Rebirth of Bayi Fishing and Hunting in the Northwest

Chapter 196 The first deer hunting on the northern slope of Ma County—whip man?
When Li Long woke up, it was already bright in the room. He heard some noise outside and thought it must be Tao Daqiang getting up to work.

I rubbed my face and eyes and felt some eye mucus. Is this due to excessive liver fire?
Having started to take care of his health in the second half of his previous life, he was more sensitive to these things. He stretched himself and felt full of energy again.

It’s good to be young. No matter how tired you are the day before, you can still be full of energy the next day after a good night’s sleep. It’s not like in your previous life when you were in your fifties or sixties, when it would take a long time to recover from a tiring day.

He got up, put on his clothes, opened the door, and the dazzling sunlight came in. Li Long squinted and saw Tao Daqiang chopping wood.

Tao Daqiang turned around and saw Li Long coming out, and said with a smile:
"Brother Long, are you up? I've already prepared breakfast. Rice porridge, unleavened bread, and cold mushroom salad. Wash and eat. I've already eaten."

"Okay." Li Long went to the waterside to wash up briefly, then went to the table to eat. While eating, he said:

"Next time you come down the mountain, you must bring some pickles and some red tofu. Oh, and make some flour today so you can steam some buns. Eating only unleavened bread will make your stomach uncomfortable."

"Okay. Then bring some noodles back next time you come back, otherwise the noodles won't rise." Tao Daqiang said after thinking for a while.

Li Long thought about it and it made sense. He didn't buy baking powder, and he didn't know if the supply and marketing cooperatives or department stores had it - they should have it, right?
They ate and chatted at the same time. After a while, Li Long washed the dishes and went to prepare the wolf meat.

Although it was a skinny wolf, the skin and internal organs weighed more than 30 kilograms. There was no way to send the meat down, so Li Long planned to cook part of it and make the rest into dried meat.

As for the internal organs, there is nothing we can do about it. Just make the most of the time to eat them in the next two days.

After Tao Daqiang finished chopping the firewood, he piled the chopped wood pieces beside the wooden house, and then came over to help Li Long.

"Brother Long, there are so many good things here. The wood used for burning can definitely be used to make a lot of things at home."

"We could transport them out frequently before, but now we can only wait for the right opportunity." Li Long said, "Look at how many fallen trees there are by the pine forest. We can only watch them fall... but there will be people from the forestry team to pick them up."

Tao Daqiang knew it, but he just felt it was a pity. If these woods were left in the team, they would have been taken home to make furniture. Nowadays, everyone's family is poor, and it is considered good if a family has one or two pieces of furniture with four or six legs. Some people don't even have a decent piece of furniture at home.

The main reason is that wood is expensive. But who could have known that so many trees would be left to fall and rot in this mountain?

Strips of wolf meat were cut off, smeared with salt and put away. Li Long asked Tao Daqiang to nail iron wire in the small house and the big house, and then hang the wolf meat on it to dry.

After he was done, he planned to go to the mountains to get some mugwort or other grass to put in the house to prevent insects.

After finishing the wolf meat, Li Long broke off the four fangs in the wolf's mouth and picked out the femur. This thing would be a good gift now and would be quite valuable in a few years.

Wolf skin is easy to handle. Simply scrape off the oil, apply salt on it, and then nail it directly to the wall of the wooden house and wait for it to dry.

It seems that I really need to learn how to tan leather, otherwise I can only sell this dry and hard leather.

After all this was done, Li Long saw that there was still time, so he said to Tao Daqiang:
"Da Qiang, let's just walk around the area, pick up some mushrooms, get some shovel handles and the like. After lunch, we'll take a break and then go see if we can find any red deer."

"Okay." Tao Daqiang agreed readily, and then asked, "Brother Long, what do you want the shovel handle for?"

"Sell it." Li Long smiled.

The shovel handle is actually a wooden pole as thick as a child's arm, about 1.67 meters long, and the main standard is that it is straight and has no large knots. When processing, the skin must be peeled off, then scraped clean and sharpened at one end.

The shovel handle is the common name, and in fact it refers to the handle of everything, because production tools such as iron shovels, axe, hoe, wooden fork, wooden shovel, etc. can all be used as handles.

But Li Long wanted to do this mainly to prepare for the autumn and winter supply and marketing cooperative tasks - Li Xiangqian said that there would be a batch of tasks for large brooms. The brooms also need to have such wooden handles.

There were plenty of Achnatherum splendens in the wasteland around the team, and as long as you were willing to work hard, you could beat it. But there were few qualified broom handles.

Li Long guessed that the task of making this batch of brooms would require at least 200 to 300. The production team could only gather 100 to 80 at most in a short period of time, which was basically the limit. So Li Long planned to stock up a batch first, so that he could earn some pocket money later - for example, a broom costs 3 yuan, and this one costs 50 cents, not much, right?
Li Long planned to make two or three hundred. There was a lot of wood around here, so it was easy to make some wooden handles. For example, if we set a task today, we would make ten?
Li Long had a clear goal, and so did Tao Daqiang. Since there was not much use for digging Codonopsis pilosula now, he decided not to dig it and instead to pick mushrooms.

If you don't eat the mushrooms after you pick them, you can slice them and dry them, then take them home and use them as dried vegetables in the winter - this is what Li Long said casually yesterday, and Tao Daqiang remembered it.

He didn't know many other mushrooms, such as porcini, pine mushrooms and the like. He only knew the straw mushrooms that Li Long took him to pick, so he just picked mushrooms with a bag on the grass slope.

Li Long climbed over the hillside and walked into a pine forest. Although it is called a pine forest, there are actually not only pine trees, but also cypress and birch trees. It is quite diverse.

After looking around, Li Long gave up. The trees here that could be used as shovel handles were all small trees that had grown for more than ten years and were not easy to grow. He thought he should go and have a look at the willow trees by the ditch.

The willow trees by the ditch here grow in a messy way, in clumps, with a lot of slanted branches. The branches of the willow trees that are two or three years old can just be used as shovel handles, so it's not a pity to cut them down.

Li Long came to the bottom of the ditch, where there was a small stream. There was a small river bend where the willow trees grew. This area was relatively flat. As soon as Li Long reached the edge of the willow bushes, he saw a pair of hoof prints in the wet mud beside the river bend that had just been stepped on.

Looking at the split hoof print, Li Long guessed that it was most likely a wild sheep, red deer, roe deer, etc. He didn't have the ability to tell what it was from the hoof print, but if it wasn't a plum blossom print, it couldn't be a wolf or something.

Could there be some deer or something drinking water here in the morning?
Li Long immediately became excited. He looked around and planned to ambush early tomorrow morning to see if he could get anything.

Even though he had only been there for a few days, Li Long felt that life in the mountains was not easy.

He is different from Tao Daqiang. He thinks it is best to travel back and forth between the mountains and the countryside. It would be best to stay here for two or three days and then stay at the foot of the mountain for two or three days.

Away from the footprints, Li Long, carrying his gun and holding a machete, chopped off seven or eight shovel handles, cleared the branches by the water, and then chopped them to almost the same height, then walked back with the machete in his arms.

When he saw mugwort on the road, he cut some and took them back. The smell of this thing can keep mosquitoes away, which is good for sleeping at night.

When they returned to the winter den, Tao Daqiang had already returned and was cutting mushrooms. Li Long placed the shovel handles against the east wall and said:
"Let's steam some rice for lunch. I'll go stir-fry some wild vegetables, and then we'll go look for red deer."

"Okay." Tao Daqiang put down the knife and tried to stand up. Li Long waved his hand:
"It's still early, you can cut yours and wait for me to get the wild vegetables back." It was late April, and there were more wild vegetables, including wild onions, wild leeks, wild celery, and artemisia, and together with the wild mushrooms picked by Tao Daqiang, there were enough to stir-fry several dishes.

Of course, if Li Long doesn't mind the trouble, he can also clean the whole ground vegetables - but there is too much sand and it is too difficult to wash.

When Li Long came back with a big bunch of wild vegetables, Tao Daqiang had already set up the chopping board and lit the fire on two stoves.

"Brother Long, do you know how to steam rice?" Tao Daqiang asked.

Li Long knew how to steam, but he wasn't very skilled. He put the dish on the large chopping board and said:
"You can steam it, but it doesn't have to be that complicated. Put water in a pot, put a strainer on it, and then take a small basin, rinse the rice in it, pour water in it, and make sure the water is one finger higher than the rice, then boil the water and steam it. But when you steam the rice this way, there will be no rice soup or rice crust."

"As long as it can be steamed cooked." It was the first time that Tao Daqiang heard of this method of steaming rice. He immediately went to get the ingredients to try it.

Li Long remembered the talk show host he saw on the short video platform in his previous life talking about the joke about Asian mothers steaming rice with one finger, and he couldn't help but laugh.

Tao Daqiang brought the things, washed the rice and steamed it according to Li Long's instructions. He saw Li Long laughing and was a little confused. What was so funny?
In this way, you don't have to worry about the rice being undercooked. At most, you just need to steam it a little longer. Overcooked is better than undercooked. Li Long fried three dishes.

