Lunch was fairly simple: stewed wild boar and lynx soup. They ate meat and drank broth.
After the half-grown wild boar was dressed, there were still over twenty kilograms of bone-in meat. Li Long took half, chopped it up, and put it in the pot to boil. He treated the lynx similarly, carefully skinning it, salting and hanging the pelt to dry, then removing its two front legs and stewing them with spices.
The rest was left soaking in water. After lunch, Li Long planned to take it home along with the little wild boar.
There were only twenty-odd people working there. The stewed meat was enough to give everyone two or three pieces, and with the broth shimmering with fat, there was little to complain about.
The morning's progress was encouraging too. They had felled over thirty trees and dragged them onto the flat riverbank, out of the way. Meng Hai had driven the tractor forward, widening a path that had originally accommodated only two or three people abreast until it could fit one and a half small four-wheel tractors.
This stretch of the route into the mountains ran right alongside a small river, following it upstream.
This section was relatively easy to open up. The riverbank here was fairly broad and flat; they only needed to cut down the trees blocking the way and level the uneven patches with the bulldozer.
With no obstacles over this short distance, they had advanced more than a hundred meters from the starting point in one morning. Meng Hai was optimistic. Before coming to eat, he had gone ahead to look, and the route farther on would be even easier to clear. There were far fewer trees, and they could push ahead nearly another two hundred meters.
Three hundred meters a day,