The legend said that long long ago in the ancient days of the Chosun Dynasty, savage Mongols invaded the country, burned all the beautiful palaces and Buddhist temples, killed the valiant Korean warriors in droves in one fierce battle after another, and destroyed all the great cities as they marched on the capital city of Songak. At this time of impending crisis for the kingdom, the benevolent mountain spirits sent a seven-foot-tall general to this world to save the distressed king and his doomed people. This general was not born as an infant but as a fully-grown man with a three-foot-long beard cascading down his chest. His birth cry was so thunderous, the legend said, that more than ten mountains around the town collapsed while heaven and earth trembled alike in fear at the terrific bellow. At the very moment when the general flew out of the pale bleached rock, a thunderbolt shattered the frozen air into a thousand pieces and a silvery stallion with a dazzling crystal mane leaped out from the lush eastern gulch of Phoenix Hill. The silver horse galloped across the sky, over patches of rainbow-colored clouds, toward the awaiting general, who soared up into the air to mount his steed. After a deafening war cry, they galloped to the royal city to defeat the Mongols and rescue the besieged king. At each stroke of his tremendous weapon, three thousand enemy fighters fell dead before the general, like falling leaves before the autumn wind. It took only one afternoon for him to save the whole nation with his mighty sword.
For West County boys, the most fascinating part of this legend was that the white rock and the entrance to the cave were instantly covered by bushes and vanished from sight when the general left for Songak. The farmers were told by their parents, generation after generation, that the cave entrance would open again if the nation faced another major crisis that required the return of its savior, the general on the silver stallion. He did not return when the Japanese invaded and enslaved the Koreans for four decades. Perhaps that was not a big enough crisis, or the general might have been taking a very long nap at that time. Now there was a big war going on all over the country. Surely this was the time for the general's return. Maybe the cave entrance had already opened somewhere in the gulch, so the general could ride out to attack the enemy.
The Kumsan boys had set out with high hopes that morning because a week earlier a woodcutter from Castle village said he had found a deep pit hidden under entangled tendrils and dense foliage in a steep ravine near Eagle Rock. It might be the entrance to the legendary cave. The woodcutter said he had also seen a part of the white flat boulder beneath the heavily intertwining leaves and branches in the pit. The Castle village boys were planning to go with the woodcutter to explore the pit soon. The Kumsan boys wanted to be the first to find the cave.
A short procession of five boys and a dog climbed the ridge and picked their way along the narrow, winding path. The dog was considered a member of the gang because it always accompanied Mansik, the boy who lived at the Chestnut House.
The sun was blazing yellow high in the sky when the five exhausted boys and the dog began to plod down the western ridge of General's Hill along the weedy pathway. They rounded a wide, dark brown boulder partly covered with moss and creepers, burrowed into tall weeds, and then appeared again at the other side of an acacia bush. Chandol, the tallest and strongest boy among them, was in the lead while Mansik and his dog trailed in the rear.
“We've been walking through the woods for four hours now, but where is the cave?” complained Kijun irritably. The stocky, short boy obviously found it very difficult to climb up and down the ridges as fast as the other boys did, and then push his way through the intermingling arrowroot tendrils and mulberry bushes that thrived on the crags among the pines. “My legs are so tired. Let's take a rest.”
“You want to rest every five minutes,” said Chandol impatiently, pushing an oak branch aside and stooping to pass under a low-hanging knotty pine bough. “If you can't walk fast enough, you'd better go home.”
“I don't want to go home alone,” said Kijun, still petulant but somewhat intimidated. “Let's all go home. It's almost noon and we'd better go and have lunch.” But he immediately realized that he had put his foot in his mouth. Among the five boys, only Kangho and Kijun were sure to have lunch if they went back home; the other boys often skipped a meal because their families could not afford the noon rice every day. He quickly added, “The cave is not in this gulch. I know for sure that it's not here. We'd better go home instead of wasting any more time.”
“It must be here somewhere,” Chandol persisted. “You heard what the Castle villagers said.”
