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there were no artificial sources of light such as street lamps on Indian Peak. Establishing that the only illumination by which Mr. Abe could have spotted the mice, then, came from the stars, the headlights of the patrol car, the faint light that shone from down by the river, or from the flashlight he carried, Dr. Akedera considered the likelihood of each of those sources in turn.
    Under foggy conditions, starlight could not have been of any help. It was also hard to imagine that the headlights would have been left on. As for light from the road below, even if there were no fog, it hardly seemed to count as illumination. That ruled out everything but directly shining his flashlight on the mice. But would someone who wanted to capture a small animal bathe it in a beam of light?
    At one point, Mr. Abe admitted that the area around the mice was bright, but he also seemed to contradict himself by saying that it was not as if the mice themselves had been glowing. The end result was a witness account dredged from deep down in Mr. Abe’s uncertain memories: “It was as if light leaking out from somewhere happened to fall on the two mice,” even though “Thinking about it more calmly now, there was no such light source,” and yet, “The area around the winged mice was definitely faintly illuminated overall.”
    With the assistance of a private nature conservancy group in Fukagawa City, the Mutsumi Club,the rest of that afternoon was spent reviewing old literature and calling citizens mainly in regard to the issue of winged mice emitting light. The club members mobilized en masse and two days were spent on the investigation, but there were no new developments on either additional captures or the emission phenomenon.
    Allow me to expand upon the activities of the Mutsumi Club. Its members, requested by Dr. Akedera to look into past reports of winged mice, kept up their investigations even after his return to Tokyo following the species’ all-but-certain extinction. Their detailed research, which aimed to uncover cases not included in Table 1 , resulted in a final report a year later. In the process, club executive officer Seiji Iwasawa and others encountered a highly interesting fact as regards to why it had been so difficult to gather information on the capture of winged mice. In accordance with Dr. Akedera’s request for information on the captors at the time of capture, the final report that Mr. Iwasawa sent included several photos taken when or around when the individuals had caught the mice. Despite the various seasons and hours, many of thephotos were travel souvenirs of families visiting Kamuikotan (i.e., at the time of capture), and when Dr. Akedera received these, he immediately noticed that every photo had children in it. There had been a basis for Dr. Akedera’s conjecture; the reader is invited to revisit the passage on Mr. Tamura, whose memories of winged mice belonged to his early years and were of his childhood friends sharing witness accounts with him. When the elementary school teacher found Ponta, she was leading children on a field trip, and when the reverend found Ai, the winged mouse was spotted by children playing on the shrine’s premises.
    As a result of the renewed investigation ushered by Dr. Akedera, it became evident, as he had predicted, that children had been responsible for the animals’ initial sighting or actual capture in the majority of cases. On the other hand, the imprecision of early memories and many of the individuals moving away upon maturity were imagined to be the reason why so few cases had been reported. It was extremely rare for adults like Officer Abe to find winged mice, a fact that did not contradict the difficulties that Dr. Akedera faced in locatingsuitable interview subjects.
    Currently, the Mutsumi Club alone conducts organized searches of winged mice. They employ a method based on the unique working hypothesis that Dr. Akedera tacitly proposed before he passed away: