Chapter Eighty: Returning to the Village to Share the Meat (Third Update Today, Please Keep Following)

The village chief pointed and barked out orders: “You few, hurry back to the village and fetch the cart. You few, hurry back to the village office and get the big cauldron set up to boil water. The rest of you, haul the wild boars together, then clean up the scene.”

“Chief, do we still need these traps?”

“What the hell for? They stink now. Even a fool of a boar would not come this way again. Set a fire in any trap that caught a boar, burn it out first, then fill it in. We’ll dig new ones another day.”

While Han Li was resting where he stood, Team Leader Liang and Secretary Zhang came over from the other two sections of the field and specifically stopped by to speak with him for a while.

Quite a few of the other villagers and educated youths also came over to greet him, though the way they looked at Han Li was a little odd.

In the end, Han Li found their staring hard to bear, so he got up from the ground.

By then, the carts sent back to the village still had not returned. Han Li walked over and examined the boar he had killed.

Just a moment ago, that beast had charged like a tank, fierce and dust-spitting, and Han Li had had no time to look closely.

Now that he looked, good heavens, the thing lay on the ground in a tremendous heap, its whole body plump and round, looking as though it held plenty of meat.

The boar’s coat was black tinged with gray, and beneath the gray there were even some whitish bristles.

Its ears were narrow and pointed like two peach leaves, standing stiffly back along the neck, clearly nothing like the big ears of a domestic pig.

Its snout was longer too, and the two tusks looked downright savage.

Han Li reached out and rubbed a hand over the boar’s body. Its bristles were hard, like steel wire brushes.

They had been coated with pine resin, which had made most of the hair clump together in strands.

Feeling it carefully, it was somewhat like the teeth of a large serrated saw blade.

He heard someone reporting to the three leaders on the number of boars taken this time. There were two large boars, both over two hundred jin, and none had escaped.

The remaining wild boars, large and small, came to twelve in all, most weighing in the range of several dozen jin, and probably three of them had made good their escape.

Taking the two big boars as five hundred jin together, and the twelve smaller ones at eighty jin each, that came to another nine hundred and sixty jin.

In one sweep, Upper River Village had taken nearly fifteen hundred jin of dressed weight. At a sixty percent yield, that still meant more than nine hundred jin of meat.

With over a thousand mouths to feed in the whole village, each person could get nearly a jin of meat.

The villagers often went up the mountain to set snares. Though game was hard to catch, as long as one was not too lazy, there would at least be meat on the table at home once a month.

But these wild boars were not the same as the rabbits, pheasants, and snow frogs the villagers trapped in their snares—those animals had little fat on them.

With all this pork rich in grease, the villagers would be much better off when the autumn harvest came.

As for the pig heads, offal, and bones, those were the rewards for the autumn-guard squad.

Yet these cuts were not the most important thing. The most important thing was that this time, they had all come through unscathed.

At that moment, a long line of torchlight appeared over by the village; it seemed many people had come after hearing the news.

Most of those who came were matrons and older sisters, awakened by the gunshots just now.

They had to go through such events once or twice every year, so of course they knew what was happening.

And precisely because they knew, they worried for their families. In previous years, they had all remembered the casualties and injuries caused by wild boars.

When the people sent back to fetch the carts and boil water startled them, they hurried out to ask what had happened.

When they learned no one had been hurt, a great weight at once slipped from their hearts.

Still, nothing was more reassuring than seeing it with their own eyes, so they helped hitch up the carts and came along.

After confirming that their families were safe and sound, the matrons and older sisters finally set down the worry that had been hanging in their stomachs.

What surprised Han Li, though, was that Hao Hongmin, He Mi, and several other educated youths had also come along.

However, they stayed with the other educated youths. Once they saw that Han Li was fine, they ran off to stand with the rest.

After that, everyone loaded the boars onto the carts, for there would still be plenty to do once they got back.

At the village office, the firewood blazed fiercely, and the water in the cauldron had already boiled.

Because all the boars, large and small, had been killed, even those that fell into traps.

Compared with the small amount of pig blood one could get from capturing them alive, everyone preferred not to be injured, and by now there was hardly any blood left to drain from the boars.

As soon as they returned, they began scraping the hair off at once, ladling pots of hot water over the boars’ bodies.

Those with experience would touch the boars to judge how badly they had been scalded, and then the men skilled at scraping would step in with knives and scrapers to get to work.

Cauldrons of hot water were boiled one after another, and boar after boar was stripped bare.

Even the most troublesome pig heads were carefully scalded with iron tongs before being tied by one hind leg and hung upside down from a tree.

Then someone brought wooden basins and set them beneath the boars. Once they were opened up, all the innards slid down into the basins.

After being thoroughly rinsed twice with well water, the men could finally stop and take a breather.

The butchering of these boars had to be left to the more experienced hands, so that everyone could be sure to get at least some fatty meat.

When the meat was divided, the villagers received shares by headcount. Among the educated youths, only those who had joined the autumn-guard squad received anything; the ones who had not joined got nothing at all.

The pig heads, offal, and bones were extra rewards for the autumn-guard squad, and each person received a portion.

Han Li’s group had contributed the most this time, so the five of them could each take a little more from those portions.

Han Li had the greatest merit of all, and the village even gave him an extra rack of ribs.

As for the offal, Han Li got a little of everything: liver, heart, lungs, intestines, stomach, and large bones.

On top of that, the team leader and the others secretly gave him some ribs as well, as a reward for killing the boar.

Cleaning the large intestines was a problem. If they were not washed properly, they would be filthy, foul-smelling, and hard to swallow. Ash alone could not clean them well.

To wash them clean, one needed all sorts of things, but wine, vinegar, flour, and coarse salt were all precious commodities.

What was more, large intestines could not keep; even after being washed clean, they would last only two more days at most.

So when it came time to divide them up, many people did not want them. But Han Li was not lacking in such things, especially salt, of which he had plenty.

Besides, he had been craving the taste of intestines for some time: spicy stir-fried intestines, stir-fried fatty intestines, and pickled-cabbage intestines were all delicious.

Even the main ingredient of liver stew and braised offal was large intestine; without it, they would be far less satisfying.

So he stepped forward and quietly made a trade with his teammate, exchanging two yuan for a big pile of intestines.

When Yun Yingying and the others saw that Han Li had actually traded for so many intestines, not even a sack made of snakeskin could hide that smell.

“How did you end up trading for so many intestines?”

Thank you to the generous patron for the reward, and I humbly ask for your follow reading and all kinds of votes.

Thanks: 100 points rewarded by the boy who loves historical novels.

Thanks: 100 points rewarded by classmate Wang Jinbu.

Thanks: 100 points rewarded by gafqb1114.

Thanks: 100 points rewarded by the life of a salted fish who cannot turn over.