention of a great blue heron and several seagulls. Harunobu tried chasing the seagulls, but they easily eluded him.
At last, a sailor called out to Arinobu that it was time for them to collect their belongings and take them to their temporary quarters. Those were just their personal belongings; his smithy equipment was stowed separately.
Isamu spotted them trudging up the beach and joined them. “I will guide you to where you need to go,” he said. This was a great honor, coming from a samurai to a commoner. But then again, Arinobu reflected, you would have to travel to Monterey Bay, over eleven hundred miles south of Texada, to find another swordsmith.
Arinobu and his family did not, at least, have to negotiate Marsh Berry Creek. Isamu’s scouting party had found it a rather inconvenient route for accessing Sandy Bottom Bay when they wanted to dig for clams or try to catch fish and, in the spring, had cut a trail on mostly higher (and drier) ground. Where it crossed Marsh Berry Creek, they had laid stepping stones and logs.
“With the additional manpower of the colonists your ship brought over, we can build a plank road,” confided Isamu. “We can then use hand carts to transport goods in both directions.”
The trail climbed to the east of Marsh Berry Lake and then turned left to pass between it and Rattling Bird Lake. It took them at last to a broad limestone terrace on which there was a sort of longhouse. It had a single sloped roof, making it evident that the builders expected that it would have to cope with heavy rains for part of the year. Coming closer, Arinobu could see that it was of a light construction, built in haste or with limited resources.
“So here we are. We call it ‘Welcome House.’ The frames are cedar poles tied together, and the walls are strips of cedar bark. The roofs are of bark, or leaves.” Isamu spread his hands apologetically. “Yes, I know it is primitive. The natives build their longhouses with cedar timbers and planks, but we have only one carpenter, and most of our effort goes to feeding ourselves.”
The temporary quarters for Arinobu and his family were just a curtained-off section of the Welcome House. “I am sorry, my dear,” he whispered to Umako. “Sorry you and Harunobu had to cross an ocean.”
“You did what you had to do.”
Harunobu laid down on the cedar bough bedding that had been placed in one corner. He was soon fast asleep. Umako motioned to Arinobu to go out.
In the common area, he found Isamu. “You have had contact with the natives? What are they like?” asked Arinobu. “Are they like the Ainu?”
“When I was on the Ieyasu Maru, we had contact with some of the natives on the great island to the west, Vancouver Island.”
“Is it as large as Honshu?”
“Oh, no. More like Kyushu. Anyway, we found some Japanese castaways, and they in turn helped us find some natives to serve as interpreters. We have two of the castaways, and one of the native interpreters, here now. Which is a good thing, because we did run into a small party of Indians south of Marsh Berry Lake.”
“Did they attack you?”
“No, we reached an understanding, but there were some tense moments. And we know that some of the tribes are both numerous and warlike, so we are glad that the Iemitsu Maru and Sendai Maru have upped our numbers and fighting capability. As for the natives, they are hunters and fishers like the Ainu.” He grinned. “I can introduce you to one now.”
“That would be most interesting,” said Arinobu. “But how would we communicate?”
“She speaks Japanese. Not perfectly, but she can certainly make herself understood, and understand the gist of what we are saying to her.”
“How is that possible?”
“She came aboard the Ieyasu Maru about a year ago and she has been a diligent student.”
“Well . . . even so . . . she must be quite clever. . . .”
“She is.”
Yells-at-Bears was inside the Welcome House, treating the newly arrived sailors and colonists who showed symptoms of scurvy. Her remedy was “tree needle tea,” made from the Douglas-fir trees that were common on Texada.
She was introduced to Arinobu as “Kuma-san ni donaru hito.” Literally, “a person who yells at a bear.”
She took a moment to study the smith. He was of middling height, with thick eyebrows and prominent cheekbones. She guessed that he was in his thirties. He was wearing two swords, but no hakama.
“You are a samurai?” she asked.
“Oh, no. But as a swordsmith, I have the privilege of the ‘large’ and the ‘small.’”
Arinobu had a question of his own. “Excuse me if this question is impertinent but your name in Japanese is unusual. Is it a translation of your name in your own language?”
“It is,” said Yells-at-Bears.
“How did you come by it?”
Yells-at-Bears smiled impishly. “It was because of what happened when I was ten summers old. I was with two younger children, near a berry patch, and I saw a black bear walking slowly on all fours toward us.
“I didn’t know whether it wanted to eat the berries or us, but had to assume the worst.
“I called the other children to me and had them hold me, so we looked like one big animal with many limbs, and I yelled at the bear. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Bear? Go away!”
“You must have wanted to run.”
“Can’t run from a black bear; it says, ‘I am prey, try to catch me.’ Even backing away slowly is risky. And with a black bear, it does no good to climb a tree. They climb well. Better than children, certainly.
“Anyway, the bear stopped, and rose up on two legs, like a man. I don’t know whether it was to scare us, or to get a better look at us, but that’s what it did.
“And I guess it didn’t like the looks of us, as it retreated.” She paused. “But we didn’t do any more berry picking that day.”
“I don’t blame you,” said Arinobu.