by T'aejun Yi
Slowly they approached some mountain slopes covered with a coating of fine snow. After they had passed through a hamlet, fields replaced the rice paddies, and the path took on more of a country feel. Tomu’s tail was now erect, and he ran off into a field of cropped beanstalks. To the human eye there’s nothing to be seen, but the dog puts his nose to the ground and spins around in circles, chasing some kind of scent. The young gunman holds his gun close and follows. The rest of the group watches on from the path. About fifty or sixty feet into the field, something flutters in a dip out of sight, and a pheasant flies up, looking as if it might have been embroidered on a purse. Before it can even spread its wings fully, white smoke radiates from the muzzle of the rifle, a shot rings out, and in an instant the pheasant drops to the ground like a dead weight. Han ran to retrieve it but was beaten by Tomu. He tried to coax the dog toward him, but it shot back to its master like an arrow from a bow. Once it had handed over the pheasant, it jumped up and down, rubbing its master’s legs and barking. It didn’t seem like a simple case of loyalty to its master, rather this was a dog with a keen sense of self-interest, which made it want to make its efforts known to all.
The pheasant looked as serene as a picture, apart from a few drops of blood visible beneath its shoulder. There was a kind of senseless futility to the way in which a momentary pop of gunshot had extinguished this thing, which had once flown so powerfully through the air as if breaking through waves, and which had throbbed with life like a spark or gushing spring. At any rate, with this one pheasant, the atmosphere of the hunt turned extravagant.
The imposing mountains still hovered in the distance, and the group had to walk at least another fifteen ri to the village that would be their base of operations. The street was of a fair size, with a barbershop, an inn, and even a police substation. They untied their simple bags in a warm, reed-matted room before plucking the pheasant to make noodles. Perhaps because it had grown up wild on the mountain slopes, this pheasant tasted nothing like Han had ever tasted before, even after taking his extreme hunger into account.
By the time they had finished lunch, no more than a slither of sunlight the size of a deer’s tail remained on the mountain peaks. Five ri further up was a mountain village full of experienced beaters, and beyond that vast hunting grounds with countless mountain valleys full of deer, wild boar, and occasionally even bears, so that they would be able to hunt in a new valley each day for the next five to six days.
The old gunman went alone up to the village to assemble the beaters, while Han, Yun, and the young gunman stayed behind on the street. They set off in search of the pheasants that would come down at sunset. Sure enough, Tomu flushed out more birds than in the daytime. Whenever a bird or two flew up, at least one would drop with the sound of the gun. But when there was a flock of ten or more, one would be sure to scare first, prompting the others to fly off before the gunman and his dog had even reached shooting range. By the time they returned to the street, it was dusk, and a gentle snow was falling. They shook the snow off their shoes and entered the brightly lit room with at least five glossy hen pheasants in their hands. It was then that Han found himself missing several friends whom he had left behind in the city. He washed his feet and dried them in front of a bush clover fire, having removed the stone cover from the brazier, and then they all ate roast pheasant for dinner before calling in the young men from the house to play cards with noodles as a wager. At midnight they had a simple but tasty snack of pheasant and buckwheat with a cold radish soup that made their teeth tingle, and then they stayed up past two o’clock sharing stories of goblins that had appeared on midnight trips to eat noodles or go fishing, or on the way home from visiting girls in nearby villages.
The next morning they woke up with eyes blurry, heads muddy, and stomachs churning as if from a hangover. Han found this rather comforting. When he heard that a pair of pheasants fetched four won, he almost regretted not having bought a large field in a village like this and acquired his own gun license.
Naturally they ate breakfast late. It was a perfect day for hunting: the ground was covered by a layer of snow barely a footprint deep, and a gentle wind blew.
They reached the upper village around ten o’clock. The old gunman was angry, complaining in a harsh voice that he had been waiting out in the road with four beaters since seven o’clock.
They headed straight into the mountains. The beaters spread out evenly from the foot to the top of the slopes, while Yun, Han, and the gunmen walked along the mountain crest and took up position at narrow necks two valleys further in: the old gunman sat at the most critical point, the younger gunman at the next one, and Yun and Han at another narrow spot where an animal might just try to escape if things did not go according to plan. In the case that an animal seemed to be coming their way, they were to try to send it back into the other narrow necks by shouting.
It was almost an hour before the hooting sound of the beaters came into earshot. They were moving up and over the mountain, thrashing branches of oak and hooting to each other up and down the slopes. But apart from a few mountain pigeons, no animal appeared. The gunmen moved into a fairly small pine grove on the next mountain slope and began to look for paw prints. The old gunman soon discovered the prints of a fairly large deer. After taking a careful look, he declared that it must have passed through that very morning. They crossed another peak. Suddenly Tomu began to bark loud and long. Dammit! The old gunman groaned with frustration. The dog had gone too far ahead and flushed it out. It looked like a deer calf, but its slender neck and legs were already bobbing up and down as it leapt across the next mountain slope. The old man grumbled about bringing a pheasant-hunting dog along on a large-beast hunt. No matter how his master called, the dog kept chasing after the deer.
