Tale 37 — A pack of wolf and the warding off of fire
Between Sakaige Pass and Wayama Pass, in the old days the packhorse drivers who drove their horses along the night road often met a pack of wolf, the mountain wolf, once called o-inu. When they were surrounded by two or three hundred of wolf, they built fires to keep them off, but the wolf still pressed in past the flames, so the drivers strung up the rope that had tied the horses around the fire. After that the wolf no longer came inside it, and only circled at a distance, howling until dawn.
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.