Snow fell, one storm after another. Sweeping snow in the courtyard, Li Long thought that, in his previous life, thirty or forty years later, there seemed to have been less and less snow. After a few snowfalls in winter, it seemed to melt right away, turning into winter.
Although temperatures at the Fourth Team could reach twenty-something below zero during extreme cold spells, that seemed to last only a few days, and those spells kept growing shorter.
He vaguely remembered how, in winter, even suede-lined leather shoes had felt cold at first, whereas later, an ordinary pair of padded cotton shoes seemed bearable.
With snow like this, a single snowfall now took two or three days to clear. Thirty or forty years later, a proper snowfall thirty or forty centimeters deep seemed rare.
Everyone said the weather was gradually warming, and the comparison made it feel real-the snow in the courtyard was already over thirty centimeters deep, and it was still falling.
Li Long thought a large crowd might come to the Purchasing Station to sell rabbit skins tomorrow. With snow this deep, the rabbits out in the wild were probably in for trouble. Without food, they could only come out, and once they did, they could not run fast through the snow. People could soon catch up with them.
Likewise, the Mongolian gazelles deep in the Gobi wilderness might emerge from the north and head toward the mountains to the south. He wondered whether Xu Haijun and the others were planning to go hunting.
The thick snow in the courtyard had to be cleared, so nothing else could get done that day. It was the same at the Purchasing Station. Gu Boyuan had gotten up early to sweep snow, and Sun Jiaqiang next door had not even had time