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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era
Chapter 40
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The Falling Star
Han San was—
—leveling his rifle.
* * *
A gorge valley.
A stream.
A single wolf raced on like something gone mad.
Splash, splash!
The churning of water was loud. White foam dribbled in strings from its gaping mouth, and in the water its paws tore up, the moonlight scattered into pale spray and mixed with the beast's drool.
The wolf named Ginsei. Born on the peninsula yet called by the pronunciation of the islands, the animal did not slow its stride.
When it had challenged the former leader, that old one, it had been a joy. When it had bitten down on that left leg and wrenched it apart, it had been a thrill. Once the old one was driven off, every female of the pack belonged to it.
That had been fun.
But now—fleeing now, abandoning the pack—Ginsei felt no fun in it at all.
Why had it come to this?
Because it had killed the two-legged beasts? But it had been careful, too. The ones who carried the strange sticks—avoid only those, and the two-legged ones were all weak, every one of them. Their reactions were violent. It had been fun.
So it killed the ones with the sticks by avoiding them. It killed.
It had been fun.
[Aigo! Aigo, somebody save me! Th-this. I'll give you all of this, so spare me, you beast, just spare me!]
That one with a back loaded down with fish.
[No, no! I have to get home! They told me—they told me I had a son...]
That one who went about carrying a stack of thick papers.
[The Empire will kill you.]
That one.
The one who had dared to toy with it using that stubby little rod that spat strange fire.
It killed them all. Biting, tearing, striking, clawing. Killing was that simple. The killing was always done by this side.
It had been fun.
Why had it come to this.
* * *
"Damn it all! Where did it run off to!"
Sawada Kazuo's roar shook the underbrush.
More precisely, at his roar the military police rippled like underbrush. The man the wild boar had thrown was hauled upright by another officer who forced him to his feet.
They knew that to lie still and quiet now meant lying down forever at the hands of that detachment commander.
"Ginsei! Not one of you saw which way that animal ran off!?"
"Th-that is..."
"Tracks! Find the tracks, you half-witted dogs!"
The detachment commander of the Inje military police.
Sawada Kazuo, the warrior who held this land like a fief, the extraordinarily gifted beast, trembled with disgrace. Even the moonlight beginning to swallow the mountainside was too bright to hide his writhing.
Why had it come to this.
[Are you confident, Kazuo-kun?]
Sawada Kazuo could not turn to look behind him.
Because the voice of a certain man who would be standing there still circled at his ear even now.
[A fine state of mind! Please do not forget your zanshin[1]!]
The brat who, right up until the operation began, had prattled on about every last little detail had, for some reason, clamped his lips shut the moment things began to go wrong.
When the wild boar suddenly swept through the detachment, the only one thrown into a panic was Sawada Kazuo. The baron who had stood beside him uttered not a single word.
Only—
[Mm.]
That was all.
As if amused.
As if it were fascinating that the command of Sawada Kazuo—who had reigned over Inje like a lord, a military police captain who only seconds before had brimmed with confidence—had been caught up in some absurd natural disaster, he propped his chin and made that sound.
Following silently behind him with nothing but footsteps, holding a presence utterly unlike the subordinate officers chattering and fussing about every which way over nothing, this young master of the Empire was, to Sawada Kazuo, detestable.
'What kind of disgrace is this.'
And he raged all the more at himself.
'Every part of the operation was perfect. And then, wild boar? Of all times, now?'
It was then.
The forest grew noisy. It was not the noise of the Empire's mountains, and so it was not the noise of the Empire.
"The sound came from over here!"
"Wolves! That rank stink is the stink of wolves!"
Korean words.
The barbaric language his ears had grown used to but his mind refused to accept began to reach him from every side.
"What is this."
"That... that is."
A vice-captain among the officers spoke up carefully. Not too carefully. The superior before him was no soft civil official but a warrior, and he did not favor deference.
"For this operation we gathered all our best men, did we not."
"We did. So?"
