WeTried Translations

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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era

Chapter 33

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Welcome to Sebeom Valley (1)

The air at the Inje marketplace was running hot.

"You hear about it? They say there's a 300 won reward out for one wolf."

"300 won? The hell, is that even possible? With that kind of money, you could... whew..."

"No, but something must've actually happened. They say the people standing in front of the notice board gawking got hauled off all of a sudden by the military police and the constables..."

"What, again? Out of nowhere? So the 300 won really is some kind of bait? You know, to lure out the troublemakers..."

"Guess not. A bit ago I stretched my neck out to see what was going on, and the 300 won wanted notice was still pasted right up there on the board, plain as day."

"300 won... that's no ordinary thing."

"No ordinary thing, all right."

The merchants seated in the market and the customers wandering through all tossed in their two cents.

The big commotion Han San had touched off in front of the substation without meaning to had acted as the catalyst. In an age where news crawled along slowly to begin with, the uproar had drawn far more attention to the notice board than usual.

But Han San himself had stepped back a pace from the center of all that fuss.

'300 won.'

A reward so outrageous it was no wonder people doubted it.

'If it were just Sawada behind it, I'd have figured the reward itself was a bad check too.'

But now that Tono had taken the risk to confirm he was here, Han San didn't doubt it for a second.

The existence of a baron of the Empire guaranteed the weight of those 300 won. The reward wouldn't be withdrawn until Ginsei was hunted down.

'No... if anything, it might even go up.'

The skeptics would come around to that fact soon enough too.

'What happens next?'

At eighteen, blood boiling, he would have just gone wild over the sheer size of that reward.

But now, at seventy-four, Han San saw deeper than that.

'Every kind of riffraff will come swarming in.'

This was a world where men knifed their own comrades over a sum barely worth 10 won.

From all eight provinces they'd come pouring in, every drifter, every dead husk, every ninth-rank hunter, singing, 'Wait, you get 300 won for one wolf head?'

'Every last one of them will strike out and go home empty-handed, though.'

A smile spread across Han San's lips.

'Some book once said the ones who make the most money when a gold mine hits aren't the ones who came to dig for gold.'

It was the ones selling the pickaxes and the blue jeans, that book added, who walked off with the real fortune.

Han San turned on his heel and marched into the brewery.

"Mister! Give me 2 mal of the makgeolli[1] you've got here!"

The owner's eyes went round.

"What, not by the doe but by the mal? And 2 mal of it?"

"Yes. I'm buying it all at once, so knock the price down a little."

A bottle of makgeolli ran about 8 jeon at the lowest.

One bottle was two hop, so by the doe-bowl that came to 40 jeon, but cut out the bottle deposit and lean on the wholesale advantage and you could bring it down to around 35 jeon a doe. Leaning on the wholesale edge one notch harder, he haggled the 2 mal down to 6 won 10 jeon.

"Where do I bring it for you? I'll load it on the bicycle and..."

"No need to deliver. I'll carry it on my A-frame carrier."

"Good heavens, 2 mal is near 60 geun. And with all that sloshing, it'll wrench your shoulders clean off!"

"I'm awfully strong, you see. Since you don't have to deliver, knock off a little more."

He shaved off another 10 jeon, got the cask thrown in as a bonus too, and loaded 2 mal of makgeolli onto his A-frame carrier for 6 won.

"Heave!!"

Skreeeek! The A-frame carrier let out a scream.

Two mal of makgeolli came to 36kg all told. Just as the brewery owner had said, liquid liquor had a sloshing center of gravity that added a good thirty percent more strain. If he hadn't gotten the A-frame carrier reinforced on the way back from his last trip into town, he wouldn't have dared even think about shouldering it.

But Han San didn't stop. He headed for the general store.

"Give me some straw mats and bowls. As many as I can buy."

Once he'd stacked the cheap bowls and the straw mats on top, the load barely tipped over the most he could carry up the mountain.

The money ran out clean, too.

'It'd have been nice to buy this much soju instead of makgeolli, but...'

Han San clicked his tongue. And were those the only things he'd had to give up?

The soju he'd meant to bring his father, the hand cream he'd wanted to give his mother, the candy for his little brother, all of it, he'd had no choice but to cut entirely.

What could he do? There was no money.

Then again, carrying any more than this would have been hard anyway.

"Hey there, young fella! Some kind of feast about to happen?"

A passing peddler asked it like he could hardly believe his eyes.

Han San fixed the A-frame carrier straps and wiped his forehead.

"A feast I'll have to throw, yeah."

"Really? Where?"

"Sebeom Valley. But not now. A little later."

Han San left it at that and made his way out of town.

The A-frame carrier wobbling, the load sloshing, his breath coming hard. But his step alone was light as if he could fly.

He'd shouldered the load with everything he had, and the Sebeom Valley he reached lay steeped in peace.

Naturally, news from town hadn't reached up into the mountains. Again, in his past life it had been sometime in May before Go Tae-chon, the town gossip, started going on about the Silver Star or whatever it was.

