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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era

Chapter 6

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Butchering the Catch

"Mother! We're back!"

The wooden gate flew open. Ham Ssang-sim had been sitting on the porch, neck craned as she waited for the men of the house, and now she came running out barefoot.

"Oh my, are you all right!? Hurry inside... Goodness, blood! What is all that blood!?"

"It's fine, it's not my blood. Here!"

Thud. That was the beast Han San had hauled home coming off his shoulder.

Both Ham Ssang-sim and Han Bada, who had come scurrying out behind her, went wide-eyed. Under the dim moonlight lay the dark shape of the beast Han San had set down, its drooping tail and thick body catching their eyes.

"Whoa, hyung! What is this!? A boar!?"

"Isn't this a badger!?"

True to a hunter's wife, Ham Ssang-sim recognized it at once.

Han San smiled and gave his mother a nod.

"We caught it over at Uncle Go's place. Pretty solid, huh?"

Just then Han Man-seok stepped quietly into the yard, his tobacco pipe in his mouth. Ham Ssang-sim looked back and forth between the badger, her husband, and her son, not knowing where to rest her eyes.

"Goodness... how did you get something this precious... and you weren't hurt?"

"Hurt? Not at all. This thing came out of its hole, pow! and charged, and Father just, bam! one strike and that was it!"

Han San swung his hands and told the story with real flair. It was the kind of play-by-play you'd expect from an old man who had watched the Olympics in his later years.

"This man's still got it. Well, where would a skill like that go? You couldn't kill it even if you tried."

Ham Ssang-sim looked at her husband, freshly smitten all over again.

As for the husband himself, his blunt expression stayed the same, but the whole time his son was bragging and his wife and youngest gazed at him with admiring eyes, his shoulders kept squaring up and the pipe in his mouth kept tilting higher.

Watching them, Han San smiled even as he stole a sideways glance at the badger's carcass.

'Now I'll have to dress it...'

Han San rolled up his sleeves.

Butchering a badger was nothing. What hadn't a seventy-four-year-old mountain man done in his time?

How to skin it without ruining the hide, how to tan it with ash-mixed water, how to cut the meat by section, even how to render the badger oil, he could do it all with his eyes closed.

But he didn't start right away. Instead he turned his head and looked at his father.

"Father. We have to dress this now, right? Skin it, and all that... but I've never done anything like this before. Could you teach me a little?"

Han Man-seok's gaze landed on his son. Han San kept the hesitant look on his face and bowed his head to ask for instruction.

It made sense, really. Did it make any sense for an eighteen-year-old son to suddenly handle a knife like a seasoned hunter?

Cleaning frogs and crayfish, he could pass that off as something learned while roaming around to play. But skinning and deboning a four-legged beast was a different level entirely.

And he could hardly come clean about it. He could hardly tell them, [Father, the truth is, inside I'm a seventy-four-year-old man, so I'm very well versed in this sort of thing.]

'Ha ha.'

Han San wore a wry smile.

'That will never happen.'

In that moment, of his own will, Han San made a clear decision. He would carry the secret of his regression to his grave.

It wasn't that he feared being treated like a madman if he said it. For that, all it would take was being dragged before Old Woman Wangdae in Upper Hamlet and getting doused with chicken blood in the middle of a shamanic ritual.

If anything, Han San was afraid his family might actually believe him.

In any case, this was not an era where you could float idle nonsense like, "My son came back from the future and says to buy this stock and sit on it."

To know the future was to know the tragedies that lay ahead. There were things you could call "opportunities," sure, but most of them were "nightmares," soaked in blood until they burned black past all color.

The great flood coming soon, fine, set that aside. After that came national total mobilization, requisitioning, liberation and chaos, war and dictatorship... how was anyone supposed to deal with all of that?

Stop it? The madness of that era? By announcing that he had regressed and gathering comrades? And those first comrades would be his own family?

Was the Han family supposed to join forces to hasten liberation, prevent the war, and topple the dictatorship?

'I know the size of my own bowl.'

He was no hero. Just an ordinary man who had spent his whole life in the Gangwon mountains, digging up medicinal herbs and catching beasts. He couldn't build an atom bomb, and he didn't know the first thing about politics.

'Honestly, I don't even know what stocks to buy... All I can remember are names like Samsung, Hyundai, Daewoo. Should I buy Daewoo?'

Ah, forget it. The Korean stock market wouldn't even open until decades from now.

'If whoever sent me back wanted to see that kind of story, they'd have returned my little brother instead. Neither of us is a hero, that part's the same, but...'