"And so, well, it seems a few of those Korean dogs after the bounty caught the scent and followed along. We shook them off, but with the gunshots earlier and the uproar the wild boar stirred up..."
"Hah. Those vermin?"
"Yes. My apologies. I'll drive them off at once."
Sawada Kazuo would not have known this.
But this, too, was a rumor that had flowed out of a certain tavern.
In the midst of so many rumors trading hands, Han San could not have been the only one to grasp the military police's route. There were hunters here and there who guessed that, in the end, they would have to ride the tail of the military police to reach the space between the wolf's brows.
It was only that the one presiding over the rumors at the tavern was Han San alone.
Han San did not distort the truth. He only turned its direction. 'Since you're a regular, sir,' he said deftly. 'A word I tell only to the customer who buys the platter every day'—but not to the seasoned hunters. Only the half-baked ones. The fools whose lives sat on a knife's edge, who had come to regard the edge of their own lives and the edge of a military policeman's blade as one and the same. 'Right here.'
And so, here they were.
Han San had led the bands of hunters to approach while keeping a certain distance from the military police, and it went exactly as he intended.
The aim was one thing only.
To muddy the water.
"Trash, the lot of them! They don't even know where they should and shouldn't stick their noses!"
Sawada Kazuo hissed and seethed.
His adjutant tried to soothe him.
"Yes, yes, Commander. I'll run over right away and—"
"You idiot! Where is there time for that! When we haven't even found which way the wolf went!"
Sawada Kazuo raised his rifle. His adjutant's eyes went wide.
"Commander?"
"Fire."
"No, that is..." A number of thoughts flashed through the adjutant's head in an instant, but once he set down all those humane words—the words that would set this warrior Sawada off into a fit—only one line remained. "It could also tell the fleeing Ginsei where we are..."
Sawada clicked his teeth.
"Damn it!"
All the while, the voices of the Korean dogs were drawing closer.
"Is it this way?"
"This reek of gunpowder is awful thick..."
Are they playing games right now!
He hadn't even pinned down the direction Ginsei had fled, and now those bunglers were barging in on top of it?
Men good for nothing but cannon fodder, turned into outright waste rock?
At this rate the whole trail of Ginsei would be—
"Mm!"
It was right then.
"This, surely, is a fault of mine as well..."
A voice rang out from behind him.
A finger sheathed in a black glove stretched out and pointed one way.
"Ginsei will have gone that way!"
Again, Sawada did not turn to look behind him. He looked only at the direction the finger pointed, that direction alone.
It was a single instant. Sawada quieted his churning emotions and, with a sharp crack, rolled the walnut in his hand. The dizzily swaying head of the viper took hold of its rudder.
"We scatter."
The adjutant faltered.
"Sir?"
Sawada spoke as fast as he thought.
"You! That way! You, that way! You, and you, that way! Don't stop, just go! As you go, fire on anything you see—and fire at fixed intervals even if you see nothing!"
It was Seorak. It was the birch forest.
The waterfall and the gorge valley lay right alongside.
The mountainside was rippled with folds, and the echoes of gunfire were bound to travel back and forth through the deep gorge.
The echoes of gunshots ringing out from everywhere would be enough to fool the hearing of the panicked beast, and as a bonus they would drive off the two-legged Korean dogs—so Sawada Kazuo judged, and so he ordered.
"The rest of you, hands off your triggers! Follow me and run Ginsei down!"
And so Sawada Kazuo, taking only his direct subordinates, moved like a lightning bolt.
* * *
And.
Han San was—
—leveling his rifle.
* * *
Why had it come to this.
Splash. The water suddenly went deep. It was all right. Thrashing, Ginsei gasped. It kept moving, riding the current.
It's all right.
It's all right. I can get away. When the four-legged pigs came charging, the two-legged beasts had panicked. The scent of that panic had been no lie.
This is different from before.
Until now there had always been that unknowable scent of death. No matter how it moved, it had felt like crawling deeper into that scent.
