On the way to Sidimi, the three men, including Mikhail, pelted me with questions.
I answered most of them truthfully.
Starting from how the eight of us were close villagers, I told them the story of how my Father was killed by Honghuzi Ma-jeok and how I had killed all eight of them in revenge.
I also mentioned that eight of our ten horses were Manchuria horses we had taken from those Honghuzi.
However, I did not mention the fact that I had finished two of them with a bayonet or that I had left the eight fallen Ma-jeok alive when I abandoned them.
Having seen my marksmanship with his own eyes, Mikhail Yankovsky asked in constant admiration, “So, after your Father passed away like that, you hid in the grass and shot all eight of them dead?”
“That’s right. Once I saw my Father die at their hands, I lost my mind and had no time to weigh the consequences. Besides, if I hadn’t done it, they would have killed me.”
“No, killing Honghuzi bastards is no problem at all. Even in a court of law, no one would say a word. But with such outstanding marksmanship, I imagine you’d be quite the hunter. Have you caught anything else while hunting?”
“Today was my first time catching a Wolf Pack. Aside from when Father made me practice shooting, he wouldn’t let me touch a gun recklessly.”
Fridolf Gek and Mikhail Yankovsky nodded simultaneously.
Fridolf Gek said, “It was only natural for a parent’s heart to keep a dangerous gun away from you since you were so young. No matter how great your shooting skills were, you would have always been a child to your Father.”
My heart ached at the mention of my Father, so I turned the conversation elsewhere.
“But when we get to Sidimi, will there be land for us to cultivate?”
“There’s plenty of land. As for how fertile it will be once it’s cleared, we won’t know until after the work is done, so I can’t give you any guarantees.”
“If we clear the land, does it become ours?”
“In an empty land, the one who clears it first is the owner. Who would say anything?”
“We aren’t Russians. Isn’t it possible that after we go through the trouble of clearing it, they might tell us to leave later? To be honest, Russia does that kind of thing a lot.”
Fridolf Gek and Yuli Briner, who were listening nearby, burst into laughter at my words.
Coincidentally, the three Russians here were not Russians by birth, but people born in foreign countries who had obtained Russian citizenship.
That was why they laughed so heartily when I spoke ill of Russia.
Fridolf Gek said with a laugh, “The Russian bastards certainly have that side to them. However, they won’t be able to pull that stunt here in the development zone. There’s vast land here but no people. That’s why they’re even accepting Chinese and you Koryo-saram. They aren’t so stingy that they’d harm the nation just to save a small patch of land. So, you can rest easy. If you’re really worried, you can pay a little money to the Russian government later to buy the land and have your rights officially recognized.”
“Is that possible?”
“For those with Russian citizenship, 100 Dessiatines of land are granted for free per household. If you want more than that, you can get a title deed by paying 3 Rubles per Dessiatine. Since you aren’t Russians, you can probably receive about 20 Dessiatines. If you want more, it’s the same for you—just pay 3 Rubles per Dessiatine. Once your rights are certified like that, no one can touch it. Of course, 3 Rubles isn’t a small amount of money, so it might be difficult for you all right now.”
One Dessiatine is a Russian unit of area, roughly 1.09 hectares, which translates to about 3,300 pyeong.
Twenty Dessiatines would be 66,000 pyeong, which is more than enough for one household to cultivate and make a living.
Honestly, it could even be called an excessive amount of land for a single household to clear.
When I relayed this story to Taeseok and my other Joseon comrades, they all listened with sparkling eyes.
The size I was describing was the kind of land Joseon people could only dream of.
Fridolf Gek continued.
“And unlike other Koryo-saram, you have many horses, so clearing the land will be much easier.”
“Ah, you mean farming with horses.”
“Farming is easier, and having horses makes clearing the land much more convenient too. To be honest, most Koryo-saram who cross over to Russia are so poor that they can’t bring horses or oxen, so they have to clear the land by hand, which is much harder. But since you have ten horses, it’ll be easier to clear and much easier to farm. If you had some money, it would be good to buy farm machinery from Kunst and Albers, but that might be difficult.”
In this era, many pieces of agricultural machinery that made clearing and farming easier were coming out of the United States.
If one had the money, one could buy such machinery from the Kunst and Albers trading post and pull it with horses, making both clearing and farming incredibly convenient.
However, Joseon people didn’t even know such things existed, and even among Russians, they were so expensive that almost no farm households possessed them.
This was especially true for the farmers in the Russian Far East, who were mostly poor.
***
We had indeed come the wrong way by more than a day’s journey from Yeonchu, and after walking for half a day, the Sidimi coast appeared.
Actually, one of the reasons I chose Sidimi instead of Yeonchu was the fact that Sidimi was by the sea.
Even in my past life—I can call it my past life now—I really loved the scent of the sea and enjoyed living by the shore.
And the fact that it was close to Vladivostok was also a plus.
I didn’t plan on just farming while holding so much gold, silver, and copper; if I wanted to go to the city to do something or head abroad, it was better to be close to Vladivostok.
