Chapter 28 Chapter Twenty Eight

(...Whether to go to Huangbaiya or Lijiazhai, whoever goes there may encounter wolves, but Xiong'erchuan is the closest of these three places. You might as well go to Xiong'erchuan first.) Xiongerchuan is my uncle's hometown. This hometown moved from the old county, and the villagers seem to have a mysterious relationship with wolves.According to their uncle, when they lived in the old county, the old county was the worst-hit area for wolves, and they moved to Xiong'erchuan at the foot of the mountain, and Xiong'erchuan was always full of wolves. There are master wolf hunters, and the more wolves come, the more they will follow.I smiled and said, this is called mutual generation and mutual restraint.According to what you said, there are almost no wolves now, so we master wolf hunters should all die?I said, hey, you are also considered a master?The bad guy said you still don't think I'm a master? !I said, be considered a master, the world often has the most famous doctors in the field of diseases that cannot be looked after.The rotten head pouted and ignored me.When we came to a small town called Shimen, which is a famous source of Shimen jade in Shangzhou, and there were several jade processing factories on the town street, the bad guy didn't forget to divide the Jinxiang jade, and the result was divided into two, and each was tied. The rope was hanging around my neck, and I smiled and said, "Don't give it to some woman!" But after eating in the restaurant, he went to the town alone to mess around, and my uncle scolded me in anger.We split up to look for him, and he was talking and laughing with three female shop assistants at the door of a beauty salon, and he was holding a fat man's hand and looking around.The uncle turned dark and said, "What are you doing?" The rotten head said, "Look at the palmistry, she was originally rich, but unfortunately she was not born in a good age. If it was in the Tang Dynasty, she would be able to enter the palace and be a concubine!" He grabbed his arm and walked away. He said: "Secretary, palm reading is to connect with the masses. They talked about wolves!" I said, "Meet a pervert!" He said, "It's really about wolves, the brother of that fat I just came back from Lijiazhai yesterday, and said that someone in Lijiazhai hunted and killed wolves, and when they skinned the wolves, they even took out a wolf cub." What the bad guy said was true or not, but it made my uncle change his action plan. Then I went directly to Lijiazhai.In Lijiazhai, I found a member of the former wolf hunting team to find out, and confirmed that the incident was indeed done by another member of the wolf hunting team, surnamed Cai: after the wolf hunting team was disbanded, the man surnamed Cai stole animal skins. The most terrible thing is that he was seized by the public security department when he was selling salamanders. When he searched his home, he found a fresh wolf skin. He admitted that he had killed a pregnant female wolf.My uncle didn't want to see Cai, so he only saw the photo of the wolf fur from the police station's information about his crimes, and decided that it was wolf No. 4, so he hurriedly led us to Xiong'erchuan.

In my imagination, Xiongerchuan is the same as the small mountain villages we walked through, with a narrow area, dark mountains and mixed trees, but I didn't expect Xiongerchuan to be quite a large basin.The Yinhua River flows from west to east, passes a place called Moon Ridge, turns south suddenly, bends slowly in a full bow shape, and flows westward from the hillside of the Beacon Tower. The road is passing through the middle of the basin, that is, the junction of half of the plateau and half of the beach. The villages are like peach petals, with the big village beside the road as the center, two small villages scattered on the plateau, and two small villages scattered on the beach. .My uncle's home is in Shangxi Village, Yuanshang.

