The Sea-shore—A “Hairy Aino”—A Horse Fight—The Horses of Yezo—“Bad
Mountains”—A Slight Accident—Magnificent Scenery—A Bleached
Halting-Place—A Musty Room—Aino “Good-breeding.”
A CHARGE of 3 _sen_ per _ri_ more for the horses for the next stage,
because there were such “bad mountains to cross,” prepared me for what
followed—many miles of the worst road for horses I ever saw. I should
not have complained if they had charged double the price. As an almost
certain consequence, it was one of the most picturesque routes I have
ever travelled. For some distance, however, it runs placidly along by
the sea-shore, on which big, blue, foam-crested rollers were disporting
themselves noisily, and passes through several Aino hamlets, and the Aino
village of Abuta, with sixty houses, rather a prosperous-looking place,
where the cultivation was considerably more careful, and the people
possessed a number of horses. Several of the houses were surrounded by
bears’ skulls grinning from between the forked tops of high poles, and
there was a well-grown bear ready for his doom and apotheosis. In nearly
all the houses a woman was weaving bark-cloth, with the hook which holds
the web fixed into the ground several feet outside the house. At a deep
river called the Nopkobets, which emerges from the mountains close to the
sea, we were ferried by an Aino completely covered with hair, which on
his shoulders was wavy like that of a retriever, and rendered clothing
quite needless either for covering or warmth. A wavy, black beard
rippled nearly to his waist over his furry chest, and, with his black
locks hanging in masses over his shoulders, he would have looked a
thorough savage had it not been for the exceeding sweetness of his smile
and eyes. The Volcano Bay Ainos are far more hairy than the mountain
Ainos, but even among them it is quite common to see men not more so than
vigorous Europeans, and I think that the hairiness of the race as a
distinctive feature has been much exaggerated, partly by the
smooth-skinned Japanese.
The ferry scow was nearly upset by our four horses beginning to fight.
At first one bit the shoulders of another; then the one attacked uttered
short, sharp squeals, and returned the attack by striking with his fore
feet, and then there was a general mêlée of striking and biting, till
some ugly wounds were inflicted. I have watched fights of this kind on a
large scale every day in the _corral_. The miseries of the Yezo horses
are the great drawback of Yezo travelling. They are brutally used, and
are covered with awful wounds from being driven at a fast “scramble” with
the rude, ungirthed pack-saddle and its heavy load rolling about on their
backs, and they are beaten unmercifully over their eyes and ears with
heavy sticks. Ito has been barbarous to these gentle, little-prized
animals ever since we came to Yezo; he has vexed me more by this than by
anything else, especially as he never dared even to carry a switch on the
main island, either from fear of the horses or their owners. To-day he
was beating the baggage horse unmercifully, when I rode back and
interfered with some very strong language, saying, “You are a bully, and,
like all bullies, a coward.” Imagine my aggravation when, at our first
halt, he brought out his note-book, as usual, and quietly asked me the
meaning of the words “bully” and “coward.” It was perfectly impossible
to explain them, so I said a bully was the worst name I could call him,
and that a coward was the meanest thing a man could be. Then the
provoking boy said, “Is bully a worse name than devil?” “Yes, far
worse,” I said, on which he seemed rather crestfallen, and he has not
beaten his horse since, in my sight at least.
The breaking-in process is simply breaking the spirit by an hour or two
of such atrocious cruelty as I saw at Shiraôi, at the end of which the
horse, covered with foam and blood, and bleeding from mouth and nose,
falls down exhausted. Being so ill used they have all kinds of tricks,
such as lying down in fords, throwing themselves down head foremost and
rolling over pack and rider, bucking, and resisting attempts to make them
go otherwise than in single file. Instead of bits they have bars of wood
on each side of the mouth, secured by a rope round the nose and chin.
When horses which have been broken with bits gallop they put up their
heads till the nose is level with the ears, and it is useless to try
either to guide or check them. They are always wanting to join the great
herds on the hillside or sea-shore, from which they are only driven down
as they are needed. In every Yezo village the first sound that one hears
at break of day is the gallop of forty or fifty horses, pursued by an
Aino, who has hunted them from the hills. A horse is worth from
twenty-eight shillings upwards. They are very sure-footed when their
feet are not sore, and cross a stream or chasm on a single rickety plank,
or walk on a narrow ledge above a river or gulch without fear. They are
barefooted, their hoofs are very hard, and I am glad to be rid of the
perpetual tying and untying and replacing of the straw shoes of the
well-cared-for horses of the main island. A man rides with them, and for
a man and three horses the charge is only sixpence for each 2½ miles. I
am now making Ito ride in front of me, to make sure that he does not beat
or otherwise misuse his beast.