“That deer will go at least a hundred ri today.”
They gave up on the calf and set about beating their way through another valley. Still no luck. On the next mountaintop they lit a fire and ate lunch. Han was still full, but his legs ached. It was most pleasant to smoke a cigarette while sitting tall on the mountain divide, gazing far across to mountain peak after mountain peak and down below at the sturdy branches of huge oak trees nearby.
The beaters took out their hemp wrapping cloths and heartily gulped down lunches made up of yellow millet with bites of kimchi. It was enjoyable to pass one of life’s moments sitting around a bonfire with these simple men. Once their empty wrapping cloths had been pushed back into the rear of their pants, out came their pipes. Just then, one of the gunmen shouted out. A beater had picked up a gun and was fingering it.
“Are you worried he doesn’t know how to use a gun?”
“Of course, he doesn’t.”
“But he shot a deer once.”
“A deer?”
The beater in question blushed and walked up to the fire, his thick lips shimmered with saliva and puckered into a smile. He stood out from the other beaters because of the navy blue Western-style jacket he wore on top of a chŏgŏri jacket, although the broad stitches on its seams were worn and faded, and because of his slightly bent toriuchi hunting cap and the chikatabi socks he wore on his feet. He looked the most foolish of them all: his face appeared large and round from every angle and there was plenty of white in his constantly twitching eyes.
“And when did you ever shoot a gun?” asked the old gunman.
“Why? D’you think bullets won’t fly if I pull the trigger?”
He was bragging somewhat.
“Dammit, who said the bullet won’t fly? I just asked when?”
He laughed like a child. And then quickly became excited.
“D’you want to hear how I nearly shot somebody?”
“All right, let’s hear it.”
“Ah, I almost had to wear the fetters, you know …”
“It was down in that oak tree hollow, right?”
“That’s right! I’d been watching a pheasant and kept on shooting at it, before I remembered I’d seen a couple of men
there earlier burning wood for charcoal, didn’t I? But when I stopped and looked, I couldn’t see either of ’em! They must have gone down when I hit ’em, mustn’t they? I tried running for home, when what happens but one of the men comes striding down with a bunch of axes in his arms? My legs were shaking so much I couldn’t move … dammit, I thought, my time’s up, but if I’m going to die at the hands of an axe-man, I might as well try to shoot first, so I pick up my gun. He looked like he’d scream, so I had to try to aim right. I did the best I could and held onto the gun real tight, and waited for him to get close. He’d a thick, black beard and didn’t he look fierce! And he just kept on coming, so I pulled the trigger. Bang! There’s a boom in my ear, but there’s no bullet, not even a trace of smoke, and in the meantime the axe-man just keeps on coming until he’s right in front of me! What d’you know, I was so confused I’d pulled the trigger without putting in any bullets, so of course nothing came out! Well, by this time he was about to chop my head off with an axe! That’s what I thought, and everything went black for a moment, but then I managed to pull myself together and, wouldn’t you know it, he’s already walked a cow’s length past me down the hill? I look again and there’s a stone in his hand … he was only going down to the stream to sharpen his axe … ha ha ha …”
A roar of laughter burst out around the mountaintop.
“But where did you get the gun?”
His cousin had once been the mayor of the township and owned a gun. The cousin still lived in the next village and harvested around a hundred sacks of rice each year.
In the end they came back down the mountain that afternoon without having fired a single shot. The following day they did manage to flush out one deer and a wild boar, but the beaters either pushed too far ahead or left too big a gap between themselves, so neither animal could be driven into a narrowing.
On the fourth day, Yun went out in the morning and returned with a couple of pheasants. Han, meanwhile, stayed down in the village, he felt exhausted and excused himself by saying that he wanted to eat noodles for lunch.
The other hunters had still not returned by the time the dinner trays were brought out. Han and Yun finished eating and decided to take a stroll outside. Just then, a loud shot rang out from a valley in the mountains, which encircled them like a black folding screen. Another shot followed. Han’s curiosity was piqued, but there was nothing to do other than wait. The hunters finally reappeared more than two hours later. They had caught a wild boar the size of a bull. They had cut down some oak branches to use as carrying poles, but it had been no easy job dragging the boar back down the mountain. If it had rolled to one side and into a ditch, they would have struggled to drag it back out again. When they had barely made it to the top of the village, all the beaters scattered, exhausted from hunger. Yun suggested they go up that night while the blood was still fresh, but Han could still feel the effects of his dinner and didn’t feel like going out into the dark, cold night. Moreover, he was not one of those so-called blood-drinkers who go hunting in order to drink boar’s blood, which, according to the gunman, tasted little different fresh from when heated up anyway. In the end they decided to go up before breakfast the following day.
