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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era

Chapter 53

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The Way Home

The next place Han San headed was the livestock market on the outskirts of the marketplace.

'Hope there's an ox.'

As far as Chuncheon there was a cattle market that ran every day, but in Inje you had to take your chances on the day's luck.

'A mule would do—no. Thinking about the load it'll carry, an ox is still the best...'

Mulling it over as he stepped inside, he was glad to hear the lowing of cattle.

"Mooo."

"Whinny!"

The cries of the animals rang out clear, and the distinctive acrid stink of dung pricked at his nose.

Han San studied the oxen closely. Here too his luck held. There was a bull with thick horns and firm, well-set shoulders.

The owner caught the look, quick on the uptake, and came over.

"Young fellow, looking to buy this one?"

"Yes. I've got the money."

"Aigo! You must be the young master of some great house. Fine clothes, healthy color in your face, the whole lot!"

The owner sprayed spittle as he slapped the bull's rump, pat pat.

"You've got a good eye! This one's strength is no joke, a real ox! Plowing fields, hauling loads, there's nothing my house couldn't put him to, an all-purpose worker! Buy him, buy him!"

"How much?"

"A hundred won! ...Aiyaa, come on, don't make that face! You've no idea how strong this one is! It's a steal, a steal!"

But Han San let the words go in one ear and out the other, prying open the ox's mouth to check its teeth, then crouching to run his hand over the hooves of its hind legs. Then he named a price.

"Fifty won."

"Now look here, young fellow! Where do you get off lopping it clean in half all of a sudden, eh?!"

"Don't want to, then don't. Looks to me like he's got some years on him, only ever circled a field. Never set foot on a mountain trail."

With that, Han San made as if to turn away. He'd privately been ready to go as high as seventy-five won, but haggling at the market was a battle of nerve from the start.

The owner faltered. He wasn't a professional cattle dealer but a farmer who'd brought out an ox he'd raised at home. Thick-skinned country sort that he was, why else would he have hauled the ox out in the first place if he hadn't been desperate for quick cash?

"Ah, fine! Fine! But fifty won is a bit much! Young fellow, can't you give me just a little more?"

Han San smacked his lips as if reluctant and turned.

"Aigo, you're softening me up... sixty won, then."

"Eighty won..."

"I'm leaving."

"Fine! Fine! Seventy won!"

So he bought the ox for seventy won, five less than the price he'd had in mind, and a short while later picked up an ox cart fitted with sturdy iron wheels for twenty won.

Han San cracked a small grin as he fitted the yoke onto the bull.

'Funny.'

A patch of land the size of fifteen soccer fields had cost ninety won. And the price of this one ox plus the cart came out to the exact same ninety won.

"Nureung-i, your worth is the price of land."

Considering that gold came out of that land, you might as well call it the price of gold.

"Let's go."

Han San took up the reins and walked.

Now it was time to fill the cart.

"One ton at most... but with the road to travel, and the climbs and descents along it, more like four hundred kilograms."

Even so, that was five times the most a man could carry on an A-frame carrier, ten times the proper load. The volume it could hold was no contest at all.

"Hard to keep traipsing back and forth with the ox, so let's load up everything on the way out."

Decision made, Han San headed first to where the chickens were sold.

"Leg-horn. Four hens and one rooster, please. Some plain native chickens too."

"Why on earth do you say it like that..."

He bought the hens that would become Kkokko's juniors and the rooster that would be its mate, along with some plain native pullets just to slaughter and eat.

The prices had risen since last time. Hens went for one won twenty jeon a head, four won eighty jeon in all, and the rooster was nearly twice as dear as a hen, so he had to pay two won twenty jeon. The native pullets were a bit cheaper, four for two won together. Nine won in total.

Next was the grain stall.

"I'll take a seom of white rice."

The grain stall ajumma's eyes went round.

"A seom? You don't mean a gamani sack, do you?"