There is a ditch between the West Village and the East Village, which is actually a river. There is water in the river when it rains, and the ditch is barren on weekdays, but there is a bell tower like a gun tower standing on the side of the ditch.I only found out afterwards that when the villagers moved from the old county town earlier, in order to show that they were once the people of the county town, they deliberately moved the clock from the bell tower of the old county town and built it here according to the original building, but the tower collapsed ten years ago. , the bell was buried in the mud for several years.After the promulgation of the regulations prohibiting the hunting of wolves, many strange things happened here. One night, many small clothes, shoes, toys and pacifiers suddenly appeared under the bell tower.These things are all the children's supplies in the town.People talked about it a lot, and some said it was the work of wolves, but no one noticed that wolves were haunting around.Then, a few months later, first, the lips and hooves of pigs and cattle became inflamed and festered, and a group of them died quickly, and then some members of the wolf hunting team and some people who were not part of the wolf hunting team but were still able to hunt became ill. strange disease.Then, three houses in Tanshang East Village caught fire one after another, and the main kiln on the brick kiln in Zhongxin Village collapsed. The villagers made a fuss, clamoring to build a bell tower to suppress Fengshui.However, there were no good carpenters and stonemasons in the village. They built this blockhouse-like building with the same craftsmanship as they are accustomed to repairing tombstone buildings and courtyard gatehouses, and they rang the bell for three days and three nights.Uncle led us to the basin, and didn’t go back directly to the village. Instead, he passed under the bell tower and walked to the north of Gangou. There were dense mounds of graves there, and he wanted me to kowtow to the grandfather’s grave first.

The old man's grave was built on the top of the mound, and the other people's graves were surrounded by thousands of cypress trees, and the old man's grave was covered with spikes.The uncle stood on the grave and said, "Father, I brought you back a man from the city." Then he just stood there without bowing down or praying.I kowtowed three times and sat in the grass in front of the grave. The stories of the old man flashed through my mind one by one: Now, a generation of heroes is with the soil like this. Spikes, which used to be the only symbol of hunters ?On the banks of Gangou, some people caught cliff chickens. The plump, round, black-spotted cliff chickens were extremely stupid. They yelled and flew to the north bank, flying back and forth without rest. Four of a group of ten cliff chickens flew in the air and died of breathlessness. They fell vertically like stones.And a sharp voice yelled: Brother Fu Shan, Brother Fu Shan, are you back? Come over to eat stewed tofu with Yaji chicken after dark!

Returning from the cemetery to Yuanshangxi Village, the muddy road we stepped on during the rainy season was uneven, and our legs were all up.Uncle didn't take me and the bad guy to open the gate of his courtyard. Maybe the bachelor's house had a cold stove and nothing. He just pointed the direction and went to his cousin's house.Now I know that he also has a cousin, and I should also call him uncle.Uncle's courtyard door was also locked, but it was a fake lock. Uncle pulled it and the lock opened, but the door of the main room was not locked at all, and a feather duster was stuck on the knocker.I stood at the door of the main room with two doors open, looking at the chicken coop in the mill shed, the pear and peach trees, the dried sweet potatoes on the top of the courtyard wall, and the scrap wire, broken shoes, and hair balls stuffed in the cracks of the main room wall. In the main room, there are board cabinets, Eight Immortals tables, long chairs, adobe kangs and the dry tobacco box on the top of the adobe wall, and the match made of corn tassels. I sat on an old-fashioned walnut chair and thought about how many generations Twist the roller here and turn around.Uncle said: Don't you feel familiar here? "I've never been here," I said.

"You haven't been, but you haven't dreamed of a place like this?" he said. "It happens to people." "..." I shook my head. "Oh." He sighed softly, his eyes dimmed a little.I completely understand what he means. He must think that my roots are not here, and a nephew is a nephew after all. We boiled water and made tea by ourselves, and while we were drinking, uncle came back.He went to dig the keel in the canyon in front of the village. At first I really thought there were real keels in the canyon. After hearing what my uncle said, it turned out that there were many fossils of ancient organisms on the soil banks on both sides of the canyon, such as elephant bones. , buffalo bone, fish bone, deer bone, these fossils cannot be petrified like stone, but can be scraped into powder with a knife.Someone in the village accidentally cut his hand with a scythe mowing the lawn. He applied this bone meal and found that it relieved the pain and hemorrhage very quickly. So for decades, the villagers went to dig fossils for medicinal purposes. They applied externally to wounds and took them internally. Collectively referred to as the keel.The medicinal value of keel made me add a new knowledge, but what interests me more is that these fossils are fossils of paleontology. It can be imagined that here, it is so large that it has transformed into the whole Shangzhou. In ancient times, it was not a barren land. Maybe it's the ocean, the swamp, or the mountains, where all kinds of animals and plants live, and people are just one of them. But now, there are no elephants, no bison, no deer, only People stay.

