The Tiger of the Ridge
Fortunately, they soon picked up the beast's trail.
One of Yeol Se-ho's hunters, ranging ahead, signaled for the party to halt and lowered himself into a crouch.
Hong-wi wondered what the man had found, but it did not take long for him to see it for himself. It was the carcass of a wild boar—or rather, closer to the wreckage of one.
Yeol Se-ho pointed at it and said, "Here's the reason you weren't attacked in the night."
It was a male boar of rare size, its tusks thick and impossibly sharp. But apparently it had been no match for the tiger.
The party gazed down at it in silence.
"Must be eighty *gwan* or so. He's had himself a generous feast here."
Eighty *gwan* meant roughly three hundred kilograms, and yet more than half the carcass still remained. For a tiger that could take in just under ten *gwan*—about thirty kilograms—in a single meal, this was gluttony on an extraordinary scale.
Hong-wi frowned as he stepped closer, wrinkling his nose. A powerful stench rose from the corpse—not the reek of rot, but an overpowering musk.
Yeol Se-ho pointed with his finger. "He sprayed it with urine. Marked it as his own so nothing else dares come near. A tiger never simply abandons a kill he's started on. Mark my words—he'll come back for this."
And indeed, as Yeol Se-ho said, tigers had a habit of finishing off every last scrap of their own prey.
He straightened up and looked at the sky. The sun was now high overhead.
"He'll be watching us from somewhere nearby. Darkness is his greatest ally—even within it, he can pick us out like an awl through cloth. His nose and his ears are both keen. Daylight is the only time we stand any chance of seeing him at all."
"Are we going to take him here?" Jeong Ho-chan asked.
Yeol Se-ho nodded. "This is as good a place as any. The wind's on our side."
He seemed to have resolved to bring down the tiger before the sun set.
Ho-in glanced uneasily around him. The tiger itself was nowhere in sight, but he could feel it plainly—a killing intent circling the area like a haze.
Hong-wi, too, had by now grown accustomed to that kind of sense. He could feel it: fury at the humans who had touched his food.
Yeol Se-ho spoke up. "Right. Let's go after him."
"Chasing down a thing like that..."
Ho-in's muttered words carried further than he expected in the stillness, and Yeol Se-ho broke into a grin.
"Oh, a tiger can run a few hundred *ri* in a single night if he sets his mind to it. But he can't do that every day, and being hunted like this will eat at him, make him lose his head. The younger they are, the worse it gets. That's when we take him."
They set off in pursuit once more.
The beast was clearly somewhere close. Before long, they came upon a heap of droppings—streaked with boar hair, tinged with the smell of blood, and, above all, still damp.
There was no longer any doubt. The tiger was near.
Yeol Se-ho remained cool and composed, carrying himself with the confidence of a man who knew the true master of this mountain was someone else entirely.
"Release the dogs."
The man in charge of them unclipped their muzzles and slipped off their leads. For a long moment the dogs did not move at all—they simply glared at the ridge beyond, low growls rumbling in their throats.
They say a pup knows no fear of the tiger. Confronted with an enemy you don't understand, you can bluster all you like.
But these Pungsan dogs knew exactly what sort of foe a tiger was—and showed not a trace of fear anyway. Without a single bark, they charged after their leader up the slope.
The moment the dogs vanished from view, a hideous roar erupted from beyond the ridge. It was the same anguished cry they had been hearing for the past three nights, and it was filled with rage—at the intruders who dared stand against him. It seemed as though the very mountains and trees should split at the sound.
The next instant, Ho-in flinched, and a groan escaped his lips.
"Ah!"
Hong-wi, too, let out an involuntary gasp of awe.
There he was. The beast was so enormous that the Pungsan dogs—already large animals—looked like mere puppies beside him. His coat was pale in color, sleek fur rippling with a smooth, gleaming sheen.
"A young one. Look at him," said Yeol Se-ho, pointing at the tiger. "It takes a few more years before the character for *king* stands out clear on his brow. And those eyes of his will still be blue—for age turns them slowly amber, and amber brings majesty. Time, countless battles, and trials—only those can give a beast the bearing worthy of a king of the mountains!"
It sounded almost as if the words were meant for Hong-wi.
Hong-wi nodded along, yet he could not tear his eyes from the three Pungsan dogs facing down the tiger. He had never seen dogs so brave, so nimble, so disciplined.
