Brushing off the snow, I stepped inside. was sitting with a willow log on end in front of him. He was in the middle of cutting the largish willow trunk into thirty centimeter lengths to make the figures called nipopo which are believed to protect the Uilta. The surface of the log was very white and 's large hands moved smoothly over it, shaving the wood to become nipopo in no time at all. The stove was red-hot, making the room so hot that I was soon perspiring despite the bitter cold outside.

From about two years back, I had been engrossed in the game of searching for my family's roots. This year again, I had elected to set out in mid-winter. From Tsugaru, I had taken a ferry to Hakodate and followed the southern fringe of Hokkaido west from there to Muroran. From Muroran, I had cut across to Kushiro via Obihiro, then made a U-turn past Kushiro at Akkeshi. From Kushiro, I had turned north to traverse the Konsen Plain. I had just arrived at Abashiri via Shibecha.

This itinerary follows one of the routes my great grandfather had travelled in the days of herring fishing. Near the inlet at Akkeshi, I came across a partly collapsed, abandoned shack. Entering, I could faintly make out the unpleasant odor of fish. Freezing weather being the norm for that time of year, icicles hung even inside the shack.

Iere too, as in other places I visited, I sensed a smell like that of my great grandfather's dreams, the dreams of a man whose life carried him from the "herring palace," or so the opulent residences of such men were called, to a keeper's hut. As I lingered to smoke a cigarette, the smell of fish and the spirit of the north merged together.

Unable to withstand the urge in the extreme cold, I urinated in dribbles on the snow outside. It gave me a fresh sense of surprise to see the trail of urine instantly turn into yellow crystals. Although I had been unaware of it, my lips had become very dry so that as I stood biting my lip, thin blood trickled from it onto the snow. It wasn't anything, but it made me snap out of my reverie.

The small bay at Akkeshi was covered with ice like lily pads, and from time to time, a fishing vessel would break the lily pad ice over the blackish sea to pass through. Standing on the long bridge linking the shore to the town that looked like an island on the far side, I had a good view of Akkeshi. This seaside town with its shipping company warehouses and cold-storage facilities must have bustled with fishermen at one time. Among the new warehouses, there were still some old fishermen's shacks left.

On the bridge not far from me, the greyish sea gulls that the locals refer to as gome were gathered on the railing facing the wind, their red eyes looking cold and almost cruel. Someone once told me that the gome are reincarnations of dead fishermen. I was told that the gome love to eat the flesh of fishermen who have died at sea, and when they do, the souls of the dead fishermen are transferred to the gome along with their flesh. I was also told that there are as many gome as there are dead fishermen. I have no idea how my great grandfather died, but if he had died at sea, he would certainly still be gazing at the sea day and night with the red eyes of a Hokkaido sea gull.

I did not particularly need any resource materials for my game of find-the-family-roots. One photo was all I needed, and beyond that, only a very faint premonition and the time to linger in my surroundings.

To place my being in harmony with the seasons and nature and to allow my imagination to work freely with my impressions of the setting �� these were my only aims. To be completely honest, I should say that more than constructing a narrative of my great grandfather, I went because I was interested in the narrative of "I," myself. What I set out to do was somewhat analogous to writing quotations from nature into a book that is a physical being called "I."

Most of my objectives were fulfilled by the time I ended my stay in Akkeshi. All that was left was to sort the rolls of film I had taken, my sketches and scraps of notes, and my audio recordings of birdsongs and sounds such as the creaking of boats and the sound of the wind and the sea. My arrival in Abashiri felt more like an epilogue to a journey, for I had more or less ended up there as a result of my desire to cross the Konsen Plain in winter from Kushiro.

The night I arrived, it was intensely cold in Abashiri �� more than twenty degrees below zero. My breath looked almost like snow dust. In the middle of the night, from my room at an inn on the shore of the Okhotsk Sea, I heard a strange noise.

Opening the window admitted a blast of cold air that chilled my room to freezing in an instant, but the cold air carried with it a high, ringing noise from the sea. The sound was reverberating in all directions on the dark expanse of ice floes, produced by new floes drifting in from the open sea.

The ice colliding and breaking up was a veritable symphony. To feel the sound passing through me at twenty degrees below zero was a cold kind of entertainment.

The name D. means "one who lives by the northern river." , like his father Golgolo before him, succeeded generations of shamans of a northern minority people, the descendents of a tribe of nomadic herdsmen and hunters. Uilta, the name of the tribe, means a people who lead reindeer and move to find fertile pastures for them, and their shamans must have acted as the pathfinders.

