Chapter 6 Section VI

He asked, are you scared? The dog didn't say anything, and lay softly next to the grandfather's lap.Uncle said, is there going to be a catastrophe? The dog said nothing, and looked at the maize tree with green branches and leaves. The grandfather was stunned for a moment.He saw many white spots on the corn leaves, like sesame seeds.This is the dry spot disease that corn can only get due to long-term drought and no water.But despite the severe drought, the maize has never been short of water.The Uncle surrounded the corn with soil and watered the circle almost every day.He squatted down and scraped away the brown soil in the circle, and pointed to the dry soil, which was so wet that there were water droplets.The Uncle grabbed a handful of wet soil and stood up, realizing that the dry spots were not caused by drought, but by the smell of rats all over the mountains and plains.

Of all the dung, rat dung is the hottest and strongest manure, the Uncle thought, needless to say the smell of rat dung is equally strong and hot.A night of mouse stench encloses a maize tree, can it not be hot and dry? Putting your ear to a leaf, Uncle heard the creaking sound of those spots growing rapidly.Turning around and sniffing, he smelled the dry black rat smell coming from the surrounding ocean, flowing towards the corn tree like a river. That is to say, this maize tree is going to die immediately. That is to say, if the corn wants to survive, it will rain immediately, pressing the rat smell like poisonous gas on the mountains and washing the poisonous gas from the corn trees.

The blind dog felt the panic of the grandfather, and the grandfather said, blind man, you watch, I have to go back to the village to fetch water.He didn't care what the blind dog said, so he returned to the village with the bucket. The village is still so quiet that there is not a trace of sound.The rat feces on the village streets are densely packed, and the unchanging sun has widened the gaps between the doors of each house.Uncle didn't care about many other things, he went straight to the well platform, and when he went to twist the water mattress tied down in the well, the weight on his hand suddenly became so light that it seemed like nothing, and the water mattress dripped down the well at this moment The voice disappeared.Uncle looked into the well, his face turned pale, and his hands froze on the handles of the pulley.

It took a long time before the grandfather rolled the well rope onto the pulley.The water mattress is gone.All that remained of the water mattress was a layer of dry, sore and full of holes. On the cloth was a layer of rats that had been swollen with water after death. The water mattress was eaten up by the thirsty rats that jumped into the well.The Uncle started looking for mattresses or quilts. The Uncle first went to the households where he was looking for food, and he only stayed at the door for a moment every time he arrived.The village was ransacked by rats.The boxes, tables, cabinets, bed legs, etc. of each family, where clothing and food were once held, have big and small holes that have been bitten like the plates of sunflowers that have eaten their seeds.The smell of yellow and white wood, together with the smell of rats, filled the house and filled the courtyard.Uncle ran for more than ten doors and came out empty-handed.

Walking out of the village alley, the grandfather carried three long bamboo poles in his hand. He tied the three bamboo poles together, and went to a latrine in the backyard of a family to find a small wooden bowl for excrement (the bellows, chopping board, Both the wooden bowl and the pottery bowl were cracked by the mice's bites), he tied the wooden bowl to the end of the bamboo pole, and stretched it down the well three times to scoop water, but all the scooped up were dead mice.With the sunlight above his head, the Uncle looked into the well, and he saw that there was no water in the well, and black mice were piled up at the bottom of the well like half a cellar of rotten sweet potatoes.how many live

The rat ran on top of the dead rat, climbed a few feet to the top of the well wall, and fell down again with a thud. A thin, mournful cry rose up the well wall.The Uncle returned to the eight-mile-and-a-half slope with the empty bucket. The empty mountains stretched endlessly around, and the junction of the sky and the mountains was burning like a raging fire several miles away.When Uncle reached the edge of the slope, the blind dog came running.The Uncle said that the well was dry, there was no water, and the well was filled up by dead rats.He asked if there were any mice coming here? The dog shook his head at him.He said you and I are going to die at the hands of the rat, and the corn, we won't live for a few days.

The dog stood bewilderedly in the shade of the trellis, looking at the sky.Putting down the bucket, the Uncle went to the mat to have a look, the dry spot on every leaf of the corn stalk was already as big as a nail shell.The Uncle was silent in front of the maize, not speaking year after year, watching the two dry spots on the eleventh leaf grow and join together, turning into a long spot like a sun-dried bean pod At that time, his dizzy eyes blinked, The blue veins in his neck stood up like the roots of an old tree protruding from the ground.He stepped out from the mat, took down the whip from the shed, aimed at the very center of the sun, bang bang bang, turned around and whipped a dozen times, and pulled out many animals that were flickering on the ground from the sun's rays. Shadow, and then the veins in his neck went down, he hung the whip on the scaffolding post, picked up the bucket, and walked over to the beam without saying a word.

