Chapter 8 008 Eggs Really Saw in the Water
Egg-laying ducks aren't very heavy to begin with. They mature in three months, and the heaviest they can reach is only two pounds, with an average weight of just over one pound. The advantages of egg-laying ducks are their rapid reproduction, quick maturation, prolific egg-laying, and decent-tasting eggs. Trading an egg-laying duck for a young rooster of roughly the same weight isn't a bad deal.
As for the family arguing, it was because they felt they had been ripped off. Not only was a teapot and teacups broken, but they also traded a perfectly good rooster for a plate of rotten, inedible duck meat. Nobody was happy about that.
But they were in the wrong. Song Dianbao had taken the duck by force, and they had killed and eaten it that very day. They couldn't return it and could only watch helplessly as Song Dianchen took a chicken from their yard.
Originally, Song Dianbao wanted to play the rogue and stop him, but Song Dianchen threatened to expose his theft of things from the factory, so Song Dianbao dared not make a move.
In this way, Song Dianchen easily won and brought the little rooster out.
This little rooster probably weighs less than a pound. It would take half a month to grow to a little over a pound. If the whole family ate it, they wouldn't get much flavor. It would be better to use some brown sugar to make a chicken for the three children to share.
“Let’s all eat together!” Song Xiaoli replied, but did not receive a response from her uncle.
She didn't want to see the adults eating vegetarian food while she ate meat. Based on the fact that her grandfather kept bringing out good things and money as the situation improved, Song Xiaoli could roughly guess that her grandfather still had a lot of money and banknotes, at least ten thousand yuan. He was just a very low-key person and always said that he had spent all the money he had saved by building houses.
Moreover, my grandfather always believed that "raising sons frugally and daughters lavishly" was the truth. Ever since his daughter married out of the village and his son and daughter-in-law only had two grandsons and no granddaughters, the Song family's meals were controlled to be similar to those of other families in the village, except that they ate eggs more frequently and meat a little more often. My grandfather didn't want his grandson to live too comfortably, lest he be spoiled.
But children need to grow and adults need to work hard every day, so they all need to eat good food to nourish themselves. The grandparents always thought that life was much better now than in the 1960s, but they never expected that the neighbors would be so willing to feed their child good food. Their two-year-old daughter was almost as heavy as their own five-year-old grandson.
Song Xiaoli knew that changing the mindset of a generation was not easy. Her grandfather might double the food allowance because his daughter was coming home to eat and stay again and because he had another granddaughter, but he wouldn't go any further.
To truly change things, Song Xiaoli felt she had to rely on her own efforts to make her family have no choice but to eat it.
When she got home, she saw her uncle tell the rest of the family about the dispute, then mark the rooster with his own mark and put it in the side yard.
"Little Carp," Song Wanxia said, after checking on her older brother, she squatted down and beckoned her daughter over, "Have you had enough of watching the excitement?"
Song Xiaoli buried her head in her mother's arms shyly, avoiding answering, and only praising her uncle, "Uncle is so amazing, much more amazing than that bad cousin. With Uncle around, we won't be bullied anymore!"
"So, do you like your uncle more or your mother more?" Song Wanxia didn't press the little girl any further. She gently picked up her daughter, kissed her, and asked.
"Of course it's Mom! Mom, you'll always be my favorite, my absolute favorite, my absolute favorite person!"
Upon receiving this answer, Song Wanxia kissed the soft, chubby cheek with satisfaction. "You're such a good daughter. Come on, let Mommy give you a bath, and then you can go to sleep, okay?"
There's not much entertainment in the evenings now. After dinner, when it gets dark, the family might chat for a few minutes before going to bed.
"Okay, I'm a good girl who listens to my parents." Song Xiaoli gave a kiss in return.
The uncle standing to the side twitched at the mother and daughter's display of affection. He rubbed his arms, feeling a chill run down his spine, and muttered, "Are all women like this?" He showed a disgusted expression, but secretly regretted not having a sweet-talking daughter. Otherwise, he would have been willing to endure the disgust and say some sweet words to coax the girl.
Thinking of this, he saw his troublesome youngest son trying to sneak out again, so he immediately grabbed his waistband and pulled him back home. "You brat, you still want to go out so late? Let your mother wash you clean and then go to bed."
"Tch." This brat clearly doesn't get along with his dad. He pulled up his pants, pouted, and went to find his mom, which made his dad even angrier.
The night passed, and the adults went to work after breakfast, while the younger cousin, Song Shiyi, stayed home with a strong sense of contract. Under Song Wanxia's incredulous gaze, he said, "Auntie, I'm taking Xiaoli to play today. You can go do whatever you need to do."
Song Wanxia nodded blankly, watching her nephew lead her daughter to play in the back mountain. She was still in a daze for a while. "When did their relationship become so good?"
In her memory, it seemed that her nephew was hostile towards Xiaoli at dinner yesterday, but today they went out to play hand in hand.
"I really don't understand kids."