“I don't give a hoot. Have you forgotten what we went through because of their lie last year? We searched the woods for nine days, remember, nine days, because somebody from Castle village said he had seen a boar's den in the mountain behind Hyonam village. But we didn't even catch a weasel. And my father almost killed me one night when I was late.”
“I said you could go home if you want to.'
“I don't want to go home
alone.''''
“Then shut up and keep walking, Toad.”
Kijun, who had earned the nickname of “Toad” because of his squat build and bulging eyes, grumbled, but in a very restrained whisper so that Chandol would not hear him. Chandol was the undisputed leader of the Kumsan boys, and Kijun could not afford to get on his nerves, for he wanted and needed to be in Chandol's favor all the time. Kijun tried to stay by the captain of the village boys' gang as long as he could, afraid that otherwise Mansik or Kangho would be selected as his second-in-command, if Chandol were to name one. He knew that if he went home now, alone, they would scoff at him, belittle him, and call him a fat ugly toad. But he was infuriated by the prospect of crawling up and stumbling down hills and ridges all afternoon with these dumb kids who were not bright enough to know by now that the cave had never been here in the first place and the Castle village boys had made fools out of them. Exasperated, the stocky boy whipped a wilted fir branch with the stick he carried for beating the grass to scare away hidden snakes. Dead brown needles popped off the branch and landed gently on the undergrowth. A startled quail flapped out of a nearby grove and flew away to vanish down the slope beyond a millet patch.
Mansik trailed a few paces behind Kijun, playing with his bowlegged white puppy. Behind Mansik were Kangho, a lanky, quiet boy who rarely argued with anybody about anything, and Bong, a child with long hair who had to do chores for each of them because he was the youngest of them all. Three weeks ago Bong had finally turned six, qualifying him to participate in the adventures of the older boys.
Mansik had also begun to doubt that they would be able to find the general's cave in this gulch. Not today, anyway. They had searched thoroughly but found no trace of the concealed pit or the white rock. “Maybe somebody buried it,” he mumbled to himself.
“What did you say?” asked Chandol, glaring at Mansik over his shoulder. Chandol had been annoyed already by Kijun's challenge. “You said something to me, Mansik?”
“Never mind. I was talking to myself.”
“About what?”
“Well, you know, the cave.”
“What about it?”
Mansik did not answer. He was not sure if it was all right for him to be honest.
“What about it?” urged Chandol, stopping.
The other boys also stopped because the path was very narrow and Chandol was in the lead.
Mansik realized he did not have much choice. He said, “I wonder if the cave entrance is really here. We've searched every inch of this gulch. We couldn't have missed it. Perhaps somebody buried it.”
“Why would anybody want to do such a foolish thing?” said Chandol with a sneer. “Do you want to go home, too? Sure, you can go, if you really want to. Toad'll be glad to have your company.”
Mansik decided it would be wise for him to shut up. He had a lot more to lose than to gain by aggravating the angry boy who was their leader.
As Mansik did not reply, Chandol gave him another hard reproachful glare and then turned back. The five boys and the dog trudged down the narrow winding path in silence.
There was no breeze to cool the sultry air as the five boys and the dog rested beside a tobacco patch. Kijun breathed heavily through his mouth, his eyelids drooping from exhaustion. Chandol took off his sweat-soaked shirt and fanned his face with a broad tobacco leaf. Leaning against a pine stump, Mansik absent-mindedly gazed at a black butterfly with a torn wing fluttering feebly, entangled by a cobweb netted in the bramble bush on the other side of the trail. Kangho was lying on the grass beside him, sweating profusely. The fluffy dog stretched at its full length on the rocky path a little distance away from the boys.
Nothing seemed to move around them and the boys did not want to move either. Then, suddenly, the dog bristled and started to bark fretfully. Bong, who had been picking wild damson fruit further down the trail, froze. As his frightened eyes searched, he screamed, “A snake! I hear it but I can't see it. There's a snake here! Come and help me!” The dog barked frantically at the sky, jumping this way and that.
