“Please have the rest, Grandmother.”
She slowly ate them, one at a time. When the bag was empty, she offered it to me again. I stood to leave. Chilsung read my intent and started heading toward the tracks. “Run off now,” she said. “There’s no one left here anymore.”
On the way to Puryong, I ran into countless ghosts wandering the fields and villages every night. Each time they brushed past me on those empty village roads, I heard a low, spooky woooooo, like a heavy wind blowing through giant trees. Later, when I travelled to other parts of the world and saw numerous cities and glittering lights and the vitality of those crowds of people, I was struck with disappointment and disgust at how they had all abandoned us and looked the other way.
*
Ah, now we come to that awful day. The day of the inferno.
Chilsung and I were lost somewhere between Chayu Peak and Mount Goseong, outside of Puryong, when we smelled smoke. Chilsung started barking wildly. We were about to head down the mountain, but a strong wind suddenly gusted over us, and smoke rose up all over the ridge. When we went around a bend in the path, we saw that the lower half of the mountain was on fire. No, not just the mountain: all of Heaven and Earth was aflame. The air filled with the smoke of live trees burning, and the crackling of branches and popping of sparks sounded close at hand. The fire was still down at the bottom, but the flames were climbing fast.
I turned and headed uphill. Walking downhill hadn’t been too difficult, but the path back up left me breathless and my legs weak. I glanced back to see the blaze leaping up and being swept forward on the wind. The flames seemed to lap at a hillock on the other side of a narrow ravine. The smoke surrounded us and made it impossible to find our way. I climbed as fast as I could, but the fire was faster. Chilsung kept pausing to look back at me, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. By the time we made it to the top of the ridge, the flames had already reached the spot where we’d stopped to change direction.
I looked down at where we had been headed. The fire seemed to have started at the foot of the mountain: the flames skirted the hem and appeared to be climbing their way up through the folds. White smoke rose from the lower slopes that jutted out between the narrow ravines and long stretches of open field. Something was moving fast through the underbrush: several roe deer and water deer were on the run. They stopped at the top for a moment and glanced at us before springing over the ridge. A line of flame reached the western ridge and began to climb upward. Luckily, as there weren’t many trees, it had only weeds and small shrubs to feed on. But once it was joined by the rest of the flames coming up from below, the fire would spread to the summit in an instant.
I followed the deer over the ridge with Chilsung and sat down on the grass and dried leaves so I could slide down the steep slope of the mountain like a playground slide. The slope ended abruptly, and my body was aloft. I slammed into a tree branch, ricocheted off it, and hit the ground. My body was soaked with sweat, and the pain in my side from where I had collided with the branch made it hard to breathe. It turned out that smoke was coming up from below on that side as well. Chilsung pressed his ears back and began to growl and snarl. A family of wild boar came bounding down the slope after us. They balked when they saw us, turned tail and vanished downhill, the babies scrambling to keep up with their parents. Chilsung growled and took off after them.
Stupid dog! They won’t hurt us! They’re trying to escape too!
I stood up to try to follow them, but couldn’t draw a breath. I must have pulled a muscle in my side, or possibly broken a rib. The pain went away after a few days, but even after I made it back across the Tumen River, it was another month before I stopped getting a stitch in my side every time I walked. I planted my hands on the ground and crawled on all fours through the underbrush, like the boars. The ground turned rocky, and I came upon a ravine where a stream of water was burbling down through the rocks.
Acrid smoke carried on the wind began to fill the ravine. The flames were now at the upper reaches of the slope. The crackling of dry branches catching fire sounded very close. I crouched down behind a large boulder where the water had pooled. The small puddle held no more than about two large bowls’ worth of water.
The flames zigzagged down the slope, following the trees and the curve of the mountain, while the ravine acted like a chimney, channelling the wind and narrowing the approaching column of smoke and fire. Already I could feel the heat pressing down, and it became harder and harder to breathe. Though I’d never been taught what to do in a fire, I dunked my clothes in the water, wrapped my wet jacket around my head and lay as flat as I could behind the boulder. The trees directly overhead shivered and shook and caught flame. Despite the wet clothes covering me, my back burned like I was standing too close to a campfire. The smoke, the smells, the spattering of pine resin and tree bark as they burned and the whoosh of the flames buoyed by the strong wind soared up through the ravine. I squeezed my eyes shut, but my face still wound up covered in tears and snot, and I could not stop coughing. When I finally raised my head the fire had passed, and only small embers were floating around; smoke rose from what was left of the trees. It was starting to get dark. We were on the north side of the mountain, so the sun would set even faster. The ground was spotted red with glowing embers, and burned-out stumps illuminated the ashes around them like blocks of charcoal inside a furnace. Small columns of smoke rose from the ground, and as it grew darker I felt as if I was standing in the middle of Hell. I could still hear some trees burning. A tall larch on fire stood on the slope like a giant torch, its flaming branches spreading out in all directions.
“Chilsung-ah! Chilsung-ah!” I called out as I limped down the ravine.
My voice echoed all around. Just as I had done once before, I focused my mind on trying to picture his location. He wasn’t far. I wandered among the rocks, looking for him. I finally spotted his body collapsed on a patch of grass, not far from the water’s edge. When Chilsung saw me, he wagged his tail weakly. Are you hurt? I said. Can you get up? But it seemed he no longer had the strength to communicate his thoughts to me. His white fur was streaked with ash, and I saw then that blood was pouring out of an angry red gash in his belly. The blood had turned the underside of his fur red, and was soaking the ground. Who would be stupid enough to go after some wild boars who were only trying to get their babies to safety?! Maybe he’d thought he was protecting me from them. Of course the mother and father boar would have defended themselves to the death against this intruder. The boar’s sharp tusks had ripped open Chilsung’s belly. Then, to make matters worse, the fire had passed right over him. I cradled Chilsung’s head in my arms and stifled the sound of my crying.
You’re all the family I had left in this world, and now I have to go it alone.
For the next few days, as I made my way back to Musan, the mountains continued to burn and send up smoke. I didn’t find out how the wildfires had started until after I’d crossed the border again and was in Yanji. They said there were many forest fires all over the world that year. In North Korea, the land was so parched that some of the fires happened on their own, but others were started deliberately. As the famine swept through the country and more and more people starved to death, no one could be stopped from setting fires in the mountains. All the crops had already been harvested from the collective farms and rations had been cut off, so people resorted to creating small slash-and-burn plots for themselves in the mountains. They would slip a pack of matches into their pocket, find a slope or a ravine where no one could see them and drop a lit match before making a quick getaway.