Chapter 46 Chapter Forty-Two

The people went from Kiborahathava, the tomb of the covetous, to Hasirod, and they lived in Hasirod.Afterwards the people set out from Hasiroth and camped in the wilderness of Paran.We are approaching Canaan, the good and wide land flowing with milk and secrets. What happened next was unexpected. Every household in the village lived a long period of eating meat.The day after Sima Lan and his brothers and sisters were buried, the adults went to the ditch under the west beam, and when they came back, they caught more crows than the children the day before. On the third day, I went again and caught a bunch of black crows again.

Sima Xiaoxiao distributed those crows to each household according to their heads every day, sometimes one for two people, and sometimes one for each family.The weather has finally come to Zhengchun. No matter how much rain is lacking, the green grass and trees are still green, and the wild vegetables are also growing. Girls sometimes go to the front and back of the house, and they can pick up a handful or two, accompanied by crows. When the meat is boiled in the pot, there will be a lot of oil and water in the day, and there will be a slight blush on the face.It's just that there is no salt in the cooked crow meat. After ten days and a half months, adults and children will vomit up and down.It turns out that there is no salt, no matter what kind of mountain delicacies, there is no taste, and it also makes people lose their strength.

One evening, the men caught a few more crows and came back from the mountain ridge. When they got together at the head of the village, Lan Baisui said, "I can't live without salt." Du Yan said: "If people don't eat salt, they will collapse and die." Sima smiled and thought for a while. "It's time to sell some skins. I haven't sold human skins for several years. Sell some skins and buy some salt to bring back and share." Who is going?The setting sun is lightly pink on the beams, and weeds are flourishing in the sparse wheat fields. It seems that a whole mountain range is barren grass and wild land.The streets and alleys of the village are like rivers flowing with red water.The men stood together at the head of the village, with more than twenty crows, dead and wounded, tied together like a bunch of big ants hanging from a tree.They all thought it was time to go to the city or town to buy some salt, and they all said it was time to sell the human skin.Sima smiled and said that it was still the rules of the elders, those who got married and started a business went, and those who did not marry a daughter-in-law kept their good legs for the daughter-in-law to touch and see.They picked out Dugan, Du Yan, Lan Baisui, and Lan Changshou, seven or eight men with wives and children, and asked them to stand behind the three thatched huts at the head of the village.Sima smiled and took off his trousers first, revealing two red legs with half smooth and the other half scarred like tree bark. He said that he would take off his trousers and have a look. The ones with more scars were left than mine, and the ones with less scars were left behind. A trip to the fire hospital, selling the skins to buy salt, you can eat a catty or two catties more for yourself.

A few took off their pants.There were many red scars on a row of thighs, like a layer of red mud. Lan Baisui didn't take off his pants. "I'll go," he said, "I've got a good piece of skin on my leg." A few days later, Dugan and Lan Changshou carried Lan Baisui back with a door panel, and half a bag of salt was placed on the top of the door panel.They say that the whole world is suffering from famine. In the past, half a skin of a leg could be exchanged for half a pot of salt, but now a skin of a leg cannot be exchanged for a bag of salt.However, after all, there is salt. The big households are divided into eight taels, and the small households are divided into six taels.It happened to be Guyu that day, which was considered a festival, so I set up three cauldrons in front of the village, boiled a pot of water, and sent more than a dozen men out of the village for two hours, and brought back more than thirty crows. An eagle, eating and drinking lively in front of the village.All the men and women in Sanxing Village recalled the day of Gu Yu when they were alive, and said that the meal was the best meal they ate in their lives, and that they would never forget the wild crow meal that Sima Xiaoxiao gave them. cook.There is salt, meat, and vegetables, and people are suddenly excited, shouting in the village to eat bacon——to eat bacon—every family closed their doors, took their bowls and chopsticks, and went to the front of the village Waiting quietly on a piece of wheat field.The men killed the wild crows and eagles they had caught on the edge of the field, and threw everything except the hair and dirt into the cauldron to boil.When the meat is about to be cooked, each family pours boxes of dried and fresh wild vegetables into the pot.The fire was burning extremely vigorously, crackling and exploding.There hasn't been such a grand event in the village for many years. Everyone in a village, regardless of the Zhang family, the Li family, or the Lan surname and Du surname, all gather together for dinner, just like weddings and banquets in previous years.The sun is golden and green, and the wind blows past the village like fine silk.Those feathers still stained with blood danced and rested in the fields of the village.The air was filled with a greasy red scent, and towards the houses around the three cauldrons, among the fields and in the ravines, distant music rippling past.The adults were smoking and talking far away from the cauldron. Sima Lan Niang, Lan Shishi's mother, and Du Yan's wife, Sima Taohua, were all alone guarding a pot, stirring the pot.The children stopped their saliva, stood motionless by the cauldron, held the bowls in their hands, and switched to the other hand when one got tired, their eyes staring as if they were about to flow into the pot.At this time, Sima Lanniang lifted the cover and looked at it, and called out to the men, "It's time to add salt!"

