Day 69: Waku Waku Hill

Jess and Gon slept on the far side of the hill again. In the morning, they said a quick goodbye and left to return to the eastern forest.

“Are you going back to the philosophy group today?” Gabu asked when they’d gone.

“Yes. I want to ask Takkan about his new way of hunting.”

“What was that again?” Gabu asked with a yawn. It was still early by his standard.

“Sagi says he doesn’t want to discriminate based on age or species and wants to hunt completely at random. It’s something about not choosing who lives and who dies, I think he said.”

“Does that mean he could end up hunting people he cares about?”

“I’ll have to ask him. Actually, they’ll probably also want to talk about what happened with Darrel’s wife. Would you like to come with me today? I’d rather not be on my own when they start talking about that. You can ask Takkan about the hunting thing yourself.”

“Sure, if you’d like me to come. I probably won’t be much help with the philosophy, though.”

“That’s all right. Just knowing someone there is on my side will be enough. Kuro-san might be too, but he didn’t seem to want to speak to me right after it happened, so I’m not sure. It’ll be nice to spend the day with you as well.”

“It has been a while since we’ve had the day to ourselves; there’s been quite a lot going on recently.” Gabu closed his eyes and appeared to go back to sleep. Just as Mei was thinking the conversation was over and was about to go outside to eat breakfast, Gabu said, “How about we go for a walk afterwards?”

Mei smiled. “I’d like that.”

In the afternoon, Gabu followed Mei to the clearing where the philosophy group met. Gabu had never gone to Philosophy Day before, so Mei told him a little of what to expect. Truth be told, Mei didn’t know much either, having only been to a meeting and a half.

When they arrived, Kuro-san wasn’t waiting there like he’d been previously. Perhaps now that he and Takkan were boyfriends, he didn’t need to... No, there he was, arriving with Takkan now. Were they really living together already?

Greta stood alone; Darrel and Leo were nowhere to be seen. She smiled at Gabu and Mei and walked over to stand next to them. Kuro-san did the same, just as Takkan was hopping up to perch on his rock—Mei had never known anyone without feathers who perched as much as Takkan did—and start the meeting.

“Salutations, philosophers, and Gabu!” the fox called, looking at the wolf with curiosity. Gabu smiled at Takkan but didn’t say anything. “Before we begin, I know last time became somewhat heated, but I want to make it clear that this is a safe space. We’re all here to learn, after all.”

Mei wasn’t sure if he should feel patronised, or if the remark was even directed predominantly at him. Takkan seemed to be waiting for someone to say something, so Mei said, “I’d like to apologise for leaving early last time. I don’t always know what’s right and what’s wrong when it comes to hunting, but it’s something that matters a lot to us. It was very difficult for me to learn that my choices may have harmed someone I care about.”

“No apology needed,” Takkan said. “At least you came back.” The emphasis on “you” was barely perceptible. “As it happens, we spent a great deal of time discussing the matter after you left,” he said with a glance at Linda, “so we needn’t do so again if you’d rather we didn’t.”

“We heard that you decided to change the way you hunt,” Gabu said. “I was wondering if you could explain that to me?”

Takkan smiled widely. “I wonder who told you that! As a matter of fact, the changes to my hunting philosophy are exactly what I wanted to discuss today. These changes are the result of my own personal reflection following last meeting’s discussion. To get us started, can anyone propose a working model for ethical hunting with the usual constraints?” Takkan looked at Greta, as if knowing that she’d be the one to answer.

“As much as you like to diminish utilitarianism,” Greta began, “it is one of the only moral theories you’ve taught us about that allows for the quantitive comparison of two or more acts, as opposed to the qualitative categorisation into right or wrong that most other moral theories confine us to. The constraints you mention, for the benefit of whose who haven’t heard them,” she glanced at the wolf and two goats standing next to her, “are that the model cannot require any act that results in the death or chronic discomfort of the would-be hunter, and that scavenging is not a sustainable alternative to hunting. As such, any moral theory that regards killing another animal to be impermissible under any circumstances, such the Formula of Rationality, would be immediately disqualified. It is for this reason that I believe utilitarianism to be the only practical moral theory on which to base a theory of ethical hunting.”

“Thank you, Greta,” Takkan said. “One Takkan Point. If no one has any objection, I think we can accept utilitarianism as the foundation of our ethical hunting model.” Takkan looked to Linda as if expecting her to say something. She only nodded. “We must then ask ourselves how we can quantify the harm done by a given model of hunting, and how can we find a model that minimises that harm.”

