Chapter 32 Chapter 32 Xiao Du

Xiao Du has a child's face, a slender figure, and a lively and cheerful personality, without any worries.Xiao Du is several years older than me. He likes playing with guns and fishing. I met him in the mountains of Chima Mountain. He worked as a driller, and I went there to repair the drilling machine. Chima Mountain is a mountain system in the southern Hubei mountain group. The mountain is majestic and majestic. It is surrounded by clouds and fog all the year round, and birds and animals flock together.When I first entered the mountain, I was overwhelmed by the majesty and majesty of the mountain. I thought that walking into such a mountain was a real geological team member. In such a mountain, you must have a shotgun in your hand.At that time, it was difficult to buy a shotgun, so I went to the county and provincial capitals to buy an air gun in a sports store.I'm still excited to have an air gun, and if I can't hunt animals, I can hunt birds.

With a gun, I feel more or less like a hunter. I set up a target at the door every day, and practice my shooting skills hard. First I hit a matchbox, then I hit a penny, and then I hit a matchhead.If I finished shooting a few boxes of ammunition, I thought I could enter actual combat——I want to hunt. With great ambitions, he went around to invite people to go hunting in the mountains, so he found Xiao Du, who was now known as a sharpshooter.When I hunt, don’t think it’s the kind of extraordinary hunting deep into the mountains and valleys, hunting tigers and leopards, but——hunting sparrows.Seeing that I invited him to play mahjong, Xiaodu said: I have to go to work in the afternoon, so I will accompany you to play mahjong for two hours.two hours?This time is short, but it is good to have someone to accompany me.Xiao Du took out the double-barreled air gun wrapped in oilcloth, counted out twenty bullets one by one from the bullet box, and said, "Let's go."

He only carries twenty bullets?Is this too little?Small air gun bullets, for shooting such a small bird as a sparrow, in my opinion, it is not bad enough to shoot one in five shots.So I raised an objection: Are your bullets a little less?Xiao Du smiled and said: Twenty pills is already a lot.He said a lot, let's go, I think I have a whole box of ammunition with a hundred grains on me, and I will give him some of my ammunition after he finishes shooting. Let's go to a forest, which is a maple forest, in which there are groups of sparrows, chickadees, orioles, wax bills, pulsatillas and other small birds.It was the first time I went to shoot birds in this kind of mountain forest. I was very excited, and I hit it hard. The marksmanship that I thought I had practiced very accurately was out of shape here. Seven or eight shots could not hit a bird. Instead, I saw Xiao Du shooting one by one in front of him. He was standing and shooting without any support, and he was 40 meters away from the sparrow.About two hours into the fight, Xiao Du handed me a bunch of sparrows he had hit, and asked me how much I hit. I only shot three small sparrows.Let me say this, though: I got hurt quite a bit.I counted Xiaodu's battle results, exactly twenty, no more, no less, this is really amazing.Xiao Du said to me: You still need to practice your marksmanship.I am very convinced by Xiao Du's words. I played almost half a box of bombs and only three small sparrows. Of course I have to practice.Xiao Du also said: When you practice marksmanship, you can't put the target too close, at least 40 meters.

From then on, Xiao Du and I became good friends, and we always went out to play birds together when we had time. Xiao Du is old, but he looks young. My beard is very thick, and he hasn't grown a beard yet. The old geological team members often take pleasure in bullying him.When Xiao Du went up the mountain, he brought some snacks and a pot of water. He didn’t put them in the drilling tower. He was worried that others would rush to eat and drink. Water is hidden, most of the time it is to find a big stone and hide them under the stone.This pattern was quickly discovered by the old geologists. They would quietly go out to eat his snacks and drink water when Xiao Du was working. When Xiao Du went, there was only an empty kettle there.Putting this matter on others is to scold others, Xiao Du didn't say a word, not even angry at all, and next time he would find a more hidden place, sometimes he would make a little fake, wrap a bag of small stones in paper and hide in the A place for others to be fooled.

