"Second Uncle, how many did you set snares for?"
Second Uncle pulled a long face and said, "Don't bring it up. I set four in total, and one was cleaned out by a yellow-skinned weasel. When I got there, two yellow-skinned weasels were digging right into it. What a waste of a box of Changbai ginseng."
Ning Jie chuckled. It was completely normal for a yellow-skinned weasel to swipe their trapped rabbits. It wasn't just weasels—sometimes even eagles would swoop in to scavenge.
"What about you? How many did you bag?"
"Six."
"Not bad, that's pretty good. With the pheasants we're adding today, it adds up to a forestry worker's monthly salary."
Forestry workers had it good these days. Even though the monthly wage was just over forty yuan, the perks were plentiful. Especially those forestry department leaders—virtually every single one of them had a Beijing Jeep 212.
Right now, those jeeps were still the mainstream choice, partly because the roads were bad, and partly because they were cheap.
A Jeep 212 cost around thirty-one or thirty-two thousand, while a Santana went for over two hundred thousand. At current wage levels, saving up for a 212 would take a few decades, let alone a Santana.
Second Uncle puffed on his cigarette and said, "You keep hustling, and when you finally buy a jeep back here, you can let me show off a bit too."
Ning Jie smiled and said, "By the time I get one, I'll bring back a Mercedes S-Class."
Second Uncle gave Ning Jie a side-eye and said, "A Mercedes S-Class, my foot. Even high-ranking officials don't get to ride in those things. Take Marshal Ye, for instance—yeah, Marshal Ye's car is one of those. You think you're better than a marshal?"
"Who on earth did you learn this habit of bragging from?"
Ning Jie grinned and said, "There's no telling. I learned it from you."
"You little rascal—hey, don't run! Let me kick you!"
The two men headed down the mountain and stopped by Old Man Zhang's place to pick up the cattle. This time they didn't bring any gifts, but Second Uncle took the four Ancient Boar tusks with him. The tusks were around ten centimeters long, just the right size to carve into a few trinkets.
By the time pitch black night fell, the two of them arrived home.
Second Uncle fished out a block of frozen meat to thaw. Once it softened up, he tossed it straight to Dahei.
Dahei gulped it down in a few ravenous bites. The brute practically swallowed the rest whole, its eyes bulging wide as it stretched out its neck while choking.
Second Uncle chided it with a laugh as he patted Dahei on the head. "Look at you, you gluttonous beast—you're just like your mother. How on earth did your mother ever manage to catch the eye of a black wolf?"
Dahei looked at Second Uncle with a pitiful expression, its ears pinned back against its head, whimpering as it wagged its big backside and tail.
Dahei's mother was a hunting dog with a black back and a yellow belly. To put it nicely, she had a cheap-looking vibe, and on top of that, she was old.
On two separate occasions when Second Uncle went hunting up the mountain, he turned around only to find one dog missing. Both times, Dahei's mother vanished completely, only to trot back home by herself at night.
Another time they headed up the mountain, Second Uncle kept his guard up and watched with his own eyes as Dahei's mother slipped into the woods. He quietly followed behind her and caught her in the act of being bred by an elderly lone wolf.
There was no reproductive isolation between wolves and dogs. People had tried breeding them in the past, but ordinary wolves usually wanted nothing to do with dogs and would simply tear them to shreds.
That black wolf must have been starving out of its mind, past caring whether a dog looked good or not. Free food had practically delivered itself to its doorstep, after all.
At least, that was how Second Uncle saw it. Whether the wolf felt the same way, Ning Jie had no clue—though it was entirely possible that to a wolf, this kind of trashy-looking dog looked like a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Persian beauty. Maybe the old wolf just had a thing for older dames.
When spring arrived, Dahei was born.
The little guy took after his father: large, smart, and with a colder gaze than ordinary dogs. But the moment this fellow started eating, he was cut from the exact same cloth as his mother.
