The Old Hunter recalled those days, a strange sense of reassurance mixed with lingering fear in his voice. "No matter how terrified I was, my body stayed warm. Pressed against a living bear in that frozen wilderness, I almost forgot all my other pain."
"The bear and I relied on each other for who knew how long. When I was half-conscious, I suddenly heard a gunshot—someone shot Jubei in the eye from a distance. Blood all over its head, it hurried away."
"Later, that hunter told me he'd followed the bear's footprints all the way there, and then found me. In other words, if not for Jubei, I definitely would have frozen to death during that cold spring."
"After that, I moved my home nearby and took my Hunting Rifle up the mountain every day. Whenever I found signs of Jubei, I fired into the air and drove it back into the deep mountains, where there were no hunters."
Suzuki Sonoko was touched by the bond between the man and the bear, but then she suddenly felt that something was off. "Wait, but when you mentioned Jubei earlier, you didn't say anything like that—you clearly said that bear was vicious, liked eating people, and had an irreconcilable grudge against humans..."
The Old Hunter sighed. "I wanted people to fear it and stop coming to hunt bears, so I deliberately made up those stories."
The Long-haired Hunter snorted. "You're a hunter, yet you're protecting animals? And you didn't even do it properly—do you know how many people heard your nonsense and thought hunting that vicious Black Bear in Chiba Prefecture would be a challenge worth taking? They came here from thousands of miles away on purpose."
"But no wonder people occasionally found traces of bears without ever actually seeing one... Before