Song Wanxia was actually a little reluctant to let her daughter go far away from her, but the fields needed watering, and some ripe vegetables needed to be brought back early to be dried or pickled. She didn't want to just sit around eating since she was back home. After watching the two children playing happily together for a while on the back hill, she told them not to go into the water or run too far, then picked up her basket and went to work in the fields.
After Song Wanxia went to the vegetable garden that was farther away, Song Xiaoli tugged at her little cousin's hand and said, "Little brother, when I caught that wild duck last time, I saw it laying eggs with its rear end facing the river!"
"Hmm?" Song Shiyi looked puzzled. In his common sense, chickens and ducks didn't seem to lay eggs in water. Ducks would lay their eggs by the riverbank, but not directly in the water. "Wouldn't eggs spoil easily if they were laid in water?"
Children who grow up in the countryside know a lot.
Eggs have a protective layer on their surface. Washing away this layer with water makes the egg more prone to spoilage. It doesn't make sense for chickens and ducks to lay and incubate their eggs in places where they would spoil.
But egg-laying ducks are different.
Before laying an egg, a duck knows whether it is a fertile egg. If it is, it will find a very secluded place to lay it in preparation for hatching ducklings. If it is not a fertile egg, it will lay it directly in the water. Most animals that like to steal eggs have to go to the water's edge to drink water, and non-fertile eggs are more likely to attract the attention of predators in the water, thus indirectly reducing the threat to fertile eggs.
Only the pheasant doesn't like to go into the water, so it will go directly to eat the hatching eggs of the laying ducks.
However, this strange attribute was something that her little cousin couldn't explain to her in a short time. Taking advantage of her young age, Song Xiaoli kept saying, "But I saw it! I saw it!"
Song Shiyi touched his bald head, thinking that his younger sister might not have good eyesight. "Alright, let's go to the water's edge and take a look."
"Just consider it as coaxing her," Song Shiyi thought. "My little sister is only three years old, so I have to go along with her."
The two children held hands and walked along the shallow stream behind the mountain. There were many vegetable gardens nearby, and people walked around from time to time, so only some small wild animals roamed around, and there was no great danger. The children who lived down below would occasionally come up to the back mountain to play. Apart from telling them not to go into the water, their families were quite lenient with them. This is how children are raised in the countryside.
"Hey bro, look!" The two hadn't gone far when Song Xiaoli pointed to a round, white egg by the water's edge. "There's an egg here."
Song Shiyi had been so focused on alerting the enemy and holding his sister's hand to prevent her from falling that he hadn't looked at the river at all. Hearing Song Xiaoli's words, he glanced at it casually and said helplessly, "It's just a round stone. An egg isn't that round or that small."
As he spoke, Song Shiyi squatted down, picked up the "round stone" that was slightly smaller than a regular egg, and squeezed it hard in his palm. "This is a..."
Crushed egg white and yolk mixed with the shell flowed from his palm. Song Shiyi felt that the moment the egg broke, his heart broke too.
He jumped up in despair, screaming, "Aaaaaaah! It's a real egg! I crushed it!"
Song Shiyi, who used to only get to eat boiled eggs every other day when his older brother was home, felt incredibly guilty for crushing an egg like that. He also felt especially sorry for Song Xiaoli.
"I'm sorry," Song Shiyi's eyes welled up with tears, "You were the one who found the egg, but I..."
"It's okay, we can look for more." Yesterday, the ducks were released at around 2 PM, and many of them were already mature. After more than ten hours, there must be quite a few eggs in the water.
Those eggs, soaking in water, would rot within a week, or be eaten by the long fish she released into the river early on. But the ducks could lay two to four eggs a day, so why not collect them?
After seeing the eggs in the water, Song Shiyi became serious. He casually tapped the water with a stick in one hand while still holding his sister's hand, his eyes fixed on the water. Song Xiaoli, on the other hand, would occasionally look at the path under their feet to avoid falling.
"There's another one!" Not long after, Song Shiyi's eyes lit up. "Xiao Li, wait over there for a moment, I'll go down and get it."
This time, the eggs weren't near the water's edge; you had to go into the water to reach them.
Seeing that the water was shallow, Song Xiaoli let go of his hand and let her cousin roll up his trousers before going into the water to retrieve the egg. Her cousin was wearing straw sandals, so he didn't bother to take them off.
"Here, take this as compensation for what happened earlier." Song Shiyi dried the egg he had picked up on his clothes and then put it in Song Xiaoli's pocket. "Be careful, don't break it or you'll get your clothes dirty."
"Okay, thank you, bro."
The two walked a little further, and perhaps because they were farther away from people's dwellings, they saw more eggs. Song Shiyi even saw, just like the little girl had said, a fat duck standing in the water with its rear end sticking out as it laid eggs.
The two of them each put an egg in their pockets, not daring to put in too many, lest they bump into each other and break them. But there were still eggs in the water that hadn't been retrieved. Song Shiyi felt it would be a sin to let them go. After hesitating for a while, he tugged at Song Xiaoli's hand, "Come on, let's take the eggs in the bag home first, and then get a basket to put them in!"
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