Miko and the Bears, by Sophonisba [folklore challenge]

[saphanibaal]

-title- Miko to Kuma to Sennin (Miko and the Bears)
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Reasonably gen. Not perhaps suitable for very young readers.
-spoilers- "Before I Sleep"; "The Tao of Rodney"
-disclaimer- Not mine in any way, shape, or form.
-word count- 4792
-summary- The memorable vacation Miko had at Lake Louise.

Miko to Kuma to Sennin (Miko and the Bears)

When Miko's father announced that for their next summer trip they would go to Canada, Miko wasn't very happy. Canada was supposed to be a very cold place indeed, full of snow and moose and wolves, and people who spoke foreign languages like English (which she didn't speak very well) and French (which she didn't speak at all). Even when they'd gone to Hawai'i in Golden Week, if you really needed to you'd run into someone who spoke Japanese. Probably there were no Japanese people in Canada. She didn't see why they couldn't go to Hokkaido instead, like Mayumi-chan's family.

Nevertheless, what Father said went, and so Miko's mother had checked out English-teaching tapes from the library and played them for her family. Miko'd meant to pay attention, but her book was more interesting. Elder Brother hadn't paid much attention either -- he'd wanted to get started early studying for his high school entrance exams, and he even brought his cram school textbooks to the dinner table. Miko didn't see why, if he got to bring his books, she couldn't read one of her star books at dinner, but her parents said it wasn't at all the same thing. Possibly because he was eldest and she was Miko-in-the-middle.

And so here they were, all except Kenji-on-his-class-trip, staying in the large hotel on Louise-lake in the middle of ridiculously high and pointy mountains. Yesterday they'd gone wandering up a large glacier, which had been sort of fun -- despite the way Father had shrugged off Miko's timid suggestions that perhaps they should stay on the same side of the beribboned sticks as the other people; Father had grunted that the signs themselves told them not to stop on their way -- until the man in the brown uniform came over and yelled at them: the well-trod path up the snow-capped ice was well-trod for a reason; the ice outside it was unsafe, and might at any moment gape open beneath their family and drop father and mother and three children meters and meters deep, slamming together before even Elder Sister could begin to climb out. Miko had almost wanted the ice to open beneath her if only it would have gotten her away from that; first she had to be there while Father apologized humbly over something she should have brought to his attention before ever he bowed his head, and then he was short-tempered most of the rest of the day, grumbling again and again to the landscape over the inadequacies of languages that ordered "Keep on your way" rather than asking "Please do not go outside the space between the markers."

Today they were hiking around Louise-lake to the stream that fed it and a trail along the stream, despite the boat that took hotel guests and other visitors back and forth between the hotel and the stream's mouth all day. It was a very long way to walk, and it was too cold not to wear her new bright yellow windbreaker even when she was walking along, and too hot to have it on. She'd finally left it on and open and grimly slugged it out. It was all very well for Elder Sister -- she was in the softball club. Miko was in the math club (there wasn't an astronomy club, the science club had been full, and neither of her parents approved of the science fiction club). There was the boat on the lake now. Across the wide expanse of water, the people on it all seemed to be excited, waving and making noise that the water and wind blurred into a low hum. At least somebody was happy. Elder Sister even waved back.

And then a mountain of fur and big sharp teeth charged out of the bushes at them, whuffing as it went.

Miko screamed and flung herself back down the trail, vaguely conscious that the rest of her family was doing the same, feeling the bear's hot breath on the back of her neck -- she was running, running as fast as she could, and it wasn't fast enough --

An image popped into her mind suddenly, of how they must look from the boat, and of Miko and her family throwing themselves aside off the path in different directions and curling into little balls like earthquake drill.

Miko threw herself off to the left, tripping over a tree root, lacing her hands behind her neck as she squeezed her eyes shut. The little girl in the yellow windbreaker in her mental movie did the same. So, choosing the right and bumping and rolling down towards the lakeside, had the woman in the brown one and the boy in the red sweater. The mental images of Father and Elder Sister ran for a little more before disappearing behind the trees.

