The Fifth Year of Chōkyū, Sukeichiro the Horse Breeder, the Impoverished Villagers of Wagoku

"Sukeichiro, come eat your porridge!... Are you still not done feeding the horses? Whoa! This Jurchen Horse can actually eat this much?"

"Mm, Squad Leader Watanabe. This Jurchen Horse is very strong, even stronger than the family head's Deer-Hair Horse! I'm afraid it weighs a thousand jin, as much as ten men. The amount it eats every day has to be ten men's worth too—twenty or thirty jin of grass and beans!..."

"Buddha above! This horse actually weighs a thousand jin? It can eat twenty or thirty jin of grass in a day? Tsk, tsk, that's almost twice as much as a Honshu horse, isn't it?..."

"Right! Twice the weight of a Honshu Kiso Horse, and it eats more than twice as much! In a day it can eat twenty or thirty jin of grass and drink forty or fifty jin of water. And grass alone won't do—I still have to feed it at least two jin of dried soybeans or dried peas... What it eats is even better than the village head back home! Good thing, before we came out this time, we prepared early to keep big horses and brought a lot of bean feed..."

The crude stable was built of timber, dead branches, and leaves, standing beside a little ice river where water was easy to fetch, and it was practically the best structure in the whole camp. A tall Jurchen Horse and two slightly smaller Yakut snow horses were bedded separately inside the warm stable.

The powerful Jurchen Horse occupied the middle of the stable. It had long since shown off a stallion's might, driving the two little snow mares into the corners so it could monopolize the special feed the horse keeper gave out. At that moment, it was lowering its head, chewing a mouthful