The earlier clamor in San Zhuang's courtyard had already died away.
The yard was thick with the heavy stench of blood and the smell of boiled offal.
Most of the villagers who had come for meat had left contentedly, carrying away their tiny shares of pork offal or scraps of meat.
Only San Zhuang and four other men closest to him, hunters who entered the mountains with him, remained in the yard.
The wild boar's massive skeleton and a pile of discarded remains lay strewn across the ground. The real cuts of good meat had already been carved up and put away.
A younger hunter stared at the nearly emptied meat basket and could not help complaining, "Brother San Zhuang, we worked ourselves to the bone to bring that back, and we just gave so much of it away for nothing? Some people even secretly took extra! Honestly..."
San Zhuang was wiping the blood from his hunting fork with a rag. Without even raising his head, he said in a muffled voice, "What are you in such a hurry for? You can't catch a wolf without sacrificing a child. In times like these, what can the few of us do on our own?
"Give everyone a little sweetness now, and if anything happens later, it'll be easier to talk. Treat that bit of meat as food thrown to dogs."
Though he said that, the corner of his eye still twitched as he looked at the basket, now more than half empty.
The boar had looked huge, but once it was skinned, deboned, and gutted, there had not been much pure meat left to begin with. After dividing it up like this,
the five of them, the main force, truly did not have much left for themselves.
Thinking of how Fang