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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era

Chapter 30

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The Second Trip into Town (1)

A few days passed.

They say a word with no feet travels a thousand li, but in tiny Sebeom Valley the word just bounced up and down in place, jumping where it stood.

The three good-for-nothings of Sebeom Valley caught a wolf!

"No, is that for real? Those layabouts, the ones without a lick of use to their name, they caught a wolf?"

"It's the truth, I'm telling you! I saw the teeth with my own eyes."

The Sebeom Valley washing spot.

The women's chatter rose louder than the slap of their laundry bats.

"You saw the teeth?"

"That's right. My stomach was off, so I went to see Baechil's mother, didn't I. I took the medicine she fixed up for me, and just as I was thinking, ah, that feels better, all of a sudden, clatter! There was this sound. What's that, I said, and I looked, and there was this yellowish tooth with an edge so keen it could cut. That was no dog's tooth, no way."

"You're sure you didn't see it wrong?"

"I did not! Well, once might've been a mistake, but the whole time I was there Baechil's mother kept dropping it and picking it up and dropping it and picking it up, going on with that nonsense again and again."

"Huh?"

"So Baechil's mother, see. 'Aigo, my hands have no strength in them... I've gone and dropped the wolf tooth my son caught, I'm so sorry. I'll tidy it away, the wolf tooth my son caught... oh my! Dropped it again... ah, forgive me. The wolf tooth my son caught keeps slipping out of my hands,' she's saying, grinning that simpering grin the whole time, putting on a whole song and dance of the most shameless to-do you ever saw."

The women listening nodded, an ah dawning on their faces.

The Im household—which is to say Baechil's mother—did have a bit of that side to her. For someone with such a meek, demure look about her, too. It wasn't for nothing she got lumped in with that Mrs. Go as one of Sebeom Valley's three wicked ladies.

For the record, the first of those three wicked ladies is said to have carried the surname Ham.

That's not the important thing right now, though.

The rumor added bones and fattened up its flesh as it traveled up and down Sebeom Valley.

"Hunter Han's boy caught a wolf with a stick. Goodness. Was Hunter Han such a great man as that?"

"Ah, I knew it all along! I heard he beat down a badger in a single blow last time, too. Our Middle Hamlet really does have a lot of hidden masters living quiet, doesn't it!"

In Middle Hamlet the whole Han family was held up high. These people had either been ruined by the land survey project[1] or had drifted in during the Manse uprising of 1919[2], so there was a sense of solidarity among them.

That wasn't to say they'd go scooping out salt or barley for one another, but words cost not even a single jeon, so why be stingy with them?

"I told you, hyung, eh? A wolf! There really was a wolf, come all the way from Si-beria! I never flinched from a badger, you hear me? What's that cousin-of-a-raccoon worth, anyway. A wolf! The howl-ing of the wolf, I caught it right then, eh? I felt that o-men, and so I..."

Down in Lower Hamlet, Go Tae-chon ran his mouth like that.

Pi Sun-dae, sitting beside him, took a swallow of his drink, screwed his face up tight at the harsh kick of the liquor, and spat out:

"Son of a bitch, the way you talk, honestly. Hey! Go Tae-chon, you son of a bitch, can't you get a word out without mixing in that crooked foreign talk?"

"Ah, hyung, you're one to talk, eh? Can't you peel off that son-of-a-bitch, son-of-a-bitch you tack onto the end of every sentence?"

"This son of a bitch, you're asking to get smacked."

"Heuuaack! Don't pull my hair! That kind of violent role isn't, eh? It isn't you, hyung, eh!?"

"To hell with you, you son of a bitch."

"Ah, I said don't pull, no, hyung—anyway, that's not the point, eh? At any rate, the thing about this wolf..."

Even as he ran his mouth, Go Tae-chon's heart was a tangle.

On the one hand he saw it as a chance to somehow shake off the humiliation he'd suffered in that last badger fiasco, and on the other the fact that Han San, that little brat of a bastard, had become the center of everyone's talk made his stomach churn with envy.

Pi Sun-dae, by contrast, could look at the facts a little more plainly.

"That Han San. That son of a bitch."

Pi Sun-dae set his soju cup down on the porch edge with a sharp tak! and snapped the hwatu cards together with his thick hands.

The wolf's head "the young master" had brought home the other day flickered before his eyes.

