"?? What ox-balls are you talking about? Why can't I understand... This bowl was originally my ama's big bowl. Not two years after I could remember things, he died, and it became my big bowl! How did he die? Ran into another tribe while hunting and got smashed to death with one hammer, that's all. At least he left a corpse behind and didn't get carried off and eaten... After that, I kept using this big bowl to eat. I could eat two bowls in one meal! But eating two bowls was impossible too, because the tribe didn't have that much food..."
"What did we eat? Usually in spring it was a little more than half a bowl of watery stuff, in summer one bowl of dry stuff, and in winter not even half a bowl of watery stuff. The best time was autumn, when there was lots of game, easy to catch, plus acorns and Barnyard Millet, so we could eat two dry bowls... It's summer now, and we didn't catch any game this time either. If you hadn't brought food, today we'd only have been able to eat half a bowl of thin gruel..."
Tulusiting Mountain Guard was a guard post that could garrison a thousand men, so the mountain fort was built on a very large scale. Even with half the buildings collapsed, housing five hundred men and horses would not be a problem at all. And right now, counting the one-hundred-and-fifty-man horse-buying party and the hundred-plus tribespeople, there were only about three hundred people in the fort altogether, which instead made the stockade seem empty and deserted.
The kitchen the Ming army had left behind was still fairly intact, mainly because the roof was sturdy and did not leak even on rainy days, so a great