And then the bear was coming back to them, coming back to them, and Miko held her eyes closed even tighter as it sniffed at her. There was a rush of horrible-smelling breath, and she was sure, sure that it would walk over her with its long sharp claws or eat her with its big horrible teeth, and she was vaguely conscious of the wetness trickling down her cheeks and legs --

-- and then there was noise going away, and a mental picture of the bear loping off up the slope, wondering what the funny humans had been doing getting in the way of his route home from the baths.

Miko didn't open her eyes, not then, not even when Mother and Elder Brother were leaning over her and Elder Sister was saying in the background, "I was so scared!"

"Miko-chan, are you hurt? Did the bear..?"

Miko mutely shook her head and cried harder. She knew they had to have seen that she'd soiled her pants, but neither of them mentioned it.

"We're going back to the hotel," Father announced. Miko allowed her mother to help her to her feet, her brother to press the fallen branch he'd picked up for a hiking stick into her hand, and followed, shame pressing down on her like the weight of the world.

"Do you want to come to the lecture with us?" Miko's mother asked later. "There will be slides and demonstrations, and your sister and I will tell you what they are saying if you ask."

Miko shook her head. She had showered and changed and the tears had finally stopped coming, but she hadn't been able to eat any of the lunch her mother had made and she didn't want to go to a lecture in English and she didn't want to go anywhere. She was going to stay right here, in the nice hotel room, until they loaded her up and took her home.

"Let her stay," her father said, and Miko's family slowly trooped out and left her alone, curled up on the bed she shared with Elder Sister. The room grew quiet, and her eyes fell closed, and she slept.

When she woke up, her eyes cleared, and everything else felt fuzzy. It was almost as if everything that made her Miko had been cried out or drained out in her sleep, and left her -- not bad empty, just... empty.

The knock on her door startled her.

"Who's there?"

"I.. was on the boat," a man's voice said in polite and somewhat hesitant Japanese. "I wanted to make sure Miko-kun was all right." He muttered something in English, irritated. "Miko-san, I said."

Miko opened the door a little. She was vaguely aware that she ought to be nervous, but all her nerves seemed to have gone far away behind clouds. Or spiderwebs. Cloud-webs.

On the other side of the door was an old foreigner. He was a large, solid man, even though he was old and bald as an egg except for little bits of white hair behind his ears. He was wearing a jacket with patches on the arms and leaning on a cane that split, at its bottom end, into four little rubberized feet. Bright blue eyes peered out at Miko from wrinkles worn into paths by persistent crankiness. This made Miko feel vaguely better, seeping in from wherever her heart had gone on vacation; the foreigner might be tall and, well, foreign, but he was not entirely unlike her grandpa.

The old man looked at her as if she was a place he hadn't expected to be the same as last time but was.

"Is something wrong, grandfather?" Miko asked politely.

"I am just glad Miko-ku -- Miko-san is all right. I cannot believe they did not make sure you knew what to do if you met a bear, just because of the language thing. Fn. And I am so out of practice with the... the... the mind-reading thing, even with the... booster," he finally substituted in English.

Miko blinked. Mind-reading?

But then, there had been that mental image, as if she'd been seeing everything from the boat...

"I'm sorry for the inconvenience," she thanked him.

"What should I have done?" the old man shrugged. "Look, it's awkward standing around like this."

"I... " Miko shifted from one foot to the other. It would be polite to invite him in, but somehow she thought her parents wouldn't like it...

"Can you come down to one of the public rooms?" the foreigner asked her. "We can sit and talk and not scare your parents. I promise I'm not a suspicious person."

Miko nodded gravely, tore a sheet out of her notebook to write her parents a note and leave it on the bed, put on her glasses and her green sweater and tucked her astronomy book under her arm, and came out and locked the door.

"Mind-reading?" she asked as they slowly walked down to the elevator.

