Snow Hunters A Novel by Paul Yoon

Author:Paul Yoon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

10

They were loaded onto the bed of a truck and taken into the surrounding forest. It was the only time he left the borders of the camp. All through the day he felled trees, the guards gathered on a high riverbank above them. They would use the wood to build additional shelters and for fire.

They were given time to rest and they went into the river. Some of them bathed while others sat in the cool water or washed their faces and their necks.

It was their second year at the camp. Yohan immersed himself, holding his breath, feeling the current pass over him. The life of it.

Peng lay beside him. His body submerged, the dirt on the bandages over his eyes began to loosen. They had been holding on to a boulder. Earlier, they had been speaking of the river in Yohan’s town, how in the warm seasons they had gone swimming there. All the children did, entire groups of them navigating the slow current and one another as though they were each a ship.

Yohan spoke of that one time a girl surfaced, unmoving, her back to the sky and the delayed confusion and then the shouting.

Peng asked whether Yohan had known who the girl was. Yohan could not remember.

—Was I there? Peng said.

In the water they faced each other for a moment, the two of them holding their breaths and the sun on them and their bodies afloat. Yohan smiled. Then he shut his eyes.

He would never know when Peng let go. Just that when Yohan looked again beside him he was no longer there.

It happened too quickly. On the banks a guard shouted but Peng remained motionless as he caught the current and floated away, moving faster now with the river.

Two guards started to run, following the banks. Peng grew smaller.

He would always wonder whether Peng heard the shouting. Perhaps he had been daydreaming. Perhaps he had fallen asleep. Perhaps he was aware of what was happening and no longer cared.

He was twenty-six years old. This young man whom he had first seen as a boy in front of an audience, on the shoulders of his father, leaping into the sky. Peng, who once sat on a tree stump in the woods, exhausted, his rifle between his legs, the crescent shape of an orange rind in his mouth and his face frozen in a smile.

On that first day at the camp, he had reached into the air and found Yohan’s wrist. He asked where they were, what was happening. They were suddenly surrounded by men and a foreign language. A helicopter deafened the morning. Yohan felt the bandaged face against his shoulder. He held Peng’s hand as he looked out at a field of barracks and cabins, an old mill and tents, a graveyard and a garden.

That afternoon in the forest there were four rifle shots and the sounds echoed across the river. In the distance, water sprayed into the air.

It was the last he saw of him.

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