Rebirth of Bayi Fishing and Hunting in the Northwest

Chapter 1053 The daily income of the cabin actually exceeded that of the purchasing station?

After the man and woman left, Li Long prepared to tidy up the cabin. Since they hadn't been there for the past two days, and the wind was blowing at night, there was a lot of straw debris piled up on the wooden floor in front of the cabin.

Some leaves were blown down from the treetops, but fortunately, the tree was thickly constructed, so the sunlight hadn't penetrated yet.

He let Mingming and Haohao come out to play under the pergola, while he took a big broom and prepared to clean the area.

The broom had barely been swung twice when someone came walking over from the south.

This man was quite brave; he was carrying a large bag of fritillaria bulbs in his hand and another bag on his shoulder.

Did you bring all the gains from the past two weeks?

Li Long quickened his sweeping pace, barely managing to clean the wooden floor before he reached the table.

This is yet another stranger.

Li Long placed the large broom upright against the wall, clapped his hands, and walked over to ask:
"Exchange for money or goods?"

“This bag can be exchanged for money,” said the burly man, who was easily over six feet tall. He was referring to the whole bag, and then placed most of it on the table, saying, “This can be exchanged for something.”

"Let me weigh it and see," Li Long said, taking the bag. "Then we'll check the quality, and I'll give you a price, okay?"

“Okay.” The burly man said, tossing his hair. His hair was rather oddly shaped, with very little hair on the sides, like it had been chewed by a dog, while the top was quite long, especially the bangs.

I don't know what kind of weird hairstyle it is.

Li Long guessed that he must have cut his hair himself in the mountains with some kind of knife or shovel. He didn't have clippers and thought his hair was too long, so this was the only way he could do it.

"The whole bag weighs 32 kilograms, but this half-full bag is heavier, weighing about 35 kilograms—is this half-full bag semi-dry, or has it been dried?"

"Yes, boss, you're a real expert!" The burly man, who had been expressionless the whole time, exclaimed in surprise. "Impressive, impressive."

"Then I suggest you do it the other way around. This whole bag should be fresher, so you can exchange it for something else. The one that's more than half full, half dry and half wet, is more valuable, so you can exchange it for money."

"How much money can each of these two bags be exchanged for?" the burly man asked, somewhat bewildered.

"Let me check the contents first." Li Long untied the bag and looked inside. "It hasn't been washed, it's a bit dirty. This bag is mostly full, half dry and half wet, I'll exchange it for five hundred yuan."

"The fresher bag, I'll exchange it for 250 yuan."

"You can get this much in return?" The burly man exclaimed in surprise. "This is worth so much? Then exchange it all for cash! I'm not digging anymore, I'm taking this with me!"

Li Long was somewhat surprised and asked, "You can dig for another twenty days. Don't you want to earn more?"

"I'm not digging anymore, it's too dangerous in the mountains. I originally thought I could earn four or five hundred yuan here in northern Xinjiang and then come back, but this has exceeded my expectations. I'm quitting, I'm leaving!"

The burly man spoke very resolutely, so Li Long exchanged both bags for money.

I also gave him a naan bread as a bonus.

The burly man took the money, counted it carefully, put it in his inner pocket, and then, while eating the naan bread, walked out of the mountain.

"Aren't you going to pack your things?" Li Long called out to his retreating figure.

The person simply waved their hand and said:
"No more!"

It really is true that contentment brings happiness.

Before Li Long could even express his feelings, several more people walked over from the south, carrying bags of various sizes to exchange their items.

Among those familiar were the Wu family uncle and nephew, while the rest were relatively unknown.

Most of them exchanged their goods for money, and a small portion for supplies. After this group of people left, Li Long discovered that in less than an hour, he had already collected over 100 kilograms of fritillaria bulbs.

After quickly getting the fire going under the stove and putting the pot on, Li Long was worried that he wouldn't have time to cook later.

There are two stove burners; one is for stir-frying vegetables, and the other is for steaming buns.

Before the mushrooms were even cooked, another group of people arrived. Li Long could only tell them to wait while he served the dishes first.

There was really no time to cook after that, as people came one after another to replace the fritillaria bulbs. Li Long still managed to take the steamed buns down from the stove and let the two children eat them in the house.

By the time he could finally eat lunch, it was already 3 p.m. He had acquired nearly 400 kilograms of fritillaria bulbs, which, even though he still had money, were too much for his jeep to hold.

