Chapter 35 Catching Yellow Eels at Night
Hearing what his sister-in-law said, Lin Heng smiled and shook his head, saying, "I'm not angry, I was just joking."
"Because there are no secrets."
Lin Heng added with a smile.
"Ah?" Sister-in-law Liu Juan was puzzled.
"Because you can see it if you just walk into the woods at night. It doesn't require any skills."
Lin Heng smiled slightly.
When sister-in-law Liu Juan heard this, she immediately felt a little regretful. It turned out to be so simple. If she had known earlier, she would have waited until the evening to check it out.
"But I advise you, sister-in-law, not to catch them these days, and no one in the family should catch them either."
Lin Heng said with a smile.
"Why?" Sister-in-law Liu Juan was a little confused. She thought that such delicious food should be eaten more.
"If there's an outsider in our family, word will spread from one person to ten, and from ten to a hundred, and everyone will know about it, and we won't be able to catch him.
When no one is around, we can catch them quietly. They will still be there until July."
Lin Heng explained that in later generations, there was no shortage of food and clothing, as if all the cicadas and monkeys had been caught and their extinction was cut off.
Not to mention this day and age, if the villagers knew they could eat it, they would definitely hide in the woods every night.
"That's true. Let's wait until the person leaves before catching him."
When Liu Juan heard this, she immediately felt that it made sense. The women in the village were the most terrifying. They would run across several mountains just to pull a locust flower, not to mention catching such a delicacy as a cicada monkey.
She immediately turned around and went back to tell the others.
Lin Heng walked into the yard and didn't see Xiulan, so he found Caiyun to ask.
"Sister-in-law Xiulan went to pick the black fungus. She said everyone in the family loves to eat it.
But I clearly saw that you were the only one who loved to eat, and the others barely touched their chopsticks. "
Caiyun said as she flipped through How the Steel Was Tempered.
She has already read more than half of this book, really working day and night.
Lin Heng: “…”
He really hadn't noticed this, and only remembered it when Caiyun mentioned it.
In the past, gray-gray vegetables were only occasionally served on the table, but recently they seem to be served at every meal.
It turned out that it was his wife who pulled out the hair for him. He was really moved.
After untying Xiongba's chain, Lin Heng took it out to find his wife Xiulan.
“Woof woof!!”
Xiongba shouted twice towards the sky, as if he was training his voice.
She looked back every three steps as she walked, and from time to time she ran to Lin Heng's feet and rubbed against them, as if she was afraid that he would get lost.
Lin Heng found his wife Xiulan at the edge of the field below the road. She was squatting on the ground picking green onions with her daughter Xiaoxia on her back.
"Why are you here?"
Hearing Xiongba's voice, Xiulan raised her head and smiled.
"Come and pick you up. Give Xiaoxia to me." Lin Heng said with a smile, and walked over to pick Xiaoxia up.
"There are a lot of garlic cloves here. I picked a lot of them and pickled them at home. They are delicious when eaten with noodles."
Xiulan pointed to the garlic in the bamboo basket and said.
This is a plant that looks similar to garlic sprouts, but is a wild plant. It is also called wild garlic and small-root garlic.
The aroma is very unique. People in rural areas usually put it in a jar and soak it until it becomes sour before eating noodles. It tastes pretty good.
"Well, you do it and I'll watch."
Lin Heng smiled and pulled his daughter. His daughter touched Xiongba's head and tried to break free from his hand to play with Xiongba.
Xiulan didn't know why Lin Heng was grinning foolishly and just kept picking wild vegetables.
The gray-gray vegetable generally grows very tall, more than 30 centimeters tall, and only the leaves are edible, which requires quite a lot of effort to pinch.
After picking half the bamboo basket, Xiulan didn't stand up until it got dark.
On the way home, Xiulan suddenly said, "I'm not going to catch cicada monkeys tonight."
"Actually, I have forgotten what you said yesterday." Lin Heng chuckled.
