Tsurumi’s scouts have arrived in Sapporo, assuming Hijikata is also there to look into the news of the red-light district serial killer. Asirpa, Sugimoto, Shiraishi and Vasily are searching towns for a tattooed peddler, Sugimoto and Shiraishi in particular get maybe a little overzealous in their desire to get every peddler they encounter to strip naked.
Shiraishi channels his inner Pennywise to get a tip from one of Golden Kamuy’s trademark useful kids and they track a tattooed peddler down, but the tattoos are on his face, not his body, and he manages to give them the slip on a coal trolley. Asirpa thinks she heard him say they’ll never find the gold, so he may not have been a dead end.
The quartet then boards a paddle steamship, the faster and easier way to get to their next destination of Ebetsu with the melted snow turning the roads to mud. Their ship is then attacked by Pirate, the prettiest Abashiri prisoner, who demonstrates his superhuman swimming ability in singlehandedly boarding the ship and pointing a gun (which he makes sure to dry out) at the Captain.
Asirpa is in the cabin while Sugimoto and Shiraishi are topwise, making Sugimoto nervous. However, once Pirate recognizes his old bud Shiraishi, he’s friendly towards him. When another steamship packed with soldiers passes, the pirates try to make it look like everything’s fine, but a grizzled, armed postman in the cabin with Asirpa has other ideas.
He wants to be a hero, so he starts shooting his post office-issued pistol at the pirates. It looks at first like he scores a headshot, but it’s actually Vasily with his rifle from one of the dinghies being towed behind the ship. When Pirate loses three of his “citizens”, he counters by throwing the anchor of the ship into the cabin.
Sugimoto takes exception to Pirate being so reckless with Asirpa down there, so the two get into a little scuffle, each of them proving their mettle to one another. Asirpa ends up saving herself by luring the postman out onto the deck with the promise of more ammo, then kicking him overboard.
With the chaos agent removed from the equation, Pirate re-engages Shiraishi and Sugimoto as chums and potential partners, suggesting they work together to find the gold. He intends to start his own island country with his share. Then he asks Sugimoto about his family, and learns he lost them all to Tuberculosis.
Sugimoto thinks back to that dark time in his life when he was utterly useless to stop the death of his father, the last member of his family left besides him. The last thing his father tells him is to get away and make a life for himself. Not to build and rule his own country, mind you: just a life.
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