sjar Chapter 138 The sable is naturally wary; a cunning rabbit has three burrows.
Chapter 138 The sable is naturally wary; a cunning rabbit has three burrows.
People in the Xingan Mountains worship tigers. Some hunters, afraid of breaking a taboo, usually don't call them "tigers" directly, but instead call them "Old Mother," "Big Claw," "Fine Hair," "Wild Boar Herder," "Old Gunner," etc.
The old master of the Lu family was most afraid of breaking taboos, so Lu Zhiqiang heard it a lot since he was a child and also followed the old master in calling him "Big Claw".
Li Ju'an laughed and said, "Of the three of us, you're the only one who's ever met Tiger King. You've even chatted with him. What are you afraid of?"
Last time, Lu Zhiqiang went into the mountains with Sun Weimin and encountered the Tiger King at the bottom of the pit. The tiger's roar kept him awake for several nights, giving him nightmares. Now, when he heard Li Ju'an mention it again, he couldn't care less about anything else and turned to go back.
Song Desheng kindly advised, "Brother Lu, all eleven dogs are with us. You're going down the mountain alone. What if you run into Tiger King by yourself? Let alone Tiger King, even if you run into Zhang San, a Type 54 pistol wouldn't be enough for you to keep firing and reloading."
Lu Zhiqiang gritted his teeth angrily, then turned around and came back. Li Ju'an deliberately asked him where he had just been. Lu Zhiqiang glared at him through gritted teeth, and spat out, "I needed to pee, so I went to find a latrine."
Li Ju'an continued to tease him: "You've solved it in such a short time? You didn't even take your pants off."
"Pah! I went to the outhouse to fart."
The three men led the mule and sled towards Xiaoling Village.
Xiaolingtun is located on the western slope of the northern section of the Xing'an Mountains, near Qianjin Ranch. This ranch was one of the Air Force's Beidahuang Farms 20 years ago, in the 60s. In the past, there were more than a hundred ranches like Qianjin in the Beidahuang reclamation area.
Standing on the ridge, Song Desheng looked down and saw that the farm was surrounded by a vast, boundless plain.
In the past, during the autumn harvest season, this area was covered with ripe, golden wheat fields. When the wind blew, the wheat waves rolled. But now, this area is covered with snow and blends into the continuous mountains.
In the distance, there are endless fields of white snow. In the past, this land was covered with slightly green soybeans during the harvest season, but now it is nothing but snow.
Song Desheng was very excited and shouted, "Brother Li, Brother Lu, I've never been to this place before. There are mud-brick houses and thatched houses. Are those big thatched houses over there a large dormitory for students of the flight school who come to work in shifts? This is really big. It can definitely accommodate one or two hundred people."
He had heard his father talk about the past reclamation of the Great Northern Wilderness and was very curious about the farm's administrative offices, kitchen, and canteen. Before leaving the military, Song's father was an air force mechanic and liked to talk about his experiences of not having enough to eat during natural disasters.
While others were so hungry they were gnawing on tree bark, Song's father ate stewed cabbage and potatoes that he had grown himself on the Beidahuang farm. Each person had a large bowl of it, along with a large aluminum box of fried soybeans, which they could eat as much as they wanted without limit. There were also five or six kinds of pickled vegetables produced on the farm, which they could choose from.
What was even more exciting was that Song's father had unlimited millet porridge back then. It was made from millet grown on the farm, and the farm also produced its own flour, which made snow-white steamed buns. Everyone could eat as much as they wanted. That was during the most difficult period in the country, when everyone was on a ration of food. No one expected that coming to the Great Northern Wilderness reclamation farm would mean having enough to eat!
Whenever Mr. Song talked about this, he was incredibly proud, boasting that he had won over Mrs. Song with such a display. This amused the Song children, and Mrs. Song would tease him, saying that he had taken advantage of her naivety and had easily lured her away.
The pasture is situated along a riverbank, surrounded by mountains on the east, south, and north sides, with a relatively open and flat area on the west side, resembling a pocket. The terrain is diverse, integrating forests, grasslands, and wetlands.
As Song Desheng was talking to himself, he suddenly turned his head and found that Li Ju'an and Lu Zhiqiang were gone. Only his hunting dog, Hua Er, was left behind him, squatting and patiently waiting for him.
The other hunting dogs and the tiger were nowhere to be found.
In his panic, Song Desheng called out, "Brother Li? Brother Lu?"
The hunting dog, Flower Ears, impatiently nibbled lightly at his trouser leg and tugged it westward. Only then did he discover a row of large, rough footprints in the snow. Judging from the fact that the footprints had been made recently, there were still bits of snow between the frozen footprints.
As he walked further, he indeed found a newly set trap, as well as a mark left by Li Ju'an on the tree trunk.
He was overjoyed. It turned out that Li Ju'an and his companion had gone to catch sables, and it seemed that there was hope of catching sables today.
He was skiing on pigskin skis with hair on the bottom, and he could only ski forward, not backward, no matter which way he went. He hurried after Hua Er and Li Ju'an, muttering to himself, "You two are really kind of you, you even left a dog for me to lead the way."
He followed Hua Er for several hundred meters on pigskin skis when suddenly the hunting dog in front of him stopped and turned to look at him.
Song Desheng cursed, picked up his skis, tucked them under his arm, and spat, "Li Ju'an's dog has become a spirit, and now it's looking down on me."
Sables are naturally wary and have multiple burrows; they don't only travel by one route.
After setting the traps, Li Ju'an almost immediately led the hunting dogs away. At several places where traps were set, he scolded the dogs not to follow him. He and Lu Zhiqiang set the traps themselves, fearing that if the dogs left their scent, the sable would become wary and take a detour, abandoning the cave entrance altogether.
He set up seven traps before going to find Song Desheng.
Suddenly, a tiger barked ahead.
Tigers rarely bark, but when they do, it means they've spotted something, though not necessarily their prey.
He went over to take a look and found a claw print behind the bushes next to the red pine. This giant creature's footprint was 14 centimeters wide, 16 centimeters long, and had a stride length of 80 centimeters.
Lu Zhiqiang gasped and growled, "It's a big paw, bigger than my shoe print."
He had small feet and wore size 39 shoes, while Li Ju'an wore size 45. The tiger king's paw print was indeed larger than his foot. The two of them lifted their feet around the large paw print and compared them for a while. Li Ju'an said, "This tiger king is big enough. It doesn't look like a female tiger with cubs. It should be a male tiger, weighing over 800 pounds."
He didn't say the last half of what he wanted to say, and there was a possibility that the tiger weighed nearly a thousand pounds, but he was underestimating it.
Lu Zhiqiang was sweating profusely, his eyes wide open. It's common for territories of male and female tigers to overlap, but he truly hadn't expected to find two tigers with such large claws near the village!