Biogenesis (3 page)

Records of the Research Conducted on Day One, Afternoon

Below are the lists of the locations, dates, and times where winged mice were found and their dates and times of death, as compiled by Dr. Sakakibara and exactly as Dr. Akedera would have seen them. (There are other instances of capture, but they are not included in the table because the time, date, and/or location were unclear.) (
Tables 1
,
2
)

Table 1
No records from before 1930 (excluded: Ponta & Ai)

Table 2
Records of winged mice deaths (available only for those listed in
Table 1
from 1945 on; as of 1940, all those previously caught had died)

There is a tape recording of a strange conversation that took place as Dr. Akedera sat in the hotel lobby reviewing the above data. Some bits have been omitted for ease of reading. (A: Dr. Akedera, S: Dr. Sakakibara)

A: I haven’t yet heard what preceded my being called up here at this stage.

S: Preceded?

A: In the spring, Dr. Hiroo Sugiki was invited to come here, correct? Why was I chosen this time, and not him?

S: Did Dr. Sugiki say something to you?

A: No, I haven’t heard anything from him. After the breeding attempt, they suddenly grew weak, so he was hurriedly dismissed and I was brought in. May I take it that you decided to preserve genetic material at that point?

S: Is that what you were told?

A: Am I to understand that Dr. Sugiki made some kind of error?

S: No, nothing of the sort.

After this exchange, Dr. Akedera identified certain facts. The winged mice deaths all occurred from September through December, and regardless of when they were caught, the deaths occurred in clusters. For example, the mouse caught in 1945 survived until 1956, for eleven years, remarkably, while the mouse caught in 1955 also died in 1956, after just one year. Interpreting this as an instance of winged mice dying in immediate succession once they were kept in the same cage seemed to explain the roughly simultaneous deaths of the two mice caught together in 1971. What happened in 1980 and 1981 only reinforced the pattern.

Dr. Akedera seems to have wondered, at that point, if some kind of infectious disease was not to blame. Yet, based on the cases that came with observation logs, there was no apparent rapid onset that is normally seen in infectious diseases, so it is likely that he suspected something more specific akin to sexually transmitted diseases among humans.

But Dr. Akedera made another discovery from the same piece of paper. There was a correlation between the time of year and the numbers captured. Two mice were caught together in September, October, and November, whereas when one mouse was caught, it was in April, May, or June. What did those numbers mean? With ordinary mice, mating occurs year-round, and many other organisms experience a spring mating season. It seemed counterintuitive, but Dr. Akedera theorized that perhaps the mating period for winged mice was not springtime but autumn. Until then, researchers had been invited in the spring months, considered the optimal season for breeding, but Dr. Akedera went so far as to postulate that all of the attempts had ended in failure because of this. While the older
cases did not come with such records, the recent mating attempts were called off because the animals might hurt each other, and the fact that they were then placed in adjacent but separate wire cages lent a great sense of veracity to Dr. Akedera’s hypothesis. As this point will be important later on, the reader is asked to note that the separated winged mice were still close enough to be aware of each other’s presence.

Right there and then, Dr. Sakakibara expressed surprise at Dr. Akedera’s lucid reasoning. The center director, who had not expected much of the newcomer, must have been happy to admit that this was virtually the first time during the entire breeding program that a clear-cut hypothesis had been proposed. Perhaps he even welcomed Dr. Akedera’s hypothesis as a game changer that could unravel the enigma that was the winged mice’s impending extinction.

Nevertheless, the initial theory of a sexually transmitted disease and the hypothesis of an autumn/winter mating period clearly contradicted each other, and Dr. Akedera’s lab notes suggest
that he was puzzled as well.

He undertook an investigation of the cliff-side road by car, working with Katsumi Igarashi, a Kamuikotan photographer, as his guide. With a map in hand, Dr. Akedera proceeded to confirm each site where winged mice had been caught according to Dr. Sakakibara’s list.

“Since all the fuss, there had been slight changes to the ecosystem of Kamuikotan, like fewer salamanders, and it seemed to interest Dr. Akedera greatly. He knew our geography so well it was hard to believe he’d never been here before. He might have walked nearly twenty kilometers on that day alone” (Mr. Igarashi).

Because the area is situated in the upper reaches of the Ishikari River, a hiker trekking through Kamuikotan in the late summer or early autumn will find great boulders scattered here and there. The streams gushing down its gorge and forming white patterns like the back of some snake testify to the fact that nature has remained untouched there. Above the sharply rising cliffs are dense growths
of foliage; a little higher up, and a grassy plateau stretches out, a small pond in its midst. This continues on to an even steeper slope from which the mountains rise, covered in trees. Dr. Akedera walked briskly through the virgin woods, comparing Dr. Sakakibara’s list against a map and asking Mr. Igarashi to take photos.

Table 3

When Dr. Akedera returned, his clothes covered in mud, he reordered the original list with a certain idea in mind and entered it into his log (
Table 3
).