On top of that, he ate a ton and grew fast. While a normal hunting dog took two and a half years to reach full size, this monster was already as big as an adult dog by the time he was one year old.
Among the family's dogs, aside from Dahuang, nobody matched his size.
Dahuang was an anomaly of his own. Even though he was a hunting dog, he belonged to the Lü Bu tier among canines—huge and spoiling for a fight, refusing to bow to anyone.
Ning Jie frequently suspected that this bastard was just a shaved lion, or perhaps some kind of hyper-androgenic mutant strain of dog.
There was a Russian breed called the Caucasian Shepherd; the larger ones stood eighty to ninety centimeters tall on all fours and weighed a hundred and sixty or seventy pounds. Dahuang's physique was hardly any smaller than a large Caucasian Shepherd.
After feeding Dahei his special portion, Second Uncle led him back to the kennel.
They had plenty of dogs, so Second Uncle had simply built a shed larger than the cattle barn. With Dahuang and Dahei standing guard, the dogs generally didn't fight among themselves. Whenever a scuffle broke out, Dahuang and Dahei would rush in and lay down a ferocious beatdown, saving everyone the trouble.
Before they knew it, the date rolled around to December tenth.
They had tracked that herd of red deer for over a week without finding a single trace. More likely than not, the red deer hadn't made their return journey this year and had retreated deep into Baitou Mountain.
During that time, Second Uncle and he went to three local markets to offload some of the scattered game they had caught. Lately, they hadn't landed any major game—they hadn't even laid eyes on a roe deer.
By now, the forestry farm had begun frantically hauling out timber. In the logged-out areas, the ginseng farms would turn over the soil to plant ginseng the following year, squeezing the animals' living space and driving them deeper into the remote mountains.
Second Uncle increasingly felt that Ning Jie was making sense. In past years, winter never passed without bagging a red deer or a sika deer, but this year they only had a single Ancient Boar—output was down by more than half.
Right after returning from the market, Second Uncle brought back a good haul of sorghum candy. The treats had a layer of flour wrapped around the outside and were nice and chewy, tasting much better than the cheap little sweets.
When they got home, Mother Lin wiped her hands on her apron as she walked into the room, saying, "Zhuzi came by a moment ago and said someone sent you a letter. I tried to get him to stay for dinner, but he wouldn't. Whenever you see him next, buy him a couple of packs of cigarettes."
Mother Lin still remembered Zhuzi's favor. Ning Jie nodded in agreement, feeling a little curious—who on earth would be writing him a letter?
He had stopped going to school after finishing junior high, not because his grades were bad, but because he wanted to help support the household alongside Second Uncle.
Second Uncle had smoked through the tobacco pouches to the point of fraying the edges, but he flatly refused to let Ning Jie attend high school. As for his old classmates, they were all cooped up in the mountain hollows, and the only two who went to normal school turned out to be girls.
In this day and age, unless a woman was deeply fond of you, she would never write you a letter. Girls back in this era were still very reserved—unlike those later years of rapid internet development where people sent out online bottled messages across thousands of miles.
"Who is it?"
"How would I know? I didn't open your letter. My reading skills are rusty, and I can't make heads or tails of it."
Ning Jie took the letter. The return address was listed as City B Forestry, and the handwriting was graceful and intimately familiar to him. At a single glance, he could tell it was written by Lin Yuezhi.
Holding the letter, he walked into his bedroom while Mother Lin chuckled secretly behind his back, taking in her son's demeanor—this clearly looked like romance.
He unfolded the letter. It spanned two full sheets of paper, densely covered in handwriting.
Reading through it carefully, he realized Lin Yuezhi's mother had originally scheduled her surgery precisely for the day Ning Jie played the hero saving the damsel in distress—which, in his past life, was the exact day the two families got engaged.
He never expected that by meddling and paying the surgery fees in advance, Mother Lin had undergone the operation just three days after his departure, and the procedure had been a complete success.