When the snow still lay six feet deep, my partner suddenly spotted something and pointed it with a surprise out of the dining room window in our apartment during lunch. In the direction of his pointing, I saw a Japanese serow on the snow-covered ground under a tree in the grove about 30 feet away from the building.
I had never seen a Japanese serow in the residential area. Or should I
rather say, I had never seen it for real altogether. It had a face like
a goat and its body looked rather like a calf than a serow, covered
with light brown and gray fur. I wondered why just looking at a wild
animal was somehow awe-inspiring. I took my binoculars and observed it
closely.
The Japanese serow was standing on its hind legs and holding
on to the trunk with its forelegs. It seemed to eat the tree bark or
something on the trunk. Every time a car pulled into the parking lot
stretched out between the grove and the apartment building, it hid
behind the tree and peeked out the lot. After people were gone, it
resumed eating.
In the beginning of this winter, my partner bumped
into a boar for the first time on the foot of a mountain beside the
street he was walking on. The boar was staring at him at a distance of
60 feet. Its size was about a calf and with black fur and a pig-like
face. He was afraid and turned back. It was the right choice since I had
heard about quite a few incidents that a boar rushed into and injured
people or bit them in Japan this year, which hadn’t happened so often
before. Considering that much more bears than before appeared in my town
last autumn, wild animals have come down to the residential area around
this year far more than they used to.
It’s said that has to do with
climate change. Wild animals aren’t the only ones that have been sent
out of the depths of mountains. Judging from the present situation,
unknown viruses that are new to human beings and stay where they’re
supposed to be may continue to come out as well.
Twilight drew near
and the spots in the parking lot of my apartment building were being
filled up as commuters’ cars came back one after another spewing out
exhaust fumes. The Japanese serow started walking back slowly. It stared
over here for a while one last time as if it was trying to tell
something, and plodded back on the snow, up into the mountain.