"Yes, a seom."

In some places it was a seom, in others a gamani. People mixed the two often, but strictly speaking a seom was a measure twice as large as a gamani. By weight, about a hundred and sixty kilograms.

"Hyaa... you do buy big, don't you! Twenty-eight won!"

"Isn't that a bit pricey? I'm buying a lot."

"What can I do when demand's high? It's been nothing but chaos lately. Foxtail millet's jumped, potatoes have jumped, barley's jumped—so how could rice just sit still? It has to jump right along."

Han San sighed inwardly. The food prices that had shot up thanks to the great Ginsei uproar still hadn't come all the way back down.

'Give it a month and it'll settle, but...'

Never mind. He'd already bought the ox and the cart anyway. Better to think of it as buying time with money.

"I'll take it."

"That's it! Good thinking! I'll pick out some real fine rice for you!"

And so Han San made a full circuit of the marketplace. Salt, doenjang, ganjang, flour, oil, liquor, meat...

'And all manner of odds and ends.'

Rope, thick wire, twine, a hacksaw, and the like—things too bulky and heavy to even think of shouldering on an A-frame carrier—cost him close to another fifty won.

The cart grew heavy.

His wallet grew thin.

'Honestly... what with the gun and greasing the permit earlier, a hundred and ninety won flew off in the time it takes to draw a few breaths.'

The money left was somewhere around ninety won.

'I'll hold on to this.'

Han San headed for the gun shop, fed up.

Since the money was paid and there'd been no trouble with the household register, the shop owner had handled things briskly.

"Welcome! Here. Got it all ready for you."

The gun dealer pushed the goods out with a beaming smile. A firearms permit stamped with the seals of both the chief of the security section and the station chief at the Inje township police constable post, plus a Murata hunting gun and a bundle of cartridges.

"Thank you."

Han San grinned.

Perfect. Now even if someone saw him firing a gun, he had an alibi to fall back on.

'Use this one day to day, and at the decisive moment, fire the Type 38.'

The Murata hunting gun itself was of enormous use. A shotgun had a role only a shotgun could fill.

'For the firepower you can pour out at twenty meters, nothing can keep up.'

Han San slapped the bull's rump, pat pat, with a satisfied look.

"Let's go, Nureung-i! I'll show you our house!"

"Mooo."

Clatter, clatter. The sound of the ox cart's wheels crunching over gravel was brisk.

Han San led the ox cart out onto the new road.

'Come to think of it, this is the first time since regressing that I'm going home by the proper route.'

If he'd been leading just the one ox, he knew a few [shortcuts] he could have used. But the trouble was, a loaded cart couldn't cross those shortcuts.

He could hardly bust a spoke on a brand-new cart its first day out, could he?

Nothing for it. Just follow the road around, nice and quiet.

'Take about fourteen hours, will it?'

When man and ox traveled together, you had to keep pace with the ox. A man could run, but an ox couldn't.

'Won't reach the house till near the dead of night.'

Smacking his lips, Han San walked the new road with the ox.

When man and ox plodded along, the cart rattled out a rhythm to match.

Time passed.

Han San held the reins loose and looked around as he walked. You'd be hard pressed to spot a single car in three or four hours, so the new road through Mount Seorak was clean, not a wisp of exhaust on it.

He looked at the sky, looked at the birds, breathed the clear air. The smell of ox drifted off Nureung-i following behind, but even that felt peaceful.

'It's good.'

It was May. The spring breeze tickled his cheek.

Flowers—pheasant anemones, false starworts, and corydalis in full bloom; a little farther on, demure lily of the valley, false Solomon's seal, and fairy bells; a little farther still, the budding rock jasmine, dwarf iris, and woolly azaleas—lay scattered everywhere.

The mountain road he'd always scrambled up and down like a man in solo skirmishes, he now walked loaded with cargo, ambling along a maintained road, and it struck him anew what a blessed place he lived in.

