Chapter 10 010 Too Many Wild Duck Eggs
Grandma and my aunt were cooking. They hadn't planned to have eggs for lunch, but instead planned to cut a piece of sausage and stir-fry it with edamame. So they didn't notice that there were five extra eggs in the basket.
When Song Dianchen returned with his two children, they insisted on taking the basket to the kitchen. As a result, they actually found wild duck eggs with slightly greenish shells among the messy broken leaves and weeds. The adults in the family were a little surprised.
"Wow, you really found a bunch of wild duck eggs!" Song Wanxia picked up her daughter and wiped her sweat. "Mommy's little carp is so great! Are you tired from playing? How about Mommy gets you a basin of hot water to wipe you down?"
"Mom, let's take all the eggs out first. My brother and I want boiled eggs for lunch!"
"Alright, alright, I'll boil some eggs for you. You should wash up quickly, or you'll catch a cold if you don't wipe your sweat," Zhang Lian, who was cooking, quickly agreed. "Just leave the basket here. Dianchen, help the children take all the eggs out of it."
They initially thought the children had filled the baskets with too much weed to protect the duck eggs, but to their surprise, the two children were quite capable, arranging the eggs neatly with a layer of cushioning and a layer of eggs. After taking all the eggs out of the two baskets and combining them with the previous five single baskets, they found a total of one hundred and thirty eggs.
"Did they disturb the wild ducks' nest?" Song Dianchen changed the cardboard box used to pack the eggs, and the protective layer to prevent the duck eggs from being shaken was replaced with cleaner rice husks. "More than a hundred eggs, although they are smaller than chicken eggs, if Sega is also at home, the three of them can eat one boiled egg a day for more than a month."
Now that Song Xiaoli and Song Shiyi had finished washing up, they quickly came to the kitchen. Hearing the most "fierce" man in the family say this, they both looked smug and couldn't hide their pride.
Song Xiaoli tugged at her mother's clothes, "Mom, when I caught the wild ducks yesterday, I found out that they lay eggs in the water."
“My sister told me, so I took her to retrieve all the eggs from that section of the stream!” Song Shiyi straightened his chest.
"Were all of these caught from the water?" Zhang Lian asked the children as she ladled out the cooked dishes.
“Yes, they are really good at laying eggs. My brother and I even saw a duck this big, with its tail sticking out, laying two eggs in the water.” Song Xiaoli seized the opportunity to reveal as much as possible about the habits of egg-laying ducks.
As for more complex cases, I believe that with so many wild eggs to tempt them, my family will try to find a way to investigate them.
Silence fell over the kitchen for a moment, broken only by the crackling of the firewood. After a while, the observant Song Wanxia asked an important question, "These eggs were all taken out of the water, won't they spoil quickly?"
It's common knowledge that eggs spoil easily when they get wet.
Zhang Lian thought for a moment, took out a bowl, and randomly picked out five wild duck eggs from the ones that had just been laid out. She knocked them all into the bowl, looked at them, and smelled them. “They’re not spoiled yet, but I don’t know how many days they can last. I’ve never seen wild ducks lay their eggs directly into the water before; they only lay them near the water’s edge.”
Moreover, if wild ducks lay their eggs near water and the eggs are taken away, they will know that the place is not safe and will never lay their eggs there again.
But water is flowing, which will cause the eggs to float and drift. If they hit a rock, they will be broken. If they encounter a snake drinking or passing by, they will be swallowed. In any case, laying eggs in water is just like a wild duck indifferently throwing away its newborn chicks.
To help her family discover the eggs were different quickly, Song Xiaoli thought for a moment and gave another hint, "But they don't all lay their eggs in the water. I've seen them in the water several times, but I also saw one time that a wild duck found a small grassy nest and hid inside to lay its eggs. I thought that egg was different and that the wild duck was deliberately hiding it, so I didn't take it."
With this hint, Song Wanxia's mind worked very quickly. She checked the remaining eggs, more than twenty in total, before saying to her mother, Zhang Lian, "Mom, these are not hatching eggs."
This led to some speculation: could it be that the wild ducks were possessed and knew to hide the hatching eggs while releasing the non-hatching eggs directly into the water?