The blind dog stared at the direction where the grandfather was walking, and there was a lot of tears in the melancholy and dark eyes. It didn't go back until the sound of the grandfather's footsteps was so weak that it disappeared completely. inside. Uncle went to find water. The Uncle believed that there must be water to drink in the direction where the rats fled. Without water, how could they have survived the severe drought until today! The Uncle thought that the reason for their great migration must be because they had no food and had to eat them. How could it be possible to eat up all the wooden utensils in the village that smelled of food and clothing? The grandfather thought that the great migration was definitely not due to lack of water.

The rays of the sun are straight and bright red, walking alone on the mountain range, the rays of light appear stubby and strong, and each beam and strand can be counted with eyes.A pair of empty buckets in front of the shoulders and behind the shoulders let out a mournful and cracked groan, like the sigh of the scorched land.Listening to that pale voice and the lonely, earth-colored kicking under his feet, the Uncle felt a emptiness in his heart that was much larger than the drought in this world.He walked through three villages in a row. The dry well was filled with hay sticks and wheat straw, and there was not even the slightest smell of mold and decay.He decided not to go to the village to find water anymore.

How can the people in Youshui village escape.He walked one deep ditch after another, looking for any specks of moisture and mud along the bottom of the ditch.When he climbed over several mountain ridges and saw a thatch tree in the shade of a rock in a narrow ditch, he said, "Fuck, how can there be a road to nowhere?" Then he sat on that block Resting on the rock, I pulled out the thatch one by one, chewed the sweet juice from the thatch root, and swallowed the crumbs, saying that if there is no water in this ditch, I will be killed. He began to walk step by step into the ditch, panting step by step, falling in front of him like pine shells in winter.He didn't know how far he had traveled. When he was chewing thatch roots just now, the sun was still half white and half red on the western mountain ridge, but now when he found that the dry and cracked land under his feet was replaced by uniform white sand, The sun turned blood red over the mountain.

