Snow Hunters: A Novel

for Laura, my coast

I saw a tree inside a tree

rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.

—CHRISTIAN WIMAN

Children in the trees,

one falling

into the grip of another

—MICHAEL ONDAATJE

T
hat winter, during a rainfall, he arrived in Brazil.

He came by sea. On the cargo ship he was their only passenger. In the last days of the ship’s journey it had grown warm and when he remarked that there was no snow, the crew members laughed. They had been throwing fish overboard, as they always did, for luck, and he watched as the birds twisted their bodies in the wind and dove. He had never seen the ocean before, had never journeyed so far as he had in this month alone. He was called Yohan and he was twenty-five years old.

He was dressed in an old gray suit that was too large for him and wore a hat with a short brim. They were not
his clothes. They had been given to him at the camp and after he had changed, the young nurse, an American, took the military shirt he had worn for all those years and folded it with care even though it was torn and stale, no longer recognizable.

The nurse had thin shoulders, he remembered, and her neck had darkened from the sun. She had been kind to him. Through all the days at the camp there had been that. But he did not tell her so and he said his farewells to the guards and the doctors who stood in a line under the tent in that long field where the sky was always low and vast and where there was always a wind that carried the smell of the soil and sickness and the sound of animals from a nearby farm.

He was escorted into the back of a UN truck. It had snowed the night before but the day was clear as he left. From a tower someone waved. He shut his eyes and thought of castles.

He had also been given a rucksack with a spare shirt and trousers. A letter confirming his residence and his employment was in his jacket pocket, tucked behind a folded handkerchief.

It was close to dawn, and the ship was near land, when the rain began to fall. The rain was slow and light
and they all remained on deck. Yohan felt the drops tap the brim of his hat and vanish along his shoulders. His eyes were dry and red from the wind. The night before, facing a mirror in a cabin, he had clipped his hair short, the way the nurses had often cut his hair in the camp, checking for lice. He had also shaved, unsure at first whether he remembered how, hesitating before pressing the razor against his skin.

He could see now the coast. It resembled a cloud at first. Then it changed and the line broke into segments and he saw the tiles of rooftops and the stone and the whitewashed walls following the slope of a tall hill.

The port grew visible. Then the sails and the masts of ships. He gripped the railing and followed the smoke from the steamers rising above the town.

Near the peak he could make out a church spire and higher, on the open ridge, a single large tree. Farther up the coast, to the north, a plantation house stood in a long field. And farther still, on a headland, a lighthouse was flashing.

They entered the harbor. As the ship approached a pier they were surrounded by a low fog and the sudden echo of voices and engines and the strains of ropes against pulleys. Merchants were looking up at them, motioning
their arms and lifting the goods that they were selling. Fishermen were cleaning their boats; landowners were preparing to journey farther west, to visit their farms and their tenants.

He said the name of this country and then said it again.

The ship docked and he helped the men unload their shipment. He kept his eyes focused on the ship, on the crates sliding down the gangplank. He felt movement behind him, heard a slow hammering. He caught the scent of blood but was unsure whether it was his imagination or from all the fishing nets moving through the air.

The rain had not stopped and one of the sailors, the oldest of them, offered him an umbrella. It was blue with a wooden handle.

The sailor shrugged and grinned and said, —From the child, and pointed up at the ship where Yohan thought he saw a crown of hair and the length of a pale scarf gliding along the sky. A young boy was running after her, waving, and from that distance Yohan caught the voice of the girl, its delicacy and assuredness, the way it rose like a kite, the foreign cadence of words in another language.

He paused, as though expecting something. But then they were gone and he was unsure whether he had seen
or heard them at all, unsure whether he had understood the sailor correctly. There were no other passengers, he was told.

—To a good life, the sailor said now, and Yohan shook hands with them all, catching the fatigue in their oil-stained faces, these men whom he had lived with for over a month and who had made an effort to keep him company on that ship, teaching him card games, sharing their cigarettes, telling him what little they knew of the country where they had just arrived.