"There is another thing that follows people." Rotten said. "what?" "Lice," Rotten said with a grin, "in ancient times people must have had lice." The uncle's hand was reaching into his bosom to grab it, but he stopped and smiled awkwardly.I hated the rotten head's joke, and I said, "Go and bathe Fugui, and wash the black hair to white," and pushed him out the door. "I heard from my grandma," I said, "when our village was moved from the old county, wolves also came?" "That's not the case!" said the uncle. "After the old county was abandoned, Zhen'an County had the most wolves in Shangzhou, and our place had the most wolves in Zhen'an County. If you go to the village, almost every household has been victimized by wolves. Yes, there are probably five families over the age of forty whose children were eaten by wolves, six or seven whose arms were bitten off by wolves, and fourteen or five families who were scratched by wolves. We in Xiongerchuan always think that our Xiongerchuan has enmity with wolves. However, there are many wolves, but Xiongerchuan has a large population. According to the old people, it was only the village in the center of the basin when it moved from the old county. Now the central village is large. There are four small villages around the same town. It’s just that there are more and more people, and the land is getting less and less. The average per capita is less than eight percent of the arable land.”

"There is a movie in the United States called 'Dances with Wolves', which is really a dance with wolves." "Dances with Wolves?" Uncle shook his head, he may not have seen the movie, he thought I was mocking them. "What kind of dance do people and wolves dance? Your grandma knows what kind of day it is! Ziming, you are from the city and know a lot. Do you think it's strange? Wolves have been harming people for generations. Say no more." All of a sudden it disappeared?! There were no hunters in the past, everyone could be called a hunter, and then there was a hunter. This is the role of your uncle. Now there is no wolf hunting team in Shangzhou, only you are left There is only one uncle, and you see how quickly this changes!"

"I'm not a hunter anymore," said the uncle. "Don't you still have this gun and a suit?" said the uncle, "Nowadays children go out at night no matter how dark they are, they just slap their buttocks and go out. Only people of our age are used to holding a gun when going out. Bring a shovel or a stick." That night, my two uncles took over for their nephew. Strictly speaking, the uncle had been the head of the village for several years, and later he had been planting shiitake mushrooms for many years. He looked younger and more lively than the uncle. , A table full of four meat and four vegetarian dried fruits was set up, and more than a dozen people from the village were invited to accompany them.He introduced the visitors to me one by one, and my seniority became much lower. I either called that grandfather or this uncle. When talking about my grandma, they all said my grandma’s nickname, saying that my grandma was Xiong Erchuan. The people with the most late luck were almost eaten by wolves, but survived. They saw that my grandma must have a good fortune after surviving a catastrophe.They also said that I look like my grandfather, who was so tall and thin when he was alive, with slightly swollen eyeballs. "But he has no beard!" said the uncle.I got up in embarrassment, touched my cheeks and upper lip, and they said, how pitiful, it would be nice if I had a big beard.My relatives and elders who have been around for a long time treat me very warmly, but none of them are as handsome as my two uncles. I can’t flatter their image. And the one with short arms and short legs, and even one who kept shaking his head, was normal when he was eating and drinking, but when he stopped chewing, his mouth would salivate.The banquet lasted for a long time, and I couldn't drink too much. They tried to persuade me with many reasons, and I was flushed from drinking, and even unbuttoned my shirt, so that they could see small red spots all over my body. Then he said: "After all, he is from the provincial capital!" He stopped trying to persuade me.And they themselves sat in the manor with each other, punching loudly, and the concubine scooped out the self-brewed persimmon wine from the big wine jar in the inner room.It was almost midnight, and the banquet hadn't left yet, so I laughed along with their smiles, played with Fugui and Cuihua who were hiding under the table, and let Fugui drink a glass of wine, half of which was covered with Fugui's long tongue. cup, and sneezed a few times in a row, when a person walked in at the entrance of the nursery.The gate of the courtyard was always open, and there was no light in the courtyard. It was dark, and the faces of the visitors could not be seen clearly. The uncle did not look back, and shouted while filling the wine: "Xisheng is here, go to the kitchen to get a pair of chopsticks." Bar!"