Now Linda spoke up. “If the purpose of the hunting model is to determine what subset of prey available to be hunted the hunter should choose to eat, then the harms we should consider are twofold. There’s the direct harm done to the animal who is killed, and there’s the indirect harm suffered by those who are affected by the animal’s death. In a sense, both types of harm are a deprivation of opportunity: the opportunity to continue living in the former case, and the opportunity to benefit from the prey animal’s existence in the latter.”

The phrasing of that sounded more than a little uncompassionate to Mei, but he supposed the phrase “benefitting from an animal’s existence” was intended to be as general as possible. It covered both enjoying someone’s company and also being dependent on them for your own survival, like in the case of an infant.

“In that way,” Linda continued, “they are directly aggregable. We can look at the amount of happiness that the prey animal would have enjoyed during the remainder of their life and add that to the happiness they would have brought to other people. This total metric can be used to compare the overall harm that would be done by eating one animal instead of another. That being said, as I explained last week—”

“Thank you, Linda,” Takkan interrupted. “I know you’ve got more to say, and I promise we’ll get back to it. Three Takkan Points for that explanation. I particularly like your idea for unifying two types of harm that would appear at first glance to be incomparable. Mei, you’ve thought about this problem as much as anyone else here, if not more. Can you see any faults in the model Linda describes?”

Mei was caught off-guard. It was true he’d thought about the problem of hunting for hours at a time, but never in the same terms that Linda and Greta were using now. He took a moment to gather his thoughts. “It makes sense when we’re all here talking about it, but it isn’t much use when you’re out hunting. How are you supposed to tell how happy an animal’s life would have been?”

“That’s a fair criticism,” Takkan said, “and one that’s crucial to the problem we’re about to discuss. One Takkan Point. Of course, on the face of things, the utilitarian hunting model seems fine. It’s the way I’ve been hunting for most of my life. But last week, Linda showed us a fascinating argument that undermines the whole thing. Linda, would you care to remind us?”

“As Mei said,” Linda said, “we have no way to judge the potential happiness of an individual’s life. As such, when using the hunting model in practice, we must resort to generalisations, thereby assigning moral worth to entire groups of animals at once. Since there’s no practical difference between assigning moral worth to every animal in a group and assigning moral worth to the group itself, if we’re doing one, we can be said to be doing the other. Are young rabbits worth more or less than elderly squirrels? To put it another way, if you use this model in practice, you are killing people because of their species or age.” That idea made Mei uncomfortable. He couldn’t imagine how Takkan must have felt hearing that for the first time, since the fox had been doing exactly that. “Reasons don’t matter in utilitarianism, but few people use utilitarianism as their main moral theory; for most moral beings, reasons are the primary determiner of right and wrong. If you’re going to choose between killing one person or another, you would hope to have a better reason than ‘because she was a rabbit.’”

“Thank you, Linda,” Takkan said. “To make sure everyone understands this intuitively, I’d like to look at a small example. Gabu...” Gabu had been paying attention, but his eyes widened at being addressed directly all the same, “...during the time that you and Mei were keeping your relationship secret, let’s say a small animal saw the two of you together and was actively threatening to tell everyone about you. You hadn’t eaten at all that day, and you could make the entire problem go away with just one bite. You have to eat someone that day anyway, so why not this one troublesome creature? Would you have done it?”

“Well, you see,” Gabu said uncertainly, “that sort of thing did happen quite a few times. Not the threatening, but people seeing me and Mei being friends. Most of the time, I’d just pretend to be hunting him and nothing bad would happen.”

“And when that didn’t work?” Takkan said.

“We would ask the person nicely not to tell anyone,” Gabu said with a smile. “That only happened two or three times, though.”

“My point is,” Takkan said with only the slightest hint of impatience—no one could be truly annoyed at someone like Gabu, “if you felt that you had no choice but to eat an animal or let that animal tell everyone about you, would you have done it?”

Gabu’s face fell slightly. “No, I... That wouldn’t seem right.”

“Why not? If you eat this animal now, you won’t have to eat another animal later. The same number of animals die at the end of the day.”

“Because...” Gabu said, and then had a flash of inspiration, “...like Linda said, I’d be killing them for a reason. And it wouldn’t be a good one.”

“Perfect!” Takkan said. “I’d like to highlight that whether or not a carnivore should hunt isn’t the topic for today’s debate; the reason a carnivore hunts is because that’s the only way a carnivore can survive, which we’re taking to be a good reason for now. The question is of who a carnivore should hunt. As Linda explained and Gabu’s example demonstrated, any active decision regarding who lives and who dies should be made with a good reason, ideally one that depends on neither age nor species, nor whether killing them would be convenient for you. Can anyone suggest a sound way of determining whether a reason is good?”