The eldest uncle thought of another question. He squatted down, tried to soften his voice, and asked Song Xiaoli, "Xiaoli, is the wild duck that you saw laying eggs in the water the same as the wild duck you caught yesterday?"
"Yes, they're smaller than the ducks we raise, but they're still quite plump."
"So that's how it is." Song Dianchen said thoughtfully.
"What is it?" His wife pushed him. "You should explain yourself clearly."
“Yesterday, didn’t our neighbors kill and eat the wild duck they stole? When I went in, I smelled a strong, fishy stench, much stronger than that of ordinary wild ducks. Their family couldn’t bring themselves to eat it; they forced themselves to eat some and then vomited. They even accused us of deliberately feeding the duck some strange medicine to trick them. But we all know that Xiao Li caught the wild duck. I was wondering if these wild ducks were a new breed from somewhere else, with habits different from the wild ducks we commonly see.”
“That’s certainly possible.” Song Wanxia glanced at the eggs. “However, these eggs don’t have a fishy smell, even milder than duck eggs, so they’re definitely edible. I just don’t know how long they can last.”
The family had originally planned to save the eggs and let their other child eat them when he came back. Now they know the eggs might not keep, so they have to eat them quickly or pickle them.
"I'll pickle most of them," Zhang Lian decided. "The rest, we'll keep ten separately, and tap one every day to check if they've gone bad. We'll eat the rest quickly, it would be such a waste if they spoiled."
After saying that, he cracked five more eggs into the large bowl, making a total of ten. He then added only chopped green onions and made a plate of scrambled eggs, which smelled delicious. He also made a boiled egg for everyone in the family, based on the number of people in the household.
With the stir-fried sausage and edamame I made earlier, today's lunch is quite sumptuous.
For the next few days, they had eggs with every meal. As for the newly added wild duck eggs in the stream, Song Xiaoli and Song Shiyi didn't need to collect them themselves; the adults in the family would get up early every day to search for them, and they would harvest dozens of eggs every day.
A week later, the eggs that were left to be used in the experiment went rotten.
My family also soaked ten eggs in clean water. They didn't spoil after a week, but the shells visibly became thinner.
"These wild duck eggs are quite strange. They can be kept in water for a longer time, about half a month. If you want to eat them fresh, you either need to soak them in water and eat them within half a month, or you need to finish them within six or seven days. Any extras will have to be pickled, otherwise they will spoil. Also, the eggs laid on the day of laying are greenish-blue, and the next day they are a purer green. The longer they are in the water, the lighter the color of the eggs and the thinner the shells become. When we retrieve the eggs, we can use this to judge how long they can be kept."
Moreover, the eggs laid in the water were definitely not fertilized eggs. We searched the area and found similar wild duck eggs, larger and well-hidden; a nest usually contained three to eight eggs, all of which were fertilized eggs.
My uncle and mother, as the main "experimenters," came to this conclusion.
“But you bring back so many eggs every day. All the jars we can use are full of pickled eggs. How many wild ducks are there in the mountains behind the house? The neighbors say that these wild ducks smell really bad, so we can only eat the eggs, not the ducks. But now, we can’t possibly eat all these eggs.” For the first time, Zhang Lian was worried about having too much to eat.
Song Xiaoli was also worried. Perhaps because their family lived in a more secluded area, wild ducks rarely ventured downstream; they mostly went upstream or into the more remote mountains. And since they discovered the eggs in the water, they had been collecting them every day, which meant that currently, only their family in Songshan Commune knew about it.
If everyone in the village knew, the road leading up the mountain behind our house would become lively, and we could use up all those eggs. But people are selfish; if they could monopolize this resource, who would want to spread the word so widely?
Especially since their neighbors are the family they hate the most.
"Sigh, I miscalculated. Let's release more eels into the stream." Eels love to eat these duck eggs. With them, the number of wild duck eggs will decrease, and my family won't have to get up early every day to collect them.
Moreover, eel itself is quite delicious.
Song Xiaoli began to think of various ways to eat eel.
A note from the author:
They won't keep it a secret forever; the family is just having a temporary period of adjustment.
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