In the days of old there lived a famous hunter who was such a skilled marksman that he could shoot down a bird in the wing. One day, he set out to go hunting on the Diamond Mountain in the province of Gangwon. He spent a night in the house of an old woman at the foot of the mountain. In the morning she gave him a bag of singed cooked rice sufficient to last a week, and he set out, despite the old woman’s warning: ‘You should go home at once,’ she said. ‘I have seen many hunters go up into the mountain, but none of them ever came back.’ But he ignored her advice and went off, and he, too, was never seen again.

After he had gone on this expedition, a son was born to his wife. As it happened, he grew up to be a dwarf. The other children often teased him because he had no father. So when he was 8 years old, he asked his mother for a gun, so that he might go out and avenge his father’s death. She gave him a gun, and for three years he practiced day and night.

One day his mother said, ‘Your father could shoot the left ear off my water-jar from a quarter mile away while I was carrying it on my head. And yet a tiger killed him. So you must practice a lot more yet.’

So he practiced assiduously for three more years, until he could shoot the left ear off his mother’s water-jar from a quarter mile away. Then his mother said to him, ‘Your father could shoot the eye off a needle from the distance of a quarter of a mile while I was holding it in my fingers. You must practice a lot more yet.’ Then after three more years he became so skillful that he could shoot the eye off a needle from the distance of a quarter of a mile. But he still practiced for a few months more.

Then one day he bade farewell to his mother and left home with his gun. He came to the house of the old woman who lived at the foot of the Diamond Mountain. ‘Your father was an excellent marksman,’ she said. ‘He could shoot an ant off a rock at the distance of a quarter of a mile without touching the rock at all. Can you do that?’

He tried to do it, but without success. So he stayed with the old woman for three years, practicing ceaselessly night and day, neglecting even to eat and sleep. Then the old woman gave him a bag of singed cooked rice sufficient to last for several months, and he went off up the mountain to look for tigers.

To be continued …