"Is this the second wild hog you've speared this winter?" asks Iwabuchi, the interpreter.
"No, your honor," answers Nakano; "the snow began to fall ten days ago, and this is the eighth hog I have killed; but yesterday I speared my first boar this winter."
"How long have you been a hunter?"
"Hai! your honor, ever since I was a boy. I speared my first hog when I was fifteen."
"What do you do with the boar's tusks?"
"Hai! your honor, they are the most valuable part of the animal. I sell them to an agent of an ivory-carving shop in Tokio, who comes through these parts in the spring. The Tokio men carve nétsukés from them. They are not as good as ivory, but they do for bimbo [poor men]. My own nétsuké is of boar's tusk."
"Meshi shitaku" (rice is ready), cried the housewife, at this moment, and conversation was suspended. A little table of lacquered wood a foot square and four inches high was set before each man of our party. With chopsticks for the rice and knives for the boar-steak, we partook of the hunter's fare. The march of eight miles in the frosty air, plodding our way through drifts, and stepping on snow-shoes, which furnished good exercise for our legs, had made us ravenously hungry. When full, and all had said "Mo yoroshio" (even enough) to the polite girls who waited on us, we walked out to the front, where a gaping crowd gazed at the American white-face, as if they were at Barnum's, and he was the Tattooed Man. I rushed at them, pretending to catch the children, when they scattered like sheep. In their fright they tumbled over each other, until a dozen or more were sprawling on the snow or had tumbled head-foremost in the drifts. A smile, and the distribution of some sugared cakes of peas and barley, made them good friends again. After an hour's rest we bade the hunter, the villagers, and our snow-shoe men good-by, and resumed our journey in single file over the mountains to Tokio.