He ruined it completely. She corrected him. He tried again. Somehow the second attempt sounded worse. A faint expression passed across Aina's face.
It was not quite amusement, not exactly patience either. It was the look of someone who had decided that the effort mattered more than how badly he was failing. She repeated the word again, slower this time. She broke it into two clear sounds, as though taking apart a small piece of craftsmanship so he could see how it had been made. Ran tried once more.
This time he came close. Aina took the basket back and resumed weaving as though nothing important had happened. Ran, however, refused to let the word slip away. Every so often for the rest of the afternoon, he repeated it quietly under his breath, trying to settle the sound into his memory before it disappeared. Later, he worked up the nerve to ask her about Usen.
He had heard Aina speak the name several times. Ran believed he understood part of what it meant, but he wanted to know what the word truly represented to her. Aina studied him for a long while. It was the look she gave whenever he asked something that mattered. A look that seemed to say she had not yet decided whether the question deserved an answer.
Finally, she began to speak. She talked longer than she ever had before. Ran understood only scattered words. The rest he pieced together through her hands, the direction of her gaze, and the way she pointed toward the sky, the earth, the trees, and the distant horizon. When she touched the ground while saying the name Usen, something finally became clear to him.
Usen was not a god in the way Ran had been taught to imagine God as a boy, not a distant figure seated somewhere above the clouds. What Aina described was something woven through life itself, the force that allowed springs to rise from stone. The power that brought the deer back through the mountains, the presence that let the pines bend beneath winter storms and still stand when spring returned. Ran did not argue. He did not compare what she believed with what he had been taught.
He simply listened. And when Aina finally stopped speaking, the silence that followed felt different from every silence they had shared before. It was no longer distance. It felt almost like trust. Ran reached into his vest and pulled out the folded map where he marked every trap along his line.
He opened it across the table. One by one, he showed Aina the locations. He pointed out where each trap had been placed, explained why he chose those spots, and showed her how often he wrote out to check them. Aina leaned over the paper. For several minutes, she said nothing.
Her finger followed Ran's rough pencil lines across the map. Then he realized she was doing more than simply trying to understand his drawing. She was comparing it against another map, one she carried entirely in her memory. Aina knew those mountains differently than Ran did, but no less precisely. Her finger finally stopped over a stretch of country northeast of his property, beyond the fence, where the forest became steeper and rougher.