The night was too cold for sleep, and at daybreak, hearing a great din, I
looked out, and saw a drove of fully a hundred horses all galloping down
the road, with two Ainos on horseback, and a number of big dogs after
them. Hundreds of horses run nearly wild on the hills, and the Ainos,
getting a large drove together, skilfully head them for the entrance into
the corral, in which a selection of them is made for the day’s needs, and
the remainder—that is, those with the deepest sores on their backs—are
turned loose. This dull rattle of shoeless feet is the first sound in
the morning in these Yezo villages. I sent Ito on early, and followed at
nine with three Ainos. The road is perfectly level for thirteen miles,
through gravel flats and swamps, very monotonous, but with a wild charm
of its own. There were swampy lakes, with wild ducks and small white
water-lilies, and the surrounding levels were covered with reedy grass,
flowers, and weeds. The early autumn has withered a great many of the
flowers; but enough remains to show how beautiful the now russet plains
must have been in the early summer. A dwarf rose, of a deep crimson
colour, with orange, medlar-shaped hips, as large as crabs, and corollas
three inches across, is one of the features of Yezo; and besides, there
is a large rose-red convolvulus, a blue campanula, with tiers of bells, a
blue monkshood, the _Aconitum Japonicum_, the flaunting _Calystegia
soldanella_, purple asters, grass of Parnassus, yellow lilies, and a
remarkable trailer, whose delicate leafage looked quite out of place
among its coarse surroundings, with a purplish-brown campanulate blossom,
only remarkable for a peculiar arrangement of the pistil, green stamens,
and a most offensive carrion-like odour, which is probably to attract to
it a very objectionable-looking fly, for purposes of fertilisation.
We overtook four Aino women, young and comely, with bare feet, striding
firmly along; and after a good deal of laughing with the men, they took
hold of the _kuruma_, and the whole seven raced with it at full speed for
half a mile, shrieking with laughter. Soon after we came upon a little
tea-house, and the Ainos showed me a straw package, and pointed to their
open mouths, by which I understood that they wished to stop and eat.
Later we overtook four Japanese on horseback, and the Ainos raced with
them for a considerable distance, the result of these spurts being that I
reached Tomakomai at noon—a wide, dreary place, with houses roofed with
sod, bearing luxuriant crops of weeds. Near this place is the volcano of
Tarumai, a calm-looking, grey cone, whose skirts are draped by tens of
thousands of dead trees. So calm and grey had it looked for many a year
that people supposed it had passed into endless rest, when quite lately,
on a sultry day, it blew off its cap and covered the whole country for
many a mile with cinders and ashes, burning up the forest on its sides,
adding a new covering to the Tomakomai roofs, and depositing fine ash as
far as Cape Erimo, fifty miles off.
At this place the road and telegraph wires turn inland to Satsuporo, and
a track for horses only turns to the north-east, and straggles round the
island for about seven hundred miles. From Mororan to Sarufuto there are
everywhere traces of new and old volcanic action—pumice, tufas,
conglomerates, and occasional beds of hard basalt, all covered with
recent pumice, which, from Shiraôi eastwards, conceals everything. At
Tomakomai we took horses, and, as I brought my own saddle, I have had the
nearest approach to real riding that I have enjoyed in Japan. The wife
of a Satsuporo doctor was there, who was travelling for two hundred miles
astride on a pack-saddle, with rope-loops for stirrups. She rode well,
and vaulted into my saddle with circus-like dexterity, and performed many
equestrian feats upon it, telling me that she should be quite happy if
she were possessed of it.