The other boys also heard the hissing sound. But it was not a snake. The sound came from the sky, somewhere beyond the mountains in the south. It sounded something like a whistle. The shrill tinny sound grew more and more distinct, coming closer and closer, fast, very fast, and the dog barked, and the sound came so fast and close that Mansik thought it must explode any moment, and it did explode. A deafening noise shattered the still silence of the mountains as if the whole earth had split into a million pieces, and Mansik momentarily thought, here it comes, the general is coming back on his silver stallion.
The five boys saw four shiny objects in a diamond formation screech into the open sky from beyond the southern peaks. The thundering birds blasted across the sky over their heads, their metallic white wings shining in the sun, and then swished away towards the town.
“Hit the dirt!” Chandol shouted, throwing himself flat within a bush-clover grove. “Take cover!” he yelled again, crawling on his belly deeper into the grove. “They're airplanes!”
Now the boys understood what was going on. They scattered, yelling and blubbering in fear, to hide themselves from the fiery flying machines.
Four more airplanes, and then another four, spurted out from beyond the southern peaks and whizzed off to the town, trailing white tracks of vapor behind them.
Mansik grabbed Fluffy and hurled himself into a sunken furrow in the tobacco patch; Kijun rolled into a thorny bramble bush, whining in a terrified voice; Kangho remained lying flat on the trail, covering his head with his hands; Bong, whimpering, crawled back down the trail the way they had come like a stunned fish swimming the wrong way, its sense of direction lost.
When the airplanes vanished, silence suddenly returned. In the eerie quiet, the bewildered boys scrambled to their feet one by one. They heard the faint rumble of distant explosionsâ
whum
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whum
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âbeyond General's Hill.
“Do you hear that? Do you hear that?” Kijun gasped, rolling his terror-stricken wide eyes. “It's an air raid. They're bombing again. Maybe they're bombing Kumsan.”
“Why should they bomb our village?” asked Kangho, his eyes flashing. He did not seem to be too sure of his own words. “Nobody is fighting any war at our village, you know.”
“They must be bombing the town again,” Chandol said wisely, dusting his pants. “There're Reds in town and it's
them
that the planes are after.”
“We'd better go home now,” said Mansik, putting his dog down.
Nobody objected to Mansik's suggestion.
The bombing continued even at night. The villagers of Kumsan and Hyonam flocked to the riverbank early in the evening, many of them skipping supper, to watch scarlet and black pillars of flame and smoke belch up from the town. Several searchlights streaking up from the provincial capital building at the foot of Phoenix Hill swept the night sky, crisscross, to ferret out the invisible planes that droned and whizzed around in the dark space, spitting out fire again and again. Orange flames gushed up anew from the darkened town following each explosion blast, while the ground artillery burped and shrieked in a frenzy.
“How can they see the buildings in the dark from high up there?” said Yom, the stumpy ferryman, sitting in front of his cabin astride the plank bench for waiting passengers. “I guess someone is giving signals to them with a torch from the ground.”
“What will we do if they drop the bombs at our village by mistake?” said Han, the mill owner, sitting next to the boatman on the bench, resting his chin on the long handle of his hoe.
“But all the bombs do fall in the town,” the boatman said with apparent admiration. “Maybe the bombs have some sort of eyes that can see in the dark.”
“I've never heard of bombs that have eyes,” the miller said.
“Anyway this war will be over in a few days,” said Kijun's uncle, standing under the willow tree beside the bench with his hands folded on his chest. “Nobody can survive such a bombing very long.”
Flames flashed up suddenly near the railroad station, subsided for a moment as if to take a breath, and then spurted in all directions with renewed ferocity, reddening the sky. “There it goes again,” said the boatman, rising, and some twenty Kumsan villagers, who had gathered around the ferry, silently watched.
The villagers who had been to the town that morning said the police station and many other big buildings occupied by the People's Army, as well as half the stalls at Central Market, had been completely destroyed. And dead bodies were scattered everywhere on the downtown streets. There was urgency in their voices as the farmers discussed what they had seen or heard about the bombardment, because now they knew the same thing might happen to them.