Chapter 3: The Mandrill, the Wild Monster, and the Short Mule of Hunan-Guizhou
Short mule is considered a curse word in the dialects of many places, such as Taiwan, which means "punk", but at home, or in the Hunan-Guizhou area, it is only used to express one meaning: mandrill wild monster.
There are a lot of rumors about mandrills and wild monsters in different places, so I won't go into them one by one.
The short mule I'm talking about is a kind of mandrill rumored in the mountains of my hometown. They are no more than a few dozen centimeters short, always wearing a red straw hat, the outer skin is green or purple, some people say it is red, hairy, always in groups of three or five, like to tease people. For example, farmers will be brought to the ground to eat lunch into the stone, or to the mountain people who have offended them shit inside the stove, and for example, some mountain villages in the middle of the night to go to the ground to eat mud, and then return home to sleep and feel very full - this is the short mules by the confusion.
The red straw hats they wear are made of dragon fern grass, which is said to have come from the age of dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago.
Of course, these are just legends, I was in high school when I lived in the school dormitory, every student has a stomach of these stories.
I can't say it's true, I can't say it's false, but my classmates from the countryside west of the Castle Peak Realm said it the most.
I studied that broken book for a whole day, and during the evening meal, I told my parents that I was going to take a trip to the Castle Peak Realm - a blessing, not a curse, but a curse that can't be avoided. To be honest, my heart palpitated at the kind of pain that struck me on the first night. The pain was simply beyond what a human being could bear, and at one point in time, I even thought of dying.
My mother looked at my grandmother's statue on the shrine without saying anything, sighing and shedding tears. My father said that my little uncle was in the forest of Qingshanjie, and that if I wanted to find a short mule, I should go to my little uncle, who was guarding the forest house in the forest, so the two of them could take care of each other.
That night, my father hung up the phone with my brother-in-law, and I left the next morning.
My uncle is a formal employee of the County Forestry Bureau, always doing forest guarding and forest fire prevention work in remote forest farms. Green Mountain Boundary is a boundary to the west of the county, high mountains, birds and beasts can hardly fly, is a primitive forest that is rarely visited by people. The county forestry bureau had a station there, and my brother-in-law was on duty in the deepest forest guard house.
I set off in the morning, to the county transfer to the township, and then transfer to the forest field, along the mountain road all the way to the forest guard house, a lot of tossing and turning, to the time has been five o'clock in the afternoon. At that time it was summer, the day was still bright, there was no cell phone signal in the deep old forest, but fortunately there were telephone lines laid in the early years, so my little uncle got the notice and stood at the entrance of the slope waiting for me early.
I brought some gifts to him, wine and cigarettes, he happily accepted.
Their forest house is a lime painted Indian house (that is, brick house), and I traveled all the way to see the wood house is very different, not big on two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom. Inside the kitchen, a pot of meat was already cooking, and the smell was wafting from afar. Inside there is another person, thirty-something years old thin man, hey smile at me, revealing a mouthful of smoky yellow teeth.
Uncle Xiao introduced me, said it was his colleague, called Li De Cai, let me call Uncle Li. Li Dezai hastily excused, said called brother well, he said he had seen me before in the small uncle's house, a few more good a young man Oh, a ** years have passed, that time he is still in-laws have not begged after the child, and now the children are dragging the snot around.
Li Dezai face black, skin is very brown, the left side of the face has a scar, look fierce, people are still kind.
We sat down to eat, inside the pot is cooking rabbit meat, enough to put two, are a few days ago to fight. The job of guarding the old forest is very boring, so my uncle would often use an air gun to shoot some wild animals, secretly, no one cares. The vegetables were all picked from the neighboring vegetable field and were fresh. I opened the wine I bought and drank while chatting with them. My younger uncle already knew why I was there, and was scolding my grandmother for her drunkenness: "She's just an old beggar woman who has been engaging in worms and superstitions all day long, and now that she's dying, she's still harming you!"
I was already a little afraid of these things, plus how she was also my grandmother, so I did not follow his words, but Li De Cai also cursed a few words in passing. Eat meat and drink wine, and then talk about the short mule thing, I asked the little uncle has not seen? Little uncle laughed, said he has lived for almost fifty years, just have not seen one, are other people to blackmail, made up.
He has spent his whole life in the mountains and forests, protecting forests and catching wood thieves, and would have died of fear if he had believed this.
It is Li De Cai looked at me, look hesitant, I asked him if he had seen, he said no again.
After dinner, I took the initiative to clean up, uncle did not allow, said while the day is still bright to take me outside. Out of the house, outside the sky is a little dark, the forest low can not see the sunset, only to see the sunrise on the opposite side of the mountain reflecting the sky, golden splendor of a brilliant. We stepped on the mountain road covered with fallen leaves and grass and walked slowly, the little uncle walking while coughing. He was an old smoker, but he didn't dare to smoke while patrolling in the forest, he just coughed.
The forest guard house is on a small hill, we walked a few hundred meters, uncle was telling me some interesting stories about the forest guard. In fact the work was boring as hell, walking on iron feet every day, being careful and defensive, tired as hell, but he told me something about the inside of a nearby village that intrigued me:
He said that the nearest village is called Segai, Segai is located in the mountains, the fields are all sloping terraces, the forest is a state-run forest, so it is very poor, poor, poor - some people go out to work, and never come back in their lives. There is an old bachelor in the village, because there is an old mother in, also did not go, in the field hard labor, 38 years old are not a woman wants to follow him. One day the year before last, he suddenly ran to the county inside the gold store inside the sale of gold, a big pile of oh, worth when hundreds of thousands of it. Last year, the price of gold 240 a gram, he had a pile of more than three pounds, and then the gold store of the old teeth of the yellow pressure on his price to 200, he sold, got almost 300,000 it.