I was happy when I left the “beaten track” to Satsuporo, and saw before
me, stretching for I know not how far, rolling, sandy _machirs_ like
those of the Outer Hebrides, desert-like and lonely, covered almost
altogether with dwarf roses and campanulas, a prairie land on which you
can make any tracks you please. Sending the others on, I followed them
at the Yezo _scramble_, and soon ventured on a long gallop, and revelled
in the music of the thud of shoeless feet over the elastic soil; but I
had not realised the peculiarities of Yezo steeds, and had forgotten to
ask whether mine was a “front horse,” and just as we were going at full
speed we came nearly up with the others, and my horse coming abruptly to
a full stop, I went six feet over his head among the rose-bushes. Ito
looking back saw me tightening the saddle-girths, and I never divulged
this escapade.
After riding eight miles along this breezy belt, with the sea on one side
and forests on the other, we came upon Yubets, a place which has
fascinated me so much that I intend to return to it; but I must confess
that its fascinations depend rather upon what it has not than upon what
it has, and Ito says that it would kill him to spend even two days there.
It looks like the end of all things, as if loneliness and desolation
could go no farther. A sandy stretch on three sides, a river arrested in
its progress to the sea, and compelled to wander tediously in search of
an outlet by the height and mass of the beach thrown up by the Pacific, a
distant forest-belt rising into featureless, wooded ranges in shades of
indigo and grey, and a never-absent consciousness of a vast ocean just
out of sight, are the environments of two high look-outs, some sheds for
fish-oil purposes, four or five Japanese houses, four Aino huts on the
top of the beach across the river, and a grey barrack, consisting of a
polished passage eighty feet long, with small rooms on either side, at
one end a gravelled yard, with two quiet rooms opening upon it, and at
the other an immense _daidokoro_, with dark recesses and blackened
rafters—a haunted-looking abode. One would suppose that there had been a
special object in setting the houses down at weary distances from each
other. Few as they are, they are not all inhabited at this season, and
all that can be seen is grey sand, sparse grass, and a few savages
creeping about.
Nothing that I have seen has made such an impression upon me as that
ghostly, ghastly fishing-station. In the long grey wall of the long grey
barrack there were many dismal windows, and when we hooted for admission
a stupid face appeared at one of them and disappeared. Then a grey
gateway opened, and we rode into a yard of grey gravel, with some silent
rooms opening upon it. The solitude of the thirty or forty rooms which
lie between it and the kitchen, and which are now filled with nets and
fishing-tackle, was something awful; and as the wind swept along the
polished passage, rattling the _fusuma_ and lifting the shingles on the
roof, and the rats careered from end to end, I went to the great black
_daidokoro_ in search of social life, and found a few embers and an
_andon_, and nothing else but the stupid-faced man deploring his fate,
and two orphan boys whose lot he makes more wretched than his own. In
the fishing-season this barrack accommodates from 200 to 300 men.
I started to the sea-shore, crossing the dreary river, and found open
sheds much blackened, deserted huts of reeds, long sheds with a nearly
insufferable odour from caldrons in which oil had been extracted from
last year’s fish, two or three Aino huts, and two or three grand-looking
Ainos, clothed in skins, striding like ghosts over the sandbanks, a
number of wolfish dogs, some log canoes or “dug-outs,” the bones of a
wrecked junk, a quantity of bleached drift-wood, a beach of dark-grey
sand, and a tossing expanse of dark-grey ocean under a dull and windy
sky. On this part of the coast the Pacific spends its fury, and has
raised up at a short distance above high-water mark a sandy sweep of such
a height that when you descend its seaward slope you see nothing but the
sea and the sky, and a grey, curving shore, covered thick for many a
lonely mile with fantastic forms of whitened drift-wood, the shattered
wrecks of forest-trees, which are carried down by the innumerable rivers,
till, after tossing for weeks and months along with
“—wrecks of ships, and drifting
spars uplifting
On the desolate, rainy seas:
Ever drifting, drifting, drifting,
On the shifting
Currents of the restless main;”
the “toiling surges” cast them on Yubets beach, and
“All have found repose again.”
A grim repose!
The deep boom of the surf was music, and the strange cries of sea-birds,
and the hoarse notes of the audacious black crows, were all harmonious,
for nature, when left to herself, never produces discords either in sound
or colour.