Supernatural: Bobby Singer's Guide to Hunting (13 page)

They called themselves
or
hantaa
, which means hunter. Not that original, but what are you gonna do? Looking back, the lore he told me about the “great beast” his ancestor had slain with that samurai sword makes me think it mighta been a
dragon
, which made that blade a
dragon sword
. If current events are any indication, you’ll need to brush up on dragon history . . . I’ll get to writing some down as soon as I can.

We ate a meal together, and my Japanese brethren told me that I was wrong about the werewolf—it was actually an
okami
we were hunting. They’re a cousin of the werewolf, but specific to Japan. Most of their MO is similar, but the method of dispatching them is very different. Made me real glad that I didn’t try to go after the thing myself, or things woulda gone pear-shaped right quick.

To kill an okami, you need a bamboo dagger, blessed by a Shinto priest. In Japan, those aren’t hard to find. In fact, one of the hunters at the table was himself a Shinto priest. In America and other parts, good friggin’ luck. Probably could get one imported, but if I learned anything on board
Nishigo Maru
, it was that the boat trip between San Fran and Tokyo is looooong.

Once you’ve got your bamboo dagger and had it blessed, you need to stab the okami seven times. Not six. Not eight.
Seven
. Why? I don’t know. The folks at the Japanese Ninja Hunter Lodge didn’t know, either, they just told me over and over to stab the okami seven times, so I took notice.

I thanked the hantaa for their hospitality and asked what they planned to do next. Go after the thing? Collect more evidence? I was new to the game, so I wasn’t sure what a proper hunter would do. Their answer? They weren’t gonna do squat. I was.

See, the old man told me that I had a dark spot on my soul, or something to that effect. That I wasn’t going to be able to start moving on from Karen’s death until I’d been able to take retribution on some of the dark forces in the world. Mostly, I think, he knew I was a crappy hunter and I needed to get better quick or die trying.

So out I went, into the wilds, armed with a bamboo dagger and a prayer. I spent the next week chasing leads, going from one clue to the next as quickly as I could. Eventually, another victim was found. I felt terrible, seeing as the hantaa clan had trusted me to find the okami and put it down before anyone else got hurt.

I redoubled my efforts, and was able to find a solid lead—all the women had gone to the same bar within twenty-four hours of being killed. The okami musta been following women home from the bar and attacking them when they were alone.

A flannel-wearing white dude at a hip Japanese bar attracts a lot of attention, let me tell you what. Usually, that’d be a bad thing. In this case, I used the attention to talk to as many people as possible about the bar’s regulars, ask if any of them had been acting strangely recently. The bartender pointed me in the direction of a particularly shy-looking man of about twenty-three. He sat in the corner and nursed a beer, eying women as they walked by.

Just before closing time, the guy up and left. I followed him out to the alley, where he lit up a cigarette and waited in the shadows. It’s hard to follow someone discreetly when they’re already in the best hiding spot, but I made do. Sure enough, after a few minutes of waiting, he started to tail a woman as she walked home.

I tailed them both, interrupted his stalking just as he closed in on her. Right as I was pulling the bamboo dagger from my jacket, he screamed out something I wasn’t expecting: “Surprise!”

From out of nowhere, there were suddenly twenty-five people all around me. They were all holding noise makers and balloons, one of ’em had a friggin’
cake
. Weirdest surprise birthday party I’ve ever seen, but hey, that’s Japan.

I started to walk back to the bar, feeling like a damn fool, when the bat hit the back of my head.

. . . . .

Thanks a lot, Americans, for introducing baseball to Japan. Now they can’t get enough of the sport, and that meant that the baseball bat that the okami used to clock my noggin was of very high quality. The better to give me a concussion with.

I could only have been out for a minute, because when I came to, the okami was still trying to drag me to a secluded area. Guess he didn’t want to rip me to shreds where the birthday partygoers could see. He was about thirty years old, and a salaryman. His suit was nice, like he made a decent living, and his hair was impeccably styled. All this murdering must have been his side job.

So there’s a lesson for you—first of all, you can’t tell the monster just from his appearance. Shady looking guys could be legit, businessmen can be monsters. Second, standing out like a sore thumb while you’re hunting can just as easily lead the monster to you as it can lead you to the monster.

In this case, luck was on my side. This guy knew I was onto him, but he probably thought I was a cop. Had no idea how prepared I was for this encounter. A lot of monsters are completely unaware that there’s even such a thing as hunters, since it’s not like there’s some orientation session they all have to go to when they find out they’re monsters ( . . . that we know of). The okami hadn’t noticed that I’d come to, and was very surprised when I hooked my leg behind his foot, tripping him. I was on top of him in a second, reaching for my bamboo dagger—but it wasn’t there. Balls. Musta dropped it when I got hit. I leaped off him, ran back towards the lighted area where he’d jumped me. A flying baseball bat hit me in the back of the knees, knocked me flat on my face.

But I’d been knocked down before, and this time I was determined to come out on top. I picked up the bat, hurled it back at the okami, who took it right in the face. No matter how big you are or how invulnerable to conventional weapons, that’s gotta hurt.

Grabbing the bamboo dagger, I raced back to him, grappled with the beast as he bared his fangs. They were razor sharp and headed right for my carotid artery. I got the bamboo dagger between us and pushed it towards him as hard as I could, inch by inch, as he tried to reverse it and impale me instead.