Sima turned around with a smile, "A pot contains half a catty." "Eight or two?" "It's nothing but seven taels in a pot." Using a scale, put seven taels of table salt in each pot.The color of table salt is black and gray. Once thrown into the pot, the white foam in the broth immediately shattered, and the crow's head, crow's legs, eagle's wings, eagle frame, and bright red were as bright as paint. With a layer of paint, the wild vegetables in the pot are full of strong green.The whole field in front of the village is full of purple fragrance.Before eating, he carried Lan Baisui out of the house and let him sit on an armchair. Sima Lanniang brought him a crow's leg and said you should try it first.He said let the village chief taste it.She said that you sold the Pili, it's up to you to taste it.Lan Baisui took the crow's leg, and the children flocked towards him from the pot like sheep.Sima Lan, Sima Lu, Sima Hu, Du Zhuang, Du Zhu, Liu Gen and Yang Gen, as well as his own Lan Shi, Lan San Jiu, Jiu Shi, Ba Shi and Zhu Cui.A pair of blue eyes stared at the crow's leg in his hand and his opening mouth.He saw the children's thin and long necks when they swallowed, and their Adam's apples slid up and down quickly, making the scorching sound of wheels rolling over beams.He touched the crow's leg to his lips, looked at the man and woman behind the child and said:

"It's ripe, rotten and fragrant." The children immediately rushed towards the three cauldrons, the collision of bowls and chopsticks, and the sound of gongs and drums.But at this moment Sima Hu didn't run to the pot, he strode up, snatched the crow's leg from Lan Baisui's hand, and ran to the crowd to eat it. Lan Baisui said: "My God, the children are starving to death." Lan Shisi saw it, chased him to a tree outside the crowd, stood in front of Sima Hu, and grabbed the crow's leg again. "You are shameless, this is my father's." Sima Hu salivated and smiled:

"People say you want to be my sister-in-law, but to be my sister-in-law, you have to let me eat half of it." Lan Shisi yelled, spat in front of Sima Hu and left.But after walking a few steps, he turned around and tore off half of the meat from the crow's leg and gave it to Sima Hu. In mid-spring, the sky is high and white, and the clouds are like cotton wool.The famine left the village with no pigs, sheep, chickens or ducks.The village streets are quiet, as empty and lonely as crop fields after harvest.The only pair of old cows looked here from the other side of the village, as if they were looking at a distant grassland.

The wheat engulfed by the weeds on the mountain range bent over aggrieved among the grass.Everywhere is dry green and lush earthy yellow.In mid-spring, the appearance of the world's scorching summer made the Palou Mountains become unprecedentedly deserted.Only the wheat field in front of the village is extraordinary on the day of Grain Rain.Sima Xiaoxiao, Du Yan, and Lan Changshou, Lan Baisui's uncle and younger brother, each took care of a cauldron.People of the three surnames stood in three teams. Those surnamed Sima went to Sima Xiaoxiao's to share crow meat and cooked vegetables, those surnamed Du went to Du Yan's, and those surnamed Lan went to Lan Changshou's.The three teams moved slowly towards the pot, and each person put their bowls in front of the pot, and got half a crow's leg or a wing, a crow's head or half a crow's bone.Then put a spoonful of broth and two spoonfuls of wild vegetables.Soup and vegetables are rationed, and you can serve them yourself after eating.After filling, add water and vegetables to the pot, and add firewood under the pot to start the fire.After nearly two years of hunger, on the day of Grain Rain, it was like breaking the fast, and the ravines and ravines were filled with the sound of eating and drinking from mountains and tsunamis.The air is filled with the half-green and half-purple oily smell of vegetables and wild meat.Walking in front of the village, the breath hangs on your lips and the tip of your nose like cobwebs. Take a deep breath, and the white salty smell will condense in your throat like frost. .Du Bo of Du Yan's family is hungry and has no energy to eat, Sima Taohua asks Zhucui to send back half a rack of crow bones and two spoonfuls of green vegetables.Zhucui went to the alley of the village and was snatched away by Sima Hu who was hiding there.Zhu Cui said Sima Hu, you are a shameless dog.Sima Hu didn't say anything, gnawed on the crow's bones and ran towards the mill road in the middle of the village.Sima Taohua went to find Sima and said with a smile, brother, the sixth child you raised is not a human but a wolf, why don't you send him to the ditch to starve to death.Sima smiled and asked Sima Lan to bring Du Bo his bowl of Yazhucai.

