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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era

Chapter 59

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The Meokbawi Valley Revolution (2)

Wind rolled up the gorge valley.

The paper in Han San's hand flapped, flap, flap, with a sound like a flag.

The people froze. The only loud thing was the darting of Deok-tae's eyes.

What is custom?

It is the shade that settles where the law cannot reach.

Deok-tae was the toad that had crouched and lived in that marsh. Now that the blazing sun had come to shine on it, he was in danger of drying up and withering in an instant.

Of course, he had no intention of withering quietly.

"Little San, you've really lost your mind! How dare you shove a filthy Government-General document at this land!?"

Deok-tae raised his voice.

"You shove a Jap stamp into this sacred Meokbawi Valley!? And you still call yourself a Korean!? You little brat! You wretch, selling off the soul of your own people!"

Han San fired back in a voice trembling with righteous indignation.

"And you lot sold off the ice of the gorge valley..."

"What, the ice of the gorge valley... huh? Hmm?? No, what in the world is this huge load of nonsense you're suddenly spouting!?"

Deok-tae, as expected. With his years of seasoning, he caught on fast that it was nonsense flung out at random and shook himself loose from the stupor.

Han San deflated a little, but he soon squared his chest. There had been a reason for flinging out that nonsense.

After all, Han San hadn't come here to trade insults with Deok-tae!

What could ever be solved with words?

What Han San wanted to say was a single line: the land deed was in his own hands.

So he had no intention of squabbling over petty quarrels with them. He wasn't going to whine about why only Deok-tae and his lot got to use the valley beside the village, and he wasn't going to sit and listen to talk about how they'd used it for generations, either.

Because the land deed was in his hands!

When the legal owner has issued an eviction order, what further footnote could be needed?

But Deok-tae was a clever fellow too. The head of that wrinkled little dwarf was packed full of every kind of cunning trick scraped together over half a century.

Deok-tae's eyes flashed and he shouted.

"Boys! Take that from him!"

The three hired hands in front of Deok-tae came shuffling forward. The pressure rolling off them made even the gorge valley stream seem to flow a beat slower.

Only then did Chuk Hong-cheol pull free of his identity crisis a little and grumble.

"Hey, reactionary boss. We're screwed here, aren't we?"

"That how it looks?"

"Damn it, I don't know! I'll just do my job. If I've eaten my keep, I've got to work it off. Hey, you bastards! Don't lay a single fingertip on my boss!"

Chuk Hong-cheol slammed down the A-frame carrier he'd been hauling.

Inside the carrier was the Murata hunting gun, wrapped in oiled cloth. Beside it, also well wrapped, lay the leaf-spring blade.

And not only those. Atlatl, hunting stones, slingshot—there was nothing it didn't have.

But Han San drew out none of them.

'Pulling out a tool right now would be crossing the line.'

Deok-tae's gang, coming at them, were unarmed too. Whether they reckoned bare hands were enough, or feared crossing the line into a full-blown escalation.

'It's both, probably.'

Either way, Han San wasn't afraid.

Those who came bare-handed could be beaten bare-handed, those who picked up weapons could be stabbed with weapons, and those who crossed the line could be met by crossing the line right back!

Chuk Hong-cheol was already loosening up. Crack—the knuckles of his fingers cried out hard.

"Boss, there's three. How do we split them?"

"One for me. Two for the comrade."

"What? Boss, you're young. You good with just one? Let's make it half a one?"

"Aw, I can't rest easy handing two and a half to a man who foams at the mouth from climbing mountains."

"Ah! So you count climbing mountains as struggle!? I really will have to revolutionize big today!"

No sooner had Chuk Hong-cheol grumbled that than the biggest of the hired hands came lunging in.

"How dare you scum, in front of the elder!"

A palm like a bear's paw flew at Chuk Hong-cheol's collar. It was the kind of momentum that would crush an ordinary man and send him stumbling backward.

But Chuk Hong-cheol was a butcher.

An expert who knew where a muscle's vital point lay, where to slide the blade so the bone would snap clean, stepped a single pace forward.

"You're the one who's the reactionary bastard!"