Of course, back then this Ginsei creature might have become a topic late for some reason, or the reward itself might have been a bit lower. Or it might be that Go Tae-chon, greedy for the reward, had gone about it alone and only later come begging his father for help.

That last one was probably a touch more likely.

But either way, one thing was certain, a limit of those times: between the town and Sebeom Valley there lay a cliff where news drowned.

'The one who knows first and moves first is the one who eats first.'

Han San clicked his tongue.

"Mother!"

The moment he stepped into the yard, Han San set down the A-frame carrier.

Thump! Dust rose, and with a slosh the smell of makgeolli spread out.

Ham Ssang-sim came out of the kitchen, took one look, and was aghast.

"Omama! Wha—what is all this? Liquor? Oh my, San, what are you doing with so much liquor... it's not a feast, and if you wanted to drink with your father you could've brought a couple bottles of soju, why so much..."

"It's not for a feast, and it's not to drink." Han San grinned and rinsed his mouth with the water his mother had scooped for him. "I'm going to sell it."

"What? Sell it?"

Ham Ssang-sim blinked.

Han San nodded.

"Yes. I'll sell all this liquor and turn a profit several times over."

"Sell it... even if you set up shop, who in this booger-sized village is going to come buy a drink... and anyone who does come to drink, they're all faces you know, so they'll just ask to put it on credit..."

"It won't be the village folks. Outside customers are going to come flooding in."

Han San took his mother by both arms and met her eyes.

"Lend me your cooking, Mother. Let's all pull together as a family and make some money."

"Er, uh..."

Ham Ssang-sim looked into her son's eyes.

A few weeks ago she'd have whacked him across the back, asking where he'd heard such nonsense and what a pointless thing it was. But her son now was no longer that wind-headed good-for-nothing.

The eldest son who hunted badgers alongside his father, who hunted wolves alongside his friends, who'd repaired the house good and solid. The eldest son who'd even inherited that cloth-wrapped stick.

The steady look of the rightful next head of the Han household.

"Ah... all right. San. Fine. What's this mother of yours got to do?"

"Gukbap. The most delicious gukbap in the world. The kind you eat with liquor."

Ham Ssang-sim raised one eyebrow. The wife of a lame hunter, the homemaker who'd fed and raised two sons, quickly finished the arithmetic in her head.

"Gukbap... right, all right. But even if I use wolf bone and badger bone for now, the amount's going to fall short for pairing with all that liquor... and the doenjang[2] and ganjang[3], too..."

Han San nodded. That was something he'd been thinking about himself.

"Hold out with that for now. I'll come up with another scheme and stock the ingredients so there's nothing lacking when you put your skills to work. I'll bring in a variety of liquor, too."

"All right... all right, got it. From when? Where?"

"Tomorrow evening at the earliest. As for the place, it's obviously not our house. Just wait a little, Mother."

Han San gathered up the wolf hide from the outer wall of the house, where the mud-cement had hardened solid.

"I'll go secure it right now."

He had goods to use for the time being, and he had his head cook.

Now it was time to go meet the moneyman.

A red brick house.

A tumor especially out of place even among the Lower Hamlet clinging to Sebeom Valley. The yard of Pi Sun-dae's usury gambling den was thick with a fishy stench.

"Kya! Look at it, this magnificence. Seriously, Uncle, what do you think? Isn't it cool?"

Kim Tae-yang sat in the middle of the wooden floor with a wolf skull. He'd suffered like a dog scraping off every scrap of flesh with no skill for it, but now that he'd stripped it down to bare bone, he kept rubbing the skull like he was polishing a golden crown.

"Aigo, you damn punk. Quit rubbing that dog's head already. And with precious perilla oil[4], no less!"

Pi Sun-dae snapped at him, his thick, wrinkled bulldog face screwing up, but Kim Tae-yang wasn't backing down.

"Ah, come on. Have you got no sense of romance, Uncle? Hang this right up on the front gate and, look. A town girl comes by, sees this, and she'll be head over heels."

"Do a flying side kick off a cliff. The only woman who'd fall head over heels for that grotesque thing is a shaman. And you know the shaman in this village is an old crone who only wants tiger heads, right?"

"Ah, why do you keep pouring water on a man's dreams, Uncle?"

That was when it happened.

"Anyone home?"

The gate opened and Han San stepped in.

"Oh? San, you're here?"

Half glad, half wanting to show off, Kim Tae-yang hoisted the wolf skull up high. The reek of boiled bone and the toasty smell of perilla oil wafted out together.

"Hey! Look! Polished it up a bit, how about it? Nice and shiny, right?"

Han San snorted a laugh.

"Sure is. You cleaned it up well."

"Ah, for real? Right? I cleaned it up well, didn't I? See, Uncle. San says I cleaned it up well too."

Pi Sun-dae waved Kim Tae-yang off and shot Han San a sidelong glance, eyes narrowed like he was appraising a piece of collateral.

