Back to 1984: Hunting in the Mountains

Chapter 94: Family Meeting on Land Division, Dog Dad

Gusts of autumn wind bring gusts of autumn coolness.

Half a month has passed since the last time I went into the mountains to hunt roe deer.

Nothing big happened in half a month, but small ripples still sparked several circles.

First of all, the two children were successfully admitted to the school. Yu Xiaoyun became a glorious Young Pioneer in the first grade, while Yu Xiaowei became a transfer student in the third grade.

Yu Xiaoyun is easy to deal with.

Students these days generally start school late. There are many children aged seven or eight in the class, and there are four or five who are nine years old like her. In terms of age, she does not seem particularly special.

The only problem is height.

Girls develop early, and Yu Xiaoyun inherited the tall gene. She is a few years younger than her brother Yu Xiaowei, but only a few centimeters shorter than him.

Among a group of first-year students, he stands out like a crane among chickens.

She is almost a head taller than many boys.

Because of this, after she entered school, she was very fortunate to be appointed as the class monitor by the team leader Li Chun'e.

Yes, that’s right, her homeroom teacher is Teacher Li Chun’e.

Because these social teachers have low cultural qualities, they usually rotate between grades one, two and three. After teaching the third grade, they will return to teach the first grade again.

It's like taking one, two, one steps.

In fact, this is not strange, because in his previous life, when Yu Qiutang’s child was in elementary school, his class teacher was also Li Chun’e.

Who can I go to for justice?

He still clearly remembers his son coming back and telling him that Teacher Li had scolded him. Being young and ignorant, the boy asked for help from his father, but the teacher beat him even harder.

Tell your son, go back and ask your father how I beat him to make him cry.

After receiving a positive response from Yu Qiutang, my son became much more obedient and made rapid progress in his studies...

He is really desperate.

I must study hard and prevent my son from falling into Teacher Li's hands in the future. Otherwise, three generations of a family will have dinner at the same table during the New Year. Apart from anything else, the friendship of fellow students being beaten will be revealed.

When they were drinking, the grandson hugged his grandfather's shoulders and said with deep emotion: "Big brother, you have suffered a lot. We are all brothers in distress."

Yu Xiaoyun was still a little uncomfortable with being a squad leader. She was very anxious after coming back and said that it would be difficult for her to be a squad leader because she had no experience and did not dare to manage others.

Yu Qiutang himself had never been a squad leader, and he had never been a leader of any size from childhood to old age, so he had no advice to give to his niece. In the end, he could only tell her to follow her heart, be an upright person, and not care about anything else.

If being upright does not win others' understanding, then it means there is no point in being a squad leader and it is better not to be one.

Yu Xiaoyun trusts her uncle Yu Qiutang very much and feels that his words are basically like an imperial edict. Since he said so, there must be nothing wrong with it.

Just listen.

Yu Qiutang's real intention was to hope that both of his children would be upright in character. It is true that there are many bad people in this world, but a person with an open mind will at least be firm in his heart.

Inner stability is the foundation of happiness.

How many people are unhappy in their lives, either because they have too many desires, or because they are uneasy and insecure in their hearts, struggling all day long with the contradiction between pursuing interests and moral condemnation.

Compared to his sister who reached the peak as soon as her debut, Yu Xiaowei is much more honest. He is now no different from a blind man. There are so many words on the books, they are like ants, making his eyes dizzy.

So he could only pretend to be honest. Every time the teacher asked them to turn pages in the book, he would just follow others and could barely get by.

But if it comes to writing, he can't write for the time being. After thinking about it, he simply wrapped his right hand with gauze, saying that he injured his hand while cooking and couldn't hold a pen to write.

This solved the problem of doing homework.

But every day when I came back, I would start practicing calligraphy like crazy at home. Before doing anything else, I would first learn all the characters in grades one and two.

For this reason, he had to temporarily give up the job of helping his aunt make tofu. After returning home, he did nothing but concentrate on practicing calligraphy. He practiced until midnight when he was too sleepy to go to bed.

Seeing that he had the perseverance, Yu Qiutang found a lot of old newspapers for him to practice. Later, when the old newspapers were in short supply, he simply asked him to dip a pen in water and write on the ground outside.

Anyway, I use every possible means to cram the content into my brain, almost like cramming.

During this process, Yu Qiutang discovered that Yu Xiaowei was actually very smart, with a very good memory, and he learned characters very quickly. Even if he couldn't remember how to write some difficult characters at the moment, he could at least recognize them.

