Nohmeh

Nohmeh is an elderly woman living among settlers in a land she regards as cursed, and her painful memories make her a forceful witness to its history. In conversation with Hohsalle, she disputes the accepted account of an animal attack and rejects the settlers’ accusations about toxic grain, revealing how personal loss and competing explanations have become entangled with the community’s experience of displacement.

Identity and Displacement

Nohmeh lives with her family in a place she longs to leave. Holding a charm, she says that nothing good comes of the land and wishes she could return to Nakoshino; she cannot bear the thought of dying in what she calls a forsaken place. Her words present displacement not as a settled past but as an ongoing grief, colored by the prospect that this may be where her life ends.

Her daughter-in-law, Tomeh, is dismayed by the outburst and reminds Nohmeh that guests are present. Taya intervenes gently, telling Tomeh not to blame her mother-in-law for missing her homeland. The exchange gives Nohmeh’s anger a domestic context: her distress is familiar to those close to her, even when its blunt expression unsettles company.

The Attack and the Animal’s Identity

During Hohsalle’s questions about whether wolves attacked anyone else, Nohmeh insists that the creature in the earlier incident was a dog, not a wolf. She recalls seeing it and describes it as the small, troublesome animal that had caused them difficulty. She allows that it might have had wolf blood, but maintains that it was a dog. Tomeh partly supports her recollection, saying its muzzle looked like a dog’s, while Hohsalle points out that Tomeh’s father had called the attackers wolves.

The disagreement leaves the animal’s identity contested rather than conclusively resolved. Nohmeh’s testimony matters because it resists the simple label of wolf and places the attack within the settlers’ broader conflict with the animals and circumstances they associate with this land. Her memory is confident, but the scene also preserves the difference between what she witnessed and what others have said.

Livestock Loss and Toxic Grain

Nohmeh acknowledges that many sheep died. Some were lost after being bitten by the animal, she says, but losses had already come from ticks and toxic grain. In her recollection, the repeated deaths fed the settlers’ belief that they should never have come to the land. The account connects the immediate danger of the attack with a longer period of hardship rather than treating the animal as the sole cause of the losses.

When the discussion turns to grain, Nohmeh sharply disputes the accusation that the settlers’ grain killed local horses. She says it was not their grain the horses ate: the animals, she insists, died from red wheat grown by the local people themselves. Her correction challenges the blame being assigned to the settlers and frames the dispute as one in which each side’s account of the losses is bound up with hostility toward the other.

Loss, Memory, and Testimony

Nohmeh’s intensity has a specific personal history. Taya explains that her older brother was killed at the time and apologizes for her reaction. Hohsalle responds that he should apologize for making her recall a painful episode, while noting that this is the first he has heard of the red-wheat account. He observes that red wheat is native to Aquafa and reasons that the fire horses must have been fed it for generations. The conversation thus moves from Nohmeh’s remembered grievance to a question about the animals’ long-standing diet, without establishing a final resolution to the dispute.

Nohmeh’s testimony brings several kinds of evidence into the same conversation: what she says she saw, what she believes caused the deaths, and the loss that makes the episode painful to revisit. Her account does not erase the disagreements around it. Instead, her insistence that the attacker was a dog and that local red wheat killed the horses unsettles settled explanations, while her longing for Nakoshino makes clear how the land’s hardships are remembered by someone who never wanted it to become home.