At sunrise they washed quickly and went up to the village above. The villagers had already gathered, forming a mass of white. One of the beaters stepped out from the midst and said, “There’s been an incident.”
“What happened?”
“Some bastard cut the belly during the night and drained the blood. He didn’t even manage to get the gallbladder out without bursting it, and on top of that, he took several pounds of flesh too!”
A closer look revealed things to be just as he had said. From the color to the texture of its fur, the collapsed heap looked more like the trunk of a tree some several hundred years old than an animal. The thief had hacked out some flesh from the hind legs in addition to cutting the stomach. It was the old gunman who had shot the boar, but now the blood had completely drained from his lips as well.
“It must have been someone who lives here.”
He asked where the ward head lived.
“What are you going to do?”
“Don’t worry. Just leave it to me.”
The old gunman asked the ward head to gather all the young men from the village in his outer room. There were only about seven or eight men in all, which included the four beaters and, of course, the man in the navy blue jacket who had shot at the charcoal burner on his way to sharpen his axe. The old gunman waited for them all to sit down in the small room before speaking in a strong voice that seemed to defy the fact he had already lost some of his molars.
“This deed was perpetrated by one person, not two, and so I am sorry to have called you all in here, but please understand that this is unavoidable and bear with me … there is only one way to proceed. Sir, please have a bowl of water heated up.… Whoever did this was greedy for meat … at first he wanted the gall bladder, but once he’d punctured it in the dark, he thought he might as well take some flesh.… In any event, he must have cooked that meat for breakfast. I can’t turn all of your stomachs inside out like socks.… But if you each put your hands into warm water, we’ll soon know who’s been touching meat …”
Everyone looked at each other’s hands at once. They each had two. And those hands were all rough with bumpy knuckles. They were innocent hands, which simply did as they were told, irrespective of good and bad. They did not live by artifice but by their strength, and were more rough even than the feet of city people. This was the first time in their lives that these simple hands had suffered such merciless humiliation. A part of Han began to despise the gunman. He hoped that not one of these hands would release the oil of guilt into the water. But before the bowl of warm water had even appeared, there was one pair of hands attracting glares from several people. Those hands belonged to the navy blue jacket. At first they were knotted together, then they tried lying flat under the knees, then they scratched at the waist, before finally they pulled out a pipe and stuffed it with tobacco, by this time trembling visibly. The ever-attentive old gunman quickly proffered the brazier, which was at his side. The neck that craned to light the pipe was more than merely awkward; the bowl of the pipe shook as it touched the flames.
The old gunman suddenly raised his voice, “Are you trying to light a pipe or not?”
The man in the jacket grew all flustered as he tried to pick the pipe back out of the brazier, where it had fallen from his mouth. The old gunman glared at him, his sunken eyes by now so sharp they seemed almost to scratch. The jacket’s face burned even brighter than the brazier. The old gunman pushed the inner door open and shouted out, “Sir? We won’t be needing that water any more.”
And then he turned to the men, “While one of you stays behind, let everyone who is innocent leave.”
Eventually there was just the man in the Western jacket remaining, unable to stand or even raise his head. The old gunman suddenly lashed out at his ear.
In due course the ward head appeared, apologized for the unfortunate incident, which had occurred in his jurisdiction, and said he would consider whatever punishment was deemed appropriate. The old gunman laid out his calculations all too quickly.
“Would anything less than five bowls of blood have come out of that pig? Even if we only allow for five bowls, that’s fifty won, and then there’s the gall bladder, which he himself said just last night was worth at least forty won. So that’s ninety won, and then he made such a mess cutting up the hind legs that the skin is useless now, isn’t it? So that’s ten won for the skin, which brings us to one hundred won. And now that this has happened, how can we feel like hunting today? We’ve lost a whole day as well.”
“You have suffered great losses! But how could the likes of him get even ten won together? He has a cousin just over the way. I’ll go confer with him and see to it that you are not too disappointed. Please wait for me down below and please don’t tell the police.”
At the me
ntion of the police the old gunman added that he would make a formal complaint if there were no news by three o’clock and ended with a threat: “How many years do bastards like that have to eat prison food before they can even pretend to be human?”
In the end the old man cut three chunks of meat off the boar and came back down to the street. Everyone was hungry from walking ten ri before breakfast, but no one felt like eating meat. Han and Yun left the affair in the old man’s hands and went out pheasant hunting until dusk with the young gunman, but by the time they had returned, events had taken an even more unfortunate turn. The Western jacket’s cousin had offered thirty won in compensation, but since this was unlikely to be enough to satisfy the old gunman and rumors had probably already reached the substation, he also urged his cousin to go straight to the police, take a beating until he could stand no more, and then apologize and beg them to clear up the incident with that thirty won, which was all the money he had. But the Western jacket, with thirty won in its pockets, did not appear either at the substation or before the old gunman. A rumor had even spread that it had been spotted well into the night at Wŏlchŏngni station, buying a train ticket.