'Seorak really is a fine place.'

Han San thought it idly, hands clasped behind his back. Mm, a man really should live out his life in the place he's always lived.

'And to do that, you've got to keep it clean.'

Still walking with his hands behind his back, Han San spoke.

"Don't come out."

At the foot of a hill where the slope suddenly steepened, the place known as [Tears Pass], Han San said it.

"I warned you."

There was no response at all.

The brush spread to the left and right of the new road stayed quiet.

But Han San kept walking, not breaking his stride, and spoke.

"Stay where you are, or clear off. Then there'll be no blood spilled."

And a moment later, the brush shook.

Men in shabby cotton clothes stepped out from within. Three of them in all. In their hands were sickles, clubs, a rusted pitchfork.

"Will you listen to the way this little brat talks."

Robbers.

The greenwood outlaws who ran rampant across the Joseon peninsula in those days had appeared.

"Hey, you son of a bitch, what'd you just say? You talking to us right now?"

When the biggest of the robbers cackled, the others snickered and threw in their two cents.

"All alone, with an ox, with chickens. Wah! A mountain of rice too? Doesn't know the first thing about how scary the world is, swaggering, swaggering along, eh?"

"Set it down, little one. The ox, the cargo, all of it. Got a wallet, empty it out too. Clothes off, leave it aaall behind. Leave us nothing but your body and we'll let you go."

The robbers wore the faces of men who'd struck it rich. They'd already laid out a feast in their heads, by the look of it, even tossing out their grumbles.

"Thought I'd starve to death thanks to those military police bastards, I swear."

"The wolf pack too, ugh. Now that both are gone, life's got some flavor to it again. And we land a fat catch like this."

Their talk laid out the situation.

The military police and the Ginsei pack had been grinding the robbers down these past few weeks. And now that those two predators had vanished, the rats that had been holding their breath came swarming out.

'The mountain's going to be noisy for a while.'

Thinking that, Han San regarded them with a face that was neither quite a smile nor not.

Their heads, to be precise.

[San. On the way... if anyone with this character written on their headbands blocks your path, give them my name.]

But there were none among them wearing the headbands with the character In written on them, the ones his father had mentioned on his first day back.

Just robbers. Plain plunderers.

In that case, there was nothing more to weigh.

Han San reached out without hesitation. From the cart's bed, clack!—the Murata hunting gun was sucked into his grip, and pang!—sprang out.

It was leveled.

"Huh?"

The robbers flinched.

"I told you to clear off."

Han San said it with the gun leveled.

The robbers hesitated. They wavered. They glanced at one another, reading the mood.

A gun!

What they held in their own hands, meanwhile, were a sickle, a club, a pitchfork... however many of them there were, how were they to take on a man with a gun at this distance?

But.

"Hey, kid, you even know how to fire that thing?"

The biggest of the robbers came walking forward, snickering, gripping the sickle hard in his hand.

"This little brat. Hey! A gun, see, isn't a toy. As if a greenhorn like you ever shot a man bef—"

Bang!

The instant the gunshot shook Tears Pass, the talking robber's head burst open—crack!—like a watermelon.

The headless man toppled, blood gurgling up from his neck. The reek of blood washed over them.

And Han San—

"I warned you."

Han San said it without so much as a blink. There wasn't a flicker on his face.

Even if someone came running at the sound of the shot, there'd be no flicker on his face. The permit stamped with the station chief's seal vouched for the legality of the Murata hunting gun, and these very circumstances proved self-defense.

Of course, the legal procedures of a colony wouldn't run that ideally.

In any case, Han San was a Korean, and he'd been marked by Sawada Kazuo, the military police detachment commander for this whole area. There were plenty of factors stacked against him.

But compared to not long ago, when he'd had no household register and carried an illegally modified military firearm, even assuming the worst case, he now had the means to put up a fight.

Psychological shock?

