Going into the mountains? Have you got a death wish?

"Then let's break up," Li Long said. "I won't drag you down. You can tell people we've broken up and have nothing to do with each other anymore."

Li Long looked perfectly calm, which left Wu Shufen puzzled and caught off guard. Surprise showed on her face. This was nothing like him. With his temperament, shouldn't he have clung to her and begged her not to break up with him?

What was going on? Had he found someone new during this trip to Wu City?

Wu Shufen remembered that when they met after his return last month, she had only hinted at her displeasure over not seeing him for so long, and he had immediately spent some of his wages on a hair ornament at the commune shop to coax her out of her bad mood.

Why was he so indifferent this time?

But Wu Shufen had her pride, too. Though she couldn't make sense of what Li Long had said, she couldn't ask him to stay together in front of Li Jianguo, Li Juan, and Li Qiang. Resisting the urge to look at the Gugu Chickens, she said to Li Long with a stern expression:

"Fine, let's break up. And don't go telling people you're my boyfriend anymore!"

With that, she turned and strode away, quickly disappearing behind the house.

"Long, are you all right?" Li Jianguo looked at Li Long, feeling that his younger brother was acting a little strangely today.

"I'm fine, big brother. Let's bring the Gugu Chickens inside. Once they've thawed, they'll be easier to pluck."

"All right." Li Jianguo didn't feel he should press him further, so he helped Li Long carry the Gugu Chickens inside.

Li Qiang's and Li Juan's ears were red from the cold, and they rubbed them vigorously. They didn't feel much about their youngest uncle breaking up with someone; their eyes were still fixed excitedly on the Gugu Chickens.

"There really are five!" Liang Yuemei was delighted, too. Their pig had become a "superstition pig," making this a hard winter. Now her younger brother-in-law had caught some Gugu Chickens. It might not solve any major problems, but at least her son and daughter would get some meat.

In those days, a meal with meat was a rare treat indeed.

"Yes, there were actually more than a dozen. But after I caught five, the others got spooked," Li Long said. "It was too late in the day to chase them once they scattered."

"Five is plenty," Li Jianguo said. "With this much snow, Gugu Chickens aren't easy to catch. Hardly any families on our production team have eaten them. Let's cook some for lunch."

"How many?" Liang Yuemei scooped the pickled vegetables out of the pot. After taking the pot off the stove, she wiped the inside clean with a warmed corn cake.

Liang Yuemei broke the corn cake, now coated with cooking oil and bits of pickled vegetables, in half and gave one piece each to Li Juan and Li Qiang. They ate with one hand while holding the other underneath to catch the crumbs, their eyes still on the Gugu Chickens.

Li Jianguo looked toward Li Long. He had caught the Gugu Chickens, so he had the biggest say.

"Let's cook two," Li Long said after a moment's thought. "We can clean another two and take them to Juan's grandpa, and keep the last one for later. What do you think, big brother, sister-in-law?"

Li Jianguo and Liang Yuemei exchanged a glance, each seeing the surprise in the other's eyes.

Li Juan's grandpa meant her maternal grandfather-Liang Yuemei's father and Li Jianguo's father-in-law. In the past, whenever Li Long came into anything good, he never thought of the Liang Family.

Had he really grown up at last?

Thinking back to what Li Long had said to Wu Shufen earlier, Li Jianguo found it almost unbelievable.

"Then that's what we'll do," he said. "We'll clean them after we eat."

Once the food was on the table, Li Long waited until Li Jianguo had sat down and picked up his chopsticks before starting to eat.

He had been longing for these pickled vegetables for so long.

In his previous life, he had eaten at his brother and sister-in-law's house right up until Li Jianguo's accidental death. Pickled vegetables were a winter staple. Even after their circumstances improved, they still pickled a whole crock every winter.

But after Li Jianguo fell to his death because of Li Long, Liang Yuemei treated Li Long as an enemy and no longer let him eat at her home. Li Long drifted through life until his forties, when he finally married a divorced woman with a child.

The two of them shared a life together. Though the woman also made pickled vegetables, they tasted nowhere near as good as Liang Yuemei's.

Eating hearty mouthfuls of pickled vegetables with steamed buns, Li Long was overwhelmed with emotion.

With this second chance at life, I'm going to make something of myself. And I won't let the tragedy of my last life happen again!

After the meal, Liang Yuemei heated water to scald the feathers off the chickens, while Li Qiang and Li Juan picked out pretty feathers to save for making shuttlecocks-in those days, every household had a few copper coins, most of which were used to make shuttlecocks.

Watching the two children choose pretty feathers, Li Long suddenly remembered his eldest brother saying that, more than ten years earlier, he had been following the production team's tractor as it plowed when they unearthed a temple's buried coin hoard. They dug up a huge pile of copper coins and sold them together with the others for several hundred yuan.

That was several hundred yuan back in the sixties, when a kilogram of copper cost only one yuan. According to Li Jianguo, there had been an enormous number of coins, though most had already corroded into crumbs.

Once the weather warms up, I'll go have a look when I have time. Maybe I can find something they missed.

There was no cultural relics protection law in those days, and coin hoards already uncovered by plowing weren't protected either, so he could go and take a look.

But that was something for later.

Having lived two lives, Li Long now had a much broader outlook. The mountains were full of valuable things: velvet antlers, deer antlers, deer penises, fritillaria bulbs, and more. Both state-run pharmacies and private buyers bought them, and the prices were good.

Besides, the core militia trained for three to five months every year in those days, and guns were issued directly to the militiamen. In autumn, to protect the harvest, villages and towns near the mountains would also organize the militia for a group wild boar hunt. With a gun in hand, wouldn't the good things in the mountains be his for the taking?

In his previous life, Li Long had taken his core militia training seriously. Before the guns were handed over to the county armed forces department in the nineties, his marksmanship had ranked among the best on the whole team at the militia competitions held at the start of every winter.

He might not have been a crack shot, but shooting a wild boar was certainly within his abilities.

His thoughts wandered until Li Jianguo called him over to help clean the Gugu Chickens, bringing him back to the present.

The Gugu Chickens looked fairly big, but after their feathers and innards were removed, each weighed less than half a kilogram. The gizzards were kept, along with the hearts and livers-the main ingredients for stir-fried giblets.

Li Jianguo also carefully peeled out the gizzard linings-the Gugu Chickens had that layer of yellow skin, too. Once peeled off, they were dried on the heated wall. After enough had been collected and ground into powder, they made a good remedy for children's digestive troubles.

They soon finished cleaning all five chickens. Liang Yuemei put two on the chopping board, ready to cut them up. Li Jianguo wrapped another two and set them outside to freeze, planning to take them to the Liang Family when he had time. The last one was hung in an unused room for later.

Once they had finished, Li Long said to Li Jianguo:

"Big brother, I'm planning to borrow the team's horse cart tomorrow and go into the mountains to haul back some wood."

"No, you're not!" Li Jianguo glared at him, startled by the suggestion and strongly opposed to it. "It's freezing now, and the mountain roads might not even be passable. You don't know the place or anyone there. How are you going to manage? What could you even do there? If you don't get any wood and end up lost in the mountains, we'll have real trouble!"

Li Long said confidently:

"One of my coworkers at the food factory lives in the Clearwater River Commune. It's right by the mountains. He came back with me this time. I'll go find him, and he'll take me into the mountains. I'll set off early and try to get back the same day-"

Looking at Li Long's determined expression, Li Jianguo hesitated.

(End of chapter)