A mouse Mei didn’t know spoke up. “Because the animal you’re killing is a bad person?”

“That would be an example of a reason, not a method to determine whether a reason is good,” Takkan explained patiently. “But let’s examine it all the same. What is a bad person, Antony?”

“Someone who lives their life without regard for moral behaviour,” the mouse said.

“Which moral behaviour?” Takkan said. It sounded like he was stalking his prey with words. “The one that says anything goes so long as it advances the common good? The one that forgives any wrongdoing if no one has taught you how to be virtuous yet? Perhaps you mean the one that forbids lying, even to save someone’s life?”

Antony was wise enough not to reply to that. Takkan let his prey go. One Virtue Point, Mei thought.

“The way I see it,” Takkan said, turning his attention back to the group, “the world would be a dangerous place, more than it is already, if the task of judging and killing those who commit moral wrongdoings was left to carnivores. Just imagine it: badgers, foxes and wolves patrolling the forest, ready to pounce on anyone who steps out of line. No one could contest such a system without being accused of being wrongdoers themselves, even if the only crime they committed was to question a carnivore’s authority. No, even if we could all agree on what immoral conduct a person deserves to be killed for, it would be a slippery slope indeed to conflate justice with hunting.”

“To answer your earlier question,” Greta said, “there are plenty of moral theories besides utilitarianism you could use to judge whether a reason for hunting someone is good or bad. Deontology, for instance.”

“I can hardly avoid using another animal as a mere means when the end in question is satisfying my hunger,” Takkan said. “Unless the animal chose to be eaten, that is, but such cases are too rare to be relied upon. No, it is my conviction that the only admissible reason to eat someone is because you are hungry, and this reason provides no guidance as for who I should eat.”

“What would you suggest, then?” Greta said.

Takkan smiled. “Well, since we can find no reason suitable to decide whether to eat one animal or another, we must conclude that we should not decide.”

“And starve?” Greta asked.

“No,” Mei said. “He means we shouldn’t be the ones to decide. He’s talking about hunting at random.”

Now Takkan looked slightly annoyed. “You could have let me say it.”

Most people except for Linda were surprised by this. Mei got the impression that the squirrel had already figured most of this out for herself.

“At random?!” Greta said, sounding alarmed. “Surely matters of life or death are too important to leave up to mere chance?”

“Why so?” Takkan said. “Almost all deaths are a matter of chance anyway, whether it’s from injury, disease or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. By taking any decision-making out of the question, the cause of death isn’t me, Takkan, deciding that someone should die; it’s predation itself that’s to blame. A force of nature, just as any other natural cause of death. When I set out to hunt, I’m not myself. That is, no part of my personality plays a part in whom I eat; I might as well be any other fox. Or, to put it yet another way, it is my body, that feeble thing to which my mind is tethered, that is doing the hunting, not me.” Out of the corner of his eye, Mei saw Kuro-san smiling appreciatively at that turn of phrase. “I am bound to its whims. If it is to be satisfied no matter what, then let me be apart from it.”

“It sounds like you’re saying it’s not your fault if you eat people,” Gabu said. “Isn’t it better if you take responsibility for what you do?”

“Better for whom?” Takkan said. “Me? My prey? Some divine entity who reads my thoughts and judges me for them? Denying the existence of the latter, the only one who stands to care is myself, and so it is my business alone whether I wish to feel responsible for being what I am. Reasons only matter when there’s a choice to be made, and some would say not even then.”

“Except in virtue ethics,” Linda said without hesitation.

For the slightest fraction of a second, Takkan looked surprised, almost as if he’d forgotten or hadn’t known what Linda had pointed out. He covered his surprise with a very convincing look of mild annoyance, which he then shrugged off. “I’m not a virtue ethicist, so I feel no obligation to care out of concern for my own goodness. As it happens, I do care immensely about the lives I am regrettably forced to take, but that’s no reason for me to adversely affect the way I hunt—adversely for my prey, that is, for the reasons we’ve discussed.”

“What if you meet someone you know while you’re out hunting?” Mei asked. “Is there a chance you would eat them?”

“On the contrary,” Takkan said. “I would almost certainly refrain from eating any person I have a personal connection with. Not because I value my friends highly—that would imply I value non-friends lowly, which would be unfair—but because it would be disadvantageous for me to eat them. The reason I eat meat is for my own well-being. Let’s say I encountered Linda. Eating her would be harmful to my mental well-being, since I would be deprived of her philosophical insights, so on balance, it would be better for me if I did not eat her. Even a person whose existence is of no practical utility to me may cause me great anguish if I were to eat them, so I would not do so in that case either.”

