The Falcon Hunt Attack becomes a turning point in the investigation of Black Wolf Fever: evidence gathered after the hunt makes a seemingly animal-borne epidemic look potentially engineered, while the scattered cases and gaps in the transmission chain prevent the investigators from treating that suspicion as proven. Hohsalle’s account of the people bitten at the hunt sets the inquiry in motion; the later map and epidemiological questions deepen it without resolving who, if anyone, directed the attacks.

The Attack as a Medical Case

At a meeting with the director, Hohsalle gives a concise but detailed account of how the disease appeared and progressed among those bitten at the falcon hunt. The director finds both the conditions of infection and the speed and mortality of the illness highly unusual. Some bitten people survived, however, so the event cannot be described simply as an invariably fatal exposure. Hohsalle identifies Sulumina, an Aquafaese patient, as someone who might have survived even without medicine, though treatment of all the patients means that this possibility was not tested.

The contrast between patients becomes important to Hohsalle’s reasoning. Among those he treated, a Zolian falconer bitten near the chin developed severe symptoms most quickly and was affected most dramatically; Sulumina showed the greatest resistance, followed by Mazai and Olimu. Hohsalle seeks an explanation for that variation that does not rely on politically charged rumors about the Curse of Aquafa. He also asks why the illness has not apparently appeared in remote mountain regions where black wolves once lived in abundance. Finding and comparing survivors across Aquafa would help answer those questions, but Hohsalle says that a territory-wide survey and reliable information about nomadic clans would take too much time.

From Animal Bites to Suspected Design

The earlier investigation had already suggested that the disease did not spread readily from person to person. At the salt mine, victims appeared to have been exposed, become ill, and died at nearly the same time; the absence of subsequent cases among people working at the mine also counted against a continuing human chain of infection. Hohsalle reasoned that the speed and severity of the illness, together with the lack of signs among mine workers, made fleas, ticks, and airborne spread unlikely. The working hypothesis was that infected beasts transmitted it by biting.

That hypothesis did not make indiscriminate hunting a convincing remedy. Hohsalle observes that if wolves or ossam involved in attacks on sheep had carried the disease, shepherds would have been bitten, yet no such reports had reached Yotalu. The distinction mattered: the investigators needed to identify particular carriers rather than assume that every wild dog or wolf posed the same danger. The Falcon Hunt Attack thus sits within an inquiry in which animal behavior and human illness must be connected carefully, not collapsed into a general fear of predators.

The circumstances of the attack then raise a more troubling possibility. After Makokan recounts what happened to Sae, the director focuses on the beasts’ attack from a cliff, judging the approach unnatural. Hohsalle agrees that it seems suspicious. The director reasons that, if the attack was intentional, someone may have been trying to stop the authorities from capturing the escaped Gansa slave—the one man who survived the disease. This would connect the assault at the hunt with the massacre at the salt mine as parts of a premeditated scheme, perhaps involving the Gansa clan.

Hohsalle goes further in his own assessment: after seeing the conditions at the salt mine and the attack on the falcon hunt, he believes a human hand is guiding the attacks and that someone planned them in service of a goal. But he does not claim that the organizer is known. The director cautions against dismissing coincidence, and Hohsalle acknowledges that committing to one hypothesis too early could conceal the truth. He notes, too, that few cases with mittsual-like symptoms have been reported and that no major outbreak followed the hunt. If the King of Aquafa had been directing events, Hohsalle suggests, the governor’s explicit threat and the discovery that Aquafaese people could also die of the disease might have led him to abandon the scheme. This remains a conditional explanation, not an established finding.

The Map and the Unfinished Pattern

The investigation expands when Tomasolle presents a map made from cases gathered with Cheehana’s help. Red dots mark reports of mittsual-like symptoms across the former Kingdom of Aquafa, from the Yukata Plains in the south to the Oki forests in the north, where Makokan pursued the fugitive. Cheehana adds that the oldest reported case dates back eight years. The hunt therefore cannot be considered in isolation: similar illnesses had been reported over a wide area and long before the salt mine incident, though the evidence had not previously been assembled into a pattern.

The accounts on the map are not a record of one continuous epidemic. They describe separate wolf or ossam attacks, with only one or two people contracting the illness in each instance and no reported onward spread. Hohsalle finds this distribution difficult to reconcile with a simple model of infection carried by wolves. Wolves live in packs; if one animal transmitted the disease, later cases might be expected around other members of that pack. And if ticks or mosquitoes could acquire and relay the infection, several years and multiple summers should have allowed wider transmission. Instead, cases remain isolated across a broad territory. Hohsalle identifies the failure to spread as a problem requiring explanation, not proof of any single cause.

The natural-transmission question remains open. Cheehana proposes that carrier animals might not stay in one place long enough for ticks to transmit the disease. Tomasolle then points to the geographic distance between attacks: northern and southern wolf populations could not simply have mingled. Hohsalle asks whether the disease might have moved from one neighboring pack to another, and Tomasolle recognizes that as the only natural route under consideration before raising a further difficulty. The available account leaves that problem unresolved. The hunt’s significance lies in this tension: its manner suggests deliberate direction, yet the distribution and transmission evidence still resist a settled explanation.

Significance

The attack changes the investigation from a question of how to control dangerous animals into a question of how the attacks themselves are occurring. Medical observations distinguish exposure by bites from person-to-person spread; comparisons among patients expose differences in resistance; and the map reveals a history of scattered, largely unconnected cases. Each finding narrows some explanations while leaving others open.

At the same time, the possibility of political violence enters through the suspected link between the falcon hunt, the salt mine, and the surviving escaped slave. That link is alarming precisely because it is not yet conclusive. The narrative makes investigation an exercise in resisting both credulity and premature certainty: a strange attack may be planned, but the evidence must still account for where the disease appeared, who survived, and why it did not spread as expected.