The sailors were South Korean. In the war they had been in the navy and there had been times during the trip when they gathered on the deck in the evenings as the weather grew warm and they passed around a bottle and told him of the fighting at sea. But then they looked at one another and then at Yohan and grew silent.

They spoke instead of their lives now and the families they started, how they had been shipping cargo for a year and how they had moved to Japan, where there was more work to be found.

—And wives, one of the sailors had said, approaching the edge of the deck.

In his hand he held the bottle they had been drinking from, a long wick slipped into it, then the spark of
a match. His hand aglow as he threw the bottle into the night, the momentary flare in the sky, then that brief explosion and Yohan hiding his body’s reaction to the noise and the sailors shouting up at that vast dark they traveled through.

Now, on the pier, a month later, he did not want to part with them. He lingered close, listening to them speak in Korean, not knowing when he would hear it again. But there was nothing more to say and so he looked at them one last time and waved.

He left the harbor and made his way inland, sheltered by his new umbrella, following a narrow road into a neighborhood of apartments and shops. Alone now, he stared at all the street markers and the hanging signs, his body suddenly overwhelmed by the noises of a town, its new smells, an unknown language.

The sailors had taught him as much Portuguese as they could, what little they themselves had learned, but he could no longer remember the words and the phrases, his mind searching for some remnant but unable to find one, unable to focus and settle as he followed the road.

The town was large, almost a city, and opened out along the rise of the hill. As he moved farther into the town he felt its density, its height. He kept looking up
at the unfamiliar architecture, the designs of gates and entrances, the high floors. Buildings were the color of seashells. The dark windows everywhere like a thousand doors in the land.

A girl on a bicycle approached and he stepped onto the sidewalk as she sped past him, throwing newspapers against closed entrances. He paused, caught by a memory. He had not seen a bicycle in years. The rain lifted off the wheels as the girl pedaled farther away. A light appeared inside a bakery, then the smoke from a thin flue on the roof.

He stopped a fisherman, showing him a business card, and the man pointed toward the ridge and motioned his arm to the right. He followed a cobblestone road, turning at a barbershop and continuing along another road that moved around the slope, past row houses with narrow, brightly painted shutters. He began to notice paper signs on the windows, written in Japanese.

The tailor’s shop stood between an apartment and a pharmacy. The building was whitewashed and two stories tall. There was no sign. There were instead two large windows through which he could see tables, rolls of fabric, and a tailor’s dummy with a measuring tape draped around the shoulders of its headless body.

It was early in the morning. From across the street he looked up at the second-floor windows.

And it was there, standing in front of the tailor’s shop, as the rain fell, that he felt the tiredness of his journey for the first time. He heard the rush of a storm drain and his legs weakened and he grew dizzy. He gripped the umbrella and thought of the years that had passed and were an ocean away now. He thought of Korea and the war there and he thought of the camp near the southern coast of that country, beside an airbase, where he had been a prisoner for two years. He thought of the day he woke and saw the trees and then the men with their helmets and their weapons swaying around him like chimes.

The Americans called them northerners and those first weeks they kept his wrists bound. But then the doctors, in need of men, untied him and the others, and he dug graves and washed clothes in buckets. He carried trays for the nurses and took walks in the yard with Peng or the missionaries who visited, following the high fences, the men in the towers looking down at them.

He slept in a cabin with the other prisoners and in the winters the heat of their bodies kept them warm. Moonlight kept them company, the way it leaked through the
timber walls and shifted across them as the hours passed; and sleepless, he thought of his father and all that snow in the winters in that mountain town where Yohan was born and where he had lived and it all seemed so far to him then, as though the earth had expanded, his memories, too, and he could no longer grasp them. And only then, when those thoughts began to recede, fading into a thin line, would he sleep.

He did not know when exactly the war ended. He did not hear of it until some days later.

One day he was told they would return him to his home. To his country, they said. To the north.