Tale 46 — Futtachi and the deer hunter's mistake
A man of nearly fifty living in Hayashizaki, Tochinai village, had gone deer hunting on Mount Rokkoshi more than ten years before and blew an oki (a deer whistle), whereupon a monkey, old mountain monkeys said to turn uncanny, mistook it for a real deer and came down from the ridge, parting the bamboo grass, with its mouth open wide. The man was frightened out of his wits and stopped blowing the whistle, and the futtachi turned back toward the valley.
This is an English rendering of our short Japanese summary of the source tale — a summary translated from the Japanese, not a translation of the original text. The summary was drafted and translated with AI assistance, and names and numbers were checked against our records.