But now—if only it could get clear of this place—somehow it would find a new pack again, and take the leader's seat again, and that time, that time for certain, it would avoid only the two-legged beasts with the sticks. Avoid them...
The instant it thought that, the forepaws churning the water touched solid ground once more.
Splash, splash.
Ginsei thrust its head above the surface, then its body. At last even its tail came out of the water.
It came up onto dry land.
It shook itself out with a shudder, lifted its dripping head, and looked up at the sky.
Ginsei's fur, always licked smooth and tidy by the females, took in the moonlight in full. Even in the midst of that wretched flight, Ginsei's fur still gleamed silver like silk, unmistakable in any light.
Ginsei searched for its star.
The star that resembled it. The star that had always watched over it, that it could recognize anywhere—it searched for that one.
That star—it wasn't there.
No, it was there. Over there, that way... it hung on the ridgeline of that mountain.
At the sight of the star looking so perilous, as if it might vanish at any second, Ginsei let out a whimper without meaning to.
That the star's name was the Dog Star, that Sirius was originally a star of winter and so at this season hurried off to hide itself away—there was no way a mere wolf could know any of that.
Only—
Bang!
A sound rang out.
* * *
The military police moved as ordered.
The rest, apart from those running Ginsei down with Sawada, raced off in the directions they had been given, rifles raised.
They fired.
Bang! Bang, bang!
"Good gods, what—what are those fellows doing now!? What in blazes!?"
"Are they shooting at us right now?!"
The half-baked hunters jumped in shock at the wild gunfire ringing out on every side.
"Get down! Aigo, your lordships! We're not trying to fight you, sirs!"
"S-spare us, pleaaase!"
The half-baked hunters scrambled flat to the ground, or else scattered every which way.
And on a slope one ridge away,
Han San was—
—leveling his rifle.
* * *
Bang, bang!
"Yelp!"
Ginsei cowered low. Bang! It flinched. Bang, bang! It froze.
That sound, sound, those sounds!
The terrible sound! The sound of that long stick that called death!
"Yelp, whine, yelp..."
What made Ginsei pause, trembling with its tongue lolling out, was the realization that it was unharmed.
It pricked up its ears. Sharp. It listened.
In that moment Ginsei understood.
Those sounds, those terrible sounds of death—they had come from far off, from a place a long way away!
They were even growing more distant!
"Bark!"
They don't reach.
They don't reach me!
"Bark, bark!"
Ginsei lifted its head.
The exhilaration of being alive ran down through its fur.
Ginsei tried to look at its star once more. It wanted to flaunt that it was sound and whole. It wanted to cry out at the top of its voice that it was safe, that it would go on being safe.
It could not.
Ginsei only saw the moment the star at last passed over the crest of the ridge, and the pitch-black hole that opened from that direction.
The blood burst before the understanding did.
Bang!
A sharp pain came to its chest. It tried to breathe, and out came only blood foam with a gurgling sound.
No more. No breath.
"Bark..."
Ginsei's knees buckled. Its water-soaked muzzle came to rest on the ground. Soon it was painted over by the blood that flowed out.
Killing is good. Dying is hateful...
The blood covered over even that last thought.
The instant the Dog Star set completely, Ginsei breathed its last.
* * *
Bang! Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!
Gunshots rang out—loud enough to echo across the whole ridgeline, thick and dense, from every place.
Leaning on those echoes, Han San too pulled the trigger.
Bang!
There was no need to check.
Before the beast had buckled to its knees, before the blood had surged from its chest, before the gunshot had rung out, even before he had pulled the trigger, the hunter already knew his shot had found its mark.
And so.
Han San at last lowered the rifle he had been leveling.
'Not yet.'
There was no time yet to let out his breath.
'Right now.'
Han San kicked off the ground and rose. He began to move. Fast.
Faster.
[1] Zanshin (잔심, 残心) is a term from Japanese martial arts for the state of relaxed but total, lingering alertness a practitioner maintains after completing a strike or technique.
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