Han San called himself an ordinary man, and that was the truth. Thanks to a younger brother with an unusual background there were ways he'd strayed off course, but in the broad strokes he'd lived as an ordinary man.

Yet what, exactly, was the life of an ordinary man born in the Japanese colonial era and lived out to seventy-four?

It meant taking the full brunt of every madness in the modern history of Korea!

Head-on!

Without privilege! And therefore without exemption!

He had known war!

A war of his people! He'd pulled the trigger on the enemy soldiers pouring toward him! He'd run across fields strewn with corpses! Many of the soldiers he'd killed lay in those fields too! The sky that day, where the crows shrieked and shrieked, had been a piercing red!

And so this was not his first killing.

Of course, they say that killing the enemy in war is not murder. But if so, then could you really call it murder to hunt down the two-legged beasts that came at you to kill you?

'Doesn't matter anyway.'

Han San had no interest in others' judgments. If they wanted to denounce him as a murderer, then let them, by all means.

That he would not hesitate to pull the trigger on anyone who tried to kill him, or who dared threaten his family by even a hair—that resolve alone stood plain in Han San's chest.

Of course, that love of family was not Han San's alone.

"Hyung!"

One of the frozen robbers came charging, eyes rolled back.

"You bastard! How dare, how dare you, to my hyung—"

Han San's hand moved like a machine.

Clack, the bolt drawn back; clink!, the spent shell flicked out; click, the round he'd tucked between his fingers pushed into the chamber; clack, the bolt shut; and then.

Bang!!

The Murata hunting gun spat fire. This time it was the chest. "Guhk—" the one whose heart had burst open stopped mid-charge, made a choking, gasping sound, and crumpled.

In an instant only one robber remained.

Clack, clink!—the bolt drawn back like lightning again, loaded, forward. Han San turned the muzzle on him.

"Hiiik! P-please, spare me! Spare me, spare meeee!"

The last robber flung down his pitchfork and drove his head into the ground. The stink of piss filled the air.

"Set down everything in your hands," Han San said flatly. "Take out all the money in your pockets too. Your comrades' as well."

"Yes, yes! I'll, I'll give you everything! All of it!"

The robber rummaged frantically through his shirt. Trembling all over, he went through the corpses' shirts too.

Soon a few blood-smeared bills and some coins, the sickle and pitchfork and club, lay scattered on the ground.

"Th-this is all of it, sir!"

"Mm."

Han San jerked the muzzle, as if to say, well done. As if to say, you may go.

Then suddenly he asked.

"You going to take revenge?"

"Y-yes?!"

The robber flinched and looked at Han San.

Han San was watching his eyes.

The robber looked at Han San—the robber thought, for the briefest moment thought a great deal—the robber, the robber said,

"R-revenge?! Not at all, no such thought ever crossed... heh heh, heh heh!"

The robber turned up the corners of his mouth and shook his head wildly, but Han San had already caught the 'true feeling' the man had let slip without realizing.

Bang!!

"Guhk..."

The robber dropped to his knees.

The rage that fear had pressed down, the hatred, the venom that would track down where he lived even if it took years and seize the moment his guard was down to pay back this grudge, the boundless malice that only hairless monkeys can hold—all of it scattered away with the blood.

Han San lowered the gun and picked up what had fallen. Three won fifty jeon.

'Comes out to half a bottle's worth of badger oil.'

He thriftily gathered up the sickle, pitchfork, and club and loaded them onto the cart. No harm in never being short of tools.

'The clothes are drenched in blood, and too filthy to begin with.'

A hassle to strip off, and washing them for use would be more trouble than they were worth. He decided to leave them.

"Not bad."

A four-legged beast leaves meat and hide; a two-legged beast leaves money and tools. That was the way of the mountain.

"Let's go, Nureung-i."

After a quick tidying of the scene, Han San took up the reins again.

"Mooo."

The ox cart rattled along, leaving wheel tracks behind. The hunter headed for home.

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