Chapter 18 Making Furniture for a New Home
Today is the second day of living in the cave. I was afraid that I would live alone and have no concept of time. I would not know what day it was, so I carved the time I came here and today's time on a smooth and flat stone wall. From now on, I will carve a horizontal line every day. During festivals, a star is carved at the end of the horizontal line to distinguish them. Yike calculated that he had been in this world for more than two months. She escaped from Hanjiagou Village and arrived at Longshan Cave. It took her more than a month. She was lucky enough to arrive here safely. She had to thank the time-travel god for not killing her!
Today I am going to decorate my new home. The first thing I have to do is to make my own bed, and put all other things behind.
She took the hatchet to cut the bamboo. She used a long stick to knock around the bamboo forest and found that except for the place where she fell, which had a hole leading to the ground, the rest of the place was solid mud. Only then did she dare to cut the bamboo with confidence. Haha, once bitten by a snake, one will be afraid of ropes for ten years.
She first chopped a dozen bamboos, chopping non-stop with the hatchet in her hand. Even though her hands were covered with thick calluses from long-term labor and now her palms were still blistered, she gritted her teeth and endured it. For the sake of the bed, she had to persevere!
After the bamboo was cut, it was transported into the cave and cut into two-meter-long sections. A total of ten sections were prepared. These sections were dragged to a flat area in the southeast of the cave. They were laid side by side one by one and then tied together with ropes. The simple bamboo bed was ready. All you need to do is wait until the bamboo joints are dry, spread a thick layer of dry grass on the surface, and then weave a straw mat and cover it with it, so you won’t be afraid of the cold in winter. Of course, it would be even more beautiful if you surrounded it with straw mats to block the wind! It is best to build a bamboo house, and these can be completed slowly later.
It took her a whole day to cut the bamboo and make the bed. Who told her to have such small hands and feet now!
For several consecutive days, Yike continued to complete bamboo-related work: bamboo tube kettle, bamboo chopsticks, bamboo bowls, etc.
There were originally four bamboo tube kettles, and more needed to be prepared. It was very troublesome to climb up and down to get water in the cave. Prepare a few more and put more into the cave at one time, so you don’t have to come out on rainy days.
The method of making a kettle with a bamboo tube is very simple. Take two sections of bamboo tubes and connect the middle section. The method to open up the bamboo joints is also very simple. Use a wooden stick that is slightly smaller than the bamboo, sharpen one end of the stick, aim the sharpened end at the bamboo joint and poke it hard. If it doesn't work once, poke it twice. One is that I don’t have much strength, so it usually takes me two tries to poke it through.
A total of four bamboo tube kettles were made to hold water. The two long bamboo tube kettles were made of three sections of bamboo tubes, and the two short ones were made of only one section of bamboo tube. The short ones were used when traveling and hunting. Four wooden stoppers were also made to block the mouths of the kettles so that water would not pour out. Now there are a total of eight bamboo tubes, large and small.
The larger bamboo tubes are used to make several bamboo bowls, and the ones without nodes are broken open to make chopsticks. It took most of the day to finish all this. The remaining time could be used to check the traps to see if there were any animals trapped in them, and whether the snares had caught any pheasants or rabbits, etc.
Once we reached the trap, we found that the trees around it were short, there were many bushes, and there was a thick layer of fallen leaves on the ground. When she went there, she found that the fallen leaves had been turned over, and she was happy. It was obvious that there were pheasants looking for food, insects, etc. here. Pheasant stewed with mushrooms, boiled chicken... her mouth was watering. "I must go deep into the woods to see if there are any mushrooms." She thought to herself, "Now that I have caught a pheasant, I can only go to the bamboo forest to dig bamboo shoots to stew the pheasant." When she came to the place where the trap was set, there was no pheasant; and when she came to the place where the pit was dug, there was still no pheasant.
"Ahhhh! My pheasant! Woo woo woo woo! My meat!" Yike was so sad. He had been looking forward to it, thinking that he would have meat to eat, but in the end, he ate nothing.
Dejected, Yi Ke checked the trap, made a few more nooses, and went home while collecting firewood. Yike chopped the firewood as if it were a pheasant, saying, "Chop you, chop you! I told you not to go into my trap obediently. Chop, chop, chop! I chop, chop, chop! You don't go to such a good place of trap, humph! You can escape today but not tomorrow. I will definitely catch you tomorrow and eat you! I chop..."
In the evening, although Yike did not eat chicken, she cooked four eggs, two baked eggs, two fried eggs, and a pot of purslane soup. As she ate the sour soup along with the eggs, she temporarily forgot about the chicken she had not met.
Chicken monologue: "Who did I offend? They want to eat me without even meeting me."
In previous lives, what people often said was that the greatest happiness in life was not to have enough food and clothing, but to be alive. But now the first priority is to stay alive, and then to have enough food and clothing. Live well. When anyone is almost starving to death, the first thing he thinks of is eating. Only by eating can you stay alive.