At that time, there were so many birds in the mountains, especially sparrows. A flock flew up from a certain place like a cloud rolling past. The villagers strongly encouraged us to fight. They thought sparrows were one of the four pests, and no one proposed to protect them. When we hunt a lot of sparrows, we put oil in the big iron pan of the old town, put it in a washbasin, and then go to beat five catties and ten catties of bulk grain wine, and eat and drink under the mountain and moon.Xiao Du doesn't drink alcohol, and he doesn't often eat sparrows like this. At most, he tastes a few chopsticks when we invite him to eat, and he always eats by himself.He bolts the door when he gets something to eat. He has a kerosene stove and an electric stove. Most of the time he can only use the kerosene stove without electricity.The kerosene stove burns diesel oil. We found that adding salt to the diesel oil and burning it with kerosene reduces the smoke.Xiaodu came to me for burning diesel oil, and I was in charge of the team's diesel oil, which was used to wash machine parts.One day, I found that Xiao Du went out to shoot a few sparrows, and then bolted the door again when he went back. I went to knock on the door hard, and the door slammed loudly. Xiao Du had no choice but to open the door.I found out that Xiao Du was stewing sparrow soup.On the kerosene stove, he placed a small black pottery pot for boiling Chinese medicine. In the pot, there were three sparrows, one garlic clove, and two slices of ginger, which were stewed so that the whole room was fragrant.Seeing that I had discovered his secret, Xiao Du simply told me that he stewed a can of sparrow soup like this every day, which is really interesting, and I will learn from this experience in the future.

Xiao Du was obsessed with fishing for a while, and his level of fishing was not as good as mine. He went out to fish quietly by himself, in a small ditch at the top of a small pond, but he never caught any fish. When I was free, he took a pole to go Fishing, I found that Xiaodu was trying to catch some eelfish. We don't like to eat this kind of eelfish at all. It doesn't have much meat on its body and has very sharp thorns.Xiao Du caught them, cut them into small pieces, and put them in clay pots for stewing soup. I went to taste the soup, which was very fresh and sweet. I found that Xiao Du was almost a gourmet.He made things that we dismissed, but he had a unique taste.From now on, Xiaodu and I will study food together, and try our best to find food.For example, Xiao Du invented a method of piercing eel: buy a pack of sewing needles, cut open a chopstick, clamp the needle to the chopsticks and tie them tightly, then tie the chopsticks to a bamboo stick, hold them at night The eel basket with a flashlight is a rattan helmet, and only the belt of the helmet is carried, and that is a good eel basket.We didn't like the eels, so we went to pick the snails, which are very big and delicious.It was then that I started eating clam meat. Before that, we thought that only gluttonous people in Shanghai ate clam shell meat.We bask in the sun in winter, the winter sun is warm and warm, mountain eagles fly in the sky, sparrows land on the wheat fields in groups and chirp, a group of male and female farmers who have taken off their cotton jackets are steaming from the mountain pond to the wheat fields To pick pond mud, they throw the mussels they dug out on the bank of the mountain pond. These things cannot be picked into the ground to avoid cutting their feet.When I saw it, I asked Xiao Du to bring the clam shells. There seemed to be nothing to eat in those days. The canteen made pig intestine soup all day long, and it was not cleaned well, and bran often floated on the pig intestine soup.Little Dule hooted a big bucket and came back with a big bucket of mussels. We cleaned the mussel shells with a brush, boiled the mussel shells with boiling water, and took the meat.

I put ginger, garlic, and dried chili in a pot to stew clam shell meat, and stewed a pot of milky milky thick soup, which is very fresh and sweet.I braised the clam shell meat again, which was also delicious.We were pleasantly surprised: Hey, this guy tastes good.Now think about it, some people cook them as seafood for us, and they are expensive, and they are called high-end dishes. Isn’t it funny?Once, when I was eating seafood in Hangzhou, what the lady served was river fresh, even pond fresh. To be honest, I like river fresh. Compared with seafood, the taste of river fresh is much fresher and tender.However, I still called the boss, and I asked him: Boss, you are full of seafood.The boss said: Oh, a thousand rivers belong to the sea, where would the sea be without the river?Where can seafood be without river seafood?Rivers and seas in this world cannot be separated.The boss said some strong words and humor, so I forgave him and invited him over for a drink or two.