When the last dish came out of the pot, Li Long asked Tao Daqiang to lift the lid of the pot for steaming rice. Tao Daqiang looked at the pot of rice and was also surprised: Is it ready now?

Li Long smelled the fragrant rice and felt really satisfied. This was what rice was all about!
The two of them ate quickly, and then cleaned up together. Tao Daqiang asked:
"Brother Long, what are we going to do next?"

"Clean your guns, and then we'll go see if we can find any deer."

It was noon and the sun was shining brightly. The two men entered the cabin, opened the door, spread out a gun cloth and began to clean their guns.

Tao Daqiang didn't know how to clean it, so Li Long taught him as he cleaned it. The structure of a 56.5mm pistol is different from that of a small-caliber pistol, so Li Long asked Tao Daqiang to get familiar with it.

Tao Daqiang tried hard to familiarize himself with it, but to be honest, he himself felt that it might not be of much use in the future.

After wiping the guns, the two men locked the door and walked into the ravine with the guns.

The sun is shining brightly, but it is still a little cool in the shade.

Li Long saw a patch of wild strawberries under his feet, which had already blossomed with small white flowers. The locals called this a ground strawberry, for unknown reasons. It was not very big when it grew up, but once it turned red, it was very sweet and sour and tasted very good.

Li Long planned to pick some fruits to take back after they were ripe, because it would be very difficult for Li Juan and Li Qiang to eat any fruits in this season - even when tomatoes came in August, they could not eat them casually.

The children at that time were still suffering.

The two men carried guns. Li Long's purpose was not very clear. After walking three ditches, he saw traces of wild boars digging at the bottom of a ditch. However, Li Long did not plan to ambush them. There was enough meat now. It was not easy to sell it, and he had a mission to complete, so he decided to get the red deer first.

The main reason why Li Long was so persistent in getting the sika deer was that he hoped to reach a private cooperative relationship with the supply and marketing cooperative through Li Xiangqian. Every spring and autumn, there would be tasks like carrying handles and sweeping brooms, and Li Long would just take on some of them.

This kind of money is relatively easy to make and can also bring benefits to the team, so why not do it?

After an afternoon of searching, Li Long did pick up two deer antlers, but he didn't see any deer.

There were two deer antlers in the grass. Li Long had picked them up before and had experience. Tao Daqiang didn't notice them when he passed by. When Li Long saw them and said they were deer antlers, Tao Daqiang was shocked.

The two antlers seemed to have been shed this year, weighing twelve or thirteen kilograms in total, and both had three branches. Li Long decided to ambush at the river bend tomorrow morning. If he couldn't catch them, he would come here to take a look.

The next day, Li Long got up early. He and Tao Daqiang put on their clothes and took their guns and went to the river bend.

When they arrived at the river bend, it was just getting light. Li Long first lay far away and waited for half an hour without any movement. He couldn't wait any longer, so he went down the hillside to look at the river bend. He found that there were more footprints here, some of which were just stepped on, and some should have been stepped on last night. Li Long was a little discouraged and said to Tao Daqiang:
"Let's go check out the place where we picked up the antlers yesterday."

Tao Daqiang also knew that Li Long was in a bad mood, so he didn't say anything and followed Li Long over there.

When he reached the hillside, Li Long slowed down, trying to be careful not to make any noise, bent down and walked to the top of the hill, then he saw four sika deer, three large and one small, eating grass at the bottom of the ditch.

There are only females, no males!
Li Long was immediately disappointed - the little elk was a little bigger than the one in his stable, and it looked quite naughty, nudging this and that from time to time.

Tao Daqiang also noticed it, and he asked Li Long quietly:
"Brother Long, do you want to fight?"

Li Long himself was also hesitating. If he didn't fight, the prey was right in front of him, but if he fought, it was not what he needed.

"Let's wait a little longer." Li Long finally decided, "Let's go over there and ambush for a while in the woods on the top of the mountain to see if there are any male deer coming over. If there are, we'll attack them. If these female deer want to leave, we'll attack them too!"

Tao Daqiang naturally followed whatever Li Long said. The two men moved sideways and quietly approached the elk from the pine forest on the top of the slope. Then they found a place with a wide enough view more than 70 meters away from the elk and ambushed them.

The elk were nibbling on the tender grass at the bottom of the ditch, and the young elk would occasionally go to their mothers for milk.

Li Long waited patiently. When an insect occasionally came by, he would just move his body slightly, keeping his eyes on the sika deer.

Finally, just when these sika deer were about to move to the ditch, a clear and melodious sound of deer calls came from the hillside.

Li Long was overjoyed:

"It should be here!"

(End of this chapter)