Winter is sunny and warm with bright sunshine, which is the best time to repair the house. After the house is repaired, you can live in it safely when there is strong wind and heavy snow in the twelfth month and thunder and rain in the early spring of the following year.

Currently, most of the houses in Linshui Village have rammed earth walls and thatched roofs. The roofs of several households have not been repaired for many years and are leaking. They plan to tear down the old roofs, replace the rotten purlins, reinforce them and lay new thatch. This is a big project for each household and requires the support of the collective to complete.

The production team happened to have nothing to do, so they organized the members. The men went into the forest deep in the Daqing Mountains to carry wood, and the women went outside the mountain to cut thatch suitable for covering roofs. This was considered voluntary labor, helping each other. Everyone needed help sometimes, and the team did not keep track of work points.

However, when it was your turn to carry wood and cut thatch for a family, the host would provide you with meals, three meals a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Usually, you could just eat whatever you wanted in the morning and at noon, as long as you were full. For dinner, you had to have some meat, fish, or something like that. If you had chickens at home, you would usually kill two chickens to entertain them.

Meng Tao and the educated youth responded to the production team's call and joined the mutual aid group, but she didn't want to cut thatch. She wanted to follow the men to carry wood deep into the mountains.

Bao Shunfeng disagreed at first, but Meng Tao kept trying, and several educated youths came to help and said they would take care of each other. Bao Shunfeng also knew that Meng Tao was in good health recently and had a little strength. She could carry heavy loads and run fast. It would be no problem for her to go into the mountains to carry a piece of wood, so he let her go. However, he warned her and the educated youths to follow everyone and not to step into places that had not been cleared: "The deep mountains and old forests are full of gullies and bumps, covered with wild vines and weeds, which are densely packed and taller than people. It is impossible to see clearly. There is only one road leading to the old forest. Normally, no one would go into the deep mountains. Only at this time, when you need to cut wood to build a house, you ask the older generation to identify and clear the road before you can go in. In the past, some young people tried to break in by themselves, but they fell off the cliff and were found after searching for ten days or half a month. The people were gnawed by wild beasts and only bones were left... This is not a joke!"

Meng Tao nodded repeatedly. She had learned about this from the aunties and grandmas in the team a long time ago. She had also seen with her own eyes that the deep mountains and old forests were green and endless, and she really didn't have the courage to go in. She was afraid of falling off the cliff and losing her life, and secondly, she was afraid of getting lost and unable to get out, and being captured by wild men - this was what the aunties and grandmas said, and they said they were not trying to scare her. In addition to black bears, wolves, wild boars and monkeys in the deep mountains, there were really wild men, who were tall and strong, and more terrifying than black bears. In the old society, a girl was lost in the village. She was captured by wild men to be a wife, and she gave birth to a child. The child was covered in hair!

What the aunties said was as if they had seen it with their own eyes, but it was indeed a bit scary to listen to.

So although Meng Tao often went up the mountain, he only went there to chop firewood and pick some wild fruits.

This time, taking the opportunity of carrying wood, Meng Tao wanted to see this deep mountain forest. There were five families in the team who needed to renovate their houses, so carrying wood would take at least five or six days. The team would make a round trip a day, and by then, no matter how much weeds there were on the mountain road, they would be flattened. If she felt it was not too dangerous, she could go in a few more times throughout the winter, and maybe she would get something.

On the first day, we carried wood for the Lin family at the east end of the village. The Lin family cooked corn porridge and steamed multi-grain steamed bread for breakfast and lunch. Since we would not be able to come back at noon while carrying wood, we were given two steamed breads, half a water radish, and two pickled cabbages for lunch.

A group of more than 40 people climbed up the Daqing Mountain behind the village and split into two groups halfway up the mountain. More than 20 people continued to move higher to go into the mountains to carry wood, while 20 women scattered halfway up the mountain to look for suitable yellow thatch for building houses. Each person cut three loads and carried them down the mountain.

Those carrying wood gradually went into the deep forest. Meng Tao walked in the middle of the team. She wore old clothes, carried a water bottle, and had a rope around her waist with a hatchet tied to the rope. This was the basic equipment for going up the mountain. Everyone was dressed the same, but some people didn't bring water. Not every household had a water bottle in the wild, so those who didn't bring water could only endure their thirst. There were springs on the mountain, but you had to see them, as they were sometimes too far away to get a drink.

Leading the way were two old members in their fifties and sixties. They had gone up the mountain early in the morning, so now there was a road leading into the deep mountains and forests.

As Meng Tao walked, she was secretly surprised: Fortunately, she was not so foolish as to venture into the deep forest alone. The terrain under the vegetation was too dangerous, with cliffs and deep ravines everywhere. Some sections of the road could be described as terrifying. The single-sided road on the cliff was only one meter wide at most, so she had to be very careful when walking past it, and she didn't dare to look down at all; would she dare to walk along the crooked branches of the thousand-year-old trees through the bottomless ravines? Fortunately, Meng Tao had been training on the space stone platform for so long that she had overcome her fear of heights, otherwise she really wouldn't dare to go there.

If they come back carrying the wood like this, they will definitely not be able to pass through the dangerous sections of the road and will need the help of villagers to carry them.

When they finally arrived at the forest, the terrain was much better, with slopes and flat areas. Moreover, because the trees were tall and dense and the leaf decay layer was thick, the weeds underneath did not grow very tall. There were also very flat, fluffy lawns in places where the trees were sparse, with clusters of short bushes growing in an orderly manner. It was a natural and beautiful scenery. Meng Tao imagined that in spring, it would be even more beautiful with a few clusters of wild flowers. If she hadn't come here through such hardships, she would have thought this was a park.

The men began to cut down trees. Meng Tao wanted to walk around alone, but Bao Shunfeng stopped her and told her not to run around. He said there were wild beasts in the forest, which had come down the mountain to harm people and animals and destroy food in the fields. In the past few years, people from the commune’s armed forces department organized people to go into the mountains to hunt wild beasts, but the beasts would also run away, so only a few could be killed. There were wolves, black bears, wild boars, monkeys and all kinds of other beasts. It was said that some people had heard the roar of tigers. To prevent accidents, people tried to stay together and not go too far.

Bao Shunfeng pointed to a low bush not far away and said, "If you want to pee, hide over there. Just shout and no one will see you!"

Meng Tao: “…”

What a weird captain! I'm really impressed.

Several young people nearby all laughed, and someone asked, "Uncle Bao, should we also shout 'I need to pee, don't come over'?"

Bao Shunfeng said sternly: "You have to shout! Anyway, there are girls here, you all should stay away from them, otherwise you will be treated like a hooligan!"

Xu Guoliang said mischievously: "This is called sounding the alarm. If you urinate without warning, you will be fined!"

Everyone burst into laughter, Meng Tao stared blankly, she didn't know how red her face was, anyway, she was very embarrassed, it was really embarrassing for a woman to be mixed up with men, she was inconsiderate and careless.

Bao Shunfeng was afraid that Meng Tao would not listen, so he assigned several young men to form a group with her and keep an eye on her. Meng Tao gave up the idea of ​​going far away and just walked around in this forest. However, she discovered many medicinal herbs. Among them, Meng Taohua recognized two or three of them in her memory, and she also recognized them herself, such as wild Panax notoginseng, Liangmianzhen, and Isatis root. She had seen them up close when she visited the botanical garden before.

Good morning, fairies! The author is online asking for votes, collections and five-star reviews!

(End of this chapter)