"You know those things that only make sense when you're young because your brains are scrambled, and then as you get older they start making sense again?"

Miko shook her head.

"Well, you're young yet. Trust me, you'll eventually know those things, and that was one of them."

The old man talked all the way down to the ground floor and into the glittering lobby. His Japanese seemed to get better as he went; Miko wondered whether that were part of the 'mind-reading,' but couldn't think of a polite way to ask.

They walked from the main lobby into another, smaller, room with lots of stuffed chairs, a harp, and a piano. Miko's new acquaintance made a slow beeline for the piano bench, sat on it, and folded back the cover.

"Is that all right?" Miko asked as he began playing warming-up something. At least, she thought it was warming-up. It sounded like a piano version of Elder Brother warming up on his oboe.

"If they didn't want guests to play their piano," he snorted, "they wouldn't put it out where people could get at it."

One of the hotel employees looked at them and started moving towards them. Another one grabbed him by the arm and hissed something in his ear. He stopped.

Miko let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.

"I do not do well with children," the old man grumbled. "I permitted the little woman to raise our three. How should I know what I ought to do with one?"

Miko giggled. "'I'm no good with children,'" she gave the simpler form. "'I let the little woman raise ours. How'm I supposed to know what to do with one...' is what my grandpa says."

"I'm no good with children," he repeated. "I let the little woman raise our three. What do I do with one?... here, you like this song." His exercises turned into a cheerful, bouncy tune, and he began to sing in a surprisingly tuneful voice, "Whatever sort of pinch I get into, I absolutely shan't give up; that's right, that is the lovely maiden's policy. Someday we'll meet for real, on account of the ones important to us, so we'll jump on in with our faces turned up."

She'd never heard the song before, but he was right; she did rather like it, and by the end she was humming along and tapping time with her foot. The -- sensei, Miko decided to think of him as, as he was autocratic enough when he spoke and certainly had been born before she was -- smiled crookedly at her and started another, harder song.

They'd gone through several more pop songs -- Miko had concluded that the sensei must have learned Japanese from them, accounting for his sometimes unexpectedly girlish phrases -- and were in the middle of something that had segued from "I want to find my place in life and self-worth, taking the me I've been up through today and heroically stripping myself until I'm as bare as the roses that whirl in freedom" (rose petals, maybe?) to a long and rather pretty song in English that Miko could almost understand if she didn't try, seeming more like a sung kaidan than a popular song (she imagined this Hotel California as full of faceless women and ghosts who turned their heads around "Like this?" and spooks with long skinny fingers and bulging eyes) to "We'll run down the freeway artery, your car burning redly; I'll wanna know why this looks something like the last time I was in love..." when Miko noticed the old lady.

She was a small lady, standing near them with a beautiful wooden walking stick in each hand. Her face was as round and lightly wrinkled as Mother's, but brown, and Miko stared for a few moments before realizing how rude she was being. The little old lady went on smiling in an amused fashion, and the sensei looked up in the middle of "Watch me not stop till I hit the Malibu sea, tearing through the desert towns" and broke off.

She looked at him.

"So maybe I am pandering to Miko's alleged taste in music," the sensei said. "I can raise her artistic consciousness sometime when she isn't floating through the aftereffects of an adrenaline crash."

"It is Doctor Kusanagi," the old lady said. "I heard back from the -- " something Miko didn't quite catch.

"Of course it is," the sensei snorted. "The glasses and the jean and the bubbly J-pop fascination? Not to mention..."

Miko tugged at his sleeve. "Would you like talk to my father?" she said in careful English that still seemed... wrong... somehow.

"No, that is all right," the old lady said in equally careful Japanese. "We were worried about you. I am glad to see that you have recovered from your encounter with the class."

"The bear," the sensei corrected.

Miko looked at the floor. "i was scared," she said in a small voice. "i couldn't think. i... i pee'd."