Stepping out like that, Chuk Hong-cheol swatted the hired hand's wrist aside, pak! At the same moment, thwock! A fist like a wild boar's tusk burst into the empty chest, right at the solar plexus.

"Hurgh!"

The hired hand's huge frame staggered.

The hired hand right behind him ground his teeth.

"Why you!"

That hired hand came charging. But the staggering hulk in front of him got in the way, so he couldn't come straight on. In that split second when he hesitated and stopped, unsure whether to swing left or right, Chuk Hong-cheol let out a shout at exactly that exquisite moment.

"What's this, you scum!"

At the same time, Chuk Hong-cheol charged and rammed straight into the staggering hired hand before him.

With a crash the hired hand was shoved back, and "Whuh-urgh!"—the second hired hand hesitating behind him was struck by his comrade's back and lost his balance. "Hurgh!" Toward the two hired hands now stacked like a pair of overlapping scabs, Chuk Hong-cheol cocked his shoulder.

He swung.

"This is the fist of a new age, you running dogs of worn-out custom!"

With a sound of slicing wind, crash! Once more a fist burst into a hired hand's solar plexus.

"Urgh..."

The hired hand who took the blow went down without even a scream. The hired hand stacked behind him had no choice but to topple right after.

Splashes rang out one after another.

The gorge valley water sprayed up like a mushroom cap flung wide open, and the droplets, catching the sunlight back, glittered crystal clear.

"Not bad at all, comrade!"

While Chuk Hong-cheol was knocking those two down, a hired hand came lunging at Han San too.

"You young brat, raised so soft—what about that Mainland or wherever, you not going anymore!?"

A fist flew in along with the mocking words. Even as the pushed-aside wind reached his forehead, Han San kept his eyes wide open and said,

"Not going anymore."

Han San merely tilted his head to one side.

"Going to live in Inje now!"

Wind grazed past his ear, and at the same moment Han San's foot moved.

"Inje from now on!"

Into the hired hand's posture, thrown off as it followed the path of the missed fist, thwock! Han San's shin kick drove home.

"Hurgh!"

The hired hand screamed and dropped to his knees. Clutching his leg and rolling, he wailed at the unfairness of it.

"Damn it, damn it, what—what the hell kind of word game is that... Inje from now on..."

Han San let out a short laugh.

"Raised soft I may have been, but I've lived rough, you see!"

"No, no, damn, not that—the thing just now, the word game crawling around in my head..."

"I've no idea what you're going on about. Well, anyway..."

Han San straightened his clothes.

The brawl that had begun so suddenly ended just as suddenly. Once the butcher and the hunter put their shoulders together, three strapping fellows with some muscle went sprawling in no time.

They had a bit more durability than the Pi Sun-dae gang down in Lower Hamlet, but that was all there was to it. A big frame that hasn't trained in real fighting amounts to about this much in the end.

Chuk Hong-cheol swept his hair back.

"You can throw a punch, boss!"

Han San grinned too.

"I didn't waste my money either!"

The two of them strode toward Deok-tae.

The dwarf, left alone, went ashen and backed away. The big rock he'd been sitting on comfortably until an hour ago, soaking up the sun, now turned into a wall and blocked off his retreat.

"Now then, Deok-tae-ajae. You tried to take my land deed, didn't you? What of yours do I have to take to make us even?"

"Spew that nonsense again. What? Accumulated labor? Geopolitical... what? You—anyhow, you reactionary son of a... huh!?"

Right at the moment when Deok-tae's tiny eyes were quaking like an earthquake at Han San's laugh and Chuk Hong-cheol's threat—

the face of Deok-tae, buried under the shadows of the two closing in, suddenly lit up.

"People of the village!"

A cry of the most aggrieved sort echoed along the gorge valley side.

"Look at little San here! He goes on with talk of land deeds and whatnot over the valley beside our village! What in the world are we to do with this lackey who's cozied up to that Government-General!?"

The man who only moments ago had been saying the gorge valley belonged to the village now carried on about the valley beside the village, and Chuk Hong-cheol was at a complete loss.

Han San, on the other hand, was simply calm. He stood still and waited.

