Tohma

Tohma is a young man of the Oki clan whose chance meeting with Van turns an injured traveler’s search for his missing pyuika into a bond of mutual aid. He brings Van into his family’s precarious life in northern Aquafa, where the care of animals, the pressures of migration, and the protection of a small household shape his responsibilities. When black beasts attack in winter, Tohma’s concern for his family is tested in the same instant that Van’s extraordinary strength becomes impossible to ignore.

Identity and Introduction

Tohma first appears beneath an enormous spruce, seated in the hollow between three rocks with one leg stretched out. Pale with exhaustion, he is dressed in reindeer hides beside a reindeer cart, but the reindeer that should be harnessed to it is gone. His face combines features Van cannot readily place: narrow eyes and a flat nose that look Zolian beneath the clothes of a northern nomad. The contrast introduces Tohma at the meeting point of Oki and Zolian lives, not as an abstract emblem but as a young man stranded with an injured leg and a missing animal.

The absent pyuika is Tsupi, and her whereabouts give the encounter its immediate purpose. In conversation, Tohma describes how she butts him unexpectedly from behind, a familiar nuisance that makes the missing animal feel like part of an established everyday relationship. Van recognizes that Tsupi may be bearing young. Tohma immediately takes the possibility seriously: if she is pregnant, she must deliver safely, yet his family has never seen a pyuika give birth, and Van has explained the extra difficulty when a pyuika has mated with an elk.

Meeting Van and Joining the Oki Household

The two men make a practical bargain. Van asks whether, if he brings Tsupi back, Tohma will introduce him to a fur trader in Kazan. He explains that he can support himself as a hunter but cannot return to his homeland, and needs local knowledge of hunting rights and regulations. Tohma is surprised to learn that Van is a hunter; Van points to the bow he has tucked under the cart. Their arrangement begins with each man needing something from the other, but Tohma’s plea for help with Tsupi soon makes the exchange more personal.

Tohma asks Van to come live with his family, offering to persuade his father because the household cannot afford to lose Tsupi. He gives his full name as Tohma yu Oki, or Tohma of the Oki clan, and offers Van his hand; Van accepts and gives his own name. The meeting is thus both a rescue-and-care arrangement for an animal and the beginning of Van’s entry into Oki life.

By the time Van and Tohma reach the family’s winter home, nearly two months have passed since their arrival in Oki. Their journey had taken them through Kazan, where Van sold furs and bought provisions, using money stolen from the salt mine to purchase a reindeer and cart. Tohma leads him to a valley at Aquafa’s northern edge, where the family winters before crossing the mountains in summer to grasslands and hills nearer the sea. The seasonal movement is not incidental background: Tohma’s household must coordinate people, reindeer, and pyuika with different needs and rhythms.

Tohma’s father, Ohma, welcomes Van after listening to his son’s account and thanks him for helping Tohma. Acceptance as a mikucha, an adopted clan member, remains for the clan chief to decide, but Ohma offers Van food and a place in the tent while he lives and works with them. The welcome carries particular weight because the settlement is only three tents behind a stone windbreak, and the family is poor. Ohma explains that a single family needs at least twenty reindeer to support itself. An avalanche four years earlier killed or scattered members of the camp, and a contagious disease killed Tohma’s older brother and Yoki’s son the year before last. The household’s small numbers make every animal and capable worker matter.

Work, Family, and the Pyuika

The winter valley is sheltered by mountains from heavy snowfall, allowing reindeer to dig through the snow for lichens. But lichens grow slowly and take years to return after the herd consumes them, so the reindeer herders must winter in a different place every few years. Van compares this constraint with his own people’s seasonal movement: the plants eaten by pyuika grow back more quickly, allowing those herders to return to a grazing ground each year. Tohma’s world is defined by close attention to such ecological differences, because the family’s survival depends on choosing when and where its animals can feed.