Dusk was approaching when the Uncle finally found that Yaquan.He first saw that the white sand under his feet had turned into a light red water color, and then his feet felt cool after walking for half a day.Stepping on the wet sand and walking into the ditch, when he felt the narrowness of the ditch squeezed his shoulders, the sound of dripping water came like music.Uncle raised his head, and a piece of green splashed, hitting his eyes.The grandfather stood up.He hadn't seen so much green grass in five months, and he seemed to have forgotten what a meadow looked like.Water squirrel grass, green thatch, and small white flowers, small red flowers, and red and white flowers blooming in the grass.In the hot sun, suddenly there was such a thick smell of green grass, fishy and sweet, spreading loudly at the bottom of the ditch, and the uncle's throat suddenly itched.The Uncle wanted to drink water, but the sudden dry mouth froze irresistibly on his chapped lips.He has already seen a pool half the size of a mat under the dripping cliff a few steps ahead, and the pool is covered by green grass the size of a mat, as if the grass was green from under a mirror to the surface of the mirror. However, just when the grandfather wanted to drop the bucket and quickly ran to the pool to drink, the grandfather stood up.The Uncle swallowed a mouthful of the mucus that was being pulled and pulled again and again, and stood still.He saw a wolf standing behind the bushes, a yellow wolf the size of a blind dog.The wolf's eyes are green and bright.The yellow wolf was first surprised by the appearance of the grandfather, and then when he saw the pair of buckets that the grandfather picked up, his eyes became hateful and fierce, and even his front legs were slightly arched, as if preparing to pounce on it. Uncle was pinned there motionless, staring at the wolf without blinking.He understood that the wolf did not escape because of the spring.Secretly lowering his eyelids, the Uncle saw that there were many hairs on the edges of the water plants, gray, white, and brown-red.Some are animal hair, some are bird hair.When the Uncle suddenly realized that the wolf was a bird or beast waiting by the spring to drink, his heart shivered.Look at how thin it is, maybe it has been waiting for you here for three or five days.The Uncle saw two steps away, a piece of sand and stone with dry and dark red blood stains, many leftover bad dates and walnut-like mouse heads and other long and short gray bones, and only then did he smell the crispness In addition to the fishy smell, there is also a cloudy smell of carrion.Uncle's hands were sweating while holding the pole, his legs shook slightly, and the yellow wolf took a step in front of him.At this moment, when the yellow wolf approached and kicked the weeds and made green and white noises, the Uncle quickly bent down, put the bucket on the ground, and suddenly put the hook in mid-air, aiming at the yellow wolf. head of wolf. The yellow wolf was forced to take half a step back by the master's burden, the green light in Yuan's eyes turned green with hatred to the ground.Uncle fixed his eyes on the yellow wolf's eyes.Yellow Wolf also stared at Uncle's eyes. The collision of their eyes echoed in the empty canyon with the scorching yellow and dazzling crackling sound.The sound of dripping water was as loud as an explosion.The sun is about to set.Time ran past their staring eyes like a team of horses.The blood red on the cliff in front of him began to fade, and a cool air soaked down from the mountain.I don't know when it started, a layer of sweat appeared on Uncle's forehead, and the tiredness on his legs began to grow from his feet, spreading from bottom to top to his calves and thighs.He knew he couldn't go on like this.He walked for a day, but the wolf lay here for a day.He didn't take a sip of water all day, but the wolf guarded the spring that he could drink at any time.He secretly licked his chapped lips with his tongue, feeling that his tongue was hanging on the skin of his lips like hanging on a tuft of thorns.He wanted to be a wolf, can you finish drinking this pool of water? Say hello, give me a load of water, and I'll cook you a bowl of raw corn soup.While saying this, the Uncle gripped the willow pole in his hand more and more tightly, with the end of the pole facing the wolf's forehead, even the hooks hanging from both ends of the pole were frozen to death without shaking. However, the light in Huang Lang's eyes softened.It finally blinked, and even though it opened again after a blink, the Uncle could still see that its blue and hard eyes had softened a bit. The Uncle heard the sound of the sun setting from the other side of the mountain like falling leaves.He tried to put down the head of the burden pointing at the wolf's forehead, and finally put it on a clump of green grass.Uncle said, I will bring you a bowl of rice when I come tomorrow. The yellow wolf retracted its forward-bending legs, turned its head suddenly, and slowly walked around the edge of the pool, walking feebly towards the mouth of the ditch.After walking a few steps, it looked back again. The sound of footsteps was empty and gentle, echoing from loud to weak in the long and narrow gully.The Uncle watched the yellow wolf walk dozens of steps away from the corner, and the shoulder bag slipped from his hands and fell to the ground. He squatted down limply, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and shivered uncontrollably. , Only then did I realize that even the only white cloth pants on my body were sticking to my thighs with sweat. Taking a long breath of relief, the Uncle squatted on the ground and was unable to stand up anymore.He just squatted like that, moved forward a few steps, went to the edge of the pool, lay down on his stomach and drank the spring water like a thirsty cow.In a blink of an eye, the cool water vapor poured in from his mouth and penetrated to the bottom of his feet.He drank a full stomach of water, washed his face, and saw that the sun on the cliff was red but still as thick as paper, then he took a bucket and filled it with water, put the bucket by the pool and took off his underpants.Uncle took a bath by the pool. While taking a bath, my grandfather said, Yellow wolf, yellow wolf, if you give me a load of water today, where can I get you a bowl of raw corn rice tomorrow? Bring you some mice, I know you love meat.Uncle thought, I am old and weak, so I have to let you go.Ten years ago, even a few years ago, not to mention giving you a few mice to eat, it would be considered merciful for me to let you pass under my burden.The Uncle nagged and talked non-stop. After washing the pool of clear water into muddy water, he urinated by the pool again, and the paper-thick sunlight on the top of the cliff faded to a faint red. After picking up two handfuls of grass and putting them on the surface of the two buckets of water, the Uncle began to walk slowly towards the mouth of the ditch.Two buckets of water bend the load into a bow, and with one step, the grass is blocked in the bucket to prevent the water from splashing out.The hoarse and heavy cry of the hook, bumping and bumping in the ravine to the mouth of the ravine.The Uncle thought, I am really old, I should walk slowly, and I will not have to be afraid of anything when I climb the Liang Road before dusk.Moonlight will send me back to the slopes.Spray water on the corn stalks and the dry spots won't squeak and spread.Unexpectedly, Yoyo's grandfather would have blocked him at the mouth of the ditch by a pack of wolves. The yellow wolf, which was as big as a blind man, led the way, and when they reached the mouth of the ditch and saw the uncle coming out of the ditch, they suddenly stood up.After only standing there for a moment, the leading wolves looked back and led the pack of wolves boldly towards the uncle.The Uncle let out a bang all over his body, knowing that he had fallen into that wolf's trap. He thought it would be nice if I didn't take a bath.He thought it would be nice if I didn't sit and rest by the pool.He thought it would be nice for me to hurry up and walk up the mountain ridge to let the wolves go away.When he thought this way, he pretended to be calm, unhurriedly picked up the bucket to a flat place and put it down, calmly took the load off the bucket ring, turned around, and carried the bucket like a wolf. Walking towards the pack of wolves as the pack looked at them.His steps were unhurried, and the hook on the shoulder swung back and forth in front of his hands.The wolves went to meet him, and he also went to meet the wolves group walk.The distance of more than 20 steps shortened rapidly, and when he reached a distance of more than ten steps, he still walked forward calmly, as if he wanted to walk among the wolves in one breath. The wolves were frightened by the grandfather's calmness, and suddenly their footsteps faded, and they stood motionless at the mouth of the ditch.