"What's your business? Doesn't look like you came to hang out with Tae-yang."

Han San turned to Pi Sun-dae.

"I came to see you, hyungnim."

"Hyungnim? Heh, would it do for you to go calling me hyungnim?"

Pi Sun-dae's face crumpled into wrinkled laughter.

"Even Tae-yang there calls me uncle. If you call me hyungnim, the family tree gets all tangled. Tae-yang tells me you hate getting the family tree tangled something fierce. That right or not?"

Han San snorted a laugh, and instead of refuting the mind game point by point, he said just one thing.

"There's a 300 won reward out on a wolf called Ginsei."

Pi Sun-dae froze.

"What?"

Kim Tae-yang sucked in a sharp breath too.

"Ah, for real!? What—no, 300 won!?"

Han San nodded and kept his eyes on Pi Sun-dae as he spoke.

"They say it attacked a construction site and left six dead. And among the dead was a surveyor."

Pi Sun-dae's eyes narrowed. Like the thug he was, running usury and a gambling den, he'd heard a thing or two.

"I think I caught wind that the construction project site got torn up... but even so, 300 won? For one wolf? The hell! Hey! You sure about this?"

"I just saw it on the notice board in front of the substation on my way here. If you don't believe me, send a man to check."

Han San said it boldly.

As for Pi Sun-dae, he didn't doubt it any further. As Han San had said, there was no need to lie about something you could verify with one look, and above all, what Han San had done these past few weeks was a far cry from such pointless lies.

He dropped the mind game and asked what needed asking.

"So? You saying you're gonna go catch that wolf too?"

Han San grinned.

'Of course I'll catch it. Not now—later.'

There was no need to spell that out point by point either. Especially not to this Pi Sun-dae.

Han San simply laid out what he'd carried from home, slapping it flat onto the floor with a thwack.

Kim Tae-yang, who hadn't been able to follow the talk and was muttering 300 won, 300 won in a daze, saw it and let out a whoop.

"Whoa, damn, it's a wolf hide!"

Pi Sun-dae looked at the wolf hide spread across the yard, eyes narrowed too.

"What's this now? Putting it up as collateral?"

"It's a signboard."

Han San jerked his chin at the skull Kim Tae-yang was cradling.

"That's a signboard too."

He went right on.

"At the entrance to Sebeom Valley. Let's set up a tavern in a good spot. The Wolf-Catching Tavern. We sell the customers liquor there, sell them food, sell them a place to sleep, run gambling. And while we're at it, take their gear as collateral too."

"Customers? What kind of cockamamie customers in this mountain backwater..."

The moment he said it, Pi Sun-dae caught on too.

Of course customers would come.

They'd come flooding in. Right around here. Self-proclaimed wolf-catchers with eyes gone bloodshot over 300 won would come swarming in droves.

The town of Inje would take them in, sure. For a while there wouldn't be an empty spot in any tavern or inn in town.

But those fellows hadn't come for sightseeing, they'd come to catch a wolf. After eating and sleeping in town they'd comb the mountains and dig through the valleys, and after chasing the wolf around like that, when the sun set they wouldn't have the strength left to make it all the way back down to town.

So where were those odds and ends supposed to go then?

In all the breadth of Mount Seorak, Sebeom Valley wasn't the only slash-and-burn village, but the place closest to where that wolf had struck was this very Sebeom Valley.

"Heh! Look at this kid."

Pi Sun-dae laughed. He bared his canines and laughed like a wolf.

"This damn punk—I thought he was a good-for-nothing and he's a hunter. Thought he was a hunter and he's a card sharp, no less."

Han San laughed right back.

"The card sharp is you, hyungnim. I'm just a guy who saw the game getting set up first and came to sell a little of the good stuff."

"Heh heh heh, that's right! Ah, this kid really was an interesting one!"

Pi Sun-dae's laughter grew louder.

Kim Tae-yang laughed along beside him for no reason.

"Told you San here was a pretty interesting one, didn't I, Uncle."

Pi Sun-dae's face screwed up sharp.

"Ah, you damn punk, what are you doing! A precious business customer's come and you're not scurrying off to bring some tea!"

"Ah, why are you hitting me, Uncle!"

"Shut up and go get the tea, quick!"

"Ah, fine, fine! Sheesh... honestly."

[1] Makgeolli (탁주/막걸리) is a milky, lightly sparkling Korean rice wine, traditionally unfiltered and sold cheaply by the bowl.

[2] Doenjang (된장) is a thick, pungent fermented soybean paste, a staple seasoning and soup base in Korean cooking.

[3] Ganjang (간장) is traditional Korean fermented soy sauce, brewed as a byproduct of doenjang-making and distinct from Japanese or Chinese soy sauces.

[4] Perilla oil (들기름) is a fragrant, nutty cooking oil pressed from the seeds of the perilla plant, prized in Korean cuisine.

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