As summer approaches, keeping reindeer and pyuika together creates a sharper conflict. The reindeer must move to summer pastures when horseflies and mosquitoes swarm in the winter grounds and the grasses are thin; sea winds at the summer pasture help drive the pests away. Yet that migration coincides with the pyuika calving season. The previous year the pyuika had no young, and the family had simply led them after the migrating reindeer by rope. Van suspects that forcing them into this unnatural schedule may have contributed to their failure to breed. Tohma’s concern about Tsupi therefore expands into a practical problem shared by the whole household: the animals’ needs do not fit neatly into one seasonal route.

After several days of discussion, Tohma proposes asking neighboring families for help. Ohma agrees, and the family approaches Kiya’s Zolian kin and more distant relatives. Those households are eager to take part: they too have struggled to breed pyuika and have heard that Van knows how to handle the animals. The resulting plan assigns three of Kiya’s nephews—Mino, Chida, and Moki—to stay with Van and Tohma and learn pyuika raising, while the other families take the reindeer to their usual summer pasture. Kiya remains behind to care for Yuna, allowing Van to take part despite his responsibility for the child.

Tohma’s suggestion turns an isolated household’s difficulty into a shared undertaking. The plan depends on neighboring families exchanging labor and knowledge, rather than on Van alone solving the problem. Tohma’s initiative helps make that cooperation possible, while the arrangement also brings him into daily work with three young men whose Zolian appearance unsettles Van because it recalls enemies he faced in battle. The silence and apprehension between them show that cooperation does not instantly erase the weight of past violence; the work begins among people who must learn to live alongside that history.

Family and Loyalty Under Attack

Tohma’s family ties become most visible when danger reaches the winter camp. During the night attack, Yuna slips out of the tent and Kiya runs after her. Tohma is at the entrance with Ohma, holding a torch and looking toward the pyuika corral. When he sees the black shapes rushing through the dark, he calls out to his father. The leader of the beasts leaps for Ohma; Ohma raises his torch, but the animal dodges and bites his arm. Tohma strikes it with his own torch, making it release his father.

Tohma then sees Kiya bent over Yuna as the beasts rush toward them. He runs to protect them, but one of the animals crashes into his ribs and knocks him down. Lying breathless on the ground, he sees its jaws above him and braces for death. Van intervenes before the beast can attack. From Tohma’s perspective, Van seems to glow, his eyes flashing as though flames rise from his body; he punches aside one attacker, tears another from Kiya, and drives the animals back with astonishing speed. Tohma can no longer follow Van’s movements, seeing one beast after another hurled through the air.

The scene gives Tohma no time to retreat into observation: he has already acted to defend Ohma and then run toward Kiya and Yuna. Yet his attempt leaves him helpless on the snow, making him a witness to the force that saves the family rather than the person who defeats the attackers. His experience also changes the way Van appears to him. The hunter who arrived as an exhausted stranger and joined the household as a helper now moves like a stag protecting its herd, an image that joins Tohma’s animal-centered life to the family’s desperate human defense.

Narrative Role

Tohma links Van’s solitary journey to the daily interdependence of an Oki household. His missing pyuika draws Van into a relationship grounded in practical need; his invitation brings Van to a family whose poverty, losses, and seasonal constraints give the northern setting its human stakes. Later, Tohma’s proposal to enlist neighboring families shows him acting not merely as the recipient of Van’s knowledge but as someone able to organize a response to a shared problem.

The winter attack concentrates those strands into a single crisis. Tohma is a son who calls to Ohma, a family member who rushes toward Kiya and Yuna, and a young man who sees Van’s hidden capacity at close range. His story in these episodes is shaped by care rather than conquest: attention to Tsupi’s pregnancy, concern for the household’s animals, cooperation with neighboring families, and defense of the people beside him. The attack does not resolve the family’s wider difficulties, but it reveals what is at stake in the shelter Tohma offered Van and in the community they are trying to sustain.