That's pretty good.

Gradually, Yu Xiaowei was able to understand the teacher's arrangements, and the words in the book were no longer twisted ants, but characters representing their own meanings.

The first phase of Chinese cram school is temporarily over, and he plans to spend half a month to make up for the basic knowledge of mathematics. Mathematics in grades one and two is quite simple. After all, he is older and needs to use calculations in real life. Learning very simple math problems will naturally be twice the result with half the effort, and it is not as troublesome as Chinese.

Yu Qiutang was very satisfied with the learning status of both children, and he was able to put the matter to rest for the time being.

After entering school, things became much simpler. All you had to do was follow the steps and study year after year.

In a few years, it would be best if I could be admitted to Qingquan Junior High School. If not, I can also apply to a junior high school in the neighboring village. At least I can go to school.

As for whether you can go to high school or college in the future, that is another matter.

Everyone has limited abilities, and it’s not like you can go to school just because you want to.

We'll see how it develops at that time.

Apart from taking care of the two children, the rest is the autumn harvest.

The climate and geological conditions of Rongcheng determine that crops in Rongcheng can only be grown for one and a half seasons each year.

What does one and a half seasons mean?

It means growing one season's main crops, such as wheat, corn, or sorghum.

Other crops include millet, broomcorn millet, buckwheat, rapeseed, beans, etc., with a short growth cycle of half a season.

Taking wheat, millet and corn as examples, wheat is planted in the autumn and harvested in the summer of the following year, then millet is planted. After the millet is harvested in the autumn, the land is left idle for a while, corn is planted in the spring, the corn is harvested in the autumn, and then wheat can be planted.

It’s equivalent to planting three things in two years.

The benefit of this is that on the one hand, it saves land resources and allows limited land to grow more food, and on the other hand, it also adjusts the nutrition of the land.

This is commonly known as returning the stubble.

People here often mention the return of wheat and millet, which refers to this process.

Generally speaking, the yield and quality of the returned crops are lower than those of the regular crops.

It’s harvest season, and everyone has to start harvesting, including the Yu family.

At present, the land composition of the Yu family is quite complicated. Because Yu Dejin married three wives, but because this era is in the reform period of land distribution, the policy is unstable, and there are many people in the village and the team with all kinds of evil ideas.

This led to many problems in land distribution.

Specifically, among the children of the first wife, only Yu Chunmei had the opportunity to divide the land and got one and a half mu of land. The other two sisters got married too early and did not have the opportunity to divide the land.

As for the second wife, Yu Qiutang's mother died early, his brother was missing (or may have died), and his sister-in-law died early, so he did not get the chance to divide the land. But because his brother was registered as a resident of the Yu family after he came, he was considered to have settled in Wangjiazhuang, so his two children each got an acre of land.

Yu Qiutang also owns an acre of land.

As for Chen Meidi, both Chen Meidi and Yu Qiushi had land. Wang Chunhua did not get any land because she was already married and not registered in Wangzhuang.

Among them, Chen Meidi owned one and a third acres of land, while Yu Qiushi owned one acre of land.

Then there is Yu Dejin himself who owns one acre and three mu of land.

All in all, the Yu family originally had a total of seven acres and nine fen of land, plus the marginal areas, which totaled eight acres.

It looks like a lot, but it’s actually quite tight.

The main reason was that in this era, the grain yield from the fields was very low. Not much was harvested to begin with, and a portion had to be paid as public grain. If everyone ate wheat, it would definitely not be enough for the whole family.

So under normal circumstances, people would plant enough wheat to pay the public grain tax, and the rest would basically be planted with corn or other crops, which had a higher yield than wheat and were barely enough to sustain life.

Now that the family has split up, each person’s land must belong to him or her.

Yu Qiutang, Yu Chunmei, and their two children took away four and a third acres of land, which was more than half of all the land.

Among them, Yu Chunmei's land is the best. It is located in the best terrain in the village and close to the water source. The grain grown here can produce one and a half acres or even two acres of other land.

That's why when the family was divided, Chen Meidi wanted to keep Yu Chunmei's land.

As for the land owned by Yu Qiutang and the other two, it was relatively ordinary and could not be compared with Yu Chunmei's at all.

Thinking that it was the autumn harvest season and all kinds of grains were planted in the fields, Yu Qiutang didn't want to force himself to take all the grain from the land.