I won. The dagger slipped out of his hands and I drove it right into his chest. He gasped in pain, and I pulled the dagger free and stabbed him again. And again, and a few more times, and . . . dammit. In my excitement, I’d forgotten how many times I stabbed him. Five? Six?

I was pretty sure it was six, so I gave him one, final, violent stab. His blood spurted out a hole in his back, I stabbed him so hard. Funny how quickly something like that becomes an accomplishment, and not evidence of being a sociopath.

The okami fell to the ground, dead. I waited a minute, catching my breath. In the distance, I could hear the party-group moving off into the night. I thought about how close I’d come to accidentally murdering that kid, and it gave me pause. Hunting is full of gray areas, and that’s a big one. Sometimes, you’re just not sure you’ve got the right guy. Even after you’ve put ’em in the ground, it can be a question mark. This time, I’d seen the fangs. I knew for sure, and it felt damn good. My first real victory.

. . . . .

Even in Japan, cell phones were an extreme rarity back then, so I was gonna have to handle the body all by myself. After retrieving a shovel I’d left near the bar, I found as secluded a spot as I could and started to dig. Two feet into the grave, I felt an itch on my leg, reached down to scratch it, and—the okami’s fangs were in my leg. The bastard wasn’t dead—I musta miscounted the stabs. I kicked him square in the jaw and had my bamboo dagger out in a heartbeat, buried it as deep in his sternum as I could. I’ll skip to the end—this time, the critter was well and truly dead.

. . . . .

The hantaa were much more welcoming to me after I’d killed the okami, though “welcoming” for them don’t mean the same thing as it does in my neck of the woods. They took me in to fully train me in their ways, but it felt more like boot camp than a bed and breakfast. I learned so much crap from them that I use every day it’s not even funny. They were all about honor, which goes back to what I was saying before, about knowing you’ve got the right guy. “The right thing, the honorable thing,” that’s what the old man was always tellin’ me.

We went on hunts together for a few months, most of the time with one of the hantaa taking the lead. I was happy to stand back and watch them work, see what details they noticed, what they didn’t. A few times, I found things that they didn’t. Those were the best days—when I felt like I could actually contribute something to a group that’d been doing this since friggin’ Christopher Columbus was sailing the ocean blue.

To say that living in Japan was therapeutic is an understatement. So much of my life had been messed up by losing Karen, but being in a new place, an outsider in a strange land . . . it was like I’d started over. A whole new chance at life, but this time, I don’t know, I felt like what I was doing mattered. I was changing the world for the better, one hunt at a time. ’Course, before Karen died I didn’t know any of these problems even existed, but just because you don’t know about something don’t mean it won’t kill you.

While I was there, we took down that okami, a
yama-otoko
, which is sort of like a cyclops and a troll mixed together, a
hinoenma
, which in America we call a succubus, and more than a few ghosts and vengeful spirits. Poltergeists are big in Japan, and if I had to guess why, I’d say it’s because their culture can be so rigid. People there are polite, there’s a strict social hierarchy, and people rarely deviate from it. If someone walks into a room, you formally greet them. Every time. It can wear on you a little bit, but I gotta say, it’s a nice change from the way Americans can act sometimes. Like Romans under Romulus Augustus. Anyway, if you’ve lived your life constrained like that, it’s no wonder some of them go a little bonkers in the afterlife, start stirring the pot in a way they never could when they were alive.

I loved living in Japan, but all good things must come to an end. There came a day when I’d learned about everything I could from the hantaa, and I booked my trip back to America. On a
plane
, if you’re wondering. No way was I getting on another freighter.

Rufus

WHEN I GOT BACK TO SIOUX FALLS,
I spent a week just cleaning up the place. The house had been trashed before I left, and then I was gone for nearly a year, which didn’t help. The dust alone was enough to make the place feel like a tomb. Which, in a way, it was.

My next order of business was to find Rufus Turner. He’d given me his contact info, but I’d smartly dropped it into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so I had to use more unorthodox methods to find him. He’s not the type of guy that’s in the public phone book, and this was before you could do a person search on the Internet and have an answer in five seconds.

I used the same method I’d come up with in Japan—I gave him a reason to come to me. I started feeding stories to newspapers in the Sioux Falls area about cattle mutilations, trees being knocked over by dry lightning, huge black smoke clouds circling above farmland, the works. Every omen of demonic possession I could think of. Then, I waited.

It took Rufus three days to get to my place, and boy was he surprised when I was waiting for him on the front porch. This is an understatement, but the man was not happy to see me. He’d let me in on a secret world that very few people ever get to hear anything about, only to have me run off without so much as a goodbye. He tried to track me down, but assumed I’d gotten myself killed, either by a monster or by drinking myself to death.

That said, convincing him to take me under his wing wasn’t all that difficult. He still wanted a partner, and I’d learned quite a bit about hunting in my time abroad. As crazy as it seemed, there were things I could teach
him
. Not that he’d ever admit that.

He asked me a few questions before we set out on the road:

From that moment on, we were a team. Just like Sam and Dean, we rode around the country, helping people, hunting things while trying to get whatever enjoyment out of life that we could. That meant a lot of great times, but also a lot of terrible ones. Probably more terrible than great, but I knew that going in. It was a perfect partnership, until I screwed it all up. But I’ll get to that.