After crossing the Nopkobets, from which the fighting horses have led me
to make so long a digression, we went right up into the “bad mountains,”
and crossed the three tremendous passes of Lebungétogé. Except by saying
that this disused bridle-track is impassable, people have scarcely
exaggerated its difficulties. One horse broke down on the first pass,
and we were long delayed by sending the Aino back for another. Possibly
these extraordinary passes do not exceed 1500 feet in height, but the
track ascends them through a dense forest with most extraordinary
abruptness, to descend as abruptly, to rise again sometimes by a series
of nearly washed-away zigzags, at others by a straight, ladder-like
ascent deeply channelled, the bottom of the trough being filled with
rough stones, large and small, or with ledges of rock with an entangled
mass of branches and trailers overhead, which render it necessary to
stoop over the horse’s head while he is either fumbling, stumbling, or
tumbling among the stones in a gash a foot wide, or else is awkwardly
leaping up broken rock steps nearly the height of his chest, the whole
performance consisting of a series of scrambling jerks at the rate of a
mile an hour.
In one of the worst places the Aino’s horse, which was just in front of
mine, in trying to scramble up a nearly breast-high and much-worn ledge,
fell backwards, nearly overturning my horse, the stretcher poles, which
formed part of his pack, striking me so hard above my ankle that for some
minutes afterwards I thought the bone was broken. The ankle was severely
cut and bruised, and bled a good deal, and I was knocked out of the
saddle. Ito’s horse fell three times, and eventually the four were roped
together. Such are some of the _divertissements_ of Yezo travel.
Ah, but it was glorious! The views are most magnificent. This is really
Paradise. Everything is here—huge headlands magnificently timbered,
small, deep bays into which the great green waves roll majestically,
great, grey cliffs, too perpendicular for even the most adventurous
trailer to find root-hold, bold bluffs and outlying stacks cedar-crested,
glimpses of bright, blue ocean dimpling in the sunshine or tossing up
wreaths of foam among ferns and trailers, and inland ranges of mountains
forest-covered, with tremendous gorges between, forest filled, where
wolf, bear, and deer make their nearly inaccessible lairs, and outlying
battlements, and ridges of grey rock with hardly six feet of level on
their sinuous tops, and cedars in masses giving deep shadow, and sprays
of scarlet maple or festoons of a crimson vine lighting the gloom. The
inland view suggested infinity. There seemed no limit to the
forest-covered mountains and the unlighted ravines. The wealth of
vegetation was equal in luxuriance and entanglement to that of the
tropics, primeval vegetation, on which the lumberer’s axe has never rung.
Trees of immense height and girth, specially the beautiful _Salisburia
adiantifolia_, with its small fan-shaped leaves, all matted together by
riotous lianas, rise out of an impenetrable undergrowth of the dwarf,
dark-leaved bamboo, which, dwarf as it is, attains a height of seven
feet, and all is dark, solemn, soundless, the haunt of wild beasts, and
of butterflies and dragonflies of the most brilliant colours. There was
light without heat, leaves and streams sparkled, and there was nothing of
the half-smothered sensation which is often produced by the choking
greenery of the main island, for frequently, far below, the Pacific
flashed in all its sunlit beauty, and occasionally we came down
unexpectedly on a little cove with abrupt cedar-crested headlands and
stacks, and a heavy surf rolling in with the deep thunder music which
alone breaks the stillness of this silent land.
There was one tremendous declivity where I got off to walk, but found it
too steep to descend on foot with comfort. You can imagine how steep it
was, when I tell you that the deep groove being too narrow for me to get
to the side of my horse, I dropped down upon him from behind, between his
tail and the saddle, and so scrambled on!
The sun had set and the dew was falling heavily when the track dipped
over the brow of a headland, becoming a waterway so steep and rough that
I could not get down it on foot without the assistance of my hands, and
terminating on a lonely little bay of great beauty, walled in by
impracticable-looking headlands, which was the entrance to an equally
impracticable-looking, densely-wooded valley running up among
densely-wooded mountains. There was a margin of grey sand above the sea,
and on this the skeleton of an enormous whale was bleaching. Two or
three large “dug-outs,” with planks laced with stout fibre on their
gunwales, and some bleached drift-wood lay on the beach, the foreground
of a solitary, rambling, dilapidated grey house, bleached like all else,
where three Japanese men with an old Aino servant live to look after
“Government interests,” whatever these may be, and keep rooms and horses
for Government officials—a great boon to travellers who, like me, are
belated here. Only one person has passed Lebungé this year, except two
officials and a policeman.
There was still a red glow on the water, and one horn of a young moon
appeared above the wooded headland; but the loneliness and isolation are
overpowering, and it is enough to produce madness to be shut in for ever
with the thunder of the everlasting surf, which compels one to raise
one’s voice in order to be heard. In the wood, half a mile from the sea,
there is an Aino village of thirty houses, and the appearance of a few of
the savages gliding noiselessly over the beach in the twilight added to
the ghastliness and loneliness of the scene. The horses were unloaded by
the time I arrived, and several courteous Ainos showed me to my room,
opening on a small courtyard with a heavy gate. The room was musty, and,
being rarely used, swarmed with spiders. A saucer of fish-oil and a wick
rendered darkness visible, and showed faintly the dark, pathetic faces of
a row of Ainos in the verandah, who retired noiselessly with their
graceful salutation when I bade them good-night. Food was hardly to be
expected, yet they gave me rice, potatoes, and black beans boiled in
equal parts of brine and syrup, which are very palatable. The cuts and
bruises of yesterday became so very painful with the cold of the early
morning that I have been obliged to remain here.