"Hey, don't be so polite. I brought it back to share with friends and family anyway. Look at this huge crocodile—Chenchen's gone back to school, and no matter how much your sister-in-law and I eat, we can't finish it. If we freeze it in the fridge, it won't be fresh anymore."
"Is crocodile meat expensive?"
"It's not exactly cheap, but not too expensive either. Usually fifty or sixty yuan per jin. This one didn't cost me anything—it was a gift from a friend."
Lu Ao had never eaten crocodile meat before and immediately became interested.
Lin Dawu, panting, carried the crocodile into the kitchen with him. After setting down the water tank, he caught his breath and said, "My buddy's really having a hard time. He leased a huge pond to raise crocodiles, but with all the rain lately, he was careless and didn't check the fences properly. The rain washed open the fencing the night before last, and dozens of his crocodiles escaped."
"This was one of the escaped crocodiles. We spent the whole day surrounding it before we finally caught it. It got injured in the process. If it hadn't been hurt, we wouldn't have had the heart to eat it."
Lu Ao found that strange. "Wouldn't a crocodile farm have more than one layer of fencing?"
"That's true, and he did have more than one layer. But there was already a hole in the outer fence. He's usually pretty careless, so he never noticed it. Then the rain knocked down the inner fence the night before last. The crocodiles got out and slipped through the outer fence too."
"That serious? There aren't any crocodiles around here, are there?"
"No. Even if there were, they'd have gone extinct long ago." Lin Dawu straightened up and thumped his lower