Li Long made rather too much noise, startling the fish. They had been swimming upstream in orderly lines, but his disturbance sent them darting everywhere, splashing water and drawing Liu Shanmin and the others over.
The larger burbot were as long as a chopstick, while the smaller ones were about the size of a finger. They swam extremely fast, with the occasional crucian carp adding to the chaos. Excited, Li Long jumped down to the stream, but with so many fish before him and no tools at hand, he could only fret.
He simply crouched down and reached in to catch them. The fish were terribly slippery. He grabbed four or five at once, but the burbot squeezed and wriggled desperately, all slipping free and falling back into the water, where they swam frantically away and vanished.
His actions brought both Liu Shanmin and Liu Gaolou to the riverbank, leaving Bek, Mulat, and Bek's relatives, who had come out to greet them, thoroughly surprised.
"Whoa, so many fish! Are these loaches?" Although Liu Gaolou had spent some time in Northern Xinjiang, he really knew little about these fish.
"The locals call them burbot. They're plateau loaches." Li Long waited patiently and finally caught a few. A shame he had no tools, or he could certainly have caught several kilograms by now.
"All right, all right, leave it until later. Our hosts have come out to meet us. We shouldn't be here," Liu Shanmin said. Li Long smiled and climbed up the bank.
Just then, he suddenly heard a flurry of splashing. Turning his head, he saw a clubfish weighing over a kilogram-a stonefish, a type of alpine cold-water fish-dart straight over the burbot and disappear into deeper water.
Clubfish really did look like clubs. Li Long did not know their