“What happened to, ‘no part of my personality affects how I hunt?’” Mei said.

Takkan shrugged. “It’s not a perfect theory. If anyone can offer a practical way to improve it, I’m all ears.”

“I’ve got a question,” Gabu said. “How do you hunt randomly? I try not to go to the same parts of the forest too many times, but picking a different place every time can be really difficult.”

“I was wondering when someone would ask that,” Takkan said delightedly. “I’ve devised a scheme that ought to lead me to a completely different part of the forest every day, and with almost no creative input on my part. It’s complex enough that even if I wanted to end up in a specific place, I would be unable to derive the starting parameters that would result in me doing so.”

There was a long silence.

“How does it work?” Gabu asked.

“Regrettably, it would be best if I did not say. If everyone knew where I was going to hunt before I did, they would all move someplace else and I’d have to start afresh with a new scheme.”

“So it’s based on something everyone can see, like the wind or the clouds,” Mei deduced.

“It could be,” Takkan said coyly. “Or it might not. And in case you were thinking of asking, Gabu, I won’t tell you privately either. We wouldn’t want to both end up hunting in the same place, after all. No, this secret will stay between me and Kuro-san.”

Everyone turned to look at Kuro-san, who smiled sheepishly. “It’s quite ingenious,” the goat said, “if a little hard to follow.”

“I was only asking because...” Gabu said. “Should I be hunting like you say, without deciding who to hunt?”

“‘Should’ is a difficult word in philosophy,” Takkan said. “If you agree with the reasons we’ve discussed for why hunting at random is less prone to injustice, and if there’s no reason why things should be different in your case, then you may safely conclude that this is a reasonable endeavour for you to pursue.”

“I do agree with them,” Gabu said earnestly. “I would never want to hurt anyone because of who or what they are. I understand all the reasons why I should be doing that, but I have no idea where to begin.”

Takkan gave Gabu a long, contemplative look, as if sizing him up, and then sighed. “When were you planning on hunting next?” the fox finally asked.

“Tonight.”

“I’ll meet you at the forest edge. We’ll figure something out.”

The discussion returned to the philosophical implications of randomised hunting, becoming more and more abstract until they’d all but lost sight of the original question. Mei could tell that Gabu wanted to leave now that the conversation was beyond anyone but Takkan, Greta and Linda’s comprehension, but he was putting up with it for Mei’s sake.

When the meeting finally came to an end, Gabu and Mei returned home to take a brief nap before embarking on the walk they had discussed that morning. A short while later, when they’d both stretched awake, Gabu said, “Do you remember the first day we spent together, just after we first met?”

“How could I forget?” Mei said. “It’s a shame you had to spend the day hungry.”

“I was thinking we could do something like that again. Go on a picnic, I mean. There’s a place I’ve been meaning to show you.”

Mei smiled. “That sounds wonderful. Do you need to go and find...lunch...first?”

“There’ll be lunch there. Trust me.”

Refusing to say any more on the matter, Gabu led Mei out of the cave and around to the small stretch of flat land between the southwest side of the forest and the range of hills flanking the mountain.

“I’ve never gone this way before,” Mei said.

“I explored this way a few weeks ago,” Gabu said. “It’s quite a climb from here.”

Gabu led him further south, snaking from valley to valley until they were surrounded by hills on all sides. Then, Gabu started up a rocky path that took them up the side of one particularly large hill. It wasn’t quite like the path they had taken all those months ago on their way to the picnic spot; it was more grassy and there were no steep cliffs for an unsuspecting wolf to drop his lunch over, but it was certainly reminiscent of it. That must have been why Gabu had chosen it, Mei thought.

Several minutes of climbing later, they reached a plateau near the top of the hill. The land here was flat and grassy, larger than most clearings you could find in the forest. On the south side, the remainder of the hill provided partial shelter for a dense thicket that had decided to brave the winds. Mei walked to the north side of the plateau and gazed out in wonder. The late afternoon light cast the scenery in a gentle golden glow.

“The view is wonderful. I can see right over the Emerald Forest,” Mei said.

Gabu smiled proudly. “I call this place Waku Waku Hill. Excuse me for a moment.”

Mei watched him walk over to the cluster of bushes on the opposite side of the plateau, and then he went back to looking out over the edge. He hadn’t seen the Emerald Forest from above like this since first arriving here; it looked as warm and inviting as ever. More so, perhaps, now that he’d made friends and memories here.

