Chapter 4 Roasted Duck Eggs
After the rice was planted, Zhao Xuan began planting other crops: potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, corn, and some vegetables.
When they first arrived in the village, the two searched house to house for usable supplies. Seeds were essential for farmers, but after several years, Zhao Xuan didn't know if the seeds would even sprout. She even found cotton and wheat seeds in one house. These two plants were clearly not grown in the rainy and humid southern mountains; perhaps the family bought them to grow as a hobby?
Zhao Xuan had never grown these things before, but she planned to try it out.
Perhaps planting wheat and cotton on the sheltered hillsides would yield a harvest.
If they had flour, it would greatly improve their diet. And cotton would undoubtedly be a great help to her, as she experiences menstruation every month. Clean cotton is much safer than old cotton pulled from a quilt.
As for crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes, she remembered them as very easy to grow, according to her grandmother. Every winter and summer vacation, she would stay at her grandmother's house for a while. As a little tagalong, although she had never seen her grandmother plant them, she always heard her grandmother ramble on about how to grow these crops. Her grandmother had a deep affection for potatoes and sweet potatoes, as these crops had saved her life during the famine.
Bury the sweet potatoes from before the New Year in a damp pit. No need to fill it with soil, just cover it with a layer of wood ash and a straw cover. Soon the sweet potatoes will sprout. Cut off the sprout along with a small piece of sweet potato flesh and bury it horizontally in the soil. They will start to grow vines. If you mix some wood ash into the soil, they can produce more sweet potatoes.
Compared to delicate crops like rice, growing sweet potatoes and potatoes requires much less effort.
The sweet potato seedlings are still being cultivated, and Zhao Xuan plans to go to Songsong's few acres of land first.
This morning was still cool and refreshing.
She cooked rice, boiled water... She did everything methodically, threw the still-burning charcoal into a small jar for storage, and then used fire tongs to pry open the thick layer of white ash in the stove and take out four duck eggs.
Those were wild duck eggs I picked up yesterday.
They were buried in the charcoal while cooking, and they were cooked through when the rice was done.
The duck eggs have a slightly greenish shell, and I don't know what breed of wild duck laid them. The shells are very thick, and they will crack when roasted at high temperatures. Duck eggs taste slightly fishier than chicken eggs, but the fishy smell will be greatly reduced after roasting, and they will have a smoky aroma.
These eggs, once peeled, taste delicious with just a pinch of salt.
At first, Zhao Xuan didn't eat many wild chicken or duck eggs, fearing she might be picking snake eggs instead of bird eggs. Later, after seeing real snake eggs and learning they were small and elongated, quite different from bird eggs, she became less hesitant to eat them. She mostly found the bird eggs herself, as Zhao Xuan rarely ventured into the undergrowth, afraid of stepping on snakes.
She left two duck eggs for Lu An, kept one for herself, and peeled the remaining one and put it into 460's food bowl—she had promised to share one with it yesterday.
Lu An was still asleep, so she drank a bowl of porridge with a few radish strips. She held the egg in her hand for a long time, still reluctant to eat it. After thinking for a moment, she put the duck egg in her pocket.
After filling a pot with water, putting on a straw hat, and taking a hoe and sickle, Zhao Xuan went out early.
Aside from the sudden rain the day before yesterday, the weather has been great these past few days. It's slightly warm with a gentle breeze.
Everything grows vigorously in this season.
Completely different from the gray-green scenery of winter, everything in sight was a tender yellow-green, with small grasses sprouting from the cracked road, bearing white flower buds. The birds were no longer afraid of people, and flocks of them landed in front of her, pecking at something, only reluctantly flying away when Zhao Xuan got very close.
The world remained as quiet as ever, with only birdsong and insect chirps. If you listened closely, you could also hear the whistling of the wind through the branches, but even the most varied sounds only served to accentuate the quietness of the world.
She had the illusion that she was the only person left in the world.
She usually went out with Lu An. With Lu An by her side, she could chatter on about her plans, when to plant rice, when to plant potatoes. Lu An had never lived in the countryside and was not good at farming, so he just listened quietly.
Now that she's all alone, it's understandable that she'd be talking to herself, which might seem a bit odd.
As usual, he first went to check around the rice paddies. This time, Zhao Xuan didn't check very carefully. After a quick glance, he walked towards the dry fields on the hillside.