When Sima Lan came to Du Bo's house with a bowl, he saw Du Bo lying on a bed in the yard, warming a book of traditional Chinese medicine with his hands flipping. He put down the crow meat and stood there for a while without saying a word. Du Bo came out of the house.After coming out, he inexplicably didn't want to eat crow meat and boiled vegetables anymore. He couldn't stop himself from thinking about the book Du Bo was reading on the bed under the sun. Standing behind a corner in the middle of the village, he stayed there for a long time. He saw someone slapping his stomach by the pot like a watermelon. He saw someone dragging a child and walking out of the wheat field with bowls and chopsticks. He heard his father Sima laughing. I called to the villagers, saying that there is salt and wild vegetables to eat, and each family can share a black crow every day.It is said that life is still going on, and the wheat can't be so barren. Tomorrow, those who carry the hoe will go to hoe the ground, and those who can't resist the hoe will squat in the field and pull weeds.

The villagers wiped their mouths and went home. There are still a few children left by the stove, fishing for crow bones in the pot.Sima Lan walked over there slowly. Lan Changshou, who left late, said to the children, "If you haven't eaten enough, go find crows in the deep ditch by yourself. As soon as the grass is uncovered, the crows will fall to the bottom of the ditch. You just use branches to beat them." The children stood motionless by the pot, and all their eyes fell on Sima Lan.It seemed that suddenly, they understood where the crows that were distributed every day in the village for half a month came from.It was also as if they already knew that the crow was brought back from the Xiliang ditch first, so they lured the adults to hunt crows in the ditch, but the adults didn't say that they were too lazy to prove it.They thought they could kill dozens of them, and adults could kill dozens of them even more.But Lan Changshou said that as soon as the grass was uncovered, the crow would fall to the bottom of the ditch. These words seemed to have revealed the mystery that the children hadn't had time to think about.They were all surprised that they ate so much crow meat, but no one asked where the crow came from.They all knew where the crow came from, but no one thought about how the crow would fall down while flying in the sky.

"Let's take a look." Sima Lan said. They walked towards the ditch under the west beam. They walked quickly along the way, as if they wanted to tire their round stomachs immediately, and when they reached the ditch, some of them complained of stomach pains.But Sima Lan remained silent and led the boys and girls towards the ditch.When they got there, everyone stopped with a bang, and they saw that the paired tombs were all covered with thick branches and weeds.There are crows crazily planing on the thick comfrey.They didn't fly away until they got to the crow.When the branches and weeds were removed, the children were stunned, and the corpses of couples were naked in the pit.There was no flesh on the dead bodies, and the gray-black skeletons were scattered in the pit like dead branches.Snow-white maggots paraded in swarms on the skeleton like white ants, entering from the eye sockets and crawling out from the mouth stool, like a procession entering from this city gate and exiting from which city gate.The girls took a look when they were uncovering the first tomb, and they froze all of a sudden, their faces turned pale as if struck by lightning, their breathing stopped, and they just stood by the pit, as stiff as a corpse.Boys will always be boys. They followed Sima Lan and watched him stare blankly at the edge of the first pit. The firewood on the pit was picked up.He picked up the firewood from the third pit, and finally picked it up to the side of the single corpse pit of his third brother Sima Mu and did not move.The warm, dark, rancid stench frantically rushed towards their mouths and noses, and the air waves engulfed them like a forest. At first, crows came down from the cliff screaming, as if they were calling, first a few, then a dozen, and finally hundreds of them.It was as if all the crows of the world had come. They were circling over the ditch, rolling back and forth like black clouds, flying to cover the sky and the sun, refusing to land, and refusing to go to other places. The impatient cry was like scorching, flying sand and rolling stones in the ditch. They were lured by the bones and maggots, and they were on fire. All the boys and girls held branches and waited. Deadlocked time creaked under the feet of the crows and over the heads of the children. Sima Hu said, "We hide them and they fall." Sima Lan said, "You haven't eaten enough crow meat yet." Sima Lu said, "Let's roll this bone up with grass and bury it somewhere else." After three days and two days, the villagers who hoeed the ground and pulled the weeds ate up all the crow meat and wild vegetables at home, and when they went to hunt crows in the lower ditch of Xiliang, they found that all the bones in the seventeen corpse pits were gone. gone.The ditch is extremely quiet, a large number of crows have moved to no one knows where, only a few lonely and hopeless cry on the cliff.Someone came back to the village and called Sima Xiaoxiao, called Du Yan and all the men, and they all stood by the dozens of corpse pits, saying that they beat all the women and children when they went home. Where did you say that this is a buried corpse?This is to intentionally cut off the rations of the whole village.Sima smiled and said, let’s cut it. After hoeing the crops, I led the villagers to hunt for waste. This crow can’t be eaten anymore. Someone in the village died after eating crow meat. His body was as black as poisoned. . The men looked at him in surprise and suspicion. Sima smiled and said, "Didn't you see that Dugan hasn't been hoeing the ground these two days?" No one said a word, thinking that this Duggan is really nothing, leaving the child alone, and enjoying the happiness first.