Sure enough, Xisheng went to the kitchen at the left corner of the yard with heavy steps, took chopsticks and entered the main room, and took a peeled green onion, took a bite and said: "Fu Lai Fu Shan, you don't call me when you hold a banquet. You are out of wine and bring it to my house! I said Shuanzi, you must have gone through a mouse hole, and said you are here in Fu Lai, and you are here!" The fat man said: "You have a dog nose, very sharp, you Why are you looking for me?" Xisheng said, "Deshun asked me to look for you, you know it." Shuanzi said, "I told Deshun about my affairs with Deshun, don't worry about it!" Xisheng said : "I don't care if I take other people's money, the one who collects the debt also has the professional ethics of collecting it!" The uncle said: "Come to my place to have a drink and talk about it!" Both of them stopped talking and continued Taking turns to drink, everyone drank hot again, stripped their jackets and jackets, or looked like a pig's belly, or so thin that the ribs were so thin that there were countless ribs, and all of them had red cloth strips wrapped around their trouser belts.Xisheng drank three glasses of wine, asked his uncle such and such things, and then raised the glasses to toast one by one, but passed Shuanzi, who had a bad face, lowered his head and dipped his finger in the wine to write on the table, Xisheng said: "You know, Gou Xing's father has fallen asleep again. I went to see him, and he has lost his shape. It's not about Hei'er today, but about tomorrow morning. Then he transferred to your West Village and left in a flash." The East Village is here. Once Gou Xing's father falls, I don't know whose turn it is to carry him out!" Everyone was silent for a while.The uncle said: "Xisheng, what's the matter with you? You are drinking happily and talking bad things! The township government always criticizes Xicun's work. Xicun is not active in implementing the government's instructions, and is not active in implementing the summons of the Lord of the Underworld. .” Everyone laughed coaxingly.My uncle asked Lantou and me to hold wine glasses and meet Xisheng, we introduced each other, and Xisheng sat next to me and said, "I mean, why did you go to the East Village so quickly when you got a quota in the West Village? It’s Xicun who came from the provincial capital, and the dog bites through him, and the ghost is afraid of the rich!” He punched me a few more times, and I explained that I couldn’t drink anymore, and he said, “Is it because my forehead is not enough? Shuanzi looks good?!" Shuanzi has a long scar on his forehead.I said, "Did you touch that scar?" Xisheng said, "The wolf dug it up. Does he just rely on this scar to pay for it? Then I'll have one too!" With that in mind, he grabbed the wine bottle and knocked it on himself. On the forehead, the wine bottle was broken, and a stream of blood flowed down.Everyone stood up, cursing "nonsense", first persuaded Shuanzi to go home, then carried Xisheng into the bedroom, and put the ashes on the wound with a burnt cotton cover.

The wine was drunk again until the cock crowed twice, and when the crowd dispersed, the two uncles fell asleep drunk.The rotten head screamed for a headache. Cuihua combed his hair for a long time, and took "Fenbid" again, but the pain was still unceasing. I helped him hit his head with my fist, and he vomited out all the food and wine he ate and drank. Lying there moaning softly like a dead dog.After the rooster crowed four times, I fell asleep, and when I woke up, it was noon the next day. My uncle had already been up to sweep the floor, but the rotten head fell asleep peacefully. "How long has he been tossing around all night?" said the uncle. "When you are all drunk, you're going to piss me off." "He's sick..."