As it did for many people besides minorities, the Second World War changed the fate of 's family dramatically. At the time, most of the Uilta lived in present day Sakhalin, but members of the tribe moved back and forth over a vast area from the Russian interior to Hokkaido.

Then came the war. When the northern territories of Japan were ceded to the Soviet Union as a result of the Potsdam Declaration, and his family were stranded in Hokkaido. Their homeland is not so much Sakhalin but a vast borderless land all across the north.

Towards the end of the war, the Japanese Army was conscripting even the Uilta who happened to be in Hokkaido and trying to send them to battlefronts in the name of a holy war.

"They must have been crazy, don't you think, Mr. Hamada. As if the Uilta had any concept of the Emperor! What could they have been thinking?"

Transported as if they were some kind of animal, some of the Uilta died. After the war, those who had survived were registered as "natives" and left to fend for themselves in Hokkaido. With the Mamiya Strait so far away, the old days when they walked freely across its frozen expanse would never return.

"This area around Omagari reminds me of the forest of Otas in Sakhalin when we lived there. The river runs behind us here, and there are larches all around. The shoots of berries poke up all over the place in spring. But even though it's similar, it's not Shisuka, or Poronajsk �� whichever you want to call it �� and it's not Siberia either."

A little over ten years after the war, began to attend a conference of minority peoples. He says that an Ainu friend urged him to go. "First of all, we are not Japanese. Secondly, we do not have a country or a nationality. Give us back our status of not having a nationality. We want to give our nationality and civil rights back to the country of Japan. Recognize the Uilta as Uilta." This is essentially what they are asserting.

One hears of many instances where people demanded a return of national sovereignty or a restoration of nationality after the war, or a recognition of human rights. However, this was the first time I had heard a plea to give up, or rather, give back one's nationality.

I learned from that "there is no word in the Uilta language for peace. Of course, there is no word for its opposite either." This was another first for me, to learn that there were people whose language did not have a word, either spoken or written, meaning "war" or "peace."

Uilta, by the way, is their proper name although they are also known as Orochon. In the Ainu language, they are called the Oroch, but according to , Orochon is a pejorative derived by the Japanese from this Ainu name. Why it is pejorative, I still do not understand, but in order to trace its etymology, one would have to speculate on what has happened between the Uilta and the Ainu in the past, and I have a feeling that it could be rather complicated. It could also be that a deep-seated dislike of the Japanese that makes feel this way. Whatever the reason, I decided that I would thereafter cease to call them Orochon and use the name Uilta.

I heard this and many other things on a sudden visit to Jukka D�funi in Omagari which resembles the forests of Otas. With a snowstorm howling all night long outside, spoke to me through his narrow, light-grey eyes as well as his words. Around us were displays of articles used in the Uilta's daily life: hunting implements, a small cloth chastity belt with beautiful embroidery, boots made of salmon skin, colorful ceremonial costumes. On the alter were several ill�F, or ib�skki in the Uilta language, decorations made of willow somewhat similar to the gohei on Japanese Shinto alters, and looking down on us were the protectors of the Uilta, the nipopo figures.

He informed me that the wooden sleigh that was a lifeline to them in their traditional way of life was not on display there since it had been donated to a museum in Abashiri. After we made plans to go and see the sled together the next day, I fell into a deep sleep, cradling my head which had become muzzy with cheap sake and lulled by the sound of the snow which sometimes blew in from a crack in the window.

That night, I saw for the first time in a long while the dream of my great grandfather that I had often seen as a child. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I imagined that dream.

Instead of dogs, reindeer were pulling the sled which was rushing across a snowy plain. All of a sudden, a chorus of sounds rang across the frozen plain and the dark sea appeared. My great grandfather's face was just like a sea gull's, with red eyes and a narrow tongue. The sled was piled high with furs and fish.

Then, my great grandfather was standing, his legs wide apart, thrusting his penis at a fat woman from behind her. Many people were standing around, watching and laughing. "Go on, go on," they shouted in a gutteral dialect.

Having sweated heavily for half the night then spent the rest in a cold draft, I woke up. Some of the words in the Uilta language are the same in the Tsugaru dialect. The nomadic journeying of the Uilta have parallels to my great grandfather's travels. The eyes of the Uilta resemble mine. The hands of the Uilta resemble those of my father's. The Uilta's hair resembles that of my grandfather's.

The salmon coming up the river. Spearing halibut. Seal passing by just in front of you. A long journey, a journey by sled. The sound of the sled creaking. I hear dogs barking. A snowstorm continues for days on end. The oily smell of dried fish.