This represented his attempt to reconsider the data in
Table 1
according to the time of day. He noticed that with the exception of 4, for which the time is unknown, and 3, the data overwhelmingly indicated that only one winged mouse had been caught when the sun was high in the sky. As for case 3, the grass in that area grew to a significant height, as he had confirmed with his own eyes, and Dr. Akedera believed that the discovery had involved a great amount of luck. Seen in this light, the capture of single winged mice occurred, both in terms of time and location, only when conditions were favorable. From the top of the table on down, those locations (the riverside, the rock face, the serpentine) featured unobstructed views. Meanwhile, when two winged mice were caught, the locations were not suited to searching for small animals in the cases of the thicket, the cut (also
in a thicket as it happened), and the peak, and even for the rock face, it was at night, which meant that conditions were quite unfavorable. The testimonies of the elementary school teacher and the shrine reverend supported this.

But what did this collection of facts signify? Dr. Akedera paid heed to Mr. Tamura’s childhood recollections regarding winged mice.

By then, winged mice were already on the verge of becoming the stuff of legend. Even so, more than one of Mr. Tamura’s friends had told him that they had seen a winged mouse faintly glowing like a flame on the riverbank at night. One of those friends had even witnessed a winged mouse shedding tears. In the region, sightings of a glowing or weeping winged mouse were considered to be bad omens that, ironically, portended good luck for the particular individual who witnessed the occurrence.

What Dr. Akedera picked up from this was the bit about “faintly glowing like a flame on the riverbank at night.” To be spotted in a thicket at
night, he conjectured, winged mice would have to be emitting light.

Part of the plan for the second day was canceled and Dr. Sakakibara was called upon once again. The objective was to interview those who had captured two winged mice at the same time (unlike with Ponta and Ai, who had been caught separately). Most of the recorded captors had already passed away or moved from the area, but they finally found one person, a retired police officer, and obtained his testimony.

This was Takanori Abe (formerly of the Fukagawa PD).

Located halfway up Kamuikotan’s mountains, Indian Peak affords vistas of the entire gorge. At the time, Officer Abe was using that location to check for speeders. The tunnel had yet to be completed, and the only road ran along the river. When Officer Abe saw lights that were moving much faster than the others, he radioed in so that a patrol car standing by on the roadside could head out to
apprehend the violator. Originally, the peak had no name. Some readers may associate “Indian” with the famous Indian Watermill in Chitose, also in Hokkaido, but there is no connection whatsoever. The name was inspired by Westerns, where North American Indians fall upon stagecoaches on cue from a lookout.

Dr. Akedera interviewed Mr. Abe in the lobby of a hotel. What follows is a summary of the former police officer’s testimony.

Mr. Abe was serving at Indian Peak together with a sergeant from around 10 p.m. According to the records, “Visibility [was] poor due to [a] light fog.” They could not adequately carry out their surveillance from inside their patrol car, and since the sergeant was a veteran of the force, Mr. Abe volunteered to assume a post outside of the vehicle. A spot slightly down from the top offered a vantage point unhindered by any foliage. Mr. Abe left the patrol car every thirty minutes, his radio transceiver in hand, to conduct his lookout from that location. The standard practice was to let drivers be when it was raining, foggy, or
conditions were otherwise unfavorable to speeding. A couple of fatal accidents had occurred just the day before, however, and lookout duty was to extend late into the night.

The monitoring shifts ran a half-hour each starting from 22:00 and 23:00, and then came the period in question, the thirty minutes from midnight on. Seated on a large cold slab of rock and absently following the flow of headlights, Mr. Abe noticed a car moving very fast and reached for his transceiver. It was then that he noticed, at the edge of the rock, two small unfamiliar creatures that resembled tailless mice.

Although at first he assumed that they were dead since they crouched stock still, the warmth and slight stirring he felt when he took them in his hands revived legends of the winged mice for the young Officer Abe. He brought back the pair to his cruiser right away.

That was the extent of his story. He had left the force for another line of work quite some time ago, and his memory was riddled with vague
patches. Perhaps for fear of leading him, Dr. Akedera did not immediately ask whether or not the mice had been glowing.

After confirming some trivial details, he did, however, ask if there was anything more about the appearance of the mice that Mr. Abe could recall. No doubt having been in an excited state at the time, Mr. Abe only retained inaccurate recollections. His own interest was centered on the fact of capture itself, and the circumstantial details he managed to provide seemed quite suspect. Any emission of light had been too feeble to leave an impression on him, to say the least.

Dr. Akedera then confirmed with Mr. Abe that there were no artificial sources of light such as street lamps on Indian Peak. Establishing that the only illumination by which Mr. Abe could have spotted the mice, then, came from the stars, the headlights of the patrol car, the faint light that shone from down by the river, or from the flashlight he carried, Dr. Akedera considered the likelihood of each of those sources in turn.

Under foggy conditions, starlight could not have been of any help. It was also hard to imagine that the headlights would have been left on. As for light from the road below, even if there were no fog, it hardly seemed to count as illumination. That ruled out everything but directly shining his flashlight on the mice. But would someone who wanted to capture a small animal bathe it in a beam of light?