Man-duk sadly asks the tiger why he "stopped," and proceeds to take out a knife at the mountain's edge. The tiger charges Man-duk, but does not pounce as Man-duk fires. Man-duk reaches the top of the mountain and waits for the tiger.
However, following Seok's death and the wounding of the great beast, hunter and tiger, now both bereft of mates and offspring, each tread fatefully toward the snow-blasted mountain top, with the bounty hunters and army in close pursuit. The tiger brings Seok's body to Man-duk's cabin.Īfter several failures, mounting hunter deaths, and the onset of a harsh winter, soldiers of the Japanese army are dispatched to participate in escalating efforts to find and kill the tiger, and several attempts are made to enlist Man-duk to facilitate the hunt, all of which he resolutely resists. In the present time, Seok loves a girl in town, and secretly joins one of Gu-kyung's hunts in aspiration of earning a bounty sufficient to convince her father to allow them to marry during the hunt, Seok wounds the tiger, but is himself mortally wounded. The surviving cub grows up to become the Mountain Lord. Man-duk, however, secretly relocates the cubs to a safe den, though the one-eyed cub's sibling dies not long afterward. He advises Gu-kyung to them to leave them to their fate, allowing the mountain to decide if they are to survive. Man-duk spares the one-eyed cub and its sibling by intervening against the more junior hunter Gu-kyung, who delivered the killing shot on their mother.
It is revealed that years ago, Man-duk mortally wounded the tiger's mother when she leapt at him as he neared her kill to defend her two nearby cubs. Gu-kyung, Chun Man-duk's former hunting partner, is the resolute but ruthless leader of a band of Korean hunters that continually attempt to track and kill the tiger for the bounty, including by killing its mate and two cubs while using the latter for bait. The tiger is known locally in hushed tones as the Mountain Lord, and locals who revere it fear that the tiger's demise will allow unchecked numbers of wolves and boars, thereby upsetting the ecological balance. The Japanese governor-general overseeing the occupation gathers tiger pelts as a hobby to display cultural dominance over the Korean people, and soon becomes obsessed with killing possibly the last remaining tiger in Korea, an enormous one-eyed male that lives on the mountain he has killed scores of hunters and evaded capture many times, including Chun Man-duk and his former hunting companions.
Following a tragic accident years ago in which he killed his beloved wife while hunting for a large male tiger to financially provide for his family, he has retired his rifle, sworn off hunting, and become a humble herb gatherer among his cherished mountains. In Japanese-occupied Korea in 1925, Chun Man-duk, a revered hunter, lives with his teenage son, Seok, in a hut near Mount Jirisan.
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