In Han Meilin's animal painting exhibition, a gouache painting of a dog attracted me.But it’s not so much that the artist used the vivid brushwork to point out the soft, bright and slightly mischievous eyes, fully expressing the docile, kind, clever and lively characteristics of this puppy, which I admire, but it’s better to say that the artist gave this painting The title of the painting made me feel deeply.The artist titled this painting "Little Friends in Distress".In my opinion, this is definitely not the artist's pretending to be mysterious, nor is it a fictional and personified animal image. It must be the artist's memorial to the little friend who actually has a dog.Sure enough, I heard later that the painter did have this little friend by his side in times of adversity, but he died at the hands of the "Gang of Four" minions. "Little friends in need"!I think that when a person can no longer find friendship and care among his own kind, but wants to pour his love on a quadruped animal, he must have experienced a period of unspeakable pain and suffering. endured loneliness.Some literary masters have written immortal works on the friendship between a lonely man and a dog, such as Turgenev and Maupassant; and the natural scientist Buffon has also used his beautiful brushwork to describe the dog. Great description.According to him, dogs are the earliest friends of man and beauty. He also said that dogs fully possess human emotions and moral concepts.Maybe that's an exaggeration, but if someone asks me: what's your favorite animal?I still have to answer in the affirmative: dogs!Because I myself have witnessed the close friendship between a dog and a lonely old man.The Story of Old Man Xing and the Dog 1

This dog, like tens of thousands of dogs in the countryside, has no distinctive features, let alone a rare purebred dog.This is a yellow native male dog.It may be smoother in coat color and stronger in body than other dogs, but it has never performed any touching deeds that can be included in legends.Its owner is the same as hundreds of millions of farmers in the countryside. If I hadn't worked in his production team, and if the special relationship between him and his dog hadn't aroused my interest, I wouldn't have noticed such a thing. A very ordinary rural old man.This is a lonely old man in his sixties. He is neither tall nor short. Solemn look.When I was free, I would just squat under the wall or sit cross-legged on the kang, lost in thought, with a long smoke pot in my mouth, smoking pot after pot.Although there are wrinkles drawn on his sauce-purple face, these wrinkles are all along the texture of the facial muscles, not as fine and dense as the wrinkles on the faces of old intellectuals.His eyes are small, and the eyeballs are a little cloudy, but sometimes there is a little bit of the experienced wisdom of the elderly.His hair and beard were gray, of course, but he wasn't bald.In short, as soon as you saw him, you could see that although he had the melancholy dullness of ordinary lonely people, he was still a sane and strong old man.He is an all-rounder in production. Sometimes he grows vegetables, sometimes drives cars, and sometimes feeds livestock. He can do whatever the production team sends him to do, and he never cares about work points and remuneration.He lives alone in a small adobe house.This adobe house is also lonely, located at the west end of Zhuangzi, with a lonely tall poplar tree at the door.There is only one kang and two old blackened wooden crates in his house, but they are cleaned up very cleanly.In addition to the general poverty, the old man also has difficulties caused by being single. "Going out with a lock and entering with a fire" sums up his life.However, the lonely old man always seems to have strong vitality and immunity. As far as I know, he has never been sick, and he has never missed a day's work.

No matter how much the owner likes the dog, the dog of the Zhuanghu people has no name. The dog is still called "Dog"; the people of the Zhuanghu household are rarely called Dahao. Regardless of adults, dolls, cadres, and members of the commune, they all call this old man "Old Xing". .Over time, the old man's name also disappeared from people's memory.Old man Xing and his dog are inseparable companions. He also takes it with him when he is driving a car on business trips. He sits on the shaft of the car while the dog runs back and forth in front of the car.If it saw something it was interested in, at most it ran forward to sniff it, then sneezed, and hurried back into the cart.If old man Xing was working near Zhuangzi, the dog would run out of the village with a group of children at the end of the day, and the children happily greeted their parents, snatched their shovels or hoes and carried them on their shoulders, When the dog saw the old man Xing, it rushed up, licked his face, licked his hands, his ears were tightly attached to his head, his tail was wagging so much that even his waist twisted.

This dog's affection for its master is sincere, because the old man Xing only gets two to three hundred catties of grain with skins a year, and with some vegetables, he can barely maintain his own food and clothing, and there is no extra grain to feed it, but When old man Xing was cooking, it always stayed by his side, until old man Xing locked the door after eating and went to work, then went outside to find some wild food.It also seems to know that the owner can't get anything to feed it, and never "wows" to ask for alms.It guarded him and watched him eat out of a genuine sense of attachment, because the commune members were only at home when they were eating.If it was night, the rest time would be longer, of course. After the old man had finished eating, he would stroke it with a cigarette pot in his mouth, wanting to chat with it for a while.

"Where are you going today? Let me see if you are full? Damn it, it's all round..." Sometimes he pointed it with his index finger, threatening it and said, "Damn it, you want to bite the baby. I'll give you a stick. If they tease you, run away, the place is big. Don't dare to scare the doll..." In fact, he has never hit it before, and it doesn't need to be taught such a lesson at all.It is tame, and children often ride on it to play. When it comes to Chinese New Year, the production team will also slaughter one or two sheep and distribute them to the members. Old man Xing will say to it: "Tomorrow, the sheep pen will slaughter the sheep. You can go to the sheep pen and lick some sheep's blood, as well as the leftover intestines." Belly..." Although members of the commune seldom eat meat a few times a year, when old man Xing eats meat, he doesn't tear off all the meat from the bones like others. The bones were broken open with the back of a knife and fed piece by piece to his dog. "Chew it well, there is a lot of meat on it, your teeth are fine, mine is bad..." Old man Xing doesn't talk much to people, but he is very talkative when he is with his dog.The only way for this lonely old man to pass his loneliness is with his dog.For him, this is not a dog, but a relative by his side.On that summer night, when the production team sent him to watch the vegetable garden, only this dog stayed with him until dawn in the mosquito-filled vegetable field; in winter, when he fed the livestock at night, only this dog survived with him During the long cold night, at dawn, the dog's back, the tip of the tail, and even the dog's beard were covered with a layer of hoarfrost.Although the dog can't express its concern for the old man with words, nor can it chase away mosquitoes for him or set up a fire for him to roast, but it always guards him like a loyal guard, which is enough to make the old man so happy Humanity, numb from poverty and toil, was touched.Many nights, he hugged it to keep each other warm. In the dead of night, it seemed that only he and his dog were left in the world.In fact, old man Xing had a family and a woman.To truly understand the relationship between him and his dog, we have to start from this point.