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way home a pair of hungry bandits brandishing fishhooks and spears ambushed them. Izanami watched Ekashi slay the two men with his fish knife.
    One night when Izanami was fourteen, a local boy followed her home. He was the son of a hunter and his body was covered in downy hair and he moved with the stealth of a pine marten. That night on the edge of the forest, Izanami discovered what it meant for a man to be a dog. It was not as she had imagined.
    In Huchi’s tale, the male deity, Izanazi, inquired of the female deity, Izanami, whether anything had formed within her body before making an advance. The female deity, Izanami, had coyly replied, yes my body has a place completely formed, and it is called the source of femineity . The pine marten had made no such inquiry of her. He threw down his jeweled spear and ripped the crystal mountain from the muddy quagmire of her youth by instinct alone.
    Two days later the pine marten disappeared while on a hunting trip in the mountains and she persuaded the Saaghalian magician to divine his whereabouts. The short, hairy magician arrived, still carrying the reek of wet bark, which brought back memories of her mother. She left him alone in the place where she had known the dog the night previous and when he emerged from the undergrowth he said the boy had been chased down and eaten by a bear and his body would never be found.
    Izanami resolved to kill the bear in revenge. She set out that night and tracked it across the lowlands and through the mountainous terrain for eight months, until she became exhausted and was forced to give up, crawl into a cave, and lie down on a bed of rushes.
    That night a dog came to her in a dream. He claimed he was her father and told her she must speak to the gods, take dirt from the footprints of the bear, and turn it upside down. He explained that this would cause the bear to be turned upside down and rendered unable to move. She would then be able to catch it and exact her revenge. The fiery spite in the dog’s eyes reminded Izanami of what her mother had said about her father being not the kind of dog from Grandmother Huchi’s tales.
    Izanami woke in a panic and debilitating pain, to find her raccoon coat soaked with blood and what appeared to be her entrails splayed across the floor of the cave. For a wild moment she believed the bear she sought had mauled her in her sleep. She lay there for six days and nights, enduring the sleepless agony and the persistent spite of her father, waiting for death to cover her with a shroud. But her spirit refused to let go and on the seventh day she crawled out of the cave and buried the body of her stillborn child in the raccoon skin coat.
    Izanami returned to the village and her grandparents’ hole in the ground. She forgot about the bear and the hunter boy, but the mangled face of her stillborn child never left her. While she was away, Grandmother Huchi had weakened in body and spirit. She remained holed up while Ekashi continued to produce fish from handfuls of sand and Izanami gathered berries and fruits from the lowland hedgerows, and mushrooms and mountain vegetables from the highlands. When the seasons were dry they sacrificed raccoons and prayed for the rain. But the gods did not always listen and the people of Ezo suffered a season of spoiled crops.
    They buried Grandmother Huchi the following fall. Ekashi withdrew from society, leaving his work to Izanami. He refused to eat and pray. His body withered, and before spring could make its round again, Ekashi passed away.
    Izanami sacrificed an entire forest of raccoons for her grandfather. That was the year of the torrential rains; the year the earth bore an abundance of fruit for the people of Ezo. From time to time she would run her hand over the little cedar box that she kept hidden in her cloak.
    The people of the village avoided her. They said she would summon a tsunami to your door if you gave her so much as a passing glance. They said she was the one