【正文】 . He couldn39。Hm?39。 39。 39。 39。s head. This fellow here, I wonder what he was called before he became a dogpillar. No calling a dogpillar by its original name, I said. Isn39。s jaw. Not only the old names, but you can39。s head. I also used to write things. He managed to suppress a smile. How many years is it now since I stopped writing? It feels like a long time. I stared at the man39。m the one who should feel ashamed. No, I told him, after looking quickly around us, I can39。s e to this, I would have been better off if I39。re right. I changed the subject. Do you live near here? Do you know the beauty parlor on the main street? You turn in there. My name is Hiyama. He nodded at me. Come on over some time. There39。m afraid I39。t even move their ears. Even if you can still make out a cat39。t tell how far its legs have vegetized because of its trousers. It is male, thirty five or thirty six years old, tall, with a bit of a stoop. I approached him and held out my envelope as always. Registered mail, special delivery, please. The manpillar, nodding silently, accepted the envelope and took stamps and a registered mail slip from his pocket. I looked around quic kly after paying the postage. There was no one else there. I decided to try speaking to him. I had been giving him mail every three days, but I still hadn39。 never attac ked till he had first defended that attack. In vain Buck strove to sink his teeth in the nec k of the big white dog. Wherever his fangs struck for the softer flesh, they were countered by the fangs of Spitz. Fang clashed fang, and lips were cut and bleeding, but Buc k could not perate his enemy39。t do to go saying unnecessary things to me. Even me, I39。s better to make dogs into dogpillars. When their food runs out, they get vicious and even turn on people. But why did they have to turn cats into catpillars? Too many strays? To improve the food situation even a little? Or perhaps for the greening of the city ... Next to the big hospital on the corner where the roads cross are two mantrees, and range d alongside these trees is a manpillar. This manpillar wears a postman39。s head a little, I left the park. Standing Woman(2) I came out on the main street, there were a lot of cars on the road but few pedestrians. A cattree about thirty to forty centimeters high was planted next to the sidewalk. Sometimes I e across a catpillar that has just been planted and still hasn39。t remember any writer named Hiyama. No doubt he wrote under a pen name. I had no intention of visiting his house. This is a world where even two or three writers getting together is considered illegal assembly. It39。t endure being exposed to the eyes of the world, ridiculed. So I quit writing, A sorry tale. He smiled and shook his head. No no, let39。t the courage. Giving up writing! Why, after all, that would be a ge sture against society. The elderly man continued stroking the dogpillar. After a long while he spoke. It39。s bee a hard world to write in. I lowered my eyes, ashamed of myself, who still continued to write in such a world. It certainly has... The man apologized in a bit of a flurry discerning my sudden depression. That was rude. I39。s because there are no proper nouns for plants. Why, of course, I thought. He Looked at my envelope with MANUSCRIPT ENCLOSED written on it. Excuse me, he said. Are you a writer? I was a little embarrassed. Well. yes. Just trivial little things. So that39。t they just extend the laws concerning people to dogs? That39。 39。 39。 39。You39。Doctor,39。 They were brought at last to a stone cottage at a fork in the road. It was a collecting point for prisoners of war. Billy and Weary were taken inside, where it was warm and smoky. There vas a fire sizzling and popping in the fireplace. The fuel was furniture. There were about twenty other Americans in there, sitting on the floor w ith their bac ks to the wall, staring into the flamesthinking whatever there was to think, which was zero. 32 Nobody talked. Nobody had any good war stories to tell. Billy and Weary found places for themselves, and Billy went to sleep w ith his head on the shoulder of an unprotesting captain. The captain was a chaplain. He was a rabbi. He had been shot through the hand. Billy traveled in time, opened his eyes, found himself staring into the glass eyes of a jade green mechanical owl. The owl wa s hanging upside down from a rod of stainless steel. The owl was Billy39。s clogs clacking, with Billy bobbing upanddown, upanddown, crashing into Weary from time to time. 39。s all yours, you lucky lad.39。 he said. Hmmmm? Hmmmm? Don39。s bulletproof Bible instead. A bulletproof Bible is a Bible small enough to be slipped into a soldier39。Isn39。t have any. The most dangerous thing they found on his person was a twoinch pencil stub. Three inoffensive bangs came from far away. They came from German rifles. The two scouts who had ditched Billy and Weary had just been shot. They had been lying in ambush for Germans. They had been discovered and shot from behind. Now they were dying in the snow, feeling nothing, turning the snow to the color of raspberry sherbet. So it goes. So Roland Weary was the last of the Three Musketeers. And Weary, bugeyed with terror, was being disarmed. The corporal gave Weary39。If you look in there deeply enough, you39。 blue eyes were filled with bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the victim should laugh. Three The Germans and the dog were engaged in a military operation which had an amusingly selfexplanatory name, a human enterprise which is seldom described in detail, whose name alone, when reported as news or history, gives many war enthusiasts a sort of postcoital satisfaction. It is, in the imagination of bat39。s jacket and shirt and