Han San looked at his brother, still nothing more than a runt, the man who would one day become one of the central figures of the military dictatorship.

If his brother could just live an ordinary life this time around, then maybe the start of the military dictatorship could be headed off somehow, but...

'That's a far-off story.'

Smiling bitterly, Han San looked down at his own arms. Holding his family close so they wouldn't be hurt in the great currents of the age, that was all these arms could do.

With a little luck, a few people he had ties with might fit inside those arms too.

And if that was the case, was there any reason to share even a little of that heavy load with his father and mother?

The anxiety and anguish that came from knowing the future, that was for one seventy-four-year-old man to bear alone. How to handle it, too, was something he alone would judge and answer for.

In front of his family, it was enough to play the dutiful son and the dependable hyung you could lean on.

His knowledge of the future would simply be laundered into "information a sharp-instinct son had picked up somewhere." And for that, he needed to take it step by step.

"Let's go."

Han Man-seok answered shortly. He took down the meat knife that hung at the kitchen entrance, old but with a keen edge.

"Watch well and learn well. Ask if there's anything you don't know."

"Yes, Father. Bada! You come over here and watch too. Let's learn together!"

Bada beamed.

"Yeah!"

So Han San followed his father, his brother in tow.

With his two sons beside him, the old hunter asked his wife to start the cooking and got ready to butcher.

Off to one side of the yard, Han Man-seok grabbed the badger's hind legs and hung it upside down.

"Properly, you slit the throat right after the kill and drain the blood. This time the blood was running on and off on the way back, so the meat will have soaked up the smell of it."

Han San made an awkward face.

"I'm sorry. I got worked up in the moment..."

"Not your fault. Just know it for next time."

Han San nodded. With his father, you could take what he said at face value.

"The innards came out clean." Mindful that Bada was watching too, Han Man-seok added, "When you cut open the belly, be careful not to rupture the gut, and if you grab the rear hole and the throat and pull, the whole thing slides out in one go."

"Whoa! Dad, why's that?"

"Because it's all connected. When you eat something, it goes in up top and comes out the bottom, doesn't it."

Since he was teaching, his father was a little more talkative than usual. Still, only the necessary words were there, which made it easy for even a child like Bada to follow.

"On a badger, the oil is precious. When you skin it, don't let the fat layer come off with the hide."

Han Man-seok's voice was low and grave. With the tip of the knife he scored a circle around the badger's ankle.

"Don't work the knife with force. Follow the line and it opens on its own."

The retired hunter's touch was unhesitating yet delicate. Down the inside of the hind leg, past the groin, all the way to the navel, the cut ran in a straight line, and the hide peeled back in one sweep.

A white layer of fat showed like a field of snow.

Han San nodded. That right there was badger oil. A sure cure for burns, a wonder drug that consumptives chased with wide eyes. They said even the madams of Gyeongseong sought it out to protect their glossy skin.

"In autumn it'd be a lot plumper. Still, for a spring badger, this much is good."

Han Man-seok gave his assessment, and Han San silently agreed. Only Bada, not knowing any better, cocked his head as if to say, is that so?

"Grab it."

His father pointed at the edge of the hide. Following the order, Han San took hold of the hide and pulled it taut.

Han Man-seok pressed his fist between hide and flesh, working to widen the gap.

"Keep the steel blade off it when you can. It ruins things."

Pushing it apart with his fist that way, the whole fat layer stayed on the meat. The hide slipped right off. Watching from the side, Han Bada looked on as if seeing a magic trick.

"Woooow..."

Stripped of its skin, the badger looked like a moon hanging from a tree, pale and glistening.

Ham Ssang-sim, who had been working in the kitchen, brought a water jar over.

"This'll last a good while. San! You scalded your hand throwing a fit over a potato at the dinner table this afternoon, didn't you? Be sure to rub this on there."

"Ah, Mother, you still remember that?"

"Why wouldn't I remember? Your omoni hasn't gone forgetful."

"Fine, I'll put some on. Right now, here." Han San reached out with that hand, right in front of Ham Ssang-sim, and dabbed at the badger fat. "There, now my palm's all slick with oil."

"Rub there, and spread your fingers a bit and work it in between, and turn your hand and knead it onto the back too, and rub a little on your face..."

"Mother, what exactly are you trying to turn my skin into?"

"Pale! I went and birthed you good and handsome, so wouldn't pale and fair make you look even more like a young gentleman?"