With no other option, Li Long had to end his trip to the mountains early, lock the door, and hurriedly return to the county with Mingming and Haohao.

After unloading the fritillaria bulbs he had exchanged at the purchasing station, Li Long casually asked, "How much did you collect today?"

"We harvested over 200 kilograms of fritillaria bulbs and over 20 kilograms of dried wild mushrooms this morning," said Liang Shuangcheng, who was cleaning the fritillaria bulbs in the back. "The 200-plus kilograms of fritillaria bulbs included both dry and wet ones. If we count them as dried fritillaria bulbs, it would be about 120 to 130 kilograms."

“Hey, that’s not even as much as I collected.” Li Long laughed smugly. “I collected more than 400 kilograms this morning alone. If you convert that to dried goods, it’s about 200 kilograms.”

"Can you really buy this many?" Liang Shuangcheng asked, somewhat surprised. "Brother Long, I remember you said you got cheaper prices when you bought them in the mountains. Are those people willing to sell them?"

“We can’t refuse to sell them. The forestry team has increased patrols, and the rangers are stationed at various mountain passes, so they can’t go out,” Li Long explained. After unloading the fritillaria bulbs and putting them in the warehouse, he took Mingming and Haohao home.

Most of the fritillaria bulbs he exchanged from the mountains today were clean. Even the few that weren't clean, he told them that as long as the fritillaria bulbs were cleaned, they would get an extra few yuan per kilogram, so they would naturally take some time to clean them later.

I went there today but didn't see Polati. I wonder if he was assigned to guard the mountain pass and didn't have time to come over.

When Gu Xiaoxia returned home that evening, Li Long told her about the day's fritillaria purchase as gossip. The main topic was the burly man who, upon hearing the fritillaria was so expensive, simply exchanged it for cash and left.

"This person is quite interesting," Gu Xiaoxia said, somewhat surprised. "There aren't many people who can restrain their desires and be content with what they have at this time."

How many fritillaria bulbs did you collect in the mountains today?

"There are over 400 kilograms of dried and fresh together," Li Long said with a smile. "That's more than what our purchasing station collected this morning. It seems that Bolati and the others guarding the pass have been quite helpful. I have to go again tomorrow, and bring more money, because these things that are exchanged for fritillaria cost money now."

"You still need to be careful. You know the people in the mountains, some are good and some are bad, unlike in the county town where people have a stronger sense of law. You can't say for sure whether these people in the mountains will do something sneaky."

“Don’t worry, I’m carrying a gun,” Li Long said. “When they come to exchange things, I make sure Mingming and Haohao stay inside the house.”

"Okay, okay, just be careful."

The next day, after breakfast, Li Long took the children and drove the jeep, prepared the supplies, and went into the mountains again.

Inside the purchasing station, Gu Boyuan, Sun Jiaqiang, and Liang Shuangcheng cleaned the station together, arranged the items neatly, and opened the main gate to prepare for work.

"It's really strange, Li Long collected more fritillaria bulbs in the mountains than we collected here." Gu Boyuan said to Sun Jiaqiang when there was no one around. "Those people in the mountains should know that we pay higher prices here than they do in the mountains."

"Brother Long said that there are forest rangers blocking the way at each checkpoint in the mountains. It is dangerous for those people to bring fritillaria down the mountain, as it is easy for them to be confiscated. So they simply exchange it for money in the mountains."

"Although the price is lower in the mountains, the money is real and safe," Liang Shuangcheng explained. "Our mountains are really good; we can harvest so many fritillaria bulbs every year..."

“You don’t know this because you haven’t been in the mountains.” Sun Jiaqiang, who had spent two years in the mountains, was qualified to say this. “Tianshan is so big, and if you go in, almost six out of ten trails will have fritillaria.”

If a herb gatherer is not very dexterous, seeing fritillaria bulbs covering the hillside, they would definitely only pick the large ones and not the small ones.

The small flowers bloom, and the seeds are scattered; the following year, they grow into small fritillaria bulbs. Therefore, the fritillaria bulbs are inexhaustible.

"Oh, I see!" Liang Shuangcheng scratched his head and smiled.

Just then, someone came in from outside, and the conversation ended.

When Li Long drove to the cabin in the mountains, he saw Polati waiting in front of the cabin with three full bags on the table next to him.