[Ah, right then I gave San a signal, see! With my eyes. 'Is it now, San?' And San gave me a look right back, 'It's now, Yang.' With that big lug Baechil-hyung looking on in a daze, our two clubs crossed wide through the air and...]

Pi Sun-dae was a man who'd been through fire and water. A man who ran a loan racket, opened gambling halls, and served as the left arm of the peninsula's nationwide gangster boss was never going to be as plump and tender as his name.[3]

Naturally, Pi Sun-dae didn't believe a single letter of a young pup's tall tale.

But the wolf's head the kid had brought was no dog's head, that much was certain, and Pi Sun-dae, a man well used to fighting, could see the skull had been smashed in a single blow by some tremendous force.

As for the boy taking that head and trying to toss it in a pot all by his giddy self and boil it, kicking up a stink of fish and blood all over the yard and being a nuisance to everyone—well, that was the same stupid business he always pulled, so let it pass.

"Han San, then."

Pi Sun-dae carved those two syllables into his head.

"Might be I'll find some use for him somewhere."

So while Middle Hamlet and Lower Hamlet were abuzz, only Upper Hamlet stayed relatively quiet.

At Mr. Baek's smithy the clang, clang of iron being struck rang out, the Deok-tae crew loitered around Meokbawi Valley, and in front of Old Woman Wangdae's house a thick-lipped bald man stood like a temple guardian deity, while the trailing three-colored cloth and the baby bells kept their silence. The same as any other day.

"Oh my! I'm so sorry. The wolf tooth my son caught has fallen to the floor again..."

Only Im Baechil's house was a touch noisy, but that house was both the subject of the rumor and, to begin with, counted as something of an exception among Upper Hamlet.

Or rather, Im Baechil's mother was the exception.

That, too, is not the important thing right now.

The air of Sebeom Valley had changed. That was what mattered.

Disregard turned to recognition; pity and contempt to admiration.

Whether the Han family meant it or not, where there is strength there are results, and at the seat of results people's goodwill grows generous.

The cause of it all, Han San, had stepped a pace back from the whole uproar.

In the Han family's yard, under spring sunlight that had finally begun to warm, father and son spent their hours in teaching and in learning.

"You can't rush the hide."

Han Man-seok spread out the wolf hide.

The hide, dried in the shade, gave off its particular animal smell, thick and clinging.

"Yes, Father."

Han San in his past life had handled hides before, too. Many times. A lifetime spent with his feet planted in the mountains had made all kinds of things possible.

But there was still something to learn from his father.

After scraping away every last bit of remaining fat with a blade carved from wood—scritch, scritch—Han Man-seok took up the next material.

Urine water? Lye? Tobacco water?

No. It was the brain matter he'd taken out beforehand, before handing the wolf's head over to Kim Tae-yang.

"For coaxing a hide soft, there's nothing better than this."

Han Man-seok dissolved the mashed brain in water and added a few more ingredients, working up a tanning solution.

Han San, a mountain man of seventy-four years, knew the principle of tanning with brains well enough, but his father's fine recipe for blending that solution still had a corner to it that made his eyes snap wide.

"Ugh, the smell..."

Watching, Han Bada pinched his nose shut. Han San's nose stung too. Fishy and musty, and on top of that an indefinable strangeness that came from its being, of all parts, the brain.

"Now rub it in from the inside. Let it soak in. Think of it as the skin of your own face that Ssang-sim worries over."

"Sorry?"

Han San blinked. His father was simply working away in silence, as if he'd never said a word.

Han San cleared his throat and dipped his hands into the brain solution. Then gently, carefully, the way a mother smooths cream onto her son's face, he worked it in over the hide.

"It brings back old memories."

Han Man-seok said it as if tossing the words out.

"Old memories?"

"Yes. I did this with your grandfather, just like this."

Han San's hands stalled.

His father's father.

A grandfather he had never once met, whose story he had never even properly heard in his past life.

"Grandfather... what kind of man was he?"

"A stern one. Whenever I did it wrong he'd rap my head with his tobacco pipe."

Han San blinked. He couldn't picture his father in such a scene...

Han Bada, who'd been holding his nose, lit up.

"Dad got smacked around too!?"

Ah. Now, suddenly, he could picture it a little.

Of course his father had a childhood too. After all, Master Han Bada here was, for the moment, a small child sitting wide-eyed, his eyes shining.

Han Man-seok nodded gruffly.

"I got smacked a lot. My hands were clumsy."

At that, again, Han San found it hard to picture.