Although she and Lu An carefully harvested all the crops in the fields last autumn, the roots left in the fields revived again when spring arrived. She found that some fields had sprouted tender seedlings even though no one was taking care of them. The sweet potato seedlings were growing particularly fast, and vegetables such as leeks and eggplants had also sprouted very tall buds.
While chives and eggplants aren't yet ready to be eaten, sweet potato vines can be picked while they're still tender and stir-fried with garlic.
Zhao Xuan pulled a thin vine from a small ditch, bundled the sweet potato leaves he had picked into a large bunch, and threw it into his basket. If he returned early, it could be used as a side dish for lunch.
Meat has always been in short supply, and eggs are also hard to find. Live poultry such as wild ducks and pheasants are even rarer. There are many small fish, about the size of a finger, in the river. You can scoop up quite a few with a winnowing basket, but frying fish requires a lot of oil, so eating fish is very uneconomical.
Many times she could see fat pheasants or gray rabbits darting past her, but unfortunately they ran faster than her eyesight.
Lu An and 460 caught a rabbit and three pheasants together. The two of them and their dog survived the winter on these meats. However, the meat didn't produce much oil. Last year, they picked a lot of tea seeds, but because they weren't skilled at it, they only managed to extract one bottle of oil. Sometimes, when their mouths were really dry, she would carefully drip a couple of drops on the oil to use for cooking.
It seems we must plant more peanuts this year—the oil yield from peanuts should be slightly higher than that from tea seeds, right?
Zhao Xuan, who had absolutely no idea about the oil yield of these crops, comforted himself with this thought.
Last year, Lu An found three animal traps at a farmer's house. One was too rusted to open, but he managed to fix the other two. During the deep winter, when they had nothing much to do, Zhao Xuan would wander around the village and its outskirts with a notebook, noting down where there were fruit trees and where vegetable seedlings would grow next year. After finishing her own village, she extended her notes to the neighboring abandoned village, and later to the surrounding mountains and fields. Lu An accompanied her when she went to the mountains, worried about wild animals.
At the farthest point they explored, Luan set up these two animal traps.
He said there was pig manure in the area, and with luck, they might be able to catch some prey. It wasn't Lu An who recognized the pig manure, but Zhao Xuan. As they passed by, Zhao Xuan pointed to the dried-up pig manure on the ground and said, "Be careful of the pig manure, don't step in it."
Lu An asked her how she knew it was pig manure.
Zhao Xuan pursed his lips: "I saw it every day when I was a kid in the countryside."
Lu An then set up the animal traps here.
Zhao Xuan solemnly marked their locations in her notebook—not because she hoped to get meat from them, but because she was afraid of accidentally stepping on them.
As a child, she often heard stories of villagers whose legs had been broken by these things on the mountain. Of course, something that could trap wild boars could also trap people, but in her memory, these animal traps had only ever caught human legs.
Later, Lu An would occasionally go up the mountain to take a look, but he always returned empty-handed.
Zhao Xuan had even forgotten about it, so why did he suddenly remember it now? Perhaps it was because he thought of meat and then thought of these trivial things.
Lu An had already plowed the seven acres of dry land he had selected during the winter. Zhao Xuan's task this time was to remove the spring grass that had grown in the fields.
Walking along the lush country lanes, a sense of loneliness arises as soon as you step into the barren fields.
Loneliness is perhaps something every surviving human being faces in the apocalypse—a virus that was not even officially named caused human society to fall apart in just a few months, forcing the survivors to distance themselves from others.
In the early days when radio broadcasts were still audible, some studies suggested that the virus could parasitize certain individuals with antibodies. These individuals might either continuously infect others or simply coexist with the virus. However, this symbiotic balance was not permanent. Some viral symbionts would experience a viral outbreak for some reason, and in their tragic deaths, they would also infect others.
Neither she nor Lu An knew whether they were symbiotic beings carrying the virus or ordinary people. In this age of technological decline, most of the few survivors scattered around the world were also unaware of their physical condition.
Therefore, no one wants to live with a bomb that could explode at any moment; they must get used to being alone.
The seven acres of land seemed vast to her; even a light task like weeding would take her several days at her pace. Before the sun was high in the sky, she wiped the sweat from her brow, slung her basket over her shoulder, and prepared to head back.
She needed to go home to cook for Lu An, who was still recovering and shouldn't do too much work.
She squeezed the duck egg in her pocket, swallowed hard, but ultimately didn't take it out to eat.
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