My first impression upon arriving at Sidimi was disappointment.
The homes of the three men, who I thought would be living in grand Russian-style mansions, were three humble log huts.
The houses where the nearby Koryo-saram lived were also shaped like dugouts dug deep into the ground, with only the roofs being Joseon-style thatch.
However, I was the only one disappointed.
Taeseok and the others who came with me from Joseon weren’t disappointed at all.
Having never seen a Russian-style mansion to begin with, the log huts looked perfectly fine to them, and they understood the dugout-style thatched houses were built that way because of the cold.
I found out later that they were indeed built that way for the cold.
A young woman and a small boy about four or five years old came out of one log hut, and from another log hut, a young woman who appeared to be of Asian descent walked out holding a baby, followed by another child.
Yuli Briner introduced them to me.
“This lady is Skipper Gek’s wife, Oksana, and the child is their son, Alexei. And that lady over there is Mikhail Yankovsky’s new bride, Olga, and the sons, Alexei and Andrei.”
Then he lowered his voice and spoke in a whisper.
“Olga is a Buryat woman he married recently, and the one she’s holding is a child from his former wife. His wife died after giving birth to that child, so he married Olga. And the boy standing there is Andrei; he’s their adopted son. He picked him up after the boy became an orphan.”
Olga, Mikhail Yankovsky’s wife, certainly didn’t look more than fifteen or sixteen years old.
One might wonder what a man in his mid-thirties was doing, but in this era of Russia, this was nothing. In fact, not just in Russia, but in Joseon, China, and even Europe or the United States, the marriageable age for women in this era was fifteen or sixteen, and it was common to marry a man more than twice their age.
I asked Yuli.
“Yuli, don’t you have a wife?”
“I’m not married yet. So I live in that tiny hut over there. If it’s not uncomfortable, would you like to stay with me for a while? To be honest, it’s a bit much to squeeze into those families, isn’t it? The others can stay with the Koryo-saram for a bit. If you find it uncomfortable, you can stay with the Koryo-saram too.”
Even though I had fallen into the body of a boy in this era, my memories of my past life made a Western lifestyle seem more appealing.
“Then I’ll impose on Yuli for a few days.”
“Then let’s borrow a spare bed from Mikhail Ivanovich’s house.”
Near their log huts, there lived a total of thirty Koryo-saram across eight households.
They had all just returned home after finishing their farming, and when they saw us, they approached happily and welcomed us.
We happened to have a good gift to treat them with: wolf meat.
While wolf meat isn’t as delicious as dog meat, they are the same species, so it was edible if you neutralized the smell.
The Joseon people living here grew plenty of the spices needed for that, if nothing else.
That day passed with a wolf meat feast, and from the next day, everyone began preparing to build houses.
Relying on someone else’s house is only good for a day or two; we had to prepare a place for ourselves to live one way or another.
Fridolf Gek lent us shovels and hoes, and I also had two shovel blades.
At that time, iron farm tools made in the West were sold at very high prices in Joseon, and my Father had bought just the shovel blades in Russia, without the handles, to sell them in Joseon.
I had sold off most of the items Father left behind in Joseon, but I kept the shovel blades thinking they might be useful.
But honestly, building a house is no easy task.
First, following the advice of the local Koryo-saram, we had to dig into the ground and build them in the form of dugouts.
It wasn’t that the people here from Joseon were fools or didn’t know how to build in the Joseon style; there was a reason they built them that way.
Fortunately, it wasn’t the busy farming season, so our new neighbors helped us build the houses and even brought wheat straw for the roofs.
They said that since rice doesn’t grow in this region, they mostly planted wheat or soybeans.
In fact, those were better for selling to Russians anyway.
They also planted potatoes and corn, but those were mostly for home consumption.
The rice we brought was exchanged for potatoes, corn, and the like at a much higher price than in Joseon, just as I had expected.
We also had to build stables for the horses.
Although we had temporarily left them in Fridolf Gek’s stable, we couldn’t leave them there forever, so we had to create a stable for our horses too.
Even though the Koryo-saram and the Russians — actually, not a single one was Russian-born; they were all people who had drifted in from foreign countries — lived close together here, there was no specific subordinate relationship.
Although the Koryo-saram occasionally helped with the Russians’ work for pay, they were independent of each other.
The reason they gathered to live together nonetheless was to prevent the intrusion of wild beasts and Honghuzi Ma-jeok.
We ourselves had almost died after meeting a pack of wolves on our way here, and they said tigers and bears appeared frequently too.
And above all, the most terrifying thing was the Honghuzi Ma-jeok.
Even though Russian soldiers constantly went around on guard, there were few people compared to the land, so no one knew where the Honghuzi might pop up.
Perhaps because of that, there were several houses among the Koryo-saram that owned guns.
Although they were old-fashioned muzzle-loaders sold cheaply by the Russian Army, having even those was much better for fighting Honghuzi.
The Honghuzi were also doing this to make a living, so they didn’t often target places with this level of defence.