"Your hands, clumsy. With this kind of skill in them..."

"Above a trapper there is a trapper, and above him another trapper still. Like your grandfather."

Han San looked up at his father, who was talking long for once. The fact that his father, too, was someone's son came over him fresh all over again.

Just then the corner of Han Man-seok's mouth turned up, ever so slightly.

"Your hands are better than mine."

At that one gruff word of praise Han San went still. Even the stabbing reek of brain matter blew clean away.

This touch, this skill, was something handed down through the generations.

The paths that in his past life had been cut off, that he'd had to grope along alone, were only now being properly joined together.

"I'll do my best."

Han San rubbed the hide harder, as if to soak those years into his own seventy-four faster, to layer them on.

"Heave-ho!"

The pastoral days of tanning went on.

The brain-fed hide was left to rest a night, then taken out again and gripped and released and rubbed with all his strength, over and over, to make it supple.

The stiff hide gradually softened.

"Smoke it well. Don't let the flame touch it."

"Yes."

The last step was smoking.

The principle is much like soaking it in lye water—cloaking it in smoke to fix the odor and make it stand up to water.

Cured a golden brown in the acrid smoke, the wolf hide was finished at last.

"It's done."

Days of work came to an end. Han Man-seok lifted the finished hide.

Soft, tough, a hide that wouldn't rot even when wet.

"Shame it was an old one."

"Nothing for it."

Han San said the same, and felt the regret of it too.

The head still attached, and not a single hole in it since it had been beaten down with a blunt weapon. If only the coat itself had been more imposing, he'd have made a whole pelt out of it.

"You caught it, so use it however you like."

"Yes, Father."

In the midst of all that, here and there he dug wild greens with his mother and dropped by the stream and the valley with Bada, and before he knew it the day had come.

April 18th.

Ten days since his first trip into town.

"Let's have a look."

Han San stood the A-frame carrier up in the yard and checked his load.

First, the badger oil. As before, he'd filled half a doe bottle's worth and tucked it inside his coat.

"This much is about three and a half won."

And on the A-frame, alongside the wolf hide, lay one dressed male badger hide.

"Fifty jeon to a won or so."

It was a fair-sized one, so he ought to be able to get that much for it.

"Altogether, four won to four and a half..."

If he caught two or three snakes on the way, he could lock in around six won.

But beyond that kind of profit, Han San had one more play in mind.

'The hide...'

Han San's gaze swept over the other hides hung along the porch edge.

The female badger hide and the two cub hides were set aside for use at home. The female badger hide especially, with a piece cut from it to make the slingshot, was in no state to sell.

The wolf hide he and his father had worked so hard to make...

'The wolf uproar got even louder the next month, didn't it.'

Han San hadn't forgotten the events of his past life that had come back to him at the notice board in front of the substation.

'Silver Star, was it?'

The things Go Tae-chon had ranted about in his past life. Once that name-d wolf set Inje buzzing, what would happen next was plain to see.

'I can get twice as much.'

People fix their attention on what's loud, and they put extra value on it.

The price of wolf hide was bound to shoot up.

'But to do that, I have to open a deal with a leather merchant.'

Beforehand. Now. A step ahead.

That was why he was taking this male badger hide along.

'This hide is a scout.'

He'd take it in and open a deal with the leather merchant in town. He'd update all sorts of information once over, too, and do a little market shopping while he was at it.

The moment he'd settled the purpose of this trip into town, Ham Ssang-sim came out of the kitchen and asked:

"San, are you all set?"

Han San nodded as he shouldered the A-frame carrier.

"Yes, Mother. I'll be off."

"Oya. Go careful now, you hear! And don't be too late like last time."

"Don't worry. This time I'll be back in no time."

Han San grinned and stepped out through the brushwood gate.

Riding the spring breeze that had finally turned warm and gentle, he set off for the town of Inje.

[1] The land survey (토지조사사업) was the colonial cadastral project of 1910–1918, which registered land titles in ways that dispossessed many Korean smallholders and tenant farmers of land they had long worked.

[2] The "Manse uprising" refers to the March First Movement (3·1 운동) of 1919, a nationwide protest for Korean independence; "manse" ("ten thousand years," 만세) was the rallying cry, and its suppression scattered many people from their home regions.

[3] Pi Sun-dae's given name is a homophone of sundae (순대), Korean blood sausage made by stuffing intestine; the narrator's "plump and tender" jab plays on the dish.

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