Seeing the Jeep arrive, Polati excitedly waved to Li Long, but when Li Long got out of the car, he started complaining instead:
"I heard you came yesterday, so I came over yesterday afternoon, but you ran away. You haven't come for several days. What's wrong with you? You won't do such a profitable business?"

Li Long laughed at him: "Look at you, you said before that all I know is how to make money and I don't know how to enjoy life. These past two days I've been enjoying life, and now you're saying I've disappeared somewhere."

"Hehehe, I was just kidding." Polati chuckled, patting the bags as he said, "Come on, let's see how much these fritillaria bulbs in my bags are worth. I'm here to exchange them for money today!"

Let me tell you, a few days ago our team leader had us guard the pass, and I collected ten bags of fritillaria bulbs! Ten bags! That must be worth a lot of money!

However, most of them were handed over to the team; I secretly kept these.

My son's wife, Yang Gangzi, is pregnant and needs money. I need to get him some.

"Okay, let me see how much these fritillaria bulbs are worth." Li Long opened the bag and looked at the quality of the three bags of fritillaria bulbs.

Polati then took a bag of thigh stones from his horse and teased Mingming and Haohao, "Balangzi, what do you call me?"

"Call me uncle!" Mingming was perfectly clear-headed.

"Hello, Uncle!" Hao Hao had a sweet tongue.

"Oh my, these two kids are so clever! Here, take this ram's thigh stone and play with it."

The two children have a bunch of ram's thigh stones, and they've learned how to play with them from Li Juan and Li Qiang, but they didn't bring them today.

In addition, these hip stones were obtained by chance, and both children were very happy and took the hip stones to play with.

"Two of the three bags of fritillaria bulbs are fresh, and one bag is semi-dried. The fresh fritillaria bulbs weigh 72 kilograms, and the semi-dried one weighs 40 kilograms. How about I give you 1,000 yuan?"

“Okay, okay, of course no problem!” Polati said with a smile, “I want cash.”

"Here, take it." Li Long took out a bag of money from the jeep and counted out a thousand yuan for him.

"I was just saying I'd build you a shed, but then something came up and I forgot. The branches on your shed aren't thick enough, I'll go cut some now." Polati was very excited to receive the money, and after mentioning it to Li Long, he quickly went to cut some branches.

Li Long couldn't stop him.

By the time Polati returned dragging several large tree branches, Li Long had already started working. Two people came to exchange the fritillaria bulbs; one of them was the man from the previous pair of men and women, while the woman did not come.

Li Long then asked an unnecessary question: "Where is the woman who came with you?"

"I don't know. After I went back that day, I went to other places and never saw him again," the man said casually. "I wasn't very familiar with him either."

I believe you.

Li Long, of course, didn't say it aloud: Are breakups and reunions in the mountains so casual?

After changing the clothes for these two people, several more people came, and around noon, we finally saw Mo Linsheng.

He was wearing the work clothes Li Long had given him, which were quite clean. He had tied two urea bags together and draped them over his shoulders, one in front of the other. Each bag was more than half full, so it seemed like quite a lot.

When Mo Linsheng arrived at the case and poured out the fritillaria bulbs, Li Long discovered that the fritillaria bulbs were actually dried.

"You even found a place to dry your fritillaria bulbs? Aren't you worried someone might steal them?" Li Long asked doubtfully. "Isn't it dangerous in the mountains?"

“It was indeed unsafe. Two guys tried to steal my fritillaria bulbs, but I managed to steal them from them. Their fritillaria bulbs were dried; I don’t know where they were dried.” Mo Linsheng said casually, as if the matter was quite ordinary.

Li Long looked at him; he had lost some weight, but his gaze seemed even sharper.

I don't know if it's because they fought twice, but they seemed quite aggressive.

After Polati stepped onto horseback and laid the branches on the shed, he was somewhat surprised to see Morinson.

"Hey, you're pretty good, young man. You got into another fight, didn't you? You must still be injured, right? Hmm, a tough guy like you will definitely be successful in the future!"

Li Long was already used to Polati's strange theories. He asked Morinsheng, "Exchange for money or for supplies?"

"I exchanged most of it for money, and the rest for food, rice, and noodles. I grabbed a pot so I could cook some porridge myself."

"These two bags of dried scallops weigh about 60 kilograms in total. I'll charge you 60 yuan per kilogram, that's 3,600 yuan. That's quite a rip-off!"

"I'll give you five kilograms of rice and flour, no more than that, you can't carry it all. And some eggs too?"

“Alright, alright.” Mo Linsheng naturally had no objections.