"It was scary," the old lady agreed. "Bears are very strong and move very fast."

"Up to about fifty-seven kilometers per hour," the sensei said. "I'm delighted to see you give proper respect to something that could have, oh, killed you if you weren't careful."

Miko looked up in time to see the old lady fix the sensei with a look.

"Pid?" the sensei said, which made no sense whatsoever.

She looked at him some more, and Miko was reminded of her great-aunt and great-uncle.

"I've been scared lots of times," the sensei said. "I'm known for being scared, you can ask anyone -- ah, you could if they were here, which they're, ah, not." He brightened. "You could ask the little woman here, though.

"Seriously, everyone intelligent gets scared. The trick is to keep going when you're terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought, and nobody can do that without practice."

Miko nodded politely, fidgeting. She looked earnestly at the sensei.

"You should play something you like," she told him.

The sensei looked at her for a moment, and then played a quiet song with no words that made Miko think of summer evenings with the cicadas chirping and the stars coming out.

When she said as much, his face scrunkled up as if he'd bitten into an umeboshi.

Next to the piano, the old lady had slid her hands down to the middle of her sticks, and was... dancing with them. Or, well, doing rhythmic gymnastics to the piano music, and using them as batons. Her skirt turned out to have a long slit up its side, and her choice of sensible tights to wear under it suddenly seemed to mean something else.

The sensei suddenly grinned at Miko, slanted a glance at the old lady, and swung into a louder, more complicated piece of music that seemed as if it were made for rhythmic gymnastics, almost pushing the old lady into more and harder and more exotic moves -- and, my, it was the bear all over again, only safe here, where it didn't seem possible that she could move that fast, that gracefully... and if the old lady was graceful, the sensei's mental image of the bear had also been graceful, now that Miko could think about it calmly. The old lady moved, sticks whirling, coming within centimeters of the piano, its player, and a large potted plant. Or perhaps not that old; white hair and wrinkled hands aside, Miko's mother couldn't move like that, let alone her grandmothers or great-aunt.

When they finished, the other people in the room -- and there were more now than there had been -- clapped. The old lady bowed; the sensei flapped a hand as if to wave the noise away, and gently shut the piano.

"I will go to my room now," the old lady told Miko and the sensei, and bent her head towards the latter, setting her sticks against the piano as she reached for his shoulders. Miko politely turned her head away; maybe Canadians did kiss right out in public, but that was no reason to forget manners.

"Perhaps I will see you again, Miko-san," she said as she collected her sticks and turned to go. Miko blinked.

"How'd Elizabeth stand it?" the sensei said quietly to himself. Miko was fairly sure she wasn't supposed to hear it -- or meant to understand, for that matter -- and quickly looked at her book.

"Please bring me my cane, would you?" the sensei asked. "What's that you're reading?"

"It is a book about stars," Miko told him as she brought his cane over from where it had been standing by itself like some strange marker. She held herself ready in case he needed some help rising to his feet, although he seemed to be managing well enough with the cane and the piano lid.

"You like stars?"

Miko nodded fervently. As they made their way to one of the little couches in the room (the sensei glared ferociously at the people sitting on it, and they got up and moved), she held the book open and pointed to the chart of star types. "See, they come in different classes. The hottest are O, and then B --"

"Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me," the sensei inexplicably said, sitting down. "A, what's that in Japanese?"

"What did he say?" Miko's elder sister demanded, suddenly there by the seat.

"It's the star class... mnemonic," the sensei said in tones of deep disgust after trying and failing to find the Japanese word he was looking for. "We're talking about stars. See? O, B, A, F... "

"Obaa fugu kamu?" Miko offered, hoping that she had correctly guessed what "nemonikk'" might be.

"Granny chomps blowfish?" the sensei repeated, ignoring Elder Sister.

"O, ba, a, fu..." Miko explained.

"Aha. Very clever. Hey, do they mention..."