There is less and less food to eat in winter. I eat too much of a rustic bird like a sparrow, and it has no fresh taste. I can’t eat it every day, right?Xiao Du invented loach digging.Loach is actually a very cheap dish, only people in Hunan love to eat it, and the Maojia restaurant in Beijing has it: yellow braised loach.The way to make it is to fry the loach with oil until both sides are yellow, then put the bean paste, red pepper, pepper, and garlic cloves in the pot and stew it until it is melted and delicious.The loach is expensive, and Sichuan cuisine is to blame. There is a stir-fried loach in Sichuan cuisine. Since the popularity of Sichuan cuisine, the value of loach has also risen.

One of us took a hoe and a big bucket and set off towards the farmland.Is it safe to dig loach?I was dubious, where to dig such a big field?When he arrived in the field, Xiao Du searched here and there, and quickly found a place. He stood there and pointed to his feet, saying, "Start digging from here. You can see that these are all loach air holes."I looked into the field under my feet, and sure enough there were some irregular small holes in the field mud. I raised my hoe to dig it out, and suddenly loach was dug out.The loach hidden in the field mud has an iron-black luster on its body, and it looks very tender. It seems that it may hurt it if you touch it.We sweated all over, took off our cotton clothes, dug half of the field, dug a bucket full of loaches, brought them back, and started to eat them.Loach in winter has not eaten and its stomach is empty, so there is no need to remove the internal organs, just wash them.There are two ways to make loach. The big loach is stewed. We specially invite the geological team members from Hunan to give guidance. The small loach is made of loach tofu. I've done it before, so experiment.The first time the fire was too high, the winter loach was very excited in the gradually heating pot, jumping up and down, so happy that the water in the pot was splashed, and they didn't feel that they were in trouble.When they reacted, the water in the pot was about to boil, and the little loach died, its skin was torn apart, and it didn't get into the tofu.This won't work, loach drilling tofu must let the loach drill into the tofu.After discussing for a while, I came to the conclusion that it is too early to put the tofu into the pot. Put the tofu and loach into the pot together. When the loach is too hot, the tofu is also hot. How can the loach go into the tofu?They kept jumping to the surface of the water, trying to jump out of the hot pot.Afterwards, we boiled it over a low heat until the water gradually became hot. When the loach was too hot, we threw in cold tofu, and the loach burrowed into the tofu.

The soup of loach and tofu is very fresh, and it is almost the same as that of loach without tofu. I think it's just a different feeling, and the form is more or less the content.That time, we ate very comfortably. The key point was that we made loach drilled tofu, and others just talked about it. We not only made it and tasted it, but also dug loach.And through such an incident, I realized a truth, you have to practice everything very seriously, but imagination is often unreliable and unreliable. Later, Xiao Du took me to get a lot of delicious food, beat cats to eat, and caught snakes to eat.After leaving the geological team, I have been separated from each other since then. I often think of the years in the geological team, the youthful vigor, and the almost mischievous obsession to eat all over the world. I really miss it.At the end of last year, I went back to the south from Beijing for the Spring Festival, and suddenly I saw Xiao Du who had been separated for many years. He was no longer so slender, and his figure expanded horizontally as usual. He was wearing a very fat and swollen gray suit. Cotton-padded clothes, a wool cap on his head, and a birdcage in his hand, walking a little lonely among the crowd, I was startled: Isn’t that Xiao Du from the past?That little Du who confidently insisted on standing forty meters away and shooting at the bird?The little Du who took me to dig loaches in the winter fields like the great land reclamation in Nanniwan?For a split second, I suspected it wasn't him, but when I looked closely, it was clearly him.I want to shout: Xiao Du... I finally didn't shout, I don't know why, in the southern winter at the end of the year, the clouds were so low, and the little north wind was blowing silky rain. Peng Shiyou was walking towards a restaurant, Xiao Du and I finally passed each other, like a sad passage in a novel, my heart clicked, and I only cleared up my thoughts after walking a long way. It's not the same anymore.

Xiaodu...