While Xiaokelaiti was helping clean the sheep offal, Li Long was in a nearby gully, bent low with his gun in hand as he slowly crept uphill.
Talihaal had failed to catch any game the day before. He had run into a herd of wild boars but had not had a good chance to shoot. Li Long, however, had been interested when he heard about it. After asking exactly where the boars had appeared, he had headed over that day with a gun on his back and a sack in hand.
He would shoot a wild boar if he could. If not, he would pick mushrooms.
He had only picked a few mushrooms when, after walking through two gullies, he heard wild boars grunting.
Li Long did not know whether these boars ate wild mushrooms, but the lush mountain forests offered them plenty to eat. Wild boars were omnivores. They ate moss and pine nuts, as well as fruit such as wild strawberries and wild apples.
That was why people usually spotted them while they were foraging. Once they had eaten, the herd would head deep into the mountains and find somewhere secluded to lie down and rest.
According to Talihaal, this was a sizable herd, with ten or twenty-odd boars. They made quite a commotion, and there were boars of all sizes among them.
"The biggest one looked close to two hundred kilos, nearly as big as a head of yellow cattle," Talihaal had said. "Short and thick, with teeth sticking out of its mouth, curved like little knives. It looked fierce!"
Wild boars constantly ran through the mountain forests and were not as long-bodied as domestic pigs. A domestic pig weighing two hundred kilos would be nearly two meters long.
Wild boars were not that long. They grew