They were no fearless pups who knew nothing of the tiger. They understood perfectly how dangerous their opponent was, and did not rush him recklessly—their whole aim was simply to hold him in place so he could not escape.
If anything, it was the tiger losing his composure. He gathered his body low, then in a single instant sprang high into the air.
Hong-wi caught his breath. That great hulking beast could leap with such agility? The tiger cleared a good twenty feet—six meters—in one bound, as though he had wings.
Ho-in cried out without meaning to. "Oh no!"
It looked certain: the targeted Pungsan dog would be caught.
But the dog was no pushover either. This was no ordinary house-guarding cur—this animal was nearly the tiger's match in agility, and by the slimmest of margins he slipped free of those razor claws.
Seeing it, the leader dog let out a fearsome bark and threw itself into the fray alongside one of the others.
*Kraaang!*
Attacked from two sides, the young tiger erupted into furious violence. Unable to contain his rage, he launched himself straight up into the air from where he stood.
The next moment, Hong-wi could not believe his eyes.
The tiger twisted his whole body with impossible suppleness in midair and raked his forepaw at the dog leaping at him.
A groan slipped from Hong-wi's lips. "Good heavens..."
Thankfully, the dog twisted nimbly aside and dodged the blow—but he lost his balance, staggered, and went down.
In that split second of peril, the leader dog caught his companion's danger and charged in bravely—clamping his jaws right onto the tiger's tail.
Enraged that a miserable dog would dare bite and drag at his tail, the tiger let out a ferocious roar and snapped the tail away. The leader dog went flying, but in the meantime the fallen dog scrambled back to his feet and, together with the third, kept the tiger checked.
Unable to break out easily, the tiger watched the three dogs withdraw and re-form their line. Hong-wi clicked his tongue at the sight of it. It was like watching a highly trained army.
Now it was the men's turn. At Yeol Se-ho's signal, the hunters dashed forward as one.
The tiger, too, realized the tide had turned against him. With what sounded like a cry of frustration, he roared once and went bounding up the rocky ridge in great leaping strides.
Men and dogs surged up after him as one mass.
"Where did he go?" Ho-in muttered.
The men craned their heads this way and that. On the rocky slope, the tiger had somehow melted away without a trace.
They ran toward the sound of the dogs barking. Ahead, the Pungsan dogs were hurling themselves at a certain crevice in the rocks, barking madly.
The crevice looked very narrow indeed. *Did he really squeeze in there?* Hong-wi found it hard to believe, but Yeol Se-ho nodded.
Like all supple cats, tigers were masters of threading themselves through narrow rock crevices—and more than once, from such a hiding place, they had shaken off their pursuers and ambushed an unsuspecting victim from behind or from above.
He scanned the tops of the boulders.
"Call the dogs back."
At Yeol Se-ho's word, one of his men gave a low whistle, and the dogs fell silent at once and came running in perfect order.
Now what? The beast was holed up in the crevice, and until they could drag him out there seemed to be no way to reach him. Hong-wi wondered.
The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple. Yeol Se-ho and his men gathered up gravel and began pelting stones at the rocks.
Hong-wi and Ho-in bent down and joined the barrage. A stone-throwing fight was a battle any Joseon man knew well, and it proved unexpectedly effective.
Under this hail of stones, the tiger began to snarl in irritation. But he still showed no intention of coming out.
In the end, it was a contest of endurance. The men threw and threw without tiring. Tiny stones could never inflict a mortal wound on a tiger, but they were more than enough to fray his nerves.
He grew more and more irritable, bawling in frustration—until, at some point, the sound simply stopped.
The men held their stones. In an instant, everything around them had fallen utterly silent, and only the killing intent hung thick in the air.
It was a warning.
At Yeol Se-ho's hand signal, the hunters began easing into position. In their hands, no one had noticed when, were looped nooses—ropes to catch the tiger about the neck the moment he burst forth.
A terrible stillness descended. Ho-in swallowed hard without thinking, and the sound of it seemed unbearably loud.
Then, without warning, the attack came—an attack so sudden that even the seasoned band of Yeol Se-ho had failed to predict it. The ones who gave the alarm were the Pungsan dogs themselves. Had they not caught the faint musk drifting in on a light breeze, the ones being hunted that day would have been the hunters.
"The tiger!" But by the time the hunter spotted the enemy, it was already a heartbeat too late.
