Chapter 32: Playing Mahjong

The winter in the north is cold, and Gaijiatun officially entered the harsh winter after a blizzard in December. The temperature in the mountainous areas is even a few degrees lower than in other places, with snowflakes drifting from the sky every other day.

Shen Yunfang would sleep until she naturally woke up in the morning, and seeing the clear sky outside, she hurriedly got up to tidy up.

In recent days, because she was growing chives and raising earthworms in the west room and the fire in the room could not go out, she had not been able to sleep soundly, always having to get up two or three times in the night to add fire to the kang.

Also, without a thermometer to get a good handle on temperature and humidity, her breeding business wasn't developing as well as she had hoped.

The chives were okay, they could tolerate even if the temperature was a bit low, and she had added plenty of fertilizer, so so far, she had harvested the chives four times.

After cutting them twice, Shen Yunfang dug out the chive roots, split them up, and planted them all over the floor of the west room.

The pesky lettuce she also had harvested, leaving only the ones that were sown in the gaps to continue growing.

More than a month later, the lettuce had grown, and after harvesting it, she sowed another batch of lettuce seeds. Now the lettuce was half-grown and would be ready to harvest in about ten days or so.

In the space, she now had thirty-four bundles of chives, each weighing one pound. There were also sixty heads of lettuce, each weighing more than one and a half pounds due to the abundant fertility.

Originally, there was more lettuce than this, but Shen Yunfang couldn't resist the temptation of the green leaves and would wash a few and dip them in sauce to eat every now and then. Over the course of the month, she had eaten quite a few.

The propagation of the earthworms wasn't as good as expected. Firstly, it was because the temperature and humidity weren't well-controlled which affected their reproduction, and secondly, she lacked suitable containers. Almost two months in, she was still using the original pickled vegetable jar to raise the earthworms, where large earthworms, small earthworms, and worm eggs were mixed together, influencing each other.

For this situation, Shen Yunfang temporarily had no solution, as she really couldn't find anything to replace it.

She had indeed asked Dashuan's wife if there were any carpenters around, as she wanted to make a few wooden boxes, or a place where she could order some suitable pottery jars, but there were neither carpenters nor potters in her own village. The neighboring village had a carpenter, and Xiaoshutun, over ten miles away from Gaijiatun, had a potter, but private trading wasn't allowed at the moment, and even if it were, she didn't have the money, so she had to think of other solutions.

If all else failed, when the weather warmed up the following year, she would dig a pit in the backyard, line it with stones, and raise the earthworms there. Although certainly some earthworms would escape, it was still better than the current situation.

After Shen Yunfang had taken care of herself and cooked some food, she then fed the chickens before going to the west room to light a fire and water the plants.

She no longer had to feed the sheep at the production brigade every day. Since the beginning of January, the brigade had made a unified arrangement for feeding the livestock. Because Yunfang was young and there were no adults at home, she was exempted from this task, and Ergouzi's family along with Sanya's family, who fed the pigs, took over the responsibility. She would return to work when spring arrived in March. Of course, when she wasn't working, she got no work points either.

Having finished all her chores, she began to dress for going out.

She donned a thin cotton-padded jacket inside, then a thick cotton-padded jacket, and finally put on the dark blue coat on the outside. She took out the thick wool insoles from the bed, placed them inside the oversized cotton shoes, and then slipped her small feet into them.

From the chest, she took out another jacket and the pair of worn gloves, then went to the main room. By the side of the firewood, she picked up a willow basket and a crude wooden stick and walked out the door.

Once outside, she wrapped the jacket she was carrying over her head. The family was poor and didn't have a scarf, so she had to make do.

Following the small path in the backyard, Shen Yunfang began to trudge through the snow, one deep step at a time, up the mountain.

She had taken advantage of the period without snowfall to familiarize herself with the big mountain behind her house. Although she didn't dare to venture too deep, she had walked the path from her backyard into the mountains several times and had found a place suitable for her to cultivate secretly. For concealment, she found a small hillside more than an hour away from her home, which had sunlight exposure and fertile soil, making it very suitable for clearing and farming.

Shen Yunfang followed the path upward, and by the time she reached the slope, she was covered in sweat, her hands propped on her knees as she gasped for breath. With her slight build, the climb was just too much for her, especially since a heavy snow had just fallen the day before—there was knee-deep snow on the ground, making her journey all the more arduous.

After a while, when she had caught her breath, she hurriedly chose a spot and started making arrangements.

She wanted to take advantage of the recent snowfall to see if she could trap a few more sparrows.

Indeed, Shen Yunfang was so craving for meat that she thought it over and over again, and her only recourse was to target the sparrows.

She had done this in her past life when she was a child, and since it required such simple tools, it suited her current situation perfectly, as she had nothing to her name.

Trapping sparrows with a basket is something many children had done in their youth. The best time was in winter, especially when the heavy snow covered all the ground snugly. The method is quite simple, but the yield isn't always much, as sparrows are quick-witted and generally managing to trap four or five was considered good. Moreover, even if you did trap them, getting them out of the basket was immensely tricky because if you lifted the basket even a crack, the small sparrows would escape through the gap.

Shen Yunfang had accumulated her expertise entirely from practice.

The first time she came to the mountains to trap sparrows, she squatted in the snow for three hours, watching the sparrows come and eat up a good amount of the millet, yet she didn't catch a single one.

She slowly gathered experience from failure after failure, and now she had become somewhat of an expert at trapping sparrows, managing modest success on each trip to the mountain.

Shen Yunfang scattered some millet on a cleared patch of ground, then placed the basket she had brought over it, propping it up with a small stick, one end of which was tied to a thin string.

To prevent the sparrows from noticing, she specifically chose a white thread which was almost invisible against the snow unless one looked very closely. She straightened the string and, holding it in her hand, moved to crouch behind a nearby large tree.

After patiently waiting for a while, a few sparrows flew over, chirping and chattering. The sharp-eyed ones spotted the millet on the ground, and then several sparrows landed on the snow.

Sparrows are rather clever birds. Instead of acting recklessly upon seeing food, they slowly approached the basket. After observing for a long time, ensuring there was no danger around, they gradually moved under the basket.

This was a contest of patience.

Shen Yunfang squatted behind the tree, motionless, her eyes intently watching the sparrows on the ground. When a few entered her ambush range and started pecking voraciously at the millet, she pulled the string quickly, firmly, and accurately. Yes!

The other sparrows were scared off by the sudden fall of the basket and fled for their lives, while the few greedy ones inside flapped in panic, attempting to escape.

But could Shen Yunfang let them go? Of course not.

She had counted earlier; there should be five sparrows trapped under the basket.

She quickly approached, untied her clothes from her head, wrapped them around the bottom edge of the basket, gently lifted it, and pulled the torn clothes inward, especially ensuring the part around her arm that extended into the basket was tightly covered.

Then, she carefully pulled out the sparrows one by one. There was no need to tie them up—she simply grabbed them and, quite cruelly, twisted their necks, and then tossed the bodies into the open space. There were five in total, not too many, not too few.

She then restored the scene of the "crime" and continued to squat behind the tree, waiting for the next round.

This time, however, the wait was longer than before. The sparrows that had escaped were not going to be fooled again, so she could only wait for the next group.