He didn't have to wait long.

In the mountains, sound carries absurdly far. And the ruckus that had just played out was no small thing. Perhaps Deok-tae had even foreseen a moment like this and set one of his hired hands to prepare for it in advance.

Either way, along with a thunder of footsteps came the sound of shouting.

"What!"

"No!"

"He did that!"

"Is it true!"

It was the sound of people swarming in droves.

"Have you forgotten! The mountains and rivers plundered from us!"

"How can he go on about land deeds and the like!"

"Such impudence! The gall!"

"A traitor has come out of our Sebeom Valley!"

In the blink of an eye, people who'd appeared from upstream, from downstream, each by the nearest route, surrounded Chuk Hong-cheol and Han San. They had a furious energy about them, like they'd descended on the scene of a wildfire.

"Is what Old Deok-tae says true? You, San—you carried money to the Japs and bought up this gorge valley?"

"That San was singing about going to the Mainland, going to Manchuria, just two months back! I spotted right off that he was soaked through with the Japs' water!"

"Me too! I spotted it too!"

"The song of treason ringing out through Sebeom Valley...!!"

Every one of them reacting like they'd caught him red-handed.

The lot who'd been sick with envy over the money Han San had earned this past month. The fellows who'd boiled with rage seeing a nobody they'd looked down on suddenly thrive—they had all gathered together.

Of Sebeom Valley's hundred and fifty souls, that number came to roughly fifteen or so.

Apart from the three or four from Upper Hamlet under Deok-tae's sway, most hailed from Middle Hamlet. There was exactly one from Lower Hamlet, and that was none other than Go Tae-chon.

"No! How can such a bour-geois deed even exist, eh!? Han San, you've fallen clean into the dark path! Fal-len Han San! Possessed by the money demon, eh!?"

The people who normally found Go Tae-chon disgusting for the way he mixed in his twisted foreign talk now chimed in as if facing some upright, fearless reporting of the truth.

"That's right! He set out to sever the clear spirit of our Sebeom Valley!"

"To think he'd sway our village valley this way and that with one Jap stamp!"

"San, you wretch! Why don't you burn that filthy document right this instant!"

With each remark thrown on, like another log added, the people's anger blazed up. Pressed by the crowd's momentum, Chuk Hong-cheol shrank back.

"Hey, boss... this time we're really and truly screwed, aren't we? The united will of the masses has gone and branded you a counterrevolutionary son of a bitch."

"That how it looks?"

Han San let out a short laugh.

'There's a reason I pulled out the land deed first.'

There was a step that only became possible after making this matter of [ownership] clear before all the world.

Han San drew in a great breath. Putting strength into his belly, he shouted.

"Everyone!!"

His ringing voice resounded through the gorge valley.

"Everything you're all saying—why, it's all true!!"

"No, what do you mean it's all... huh?"

"Hm?"

The clamoring villagers stopped short. On each pair of eyes, dizzy with tangled gloating and envy, the same question mark formed.

Han San pressed on without giving them an opening.

"As you said, the land belongs to all the people! How can flowing water and wind ever become someone's possession! Nature is everyone's means of production! How can it become anyone's monopoly through one paltry scrap of paper!"

A question mark formed in Chuk Hong-cheol's eyes, listening beside him too. That sounds like what he himself said earlier...

"I, Han San, do declare here and now in this place!"

His chest thrown wide as if gazing up at Daecheong Peak, in an impassioned voice—

"This whole Meokbawi Valley, my private land, I hereby proclaim open as common ground for every last person in the village!!"

Silence fell.

The villagers, even their murmuring stilled, looked at one another.

Han San grinned at Deok-tae.

And only Deok-tae's wrinkled face, once again, turned pale all alone.

In the source, Han San's "이제 안 간다 / 인제 살 거라 / 이제 인제" is a pun: "이제" (now) and "인제" (the place name Inje) sound alike, so the hired hand's mockery about whether Han San is still going to the Mainland gets turned into a play on "now I'll live in Inje." The English renders the wordplay as "not going anymore / going to live in Inje now / Inje from now on" to preserve the joke that the hired hand fixates on afterward.

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