“Anyway, if I can’t go up tonight, it won’t be considered a breach of promise.
You only said that I would beg you to go with me tonight, but you didn’t say that I couldn’t eat.”
Xiulan didn't even look at Lin Heng and tried to argue, but in her heart she couldn't help but recall the taste of the fried cicada monkeys she had eaten in the morning.
Lin Heng thought her behavior was a little funny, and asked with a smile: "Then do you think it smells good?"
"It smells good, really good!" Xiulan nodded.
Back in the yard, Lin Heng handed Xiaoxia over to Xiongba to take care of, and asked it to play throwing sticks with Xiaoxia.
“Woof woof!!”
Xiongba called out to Lin Heng twice with some complaints, and seemed very reluctant to do this job.
He ignored it and took one of Xiulan's sewing needles, heated it in the stove until it was red, and then used pliers to bend the tip.
A pin hook is fine for catching creek grouper, but it can easily become straightened when fishing for larger prey.
So he made a strong one with a needle, which was very hard and not easy to straighten.
Let’s go catch eels tonight. Some of the eels that are hard to catch can also be fished.
There are also loaches in the fields, each one of them is very slippery, so you can only catch them by fishing.
Fishing for eels and loaches at night is also a very interesting thing.
When it was completely dark, around eight o'clock, eldest brother Lin Yue came to find Lin Heng carrying a bag of fertilizer.
"Let's go catch eels." Lin Yue seemed very excited.
"Walk!"
Lin Heng was also a little impatient, so he put on his water shoes, took the things he had prepared and set off.
His family's paddy fields are on the upper river, which is quite a long way away.
"Speaking of catching eels at night, this is what we discovered." Lin Yue said with a smile on the way.
"Yes, at that time no one was out at night. It was because the cows ran away. We used flashlights to look for the cows and found that the eels came out at night and lay directly on the muddy surface of the paddy field."
Lin Heng smiled and recalled his childhood with his older brother. Although they were poor, they were full of fun.
Chatting and laughing, the two men continued moving forward with dim flashlights and soon arrived at their own rice fields.
Lin Heng used a flashlight with an aluminum casing, powered by two No. 1 dry batteries, three centimeters in diameter and five centimeters long.
The light emitted was relatively weak and dim, but fortunately both of them had good eyesight and could see clearly.
“Look, there’s one here. Come here, I’m afraid I’ll let it run away.” The eldest brother Lin Yue was the first to discover a yellow eel. It was lying quietly on the mud surface, and it didn’t move when it was hit by the flashlight.
"Okay." Lin Heng walked over and took a look. It was a medium-sized eel, a little thicker than a thumb and about twenty centimeters long.
Catching eels with bare hands requires skills, and Lin Heng is the best at it because he is most interested in catching fish and shrimps.
When catching an eel, you certainly cannot hold it in your hands, nor can you grab it like you would with a stick.
In fact, only one hand is needed.
Put your four fingers together towards the palm, with the middle finger upright, so that the middle finger, index finger and ring finger form a pincer-like grasping structure.
When catching it, the key is to approach it gently first, and then once you are close enough, quickly, accurately and fiercely clamp the eel's waist in the pincer structure formed by the middle finger and the remaining fingers.
Then he clenched his fist tightly, and the eel was firmly clamped in his hand with his middle finger.
Lin Heng hit the target with one strike, pulled the eel out of the water, and stuffed it into the snakeskin bag that his eldest brother had already prepared.
By the time it realized what was happening, it was already trapped in a jar and could only jump around wildly in the snakeskin bag.
"Awesome, your skills haven't declined at all." Lin Yue said with a smile.
"Of course!" Lin Heng chuckled. He had almost mastered the technique of catching eels into an instinct. At least eight hundred eels had died from his eel catching technique.
I can’t say the success rate is 100%, but 90% is more than enough.
"There's another one here. Damn, there's another one next to it. They're both so big!"
Suddenly, eldest brother Lin Yue discovered another big catch.
(End of this chapter)
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