The humble log huts of the Russians that had disappointed me at first glance were actually clean inside and contained many items that looked quite expensive.
They intentionally kept the exterior looking shabby to avoid appearing too wealthy until more people gathered.
After the house building was mostly finished, we were all drinking tea together at Yuli Briner’s house — at Fridolf Gek or Mikhail Yankovsky’s houses, they couldn’t have this kind of quiet time because of the noisy children — when Mikhail Yankovsky spoke.
“That’s why you can live with Koryo-saram but never with the Chinese. There’s no way to know when those bastards might bring in the Honghuzi.”
Yuli Briner also said, “It’s more of a problem because those guys can transform into Honghuzi themselves. Koryo-saram are good because there are no such problems with them.”
Fridolf Gek, like a sea captain, held a pipe in his mouth and nodded as if agreeing with that opinion.
I made a request to Fridolf Gek.
“Could you take me to Vladivostok if I pay the Skipper’s fee?”
The most welcome thing I saw upon coming to Sidimi was the small schooner owned by Fridolf Gek.
A schooner is a type of sailing ship that was most popular in the 19th century.
While it didn’t surpass other sailing ships in cargo capacity or speed, it overwhelmed all other sailing ships in terms of being easy to handle and requiring a small crew.
For instance, for Fridolf Gek’s schooner, which was just over 10 meters long, two people were sufficient.
If it had been a different type of sailing ship from a previous era, five or six people would have been needed.
To go from Sidimi to Vladivostok by land, you have to circle around for more than a day, but by boat, it’s very fast.
I couldn’t help but be glad to see Fridolf Gek’s schooner.
The reason Fridolf Gek was still called by the nickname Skipper by people was largely because he owned his own schooner.
If one were to ask why he still used a sailing ship when steamships had already come out, the answer was simply that steamships were expensive.
First, the ship itself becomes incredibly expensive once machinery is involved, and the price of coal to run the steam engine is no joke.
Furthermore, the loading space is reduced by the space taken up by the steam engine, coal, and boiler water, and a corresponding workforce is needed to handle the engine.
No matter how small the steamship, at least three people are absolutely necessary: an engineer in charge of the engine, a boilerman to look after the boiler, and a stoker to keep shoveling in coal.
Gek asked while smoking his pipe.
“Why Vladivostok? Do you need to buy something?”
“I want to sell the furs I brought in Vladivostok and buy some farm machinery to use with the horses. There are a few other things I want to buy as well.”
Mikhail Yankovsky chimed in.
“That farm machinery is quite expensive. Seeing as you’re planning to buy it, you must have quite a bit of money.”
“The money I took when I killed those Honghuzi bastards I mentioned before is quite significant, and there’s some money my Father left behind.”
“You aren’t selling the horses?”
“At first, I thought about selling a few, but I think it’s better to keep them. As Mikhail said, this place is good for grazing, so I’d rather buy more horses and raise them.”
“That’s right. This place is quite decent as a grazing land. In fact, the reason the Skipper and I came here was that we saw it was a good place for grazing and wanted to create a large ranch.”
“If it’s a ranch, what do you plan to raise?”
“Yes, I want to raise horses and deer.”
“By deer, do you mean reindeer?”
“Not reindeer, but sika deer. Raising sika deer to cut and sell their antlers.”
Yuli Briner and I nodded, but Gek tilted his head in confusion.
“I’ve heard the story a few times, but will those sika deer really be worth money? I’ve heard the Chinese or Koryo-saram use them as medicine, but will it really be that much money?”
Yuli Briner and I laughed out loud.
Yuli Briner said, “Oh, that’s because the Skipper doesn’t know how big the velvet antler market is in China and Joseon. People say the Russian fur market is big, but the Chinese velvet antler market is enormous too. If a deer ranch is successful, you can rake in money.”
Originally, Yuli Briner was a person who had drifted here after failing in his business in China, so he was quite well-versed in Chinese affairs.
“But to raise deer, you have to catch them alive. Will that be easy?”
I chimed in.
“Catching them alive isn’t that hard. You just have to keep following behind the deer for days until it gets exhausted. Then the deer eventually gets tired and is captured by the person. Even if it’s hard for others, it’ll be possible for Mikhail.”
Gek and Yuli Briner turned to look at Mikhail Yankovsky, staring at him with curiosity.
Mikhail said, “I can do that. Viktor, you really know a lot for such a young age. I also only learned that after coming here, so how did you know?”
“Because I lived in the region that does the most hunting in Joseon. In our village too, there are people who catch and sell deer like that in the winter. In fact, Taeseok once caught a deer like that when I was young. If you catch it alive like that, you can sell it to a rich person for a fairly high price. Not just the antlers, but deer blood is used as medicine too.”
In fact, Taeseok was skilled at such hunting, and the Mexican Silver Coins he possessed were obtained by selling deer hunted in that manner.
Gek, who had been listening to our story, said, “Well, I also have items I want to purchase in Vladivostok, so let’s go together. There’s no need for a fee, so tell me when you need to go to Vladivostok.”