All they ask is that the crops on the fields be harvested and the land be vacated.

The reason is not that he has to be a good person, but because they are now separated in name, but the household registration book is not listed separately, so the public grain that the family needs to pay is unified.

If we take away the land and the grain together, my father won't be able to pay the tax.

This is not his style.

Even if they were strangers, he would not think of taking advantage of them, let alone his father.

The reason why he did not have too much dispute with his father over the division of the family property was because he had been a father himself and understood that being a father was the most difficult job in the world.

If you are strict with your children, they will side with their mother and say that their father only makes demands on them.

If you relax a little...

Not every child is a pure angel. Most children are very simple. Some are good, some are bad.

Without the father's strict moral restraint, the child will be like a wild tree, growing unrestrainedly and will never be able to grow into a towering tree.

Instead, it becomes a disaster.

No matter what, I have to take the blame for my father's actions.

As a father himself, he knows that fathers sometimes have no control over their own decisions and are difficult to deal with.

After all, the child is a living person and is bound to have disagreements with his father. He cannot be treated like an object and manipulated however one pleases.

So, that evening, at Yu Dejin's call, the whole family sat, squatted or leaned against the wall to hold a family meeting in the yard.

It happened that the moon was very bright at night, illuminating the troglodyte courtyard as if it were daytime. Yu Xiaowei began to squat beside Yu Qiutang, but then he thought about it and decided to go in and bring out a bench, put a brick under his butt, and continued writing.

Seeing his look, Yu Qiushi was about to run over to take a look, but was scared back by Chen Meidi's look and had to sit obediently on the kitchen threshold.

"We are very busy during the day, so we should take some time out at night to gather everyone together and discuss the autumn harvest."

Yu Dejin paused here, filled his pipe with tobacco, and finally lit the pipe with the third match. He took a long puff and then exhaled a thick puff of smoke.

The sound of exhaling smoke sounded like a sigh.

"That's the thing. Our family has seven acres and nine mu of land, plus one mu of private land, which makes eight acres. Now we're growing crops on the land, so we can divide the crops among us."

The so-called private plot is a special kind of land allocated in the early years for people to grow vegetables.

This piece of land is usually one or two mu, which is not very large and is not within the scope of the contracted land. Similarly, the area of ​​the land does not need to be calculated when paying public grain. To a certain extent, it belongs to the individual who allocated it.

That’s why it’s called a private plot.

This kind of treatment is only available to the few batches of people who received land in the early years. Those who received land as compensation later are no longer eligible for this treatment.

After Yu Dejin said this, Chen Meidi glanced at Yu Qiutang and found that he did not react much, but was just gently teasing the three puppies in the basket.

Feed them rice soup.

These puppies are just over one month old and they were supposed to continue feeding on milk for a while, but there can’t be any delay.

Hunting dog training is different from that of ordinary dogs.

Generally, guard dogs are family-oriented, which means that all family members are the dog's owners. Therefore, they need to have a certain degree of fierceness so that they can intimidate outsiders, but they will not be particularly protective of their owners.

Many dogs will even eat anything anyone throws at them.

That’s why many dogs are often killed by people throwing something poisonous to them, or throwing some knockout drug at them, and then putting the drug in a bag and running away.

But a hunting dog must maintain a certain wildness and uniqueness. A serious hunting dog can only obey its master. It may not be hostile to other people in the family, but it is definitely not that close.

Only those mixed dogs that go home to guard the house and go out to run in the mountains have strong social attributes.

But this kind of dog, even as a hunting dog, cannot be a leader dog. In the end, it can only follow behind to intimidate others.

A true leader dog would have a look in his eyes that would make most people retreat. A man-dog that dares to pounce on bears and wolves will not be afraid of ordinary humans at all.

Of course, no matter how fierce a dog is, it will still be very timid when it meets a tiger or a leopard.

Cats have an overwhelming advantage over canines.

Of the same size and weight class, canines are no match for cats. No matter how fierce a dog is, it will basically be beaten to a pulp if it encounters a leopard.

A few years ago, a leopard came down the mountain and often carried away dogs silently, sometimes without even making a sound. If it hadn't later carried away a child and been killed by a forest ranger, it would have probably eaten all the dogs nearby.

What Yu Qiutang needed was a fierce hunting dog, so when the dog came back, he did not allow anyone else to touch it or feed it. He was the dog's only owner and the dog's father in his eyes.

(End of this chapter)