An Unusual Guest
Unfortunately, as it is the busiest part of our
family day, with dinner, homework, and bath all crowded onto the
schedule during these hours, early evening is not the relaxed time
that I would like it to be. I fully expect chaos in the mornings. My
two teenage daughters lie in their futons as long as they can, with
one eye on the clock, calculating the last possible moment at which
they can get up, and still eat breakfast, fix their hair, prepare
their school satchels, etc., without being late for school. The
result, of course, is mayhem, lasting until that moment when the door
slams behind them, and they disappear from my life until
mid-afternoon. The mornings, for me, are written off in
advance.
But it is a great regret to me that I have 'lost'
the evenings as well. Daytimes are a constant buzz of activity,
either carving or printing woodblocks, working on one or another
piece on the word processor, or dealing with correspondence and what
have you, and not so suitable for what I have in mind. The late
evenings, after the girls are asleep, are too dark and gloomy. Too
gloomy for what? For a pleasant evening stroll around the
neighbourhood.
It's during that half-hour just before sunset, and
the half-hour just following, that I like to go. Our apartment is on
a busy, very noisy main road, but once safely around the corner and
into the back streets, things are more serene. In spring, summer and
fall, really the only suitable seasons for such strolls, the
temperature at this time of day is always comfortable. The neighbours
are out walking their dogs (and the occasional cat), and middle
school kids and a few salarymen are making their way home from the
station (high schoolers and a lot more salarymen come later, much
later).
One would think that a person who really had
proper control over his life should certainly be able to take a walk
when he feels like it, but there just doesn't seem to be any way to
get things to work that way. The three of us have tried going for
walk together at this time, and delaying dinner for an hour, but
inevitably the entire evening schedule thus gets pushed back, the
girls are an hour later than usual heading for bed, and then the next
morning ...! No, the increased stress in the morning is too high a
price to pay.
But I seem to be getting side-tracked here,
because it was not actually evening walks that I had in mind when I
sat down a few minutes ago to start this little piece. It was rather,
one of the reasons I particularly enjoy evening walks in our
neighbourhood, on those rare occasions when I do manage to get out.
It is those delightful little animals that come out at this time of
day to look for their dinner, the bats.
There must be hundreds of bats living in my
neighbourhood, for I usually see dozens of them during the course of
a stroll in the evening. Anywhere there is an open space, preferably
with some greenery, one can see a few bats flitting around, in the
small parks, the school sports ground, even over the asphalt parking
lot outside my window.
Just why it is that bats inspire so much dread in
most people, I really can't understand. Yes, we're all familiar with
'vampire' stories and legends, but surely any intelligent person
knows that such tales bear absolutely no relation to the behaviour of
the tiny flying mammals we see in our own community. Given the
general tendency of most Japanese (at least the female variety) to
find small furry animals 'adorable', it's a bit of a puzzle.
This isn't the only thing about our local bats
that is a puzzle for me. Try as I might, I have never been able to
discover where they go when they are finished catching their dinner
each evening. Where do they spend the daytime hours? If this was an
old village, I could readily believe that they might fly up under the
roof of an old thatched farmhouse, or into an abandoned barn, but
here in this modern town, there are just no such buildings to be
found. Everything is concrete and new. We don't even have any wooden
temples or shrines that would presumably be suitable. But they
obviously do find places to stay, and must find this area congenial,
because there are always lots of them around.
As with most of us, my acquaintance with bats has
been necessarily a rather distant one. That is, up until one day last
spring, when I finally had a chance to meet one at close range. I
nearly stepped on her (I'm quite sure it was a 'her') while coming in
to our apartment. A small little brown ball, about two centimeters
across, just at the edge of the concrete sidewalk. I thought it was a
dead mouse at first, but when I looked closer, I saw that it was a
tiny bat, and then when it moved slightly, realized that it was
alive.