I said good luck, this man do not know where to pick up it.
Uncle said yes, they say he is good luck, ancestral tomb smoke, he came back, he is ready to go to the town to make some small business. But what goes around comes around, people just can't be too proud. Later, the yellow old teeth brought a group of people to find him, said he gave the gold lump in the safe, the same night turned into cow shit, let him pay back the money - how can gold turn into cow shit? Obviously is bullying the old bachelor well, the result of a bunch of people can not come together, Huang Laoya beat the old bachelor, and then also a lawsuit, somehow, the court ruled that the old bachelor suspected of fraud, this year only released.
I said how could it be so judgment? At that time when the inspection of the goods must be real money, or else to Huang Laoya so smart people, will give money? Little uncle laughed, said Huang Laoya has an uncle is above, he pointed to the sky, shook his head in a smile, did not say much. I watched the light of the forest get darker and darker little by little, and said, "It's too dark, go back."
So we walked back deeper and deeper.
********
I stayed in the forest guard house for two days, following the forest patrol during the day and reading at night. The mountain forest is humid, mosquitoes and insects, snakes are also many, the conditions are actually very hard, but I did not care, I went south to work when I had suffered more, slept in a bridge hole, parks and rotten buildings, here there are bunk beds, and mosquito nets, in fact, has been able to. Because there is no TV, life inside the mountain is actually very boring, the only way to read.
Staying inside the mountain, only two companions with, do not talk when, all silent, only outside the forest insects singing, the heart sinks down, holding the book to read, it is easy to see into.
Read more, only to find that "suppress the mountains twelve methods" is not a pure witch doctor godmother's book, but a combination of Taoism, primitive witchcraft, Buddhism, as well as a variety of occult hodgepodge such as head-scalping, and even mixed with anecdotes and wild stories, written by the person called the mountain pavilion old man, and in the middle of a large number of notes, supplemented by the person should be called Luo eighteen.
Gradually, I began to read with great interest.
As my reading progressed, I began to enter a whole new world, feeling as if my usual life had been completely turned upside down. There are a lot of things in here that feel fake at a glance, but there are also some that seem to make some sense, and there are things about raising parasites, head-subduing, raising little ghosts, making zombies, and so on, that make people nauseous and want to vomit.
About the mandrill, there are also records in it. This is a small man who can freely come and go in the spirit world and reality, they are cunning in nature, but not ferocious, like to play tricks on people, hold grudges, like to eat pine cones and sweet potato vines, and will only be found in the untraveled mountains and old forests, and occasionally will go to the homes of the mountain people, to play tricks on the human race.
I stayed for two days without seeing the legendary dwarf mule, on the third day when I returned to the county with my little uncle, he went to hand over, while I procured a few pounds of pine cones, baskets of sweet potato vines, incense and candles, earth eggs, red thread, new glutinous rice, hunting knives, bundling ropes and nets ...... and then went home to pick out a few pieces of painted yellow talismans from my grandmother's relics, and, having finished the preparations, returned to the mountains on the fourth day once again returned to the forest guard house deep in the mountains.
That night the moon was especially bright, I sprinkled pine nuts and sweet potato vines along the slope not far from the forest-keeping house, and then squatted quietly.
There are wild animals in the mountain forest, the little uncle is not worried about me, he could have gone back to the county to rest for ten days, but he heard later that there was a murder and broken body case in Castle Peak, he was not assured, and then switched shifts with other people, accompanied by me to keep watch in the dark. Inside the mountain mosquitoes are many and fierce, but we do not dare to move, little uncle gave me a layer of black grass residue, said to be able to prevent insects. I waited quietly, feeling aware of all the sights in the clearing. As I said earlier I had worked in many factories.
When I was working in a circuit board factory, I had to look at the board every day to find defects, which cost me a lot of money, so I got a little bit of myopia, and I could see things in the distance in a blurry way. But now in the dark night, although the moonlight is very bright, but can see very clearly ten meters away from the subtle things.
Similarly, my body was getting stronger and more energetic, and my mind was thinking clearly.
I gradually became convinced of what my grandmother had said on her deathbed: she had left me an inheritance, but to inherit it, I still had to pass a test. If I pass it, everything will be fine, but if I don't, I will have to face death.
The night was late, the moon was slanting in the west, and there was nothing in the stillness of the night - only bugs chirping and squeaking. Little uncle is old, insisted on less than an hour is too sleepy, I was driven back to sleep. The mountains are damp and the night is as cool as water. I listened to the insects humming, but my heart was very calm, as if I had a premonition of something, and I waited quietly. I waited for seven hours, starting at 9:00 p.m., until after 4:00 a.m., when a dark shadow appeared on the slope of the relaxation area.
The appearance of that dark shadow instantly set my nerves on edge.
However, when I took a closer look, I realized that it was a fat mountain mouse like a kitten. As the mouse arched over the slope, one moment it was knocking pine nuts, the next it was chewing on sweet potato vines, and digging up dirt with its hind legs.
I kept my body still and took the new glutinous rice mixed with earth egg white out from inside the bag. My stomach was hurting, not seriously, but like diarrhea, I couldn't help but let out a stinky fart, no sound, so it was even stinkier, smoked myself, even the mosquitoes that had been surrounding me dispersed quite a bit.
Not a moment later, the bushes in a few dark shadows drilled out.
I can not see the color, just with the help of the blurred moonlight, see these black shadows are almost thirty centimeters or so, walking upright, in the head part of a mess of horizontal lines - that is the outline of the straw hat.