"Goodness, what's the use? Come summer it'll all burn black anyway. No use, no use at all."

While mother and son traded jokes like that, the butchering and the lesson went on.

He finished skinning it, removed the gallbladder, took off the forelegs, took off the ribs. The fat, gathered into a clump, went into a pot, which Ham Ssang-sim carried to the kitchen.

"You try this one."

Han Man-seok handed his son one of the hind legs. Han San nodded, and at first he cut the meat a bit clumsily, then, as if he'd caught the knack, he rode the grain and separated bone from flesh.

Han Man-seok nodded.

"Good."

"Because you taught me well, Father."

Han San laid it on thick. It wasn't all flattery, though. Among the fine little tricks there really were things he'd learned.

For Han San, it was a happy miscalculation.

'No wonder Wolong Sheng and Gu Long[1] made such a point of how important a teacher is.'

A teacher could erase, with a few words, all the time wasted going down wrong paths while teaching yourself. And since this teacher was his own father, Han San was all the gladder.

"Hyung, Father, I want to do it too..."

"When you're bigger. The knife, you brat, could you even lift this thing in your hand?"

"I wanna grow up fast..."

Looking at his sulking brother, Han San smiled.

This hyung would rather you grew up a little slower, but a grown-up's wish and a child's wish could never be the same.

"For now, just watch and remember. I'll quiz you later."

At Han San's words, put on as a mock threat, Bada's eyes sparkled.

"Yeah!"

And so time passed, and before long the work was done.

The meat soaked in salted water to draw out the blood, and the fat was simmering over low heat in the kitchen. The hide, for now, was spread out as a spectacle for Bada.

The inedible parts were all gathered and buried in the ground. The digestive organs and such had already been dumped in the Go family's yard, so there wasn't much.

'The stomach's a bit of a waste, really. Unlike the intestines, you can just give the stomach a rinse and grill it right up...'

Forget it. Call it a little something handed over for free.

"Let's wash up."

"Yes, Father."

Han San and Han Man-seok went to the spring behind the kitchen.

It was a place his father, troubled in the leg, had carved out over a long stretch of time for his wife. Scooping up a dipper of the life-giving water that had fed the Han family, Han Man-seok spoke.

"Turn your back."

Splash! The water poured down. The smell of blood and sweat washed away all at once.

"Aah, that's refreshing! Father, turn your back too!"

"Mm."

Han Man-seok bared his lean torso. Before the injury this had been a body like a bear's, and now it had wasted away like this. Feeling his own unfilial neglect that had worn this body down, Han San's throat tightened.

He poured the water carefully. Then he spread his hand and, careful that the hard bones of his fingers wouldn't dig in, scrubbed his father's back.

"You worked hard, Father."

"Mm."

Father and son took turns dousing each other with water. They had both washed clean and were drying off with a towel when it happened.

Han San blinked.

'Hm?'

His father, a towel wrapped around his head, had let both arms hang loose and started rolling his shoulders, shrug, shrug, wriggling them about.

Then Han Man-seok, whoosh, whoosh, drummed both fists against his son's chest, one after the other.

"You did well too."

Han San stared at his father with blank eyes.

Was it because it was praise he'd never once heard in his past life?

That was part of it, sure, but it was mostly because this side of his father just now was so unfamiliar.

His whole life he had only ever seen the silent figure, and that was what he remembered. He'd thought the man was a stone Buddha with no feelings. Someone you could trust absolutely yet found hard to truly connect with, that was the kind of person he'd judged him to be.

He had been so sure, so deeply, that he knew his father well.

And what exactly had he known?

The business earlier when his father had no tobacco, the way he puffed up when his exploits were praised. That the man had this playful streak in him too, why in the world, in over seventy years, had he never once seen it...

"Everyone, come on! Let's eat!"

Ham Ssang-sim's voice came calling. Han Man-seok let out a small "mm," squared his shoulders again, and headed for his wife.

Han San watched that retreating figure in silence.

It was all right. He was young.

Now, once more, still, young.

About his father, about his mother, about Bada too. There was plenty of time to come to know them, and he would.

He had to.

"San! What are you doing, not coming quick!?"

Of course, for right now, the first thing he had to come to know was the taste of that meal his mother had laid out.

"Yes, Mother! I'm coming!"

Han San set off. The savory smell of meat tickled the tip of his stinging nose.

[1] Wolong Sheng (와룡생) and Gu Long (고룡) were celebrated twentieth-century wuxia novelists; Han San is recalling them from his previous life, long after this era.

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