Gabu returned a short while later carrying a leaf-full of small blue berries in his teeth, which he placed carefully next to Mei before sitting down beside him. Then, with a grin, Gabu lowered his head and ate some of the berries.

Mei stared in astonishment. “I thought you could only eat meat!” he eventually managed to say.

“I thought so too until I found these,” Gabu said around a mouthful of the berries. He swallowed. “I can’t survive on them alone—believe me, I tried—but they taste really good. You should try some.”

Hesitantly, Mei took a bite. They were much milder than berries he’d had in the past, without so much of the sour tang he was accustomed to. “They taste...blue,” he said.

“I know, right?” Gabu said with a laugh.

“How did you know you could eat these? You don’t go around trying random berries in case you can eat them, do you?”

“I don’t know. They just looked tasty, and so I ate them. I’ve never seen them anywhere except here.” He ate some more of them.

They sat together, looking out at the forest bathed in the light of the setting sun and sharing the berries. Mei had only seen Gabu eat a handful of times, and never in such a calm environment as this. They’d certainly never shared the same meal together. It was nice.

“Where do you think the sun goes when it isn’t in the sky?” Gabu asked as the sun started to set behind the mountain to their left.

“Probably the same place that the moon goes,” Mei said. “It must get back east somehow, unless it’s a new sun every time.”

“I’m certain it’s the same moon every time, since the shapes you can see on it are always the same, even when it’s only a crescent. And that’s another thing: Why does the moon have to get bigger and smaller when the sun gets to be a circle all the time?”

Mei thought about that. “I don’t know, but there’s probably a story that explains it. Like Tanya’s story about where life came from.”

“Those stories aren’t true, though. They’re just what we tell pups who ask questions we don’t know the answers to.”

Mei thought about that too. “Does it matter if they’re not true? We’ll never know the real answer, and it’s not as if it affects anything. Even if the words aren’t true, it’s still true that somebody said them, and someone else listened.”

“Is this more philosophy?” Gabu asked.

“Maybe,” Mei said. “If it is, it’s not the same kind that Takkan teaches us about.”

“What happens if two people believe different things? If one person says that life has always been here, and another person says the sky and the earth created it, they can’t both be right, can they?”

“Is that a problem?”

“I guess not.”

“Anyway,” Mei said, “who says only one thing can be right? Plenty of animals would say that wolves eat goats, and they would be right. But here you are, eating lunch with a goat.”

Gabu smiled. “I am, aren’t I?” They went back to watching the sunset. The berries were gone by this point. “Why do you think we’re here?” Gabu asked. “Why do we exist?”

“Now that sounds like the kind of question Takkan would have an answer for.”

“What do you think the answer is?”

“Maybe...” Mei said. “Maybe something has to exist that can ask the question ‘Why are we here?’ Otherwise, there would be no point in ‘here’ existing at all. What good is a sunset if no one’s there to look at it?”

“So we’re here to look at sunsets and ask ‘Why are we here?’ And if we weren’t here, then ‘here’ wouldn’t exist?”

“I think so. There’s a riddle I heard once: If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

“Why wouldn’t it? And there’s always someone in a forest, even if you can’t see them,” Gabu said.

“The point is that a sound is something you hear. You can’t see or touch a sound, right? So does it really exist if no one’s hearing it? And if that’s true, you could say the same about everything we experience.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Gabu said. “It’s just...I was expecting you to say something like ‘We exist to be with each other.’”

“Oh.” Mei smiled apologetically. “That would have been more romantic, wouldn’t it?”

Gabu smiled back. “I like yours better. It makes me think about things, which is something I like about being with you.”

Mei wasn’t sure what to say to that, but enjoyed the compliment all the same. “Thank you for showing me this place. We should come here more often.”

“How about after every Philosophy Day?” Gabu said.

“It’s a date.”

If Gabu hadn’t agreed to meet with Takkan that night, they might have spent the night there. As it was, when the last of the sun’s light had disappeared, they made their way back down the hill. Spending the evening on Waku Waku Hill had been like a breath of fresh air, Mei thought. They’d scarcely had a chance to do something like this since everyone had found out about them all those months ago. As they walked, they talked about small, inconsequential things like how pretty the night was. It was cold, but being with Gabu made Mei feel warm.

When Moonrise Hill and the entrance to their cave came in sight, Mei remembered a conversation he’d had a whole month ago. They had some time left before Gabu had to leave, right?

“Gabu?”

“Yes, Mei?”

“There’s...something I’d like to show you too.”