On any number of occasions, the kids have brought
home injured birds, and we've had infant mice, and once, an abandoned
cat, just a few hours old. So we've always got the equipment standing
ready for use, the eye-dropper, shoebox, cotton wool ... But with the
single exception of that baby kitten, who is still living here
happily, those other 'rescue' attempts have of course all ended the
same way, with an interment under the bushes in the back garden. So I
wasn't optimistic about this one. As she was presumably either
damaged or diseased, simply feeding her some warm milk and providing
a box to rest in, was not going to help the situation much. But one
has to try ... especially once ones young daughters get
involved.
She took some of the milk quite readily, or seemed
to, as it was hard to tell how much was going down. Not much I'm
sure, but then just how big could the stomach of a two centimeter
ball of fur be? Her face was incredible ... unbelievably fierce in
aspect. Oversize pointed ears, tiny beady eyes, and a mouth bristling
with needle-like fangs, none of them longer than a millimeter, but
appearing huge in her tiny visage. She kept her wings folded, and we
didn't try to inspect them for damage, as her limbs were so tiny and
seemingly fragile. We didn't want to cause more problems than may
have already been there.
We mostly left her alone, huddled in a corner of
her dark shoebox, and every couple of hours offered some more milk,
which was usually taken. At intervals, she made a mess of the tissues
in the bottom of the box. This same pattern continued for a couple of
days, and she seemed to be maintaining a stable condition, somewhat
surprisingly to me, as I had really not expected her to survive
beyond a few hours. As she was doing so well, after one of the
feedings, I held her in my hands for a while, and then so as not to
let her get chilled, slipped her down into my shirt pocket. She
explored a bit, turning this way and that, and then settled down
quietly, hanging from the fabric by her tiny claw-like toes.
Well, I wasn't about to disturb her, but I did
have work to do, so I settled in at my bench, picked up my knife, and
started carving. Quite the 'motherly' feeling! Some time later, she
stirred, hunted about a bit, and then inched her way up and out of
the pocket, slowly climbing this huge mountain, to finally end up on
my shoulder. And then, to my astonishment, she took to the air.
My workroom is a six-mat room, full of bookcases
and all manner of junk, so it doesn't really offer much in the way of
flying space, but up and away she went. She flew this way and that,
from corner to corner, and then after about half a minute or so of
circling around, came to rest high up on one wall, near a corner. A
few minutes later, she was at it again, zooming around the room. I
called the girls in, and the three of us watched in fascination. Her
flight was absolutely soundless, at least to us. I hoped I might be
able to hear a faint squeaking noise as she navigated around the
various obstacles with her 'sonar', but I could make out nothing.
Either she made no sound at all, or it was just too high-pitched for
human ears to pick up.
The 'exercise' session went on for a half-hour or
so, as she alternately rested up on the wall, and flew around the
room. As it seemed that she was obviously now recovered from whatever
her problem had been, and was presumably trying to get away, to
return to her normal life, I slid open the large door leading on to
the balcony, and sat back to see what would happen. It didn't seem to
make any difference to her. The pattern of resting and flying
continued. Surely, she could tell that the door was open, couldn't
she? Outside was the open evening sky, and perhaps even just at that
moment, the other bats were out catching their meal.
And then her flight pattern altered, and she
swooped down once very low, right down in front of my face, before
perching back up on the wall. A minute later, again the same thing,
close enough for me to hear a rustle sound from her wings as they
swept the air by my head. This time, she didn't resume her perch, but
swooped around the light, dipped down past my face one final time,
and then flew out the window. Passing between two of the veranda
railings, she disappeared into the night. Our adventure with this
little guest was over.
Had we really 'saved' her? Had our care-taking
finally been of some use to a little animal? My daughters think so,
but I suspect that perhaps she had never been sick in the first
place. Maybe she was a very young bat, who had become disoriented at
sunrise that day, and who had simply been trying to 'hide' during the
daylight hours. Maybe we had actually 'kidnapped' a completely
healthy animal. We will never know. But of course we do like to think
that we did indeed help her out a little. After all, why else would
she have flown down so close to me to whisper "Good-bye, and thanks
for the milk!", just before she left?