And this was even more fun than the piano music, because the sensei knew stars. He didn't always know the right words in Japanese to describe what he meant, and Miko didn't always know the right English words to explain her questions, but there was a great deal of pointing and gesturing and smiling or snorting.

"There are eight planets," the sensei told her. "Well, nine if you belong to that weird school that swears the Moon is a planet... but of course it and the Earth are orbiting each other, that's what orbits are about. The point remains, the locus is always within the surface of the Earth, so most sane people count the Moon as a satellite of Earth, and that makes eight."

Miko blinked. "Waterstar Maakurii," she said carefully. "Goldstar Biinasu. Earth-sphere. Firestar Marzu --" (and she got that rh sound in before the z, English was hard -- ) "Woodstar Jupitah. Earthstar Satahn. Heavenly-king-star Uranasu. Marine-king-star Nep'chuun. Stygian-king-star Puruuto."

"Pluto is not a planet."

"But -- "

"Pluto and Charon and all those out there are only some of -- " he waved his arm -- "lots and lots of, of things orbiting round the sun in the Kuiper Belt. It's a... " he struggled for the term... "mini-planet. Like Ceres. Ceres is in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and you wouldn't call it a planet."

"But everyone says it's a planet."

"And years ago everyone said the other planets and the sun went around the Earth. Did that make them go around the Earth? No. Does that make Pluto a planet? No. Do you need to tell everyone else that? Probably not when you're trying to get tenure until some other people have brought it up first -- you can always tell them the truth after you get the job. I have a terrible problem with that, but that does not mean you should."

Miko nodded solemnly, only then noticing that her father and brother were approaching the little couch.

"Please forgive my daughter for bothering you about stars," her father said.

"Miko, what were you thinking?" her brother demanded in a furious whisper.

"Miko-kun has not been bothering me," the sensei told them. "She asks sensible questions and pays attention when I talk about stars -- oh, did you want her for something?"

Elder Brother opened and closed his mouth without saying anything.

"Be back at the room in half an hour," Miko's father told her, and then thanked the sensei for being willing to waste time on his daughter.

"Ah, not at all, a pleasure," the sensei said. He turned back to Miko when they had gone. "Are all your family that stupid?"

Miko let out a startled little giggle at the obscenity.

"He wanted to make sure I was all right after the bear," Miko told her family over dinner. "He was very nice. Well, he was very like Grandpa, but he meant to be very nice."

"Miko," Elder Brother said repressively. "He's famous. Doctor..." he tried to wrap his tongue around the man's name... "Sheper... is a composer and was a concert pianist for years and years. He teaches music at a little college up in the north parts of Canada somewhere and made their music department singlehandedly. His lady used to be a professor of philosophy there, and after their daughters were grown up she joined the mounted police for years until they finally said she was too old. I can't believe they're here. When we are. He's supposed to have become more and more of a recluse as he got older."

"Mounted police, huh," said Miko. "She was in very good shape."

"I heard he was playing his Piano Sonata No. 3, 'Exercise with Sticks,' this afternoon," Elder Brother went on. "I can't believe I missed it."

"Maybe he will play it again tomorrow," Miko offered. "Mrs. Dr. Sheper will probably want to practice again."

"Why Miko-chan?" Mother asked.

"They said he'd had three daughters," Father offered. "Maybe Miko-chan reminds him of the one who died."

"So," Elder Sister changed the subject, "Did I tell you Yui-chan thinks that 'elf' in Tolkien's work ought to be translated as 'sennin' instead of 'elfu'? I'm just about finished with Hobbit's Venture now, and I don't see what she's talking about. The guy who's an elf-half might qualify as a sennin, or maybe the guy who turns into a bear, but..."

"Well," Elder Brother said, "are they magical and wise? And live a long long time unless they're killed?"

"Magical and long-lived," Elder Sister said, "but the Wood-elves were anything but wise. And sennin are supposed to live off by themselves in the mountains or something, not in a big tribe, even if it is in the middle of a scary wood."