He wouldn't mind selling the stolen fritillaria bulbs cheaply. Li Long didn't offer a high price, but with Polati right there, Morinsheng knew that even if he wanted to sell them for a higher price, he probably wouldn't be able to get the fritillaria bulbs for free. It was better to just exchange them for money with Li Long.

Three thousand six hundred yuan is a huge sum of money for him, equivalent to five or six years' salary for a temporary teacher, right?

If I do it one more time before the fritillary bulb season ends, I can go home and enjoy my retirement in peace.

Mo Linsheng didn't stay for lunch; he said he needed to hurry back to dig for fritillaria. Li Long thought to himself, "That's not digging for fritillaria, that's baiting for fishing!" In the past few days, if he had dug for fritillaria by himself, he could at most get ten kilograms of dried fritillaria.

There are sixty kilograms now, and the remaining fifty kilograms must have been stolen, and the fritillaria he stole from the person was most likely also stolen.

Big fish eat little fish, little fish eat shrimp; this thing is going further and further down the evil path.

After finishing building the shed, Polati sat down to eat at Li Long's place, feeling perfectly at ease. He kept muttering to himself:

"I thought we were making a good profit, but I didn't expect this ruthless young man to be even more cunning! Three thousand yuan! Stealing other people's fritillaria bulbs is so lucrative..."

Li Long thought to himself, "You just said you had wounds on your body. You must have risked your life to get them."

Li Long stayed at the wooden hut longer today, mainly because a significant portion of the fritillaria he collected was either dried or semi-dried. By sunset, the jeep was full and couldn't hold any more. He roughly estimated that he had collected over 200 kilograms, nearly 300 kilograms of dried goods today.

The average price of dried goods is about sixty yuan. Half of them are clean, the other half need to be washed and dried, and they can be sold for about thirty-five thousand yuan.

The initial investment was approximately 18,000, meaning the profit was doubled.

Li Long vaguely remembered hearing about a book titled "One Day Equals Ten Thousand Days".

Back when the production team was first disbanded and turned into a village, the villagers would be very happy if they could earn a dollar or two a day.

So, is my current rate of earning money equivalent to ten thousand days' worth in one day?
Polati stayed with Li Long until the very end, and his presence was quite intimidating. Li Long even asked him why he wasn't guarding the mountain pass anymore. He replied that it was his turn to rest today, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to bring over the three bags of fritillaria.

By May 10th, Li Long had no choice but to call Jia Tianlong and ask him to come over quickly to his place to help La Beiwu.

"How much did you collect over there before you asked me to come and collect it?" Jia Tianlong didn't want to move from his hometown; it was so comfortable being with his wife and kids.

"I have about five tons of dried goods here. If you don't come soon, someone else will buy them all!" Li Long said half-jokingly.

The claim of five tons is false; it actually weighed a little over three tons. The claim that someone else bought it is a joke. Given their long-standing relationship, it's unlikely he would sell this fritillaria bulb to someone else.

During this period, we not only harvested a lot of fritillaria bulbs, but also a lot of wild mushrooms.

With the work in the fields mostly finished for the time being, many people started side jobs to earn some extra money. The news that Li Long's purchasing station collected all sorts of odds and ends had spread, so people looking to make money flocked to the countryside to gather things.

Dried wild mushrooms, Cynomorium songaricum, licorice root, and fritillaria bulb. Recently, animal hides have become scarce, probably because the grasses in the Gobi Desert are growing abundantly, providing ample food for animals like gazelles and deer, making this settlement worthwhile.

Chen Hongjun was a bit frustrated because he hadn't collected as many fritillaria bulbs as he had expected. Although the dried goods totaled over 200 kilograms, it was still far less than he had anticipated.

He was naturally unaware that several forestry teams had tightened their checkpoints, and many people who painstakingly dug up fritillaria bulbs in the mountains had their harvest confiscated.

The number of people a middleman can receive from is naturally smaller, and with less supply at the source, Chen Hongjun naturally receives less goods as well.

Although these 200 kilograms of fritillaria bulbs could sell for over 20,000 yuan, making a profit of several thousand yuan, the initial profit of over 10,000 yuan makes it less satisfying to see the difference now.

He was wondering if he should mention the price to provoke the vendors?
Before he could even mention a price, another purchasing station opened in Beiting. The owner of the purchasing station was his former colleague, the one who had once said he would join him.

(End of this chapter)