“Can you give me directions?” I asked and I started to pull out my field map, but she stared at in horror. I realized the interminable squiggles meant nothing to her, so instead I encouraged her to describe the route in her own way.
“Follow the road about two li until you reach the creek that flows south past the stand of elms. On the far side of the trees will be a wooden footbridge. Be careful crossing it because it hasn’t been repaired in years, and last year a boy fell in the creek while he was fishing. Follow that pathway up into the hills, and you will find the farmhouse where the old people used to live.”
“How far into the hills?” I asked.
“Until the land becomes too steep to farm.”
She seemed nervous with my questions. In fact she seemed nervous about the whole business of the abandoned farm. I asked her if she’d ever been there.
“Not since the war,” she replied.
“Why not?”
She studied me as if I were an idiot. “They come out at night.”
“Who comes out at night?”
“Them. The two old people. Many have seen them at night, crying and complaining and wailing.” Then she hugged herself, shivering even though the wind hadn’t picked up. “Demanding justice.”
I pointed over my shoulder to Daeam Mountain, toward the cliff where the monks believed Echo Company had once set up its signal equipment. “How about that cliff up there?” I asked. “During the war, Americans were there. Did you know that?”
“Yes, I knew. They were famous.”
“Famous, why?”
“Because they were the only people with food and medicine and heating fuel.”
“Did you ever talk to them?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
This seemed to make her angry so I didn’t press it. “Do you know how I can get up there?”
“You can’t get up there.” She saw my puzzlement and then added, “Not alone. You’d need someone to guide you.”
“Why?”
“The woods are too thick, there are too many obstructions, and there is no direct pathway. You’d have to know the way. And if you got lost, the tiger would take you.”
“Tiger? There are no more tigers in Korea.”
“Huh, that’s what they say.”
I considered this. This woman seemed to believe Siberian tigers still stalked these mountains, but according to the books I’d read, no tiger had been spotted in South Korea since the late 1950s. Still, there was no point arguing with her.
“Do you know someone who could guide us up there?”
“There’s only one person.” She paused for a moment and then said, “Huk Sanyang-gun.”
I didn’t have my Korean-English dictionary with me, but I believed huk sanyang-gun meant “the black hunter.”
“He hunts tigers?”
She looked at me as if I were a child. “The tigers protect what he hunts.”
“So what does he hunt?”
“The most prized possession in these mountains.”
And then I knew what she meant. “Insam,” I said.
She nodded.
Wild ginseng, sometimes called royal ginseng, was prized far above the value of the cultivated ginseng grown in the lowlands. One gnarled old red root could make a man rich. Ten thousand US dollars in Hong Kong was a low price for the prized medicinal herb, and I’d read that in private sales particularly venerable roots had gone for even more. In Asia, ginseng was considered to be a magical tonic, able to make the old man young again and the young man wise. Ernie believed it, which was why he was always chewing ginseng gum, although I hadn’t noticed him wising up any. The difference between a stick of ginseng gum made from the mass-produced version of the herb and a slice of the flesh of an authentic royal ginseng root was the difference between a copper penny and a Spanish gold doubloon.
“How can I get in touch with this Hunter Huk?” I asked.
“You can’t get in touch with him,” she told me. “If you’re pure of heart and you pray for him, he gets in touch with you.”
The old farmhouse was located right where the woman told me it would be. The afternoon was getting late and the shadows were long. We wandered around the ruin, searching for anything of interest but finding nothing. Ernie didn’t say anything, but I knew what he was thinking: Why the hell had I brought them out here? I was starting to question the wisdom of it too, but I reminded myself we had to keep searching for some sign of the man with the iron sickle, the fancy woman from Mia-ri, and the mental patient known as Miss Sim Kok-sa. It had all started here for them, and I believed they’d return. Up here, in these isolated communities, certainly someone would spot them if they showed up.
“Over here,” Captain Prevault said. She stood atop a small man-made earthen hill. “Is this a burial mound?” she asked.
“I think so.” It was covered in weeds, not well-tended lawns like the vast burial mound areas that surround the city of Seoul. I climbed the mound and she pointed to a rotted wooden board lying on the ground. It was slashed with black ink.
“Can you read it?”
I knelt and swiped off part of the dirt. Chinese characters, two rows. Names, I thought. I pulled out my notepad and copied them down. The first character I could read: “Kim,” the most common family name in Korea. The next two characters would be the given names, probably of the husband since he would normally be listed first. The second row of characters probably represented the woman’s name. She had only two characters, the first a word I couldn’t decipher but was probably her family name, and then only one character for her given name. It made sense. In Korea, wives don’t give up their names when they marry. Below the names were Chinese numbers and the character for “year.”
“Two people,” I told Captain Prevault. “Probably the two people buried in this mound. The husband’s family name was Kim. The year was 1951.”
“Over twenty years ago,” she said. Then she paused and added, “It’s them.”
It was dark now and the road was narrow and there was no sign of light anywhere in the universe except for the headlights of the jeep.
“That darkness up ahead,” Ernie said, “is Mount Daeam.”
“That’s where Echo Company is,” I said. “Somewhere on that mountain.”
“And you believe our unholy little trio should make a pilgrimage up there.”
“Not a pilgrimage,” I said. “The man with the iron sickle wants us to go there.”
“So we’re going. You see any place to stop and get a chili dog around here?”
Captain Prevault said, “We should’ve brought tents and sleeping bags.”
“And a diesel heater,” Ernie added.
“Okay,” I said, “I didn’t think this through. But we were sort of in a hurry to get out of Yongsan Compound.” Ernie snorted. I continued. “Most of the places I’ve traveled in Korea have always had some sort of civilization. I didn’t expect these mountains to be so full of nothing.”
“No bathhouse,” Ernie said, “no yoguan, no chop house, no mokkolli house, no nothing!”
“All right, Ernie,” Captain Prevault said. “He gets the point.” Then she added, “Why don’t you pull into that Howard Johnson’s up ahead.”
Ernie did a double take and she startled giggling. Then I was laughing and so was Ernie, and then we were all gliding through the night in our little jeep in the middle of the Taebaek Mountains, happy for once, not complaining about being hungry or tired or cold. Happy to be alive-unlike the couple in that cold earthen burial mound-and able to laugh and complain about the hand we’d been dealt.
By morning we were grumpy again.