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Ogata isn’t fooled. Not the way the rest of them are.
They look at her and they think she’s a child. An Ainu hunter, yes — strangely competent for her age and mature beyond her years. But still: a child of barely a decade, young and untested.
He holds no such delusions.
He sees things as they are, not as how others might take them to mean. He sees Asirpa and her bright blue eyes, blood staining her lips when she slices herself a cut of raw meat from a fresh kill, and he thinks: wolf.
Or the Horkew Kamuy, as she would call it. Maybe a cub in size, but too adept at hunting to be anything other than a juvenile. If she hadn’t encountered Sugimoto, perhaps she would still be wandering the woods in her lonesome, building temporary shelters and stalking her prey with nobody to lecture about the old practices of the Ainu.
Ogata likes the idea better than reality. Not out of some misguided sympathy for getting a girl so young involved in so much death, no; he simply prefers the image of a predator in its proper environment, undisturbed by the petty machinations of humans.
He imagines it must be similar to how he felt in his sniper’s perch during the war, picking off targets as they came. The deaths themselves afforded him no real happiness – only a slight satisfaction that he’d shot well once again. It was just the same as shooting at flying ducks across the lake to him.
He wonders, occasionally, if Asirpa would feel the same.
She kills thoughtfully. Indiscriminately, not in the sense that she gluts herself, but in the lack of discrimination with which she hunts. Her only deciding factors are the taste of the meat and the resulting effects on the surrounding environment.
If they see an animal during their trek, it will become their meal for the day. This is a rule almost never broken, helped by the vast encyclopedia of knowledge Asirpa can recite on command, as well as her entourage of criminals and soldiers well-trained in the art of pursuit.
Ogata thinks that most girls her age would not be so eager to gut a rabbit, its glossy black eyes wide with pleading. He can see how the animal might be appealing to those with a more protective instinct, how its delicate bone structure and soft fur might inspire a sort of doting affection in a well-bred daughter.
Instead, Asirpa remarks on the ease with which she can chop those same fragile bones into citatap, bestowing upon her enthralled followers another Ainu myth involving the rabbit. Sugimoto nods along dutifully, storing away the information to demonstrate again should the situation call for it – always eager to please his beloved partner.
No hint of guilt on her face; only enjoyment of the food before her. Appreciation, maybe, for the animal that had to die for her to eat. Ogata watches this process happen a dozen times over during their journey through the snowy woods, and every time he wonders: does she feel the same?
When she strings the squirrels caught in her traps on her belt, does she feel a certain level of pride at her ability? Does she congratulate herself when her arrow flies straight and true into the flank of a deer? Unlike Ogata, Asirpa deals with the aftermath of the kill as well, assigning it an equal importance to the process of hunting. Her hands are deft and quick when she skins her prey, even the ones she claims are difficult to make into pelts.
Her hands lack a tremble when she skins people, too. Sugimoto is less practiced in getting fatty tissue off the skin – sometimes, he’ll call Asirpa to check his work over before he continues. Her mouth will twist in discomfort, but still Ogata can detect no hesitation as she works her ornately carved knife through the flesh of a dead man.
She’d let it slip once, in an overheard conversation over a fire with Sugimoto, that the knife was carved by her own father. Ogata had to suppress a grin at the admission – vague amusement at the irony of using a knife gifted by her loving father to cut into the bodies of the worst men in the country.
A beloved child. A pure soul, borne from two parents who must have adored each other. Why else would she be so unwilling to truly kill? Putting a knife through a heart that is still beating can’t be so different from cutting it out from a cold corpse, can it?
Even Yuusaku, in all his unflinching beliefs, would have flinched away disfiguring a corpse in such a way. He wasn’t so sheltered that he would weep over the death of an animal, but Ogata is willing to bet that he wouldn’t be so quick to put his hands in the guts of a slain deer, either.
Yuusaku probably never raised his rifle out of the shooting range, but Asirpa’s bow has been drawn a thousand times over against her prey. When it’s moving quarry, Ogata will sometimes lower his rifle to watch her eyes track the animal’s movements with her bow moving in tandem.
Her eyes flicker in between targets in flocks of low-flying birds, identifying the easiest angle or slowest bird before carefully taking aim. If Ogata were sentimental enough, he might say that he sees himself in her: the slow exhale before drawing her bow back until it’s straining against the force, both her eyes wide open as they track the progress of the target.
He’s never understood why other snipers try to squint the eye that they see through the scope. Isn’t it better to see all there is, taking in your surroundings to account for any variability? Even when he’d tried to describe the practical advantage out on the field, all the soldiers around him had scoffed. No one had listened to him, but he supposes Asirpa might.
Asirpa might understand him. If he explained himself to her, voicing his frustrations with the rest of the bull-headed idiots in their party – even his confusion with her strange reluctance to kill humans – then she might pat his hand and nod in the way that she does, like she’s somehow older and more knowledgeable than the grown men around her.
She hasn’t seemed to realize her roots yet, the significance of her strange white wolf prowling at her side, coming when she calls. She doesn’t know what her fangs can truly do even with the blood of her prey dripping from her maw, practiced in the art of killing but not murder.
He could teach her what it means to be labeled a beast. He could whisper to her, late at night where nobody else could hear, what they call him in the 7th Division – yamaneko, always with a sneer and a knowing look – and tell her the truth about her father and his motivations. He could describe to her how it feels to pull the trigger, the hundreds he’s killed without a second thought.
But he won’t.
Not because he’s afraid of what she might say, but because he knows already what her answer will be. Asirpa was borne of two people who loved each other – that much is clear in the way she speaks of her father and her barely-remembered mother.
That love oozes out of her whenever she reprimands Sugimoto an instant before his knife falls into the ribs of yet another one of their assailants; it shines in her eyes whenever she reaches for an arrow from her regular quiver instead of the poisoned one.
He knows that even if he guided her hand with his own, finger on the same bowstring as hers, she wouldn’t shoot her poisoned arrows. She would refuse, eyes shining with that same rebellious defiance: utterly adamant of her values.
Ogata doesn’t want to see that expression on anybody’s face ever again, for as long as he lives. Especially not directed at him, on the face of somebody who might have once believed in such a laughable thing like his decency.
So he stays a quiet presence. He takes up the rear in their group as they travel both as a practical advantage, and as the spot farthest from where Asirpa marches with Shiraishi and Sugimoto. He gives barely an acknowledgement whenever Asirpa tells him another strange origin myth, and he resolutely does not preen when she compliments him for his shooting.
He simply follows from behind, eyes tracking this young Ainu wolf as it hunts for prey, wondering: will she understand?