"Do they have pointed ears?" Mother asked. "Mrs. Watanabe told me once that Tolkien's elves didn't have pointed ears, but they do in all the pictures I've seen..."

Miko rolled her eyes and cut another bite of venison. Sennin probably wouldn't have pointy ears or anything; they'd look just like people, only old, and then one day you'd look up and see one doing martial arts well enough to impress tengu, or reading minds, or...

Oh.

Miko saw the sensei again a few times over the next few days. He told her that her father had been wrong --

"You're... well, maybe a little, neither one of you is, was, dumb, but you're really not much like Caroline at all. Actually, you're sort of like a woman I used to work with. Her name was Miko, too."

"What was Miko-san's surname?"

"How am I supposed to know? Do I look like I have nothing better to do than remember my coworkers' names?"

-- had extremely idiosyncratic views on honorifics --

"Musical 'doctorates' are not doctorates, anyway. 'Doctor of Music' is very nearly as big a joke as 'Doctor of Philosophy' when not followed by some real field such as physics or electrochemical engineering."

"He means me no disrespect, Miko-san."

"Of course not. I have the greatest respect for you and your ability to, uh, buchi... buchi... kick my ass."

"Also our couch is very comfortable."

"It is. I used to keep it in my office so that I could sleep there."

-- offered her some useful advice, both about astronomy and about outdoors --

"If you grease your feet, with, with lard or petroleum jelly or something, they won't blister as much. I learned that from a boy in the American Marines."

-- and had several discussions with her about science fiction...

"And I don't know whether they've translated Alexei Panshin into Japanese, but you can always teach yourself English, at least enough to read Rite of Passage. You'll want to know it anyway, it seems to have replaced Latin as the common language of scholars and scientists."

"Teach myself?"

"The little woman and I taught ourselves Japanese so we could read Edogawa Rampo, and English doesn't have nearly as many characters to memorize."

On the day they checked out, Miko was standing by the bags waiting for her parents to finish and working her way through Elder Sister's borrowed-from-her-friend-Yui copy of Hobbit's Venture, having run out of her own books, when the sensei and his wife made their way to her.

"Oh, good, we caught you," the sensei said. He thrust his hand out at Miko. "Here. It's one of your protecting things."

"O-mamori," Miko corrected him as she took it. Her sister elbowed her for her apparent rudeness, and Miko elbowed her right back.

Unlike the o-mamori her grandmother was teaching her to make, this one was leather. It had leather sides, a leather cord, leather cording through neatly punctured holes keeping the sides closed, and thin leather cording through irregularly punctured holes holding some sort of cut-out flap down.

"It started life as a luggage tag," the sensei said shamefacedly. "Here. Squeeze it. It'll give you a little bit of calm."

Miko dutifully squeezed, and felt calm ripple through her. It was... odd.

"Be well," the sensei told her. "Don't forget you love stars. I really hate this part. I never know what to say."

Mrs. Dr. Sheper bowed to Miko, as if she were a grown woman. The bow went low enough that her forehead rested against Miko's for a moment. It was nice.

"Be well wherever you go," Miko told them, flipping back a few pages in Hobbit's Venture to check, "and let your nests receive you at your journey's end."

"May your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks," the sensei and his wife told her.

And then her father had finished checking out, and Miko had to help carry the suitcases to the taxicab.

the piano songs described:
Otome no Policy, Serizawa Rui/Nagai Makoto/Kyouda Sei-ichi. The second line is more likely to mean "Because someday I'll meet that important person for real, I'll dive on in with my face turned up," but I think he's pushing the double meaning. ^_^
Rimbu Revolution, Okui Masami/Yabuki Toshiro.
Hotel California, Don Felder/Don Henley/Glenn Frey.
Route California, SHOW/Makaino Kouji.
Hikarisasu Niwa, Mitsumune Shinkichi.
Piano Sonata No. 3, "Exercise with Sticks", R. M. Sheppard.
all translations by me