Ho-in's mouth fell open in soundless shock. *How—when—did he get all the way over there?*
The tiger was not in the crevice at all. He had climbed atop a boulder a good several *ja* high. A tiger, when he wished, could move in utter silence like that—and he was a master of the ambush.
From the boulder, the beast leapt down. He had chosen his target carefully: Yeol Se-ho. He had apparently judged him the leader of the hunters—a clever beast indeed.
It was a lightning counterattack from an unexpected quarter, but Yeol Se-ho was no easy prey either. Without a moment's hesitation he raised his three-pronged iron-tipped staff and stabbed it at the tiger's chest.
*Kkeung!*
Stabbed through the chest, the tiger roared in pain. Yeol Se-ho swung the staff to deflect the lunge and evade the strike itself, but not the shock of impact. As he tumbled across the ground, two of his men hurled their nooses in unison—and by a hair's breadth, the tiger slipped them both.
The Pungsan dogs, seeing their master in peril, charged in bravely.
He was young and inexperienced, but the beast had the wisdom to know when to retreat. In one fluid motion, he sprang away.
Yeol Se-ho, hauled upright by his men, wiped his face and said, "A remarkable beast. Tigers that young usually lose their heads the moment things go against them and get themselves caught. If we let this one go, he'll be a thorn in our side for years."
They withdrew for the moment and re-formed the encirclement. With practiced skill, they widened the ring, then tightened it, then widened it again, working the quarry toward exhaustion.
Hong-wi, Ho-in, and Jeong Ho-chan joined the encircling line. Hong-wi felt a wild exhilaration rise in his chest—never since leaving Yeongwol had he known a moment so taut, so electric. Back then, he had been the one hunted. Now, he was the hunter.
He wanted to beat that tiger. It was almost as though the beast were his uncle Suyang, crouched far away there in the south.
At some point the tiger had fallen back to ground that favored him. The hunters searched for him, glancing about. Had he hidden himself in a crevice again? But they were not worried. He had not yet broken out of the ring.
In raw strength and speed, man was hopelessly outmatched by the tiger—but in stamina and tenacity, man surpassed every beast that walked. They readied another barrage of stones.
But the tiger, it seemed, had no intention of fighting a long war of attrition on unfavorable terms. They learned later that at this point he had already resolved to punch through the encirclement—a shrewd decision, remarkably mature for his age.
The beast sized up the hunters warily and fixed on the weakest-looking link in their chain.
When the tiger burst out, Hong-wi was standing with Ho-in. The animal's stealth was, frankly, astonishing. Before they knew it, they were face-to-face with the tiger, eye to eye. It was precisely the old tale: you turn around, and there is the tiger.
"Ugh!"
Confronted at arm's length, Ho-in was so startled he nearly collapsed where he stood. But the responsibility of standing beside Hong-wi poured resolve into his loyal heart. With hands trembling faintly, he raised his staff, leveled it at the beast, and thrust.
The tiger roared and, in the same motion, swept a forepaw down at the staff.
"Aagh!"
The blow was tremendous. The sheer force of it lifted Ho-in clean off his feet, and he went tumbling across the ground.
The tiger's ferocious eyes swung toward Hong-wi.
Hong-wi carried a defensive staff of his own, but long before he could set his stance, the tiger's strike would land.
"He's in danger—"
Cha Gyeong-yeon, spotting it from a distance, felt his stomach drop. Yeol Se-ho had seen it too and loosed a cry of warning, but to Hong-wi's ears it seemed to shimmer in from impossibly far away—and in truth, it never reached him at all.
The tiger was a breath from leaping. His tail had gone rigid and raised, the bristle of his whole body standing on end—the unmistakable signal before the strike. It was the instant when, sensing victory, the beast drew breath to roar.
"You wretched beast!"
At the utterly unexpected bellow, the tiger flinched, his nerve broken for a heartbeat. It was a shout of such majesty and ferocity that no one watching could have believed the boy facing down the tiger was the one who had faltered.
Cha Gyeong-yeon could scarcely believe it. Even Yeol Se-ho's eyebrows twitched.
For one fleeting instant, man, tiger, and the very air around them all seemed frozen solid.
But only for an instant. The tiger loosed a thunderous roar, filled with rage at the insolent creature who had dared raise his voice against him first.
Yet that fleeting instant of hesitation was precisely what saved Hong-wi's life. Without a moment's pause, he drove his staff straight out, and the tiger, struck full in the chest in mid-leap, let out a tremendous roar and flailed his forepaws wildly.