The Iron Sickle (29 page)

“Do you think they’ll help?” she asked.

“We’ll find out.”

The two returned and the younger man spoke. “Our master remembers the farm couple who was murdered by a young woman with a hoe.” The monk shook his head. “Tragic. And he also remembers the hardships of the war, the winter when the Chinese invaded, the Americans suffering and dying along with Koreans. He remembers it all.”

“Does he remember the Lost Echo?”

“He remembers something like it. On that mountain.” The monk turned and pointed. “On that ledge on the southern slope.”

“I see it.”

“That’s Mount Daeam. The Americans set up their signal equipment there. Later, when the Chinese came, they took the equipment down and hid.”

“Where?”

“I’m not sure, exactly.”

“Were they ever seen again?”

“Never. Only rumors.”

“What sort of rumors?”

“Superstitions, really. Some of the farm people hereabouts claim that on certain nights, when there is a full moon, they can hear the strange foreign sounds of the Americans, like a whispered conversation, floating on the wind.”

“Do you believe it?”

The monk shrugged. “All things come within the purview of the Lord Gautama Buddha.”

“Where is this farm you were talking about, the one where the two elderly people were murdered by the young girl?”

The monk asked for some paper and pencil and offered to draw me a map. Instead, I pulled out my tactical map and spread it out on the hood of the jeep. Only dim sunlight filtered through the heavy overcast, so I aimed my penlight at the map while the monk studied the multicolored contour lines. He was a bright man. It took him only seconds to say, “Here, this is our position.” He pointed to the military symbol for a Buddhist temple, a red inverted swastika. “The farmhouse is at this end of the valley, in the foothills between us and Mount Daeam.”

“Not too far from where Echo Company had set up their equipment.”

“As the crow flies, yes,” he said, surprising me once again with his
mastery of English colloquialisms, “but very far indeed if you had to make the climb.”

“You couldn’t go straight up from the valley to that cliff, could you?”

“No. There is a narrow path that winds far into the mountains and then a less traveled path that leads back to the cliff.”

“You’ve hiked those areas?” I asked.

“Often.”

“Have you ever heard the whisperings of the Lost Echo?”

“When I meditate,” he said, “I hear only the whisperings of eternity.”

It was almost midday when we reached the valley that stretched between the monastery and Mount Daeam. Already we were hungry again, and I realized that in our haste to get out of Yongsan Compound we hadn’t planned this trip very well.

“We should’ve brought a case of Cs,” Ernie said. He was referring to canned C-rations.

“Too late now.”

“Maybe we should stop at one of these farm houses,” Captain Prevault said. “See if they’ll fix us some lunch. We could pay them.” She was hungry too.

“Not a bad idea,” I said. “Up there,” I told Ernie pointing forward. “Pull into that area in front of the pig hut. Don’t get too close to the main house, though.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to scare them. This is a military vehicle after all.”

Ernie did as I asked. I told them to wait, and I walked toward the straw-thatched farmhouse. Smoke trickled from a sheet-metal pipe. Eventually an old woman tottered out, wearing a long woolen skirt and a short traditional silk blouse with a blue ribbon. She stared at me, her wrinkled face scrunched against the pale rays of the afternoon sun.

“
Anyonghaseiyo
,” I said, taking a step forward.

She nodded back noncommittally.

I told her we were hungry, and we were looking for some place to eat. She told me there was no place around here. When I pressed her she told me about the Driver’s Eatery back in Im-dang. We didn’t want to go there. I offered her money if she’d fix lunch for the three of us. She brightened at that.

“It will only be soybean soup and
kimchi
,” she told me. “And my rice is brown.”

I told her that would be fine. She was a trusting woman, and we didn’t set a price. Twenty minutes later she carried a low wooden table out of her kitchen and set it on the long wooden porch that ran the length of the farmhouse. We sat cross-legged on the porch and ate, lifting the bowls to our mouths and shoveling in the unhusked grain. The soybean soup had no meat in it and that was okay, but the cabbage
kimchi
was sour, as if it had fermented so long it was turning to vinegar. Still, we ate our fill. When we were done I asked her where the
byonso
was and while Captain Prevault used it and then Ernie, I spoke to the woman in private. I described the farmhouse in the foothills at the end of the valley that we were looking for. She knew all about it. It had been abandoned for years and was probably overrun now by field mice.

“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.

We’d slept all night in the jeep. Ernie had found a place to pull over and even though he would’ve liked to have kept the engine running so we could keep the heater on, he’d turned it off to conserve fuel. We’d bundled ourselves up as best we could in every piece of field gear we’d brought and managed to get a little sleep—not much, because of the biting cold. Captain Prevault fared best. She curled up in the back seat on top of the mostly empty duffel bags and slept like a housecat on a fluffy couch.

I awoke first and stepped outside the jeep and stretched myself. Then I walked to the edge of the clearing beside the road. A creek gurgled at the bottom of an incline. I walked downhill, squatted next to the water, and washed my face. I found an isolated area downstream above the water line and did my business, digging a hole and covering it up like the Army field manual tells us. Soon Ernie and Captain Prevault were up and following my pattern. I’d brought a toothbrush and a razor blade but figured I’d wait for hot water before trying to scrape the stubble off my chin. Once we’d all performed our morning toilette, we climbed back in the jeep and Ernie drove off. I studied the map.

“The closest village,” I said, “to the last known position of Echo Company is up ahead about three or four klicks.”

“What’s it called?”

“I’m not sure if this is a name or just a description.”

“What is it?”

“I-kori.”

“Which means?”

“Two roads.”

“They didn’t put a lot of thought into that name.”

And when we reached the village, we realized why no one had.

“There’s nothing here,” Ernie said.

Captain Prevault leaned forward, her hands on my seat. “That looks like a cattle pen,” she said.