Every morning when I open my lonely eyes and look at the empty cave, the first thing I think about is what to eat. "Rocks, I guarantee they won't hurt my teeth, haha!" She complained in her mind, and then went to check if there was any catch in the trap. This is something she has to do every day, otherwise she will go hungry. Unfortunately, there has been no gain in the past few days.
Yike has been busy dealing with bamboo these days, and she decided to build a stove today.
Yike came to the bottom of the cliff, filled the pot with water, lit a fire in the stove, and began to boil the water.
"We must build a stove in the cave today, otherwise it will be troublesome when it rains." Yi Ke thought secretly.
First, you can go to the puddle to wash your face and rinse your mouth. The so-called gargling means holding saliva in your mouth and rubbing your teeth with your fingers, ha! It's like playing. In this forest without toothpaste and toothbrush, I can insist on touching my teeth every day. I feel like I have returned to my childhood, holding my thumb and drooling, looking for my mother, "Baby is hungry, baby wants to eat. Hehehe!" After washing my face and rinsed my mouth, and washing the wild vegetables, I went back to the stove to prepare breakfast.
Back to the stove, the water has boiled. I fill the kettle with water first and then cook breakfast. I threw in a handful of wild vegetables and cracked the last egg to boil, and that was breakfast. The wild vegetables are enough to fill you up, but the eggs and meat are gone.
As soon as he had breakfast, he went to see if there were any animals in the trap. If not, you have to find a way to hunt. You can't eat vegetables without meat every day. Without adequate nutrition, when will this small body have the strength?
She took the hatchet and rope, put on the backpack, and walked towards the trap excitedly. I first went to look at the nooses, and wow, there were prey on three of them, three pheasants. One of the pheasants was dead. It might have been the first one to be trapped. It was not there when she came to check yesterday, so it must have been trapped after she left. The other two pheasants had their long feathers plucked, their feet tied with ropes, and thrown into the backpack.
Yike went to check the three pits again. There were only two rabbits in one pit, one big and one small. You can tie the four legs of the two rabbits with a rope and throw them into the backpack to keep them company with the pheasants.
This time, Yi Ke went to check the big trap in another direction. The camouflage of the trap was still good and hadn't changed at all, except that the green grass had withered. She cut some more and threw them up.
"Little girl, go home with the basket on your back..." Yi Ke sang happily as she went home carrying pheasants and rabbits on her back. She climbed up the watchtower using a rope and returned to the cave carrying pheasants and rabbits.
Yike decided to keep the two living pheasants and rabbits temporarily as food reserves. The weather is still hot now, so you can't make pickled meat. Although Water Cave No. 2 is very cool, I don’t know if rats will enter it. If there are no rats, it can be used as a refrigerator. This will require time to experiment later. Now, we just eat the dead ones, because the body needs nourishment anyway. All the pheasants and rabbits were kept alive.
No matter what era, food storage is always the most important thing.
Now that he had live pheasants and rabbits, Yike decided to change his plan of building a stove today and make a pen for the chickens and rabbits first. Originally, it could be raised in a hidden cave, but the tunnel was too long and slippery, like touching a snake. If I had to go in and out every day, the thought of it giving me goose bumps all over my body. Besides, there were not many chickens and rabbits, so she would rather work hard and raise them in a pen.
The chicken coop was very simple. It was located in a corner in the southwest direction of the cave. A few bamboos were used as pillars, and vines were wrapped around them several times. A few large banana leaves were found to enclose the other three directions except the stone wall. The feathers on the pheasant's wings were plucked and thrown into the chicken coop, and it would not be able to fly out.
It is more troublesome for rabbits to make a circle. It is useless to surround it with stones because it will dig a hole in the ground to escape. However, the ground of this cave is full of stones and rabbits cannot dig holes, so it is enough to just surround it with stones. So Yike found some stones and built a rabbit circle. The rabbit pen has no door, only a skylight. Let’s leave it like this for now. When we have enough time, we will rebuild the chicken coop and rabbit pen.
After finishing all this, Yike went for a walk in the mountains and forests and picked some wild vegetables. I also found a patch of Chinese cabbage, a pear tree, and a plum tree, but they were just starting to bear fruit, so I didn’t have anything to eat. I was unhappy!
The first thing I thought about was the pheasant I had just trapped. Is there a chicken coop nearby? Are there any eggs? Yike ran to look for them again with the basket on his back, and actually found two nests of eggs. Each nest had more than twenty eggs, so there were more than forty eggs in total in the two nests. Wow! I didn't expect that a random idea would lead to a great harvest. This is such great luck.
Yike ate the roasted chicken and drank the ginseng chicken soup, and found it particularly delicious. He actually felt a slight sense of happiness in his heart.
Now I really hope to grow up quickly. It is so difficult to do anything with such a small body. It took me most of the day to make a chicken coop and a rabbit nest. Oh, it is so difficult! The most important thing is that Yike wants to practice again the kung fu taught by his master in the previous life, so that he can protect himself in the forest.
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