The afternoon sun shone brightly. Heading west, the sunlight was a little dazzling, but Li Long barely noticed.
He had looked at snow every day in the mountains without getting snow blindness. That counted as a special blessing, perhaps.
Wuyi Highway was one of the main roads in Northern Xinjiang. Plenty of vehicles traveled back and forth, packing the snow down hard. A sled hitched behind a vehicle would have flown along.
Schoolchildren these days, especially the older ones, would sometimes grab the tailgate of a passing tractor trailer and slide along behind it if they were bold enough. It felt thrilling.
There were few homes along the road. Occasionally, he saw a single-story house with smoke rising from it. Most had been built without permission, but nobody really bothered about that these days.
Some people built a house and lived in it for a dozen years. With nobody intervening, it was as good as having ownership. When the authorities eventually organized a cleanup, they simply issued the certificates. Later, when the houses were demolished, the owners could even collect compensation.
With Reform and Opening Up, laws and regulations were gradually becoming more comprehensive. During that process, quite a few people found loopholes to exploit.
Li Long's hunting counted as one such case.
Once the Wildlife Protection Law came out, he would no longer be able to hunt like this. Of course, enforcement had not been particularly strict at first. Wild boars here had never become a scourge as they had in Inland China, and nobody truly regulated boar hunting even into the early twenty-first century.
Everyone knew that, whether or not these creatures helped maintain ecological balance, they certainly caused harm.
There were plenty of wild hare tracks in the ditches on both sides of the road. These hares