It had snowed all night. There was no telling when it stopped, but the snow in the courtyard was already a foot deep.
Getting dressed, Ning Jie used a snow shovel to pile the snow in the yard into heaps, then loaded it into a single-wheeled handcart and pushed it load by load to the vegetable garden out front.
By daybreak, Second Uncle had finally woken up.
"You're up pretty early."
Second Uncle was carrying a galvanized iron bucket filled with soybean cake and corn grits.
Ning Jie hurried over, took the bucket from him, and said, "Yeah, couldn't sleep anymore."
"Alright then. Your mom hasn't made breakfast yet, right? Your Second Aunt made scallion pancakes and cut up some salted mustard tubers to go with corn porridge. Go call your mom over to eat in a bit."
"Yeah, got it, Second Uncle."
Ning Jie carried the bucket to the cowpen, where the family's little heifer thrust its head forward and began gobbling down its food. Every winter, Second Uncle fed the heifer a bucket of mash made from soybean cake and corn grits every day. It was too cold out, so getting some good food made it less likely to fall sick.
Second Uncle then started preparing the dogs' food. With twenty-seven dogs, they ate quite a lot a day. Second Uncle scalded two buckets of corn grits back-to-back, chopping Chinese cabbage and potatoes into them. Good lord, those little critters slurped and chomped down on it just like pigs.
Second Uncle didn't use soybean cake to feed the dogs. Though soybean cake was high in calories, it was too oily and would dull the dogs' sense of smell.
After finishing the chores, Ning Jie called his mother to go over to Second Uncle's place for scallion pancakes. Truth be told, it had been years since he last tasted Second Aunt's scallion pancakes, and they were still just as delicious.
"Xiao Jie, your Second Uncle told me about you selling that ginseng. Keep the money for yourself to use when you find a wife later on. When your younger brother graduates and gets married, you can pitch in and help him out."
Ning Jie had a particularly close relationship with the younger brother from Second Uncle's family—no different from a biological brother. Unlike him, that younger brother had a sharper mind and was a pure bookworm, currently boarding at the county high school, though it was uncertain which day he would be let out for break.
"Yeah, don't you worry, Second Aunt. I only have one younger brother like that; I'm definitely going to dote on him for all I'm worth."
Second Aunt smiled as she dropped a poached egg into Ning Jie's bowl and said, "Alright, eat up more. Be careful when you go up the mountain later, and don't be so rash and hot-headed."
"Yeah, don't worry, Second Aunt."
When they finished eating, it was probably only around half-past seven—not yet eight o'clock—and it was freezing cold.
The winters of the eighties and the winters of the two-thousands were truly worlds apart. A foot of snow was considered minor; every year they got one or two meters of snowfall, where heavy snow blocking the doors was just an everyday occurrence.
Hitching up the sled with Second Uncle and leading Dahei, Ning Jie stepped out the door.
Today was mainly for setting rabbit snares; they hadn't heard of any big game around. After setting the traps, they would take a stroll to look around—if there was big game, they would send Dahei home to fetch the other dogs, and if not, they would head back at dark.
If they ran into red deer or anything like that, a gun would be enough.
Right now, the snow in the woods was basically around a meter deep, topped with a crust of hard snow. The dogs could run across the top without any trouble, but the moment a person stepped on it, they would sink right in.
It was the same for red deer. Those creatures were large in size, and if they really bumped into one in this deep snow hollow, it wouldn't be able to run fast at all.
Though Dahei might not necessarily win in a one-on-one fight, Dahei was smart. As long as Dahei could corner a red deer, it was simply a matter of settling it with a single gunshot, so bringing too many dogs was useless either way.
Heading with Second Uncle to the small woods on the sunny slope—wild rabbits basically all huddled together once winter set in. For one thing, the small woods on the sunny slope were scarce, providing some dry grass and thin twigs; for another, once spring struck, these fellows would start pairing up.
Relatively speaking, catching rabbits in winter was also the simplest, and there was no need to use a gun at all.
Those hunters on TV shooting rabbits with guns were purely fooling children. Bullets were a lot more precious than rabbits, and besides, those creatures were small; after taking a shot, they weren't even easy to clean up.
For a veteran hunter catching rabbits, a length of iron wire was enough.
The old saying of waiting by a stump for a hare worked very well for hunters. Rabbits had a habit of generally retracing their steps along paths they had already walked.
After it snowed, you could see whether a rabbit had walked that way today. Their catching method was simple too: twist a loop at one end of the iron wire with a chopstick, thread the other end through, and you had an inescapable rabbit snare.
As soon as a rabbit poked its head in, the more it struggled, the tighter it got, and before long it would choke itself to death.
Catching rabbits nowadays had to be done early. Once spring hit, they basically stopped setting snares, because by then most of the female rabbits were pregnant, and sometimes you'd snare one whose belly was full of pups—it was too heavy a sin.
Walking around twice, the paths trodden by rabbits in the small woods were clearly visible.
These little creatures were quite amusing when they ran, leaving only three snow pits in the snowfield. When they ran, their front paws were held together while their two hind legs exerted force, leaving footprints spaced roughly half a meter to a meter apart.
You could judge the direction and size of a running rabbit just from its footprints—this was the most basic common sense for a hunter.
When setting rabbit snares, you couldn't set them if there were only footprints going in a single direction; it was useless even if you did. There had to be at least two passes—back and forth—before you could be sure the rabbits would still travel this route in the near future.
Ning Jie found a rabbit trail. Yesterday's snow had filled the path in, leaving it slightly depressed, and a few clear rabbit prints caught his eye.
Finding a spot where two trees were relatively narrow, Ning Jie wrapped the rabbit snare around a small tree, then suspended the looped end right over the rabbit's path.
He snapped off two pieces of branches, about thirty centimeters long, and stuck them tightly one by one into the gaps on both sides of the rabbit trail, forcing it to walk only along this path.
After finishing the first snare, Ning Jie started looking for the second one.
This patch of woods had rabbit trails winding back and forth; it looked like there must be plenty of rabbits mating here on the sunny slope this year.
Repeating the same process, he set a total of ten rabbit snares, then Ning Jie retraced his steps and walked out of the woods.
Dahei was waiting outside the woods, wagging its tail nonstop when it saw Ning Jie coming out.
Rabbits were naturally timid; if someone stepped on a few footprints along a path they had walked, they would take a detour for ten days to half a month. Still, their alertness only amounted to that much—as long as you didn't step on the paths they walked and just smoothed the snow flat beside them, they didn't think much of it.
Lighting a cigarette and smoking less than half of it, Second Uncle came down from the slope.
"How is it, Second Uncle? Are there many up there?"
Second Uncle smiled and nodded, saying, "Up in that copse of scrubby wood [inferior trees forming a small wood], paths are all trodden down. I set a dozen or so snares. How about you?"
Ning Jie also said, "Same here. It's the same in this spot, I set ten too. The footprints were just stepped in, super fresh."
"Alright then. Let's walk over to the shady slope, go check the north slope of Liudaogang Head to see if the red deer are back. If not, we'll go a bit further in toward the big clay pit."
The snares were set; coming back to check them tonight or making a trip tomorrow morning would both work fine.
There were fewer and fewer meat-eating animals in the mountains nowadays, so leaving them for a night wouldn't ruin anything. Rabbits were just the appetizer; red deer were the main event.
Shouldering their guns, the two of them stepped deep and shallow into the snow as they walked toward the north slope.