Dawn on the thirtieth of June. Nakabe, an inland valley of Aomori prefecture. Sato Kenzo steps out of the wooden house with the sliding door that has leaked for three winters, and pushes up the sleeves of his vest. He is seventy-one, with two days of beard, his teeth good for his age. At the gate to the yard the son of the mayor of Hirakawa put up the prefecture's poster yesterday. On the poster there is a photograph of the bear on a clearing of stacked wood, the shape estimated at two thousand three hundred kilos, two metres forty at the shoulder. Below the photo there is the toll-free number and the words: do not go out alone in the morning, carry a bell or a medium-wave radio, do not leave food in sight.

Kenzo looks at the poster. The yard has the grooves of claws in the wood of the well, three parallel lines, fresh from last night. Kenzo fastens the bronze bell to his right sleeve. The bell is smaller than a fist. His mother had brought it to him from the temple of Kōbō at Tsugaru when he was twenty. His mother had told him: this one works. The bell was not a bell for bears. It was the temple's bell for the dead, carried off from a half-abandoned temple where no one came back anymore. Kenzo's mother had died on the twenty-seventh of April, two thousand twenty-three. The bell had stayed in his mother's drawer for two months, then Kenzo had put it on his vest. He rang it at every step, when he went up into the mountains. For three years.

Kenzo's yard is near the old school that closed in two thousand nine. Nakabe had a hundred and four inhabitants in the year two thousand. It had thirty-eight in twenty twenty. Now Kenzo is the only one. His mother's house is exactly a kilometre uphill, beyond the wooden bridge over the Hie stream, on the southern ridge of Mount Kuroishi. He has twelve white wooden hives under the lean-to of his mother's goat shed, where there have been no goats since two thousand nine. Kenzo walks fast. The bell tinkles at every step on the beaten-earth path.

He crosses the wooden bridge. The planks give two centimetres under his weight. Kenzo thinks: when there were a hundred people here, you could dance on these planks. He climbs the slope of the larch wood. He sees his mother's house after the second bend. Grey roof. The kitchen door onto his mother's yard has the grooves of claws, fresh, from last night. The hives under the lean-to are eight standing and four overturned. The overturned hives have their roofs cracked, the wooden frame split open. Kenzo understands that the bear passed through here a few hours ago.

Kenzo opens the kitchen door. Inside, the smell of the wind that has been passing through for three years. The windows closed since April two thousand twenty-three. On the table his mother's empty bowl. In his mother's bowl there are now, this morning, three bees. The three bees hum quietly, without aggression, looking for water. Kenzo raises his eyes. He sees: through the closed windows, through the gaps under the door, down the hearth's chimney the bees have come in, fifty maybe, a hundred, humming freely through the living room. They do not attack. They look for water in his mother's honey jars, on the wooden cabinet that Kenzo had made with his own hands forty years ago.

Kenzo understands that the bear overturned the hives last night, that the bees lost their centre. But the bees have come here, to his mother's house, because here the wood of the cabinet still carries in its drawers the old jars with the sweet shadow of honey. The bees have come looking for Kenzo's mother. The bees have come home.

Kenzo takes the bell off his vest. He sets it on the table, beside the empty bowl. Silence in his mother's kitchen. Silence in the yard too. The bees hum quietly but the bronze is no longer heard. Kenzo begins to gather the bees one by one, from the windows, from the empty jars on the cabinet, from the sill. He takes them with his bare hand, thumb underneath, palm on top. He moves them into an old box of pale wood that he had built for his mother back in the day. The box has narrow sides, a mesh lid. The bees do not sting. One bee settles on the back of Kenzo's hand. It stays there. Kenzo carries it to the box. Another goes in. Then another. He moves them without haste. Outside his mother's yard, at the end of the path, there is the sound of a branch. Kenzo does not turn. He goes on.

The bees in the box are fifty. Then a hundred. Then a hundred and twenty. Kenzo closes the mesh lid. He says quietly, to his mother's table: mother. I am taking them to my house. They will come back to you when the hives are rebuilt.

He goes down the path with the box in his hand. At the wooden bridge the boy from the Hirakawa town hall has come back to check the poster. He sees Kenzo coming down without the bell. He says, his face tight with worry: Mr Sato, the bell. Kenzo says: I left it up there, at my mother's. Now the bell is hers. The boy does not understand. Kenzo goes on down toward the wooden house with the sliding door that leaks. The bees in the box hum quietly, a single hum, that keeps him company more than a bronze bell.