The Ladder of Love (Part II) Zhang Baotong 2017.10.10

In the middle of the dream, suddenly there was a dog barking, and it barked fiercely, and I woke up from the dream, knowing that I might have encountered some wild beast again. After a while, I heard the door between Uncle Liu and their house open, and I saw an electric light outside the window, and I walked quickly towards the vegetable and corn fields.

I was very worried, and I hoped that Uncle Liu would never encounter a tiger. After a while, the dog stopped barking, and heard Uncle Liu's footsteps coming back from the vegetable field, and then heard Uncle Liu entering the house and closing the door. I began to fall back into my dreams. However, after a while, Rhubarb screamed desperately again, and heard Uncle Liu opening the door and hurried footsteps. Before Uncle Liu could return to the house for a while, there was another wild bark of rhubarb.

In short, the barking of dogs barely stopped all night. Maybe the corn is about to ripen, and at this time, the monkey is afraid that there is nothing to eat, so he came to steal Uncle Liu's corn to eat. The next morning, I got up early, stood in front of the door and looked down the slope, and saw Uncle Liu and Aunt Xu making a scarecrow by the cornfield. And he also dressed the scarecrow in a red shirt. At first glance, it was the clothes that Aunt Xu wore in the past.

I walked up to them and said, "Rhubarb kept barking last night, I'm afraid the monkey has made a big move." Aunt Xu said, "Those monkeys are so stubborn that the young man didn't sleep all night." I said, "In this weather, I'm afraid the monkeys won't have anything to eat." Uncle Liu said, "The monkey is also very fine, and knows that these days are the time when the corn is ripe." I said, "If this continues, Uncle won't be able to sleep for the next few days." Uncle Liu said, "Yes, the crops are not ripe, and they are worried. I said, "You can only relax when you receive the food in the house." Uncle Liu said, "That's right." ”

However, I think they are only deceiving themselves by tying up this scarecrow, because the monkey is so clever that he can't even recognize a scarecrow? I remember when I was a child, my father also stuck a scarecrow on the edge of the vegetable patch, but the birds seemed to be deliberately taunting my father, and they flew directly down on the scarecrow. If even the birds can recognize the scarecrow, can the monkeys still be able to distinguish it? I asked the uncle, "Can this scarecrow be useful?" Uncle Liu said, "It can be of some use to the newcomers, but it is not very useful to those who are familiar with the area." "Actually, I don't think it's going to be of much use to the new monkeys or the monkeys that come here often. Besides, these monkeys must be the same group, and how many years they have lived on the mountain, I am afraid that they are all too familiar with this family on the top of the mountain.

After the scarecrow was tied, Aunt Xu asked Uncle Liu to go back to the house to sleep, because he didn't sleep all night. Uncle Liu didn't want to go to sleep, but when Aunt Xu saw that his face was not good, she said, "Go to sleep, I'm afraid you won't be able to sleep well these few nights." Uncle Liu did feel a little uncomfortable, so he went back to the house to sleep.

Uncle went back to the house to sleep, and I followed Aunt Xu to dig sweet potatoes in the field. Sweet potatoes don't grow that big. Aunt Xu said that if the sweet potatoes were not dug again, they would be coaxed and eaten by wild boars. Wild boars destroy crops not as much as they want to eat, but they destroy the whole field for you, make a mess, and destroy a large area, which is very hateful. So, they had to hurry up and dig up the sweet potatoes.

I was digging sweet potatoes with a pickaxe, and Aunt Xu picked up the sweet potatoes I had dug out of the ground, rubbed the soil dry, and put them in a large bamboo basket. While digging sweet potatoes, I asked her, "Auntie, have you ever regretted going up the mountain with Uncle Liu?" Aunt Xu smiled and said, "How can you not regret it?" I said, "Then tell me how you regret it?"

Aunt Xu thought for a while and said, "Before going up the mountain, I didn't know much about the situation on the mountain, but I just heard some things from the young man. That night we met by the woods by the river, and he said, 'I'll go up to the top of the mountain.' There are two thatched huts on the top of the hill and a cave where people can live. There is also a mountain spring on the top of the mountain. There are some flat and sloping lands on the side of the mountain spring, where we can grow food and vegetables, and as long as we open up the land on the top of the mountain, we can live. ’

Hearing this, I said, 'I heard that there are tigers in the mountains, and wild boars and monkeys, and they are very afraid. He said, 'It doesn't matter, with me, I'm not afraid of tigers and beasts.' I said, 'I'm willing to go up to the mountain with you.' But what are the dolls going to do?' he said, 'take them up the hill with him.' I was very hesitant to hear this, I didn't want to marry the old man surnamed Sun, I really loved the young man in my heart, and I wanted to leave here with him and live in the mountains. But I didn't want the children to suffer with me, because I knew that there was nothing to eat, nothing to wear, nothing to use, and not even a single figure to be seen on the mountain. And the children are old enough to go to school.

However, that day, the man surnamed Sun came to our house again and discussed with my father-in-law and mother-in-law about marrying. I immediately panicked and went to find the young man. I stopped him on his way back to the village, and when I told him about it, he told me to wait at home with my child, and he would come tomorrow night to pick me up and my child up the mountain. At that time, I was just thinking about getting rid of the man surnamed Sun, and I didn't want to be married to him. Therefore, I don't think much about my life after going up the mountain, and in fact, there are many things that I can't think of beforehand. So, in a panic, he followed the young man up the mountain.

After going up the mountain, it wasn't as good as I thought it would be. Originally, it was nothing at the bottom of the mountain, but it was difficult to get to the mountain, and it was very difficult. After eating the bag of rice and the piece of bacon I brought, I didn't have anything to eat, so I started looking for something to eat all day long. The things I found were not eaten by the pigs at the bottom of the mountain, but they were very rare and precious on the mountain, because I didn't know if I could eat the next meal in my mouth. In particular, the children cry all day long to go down the mountain and go home, which makes me headaches and distraught.

There was no food, no clothing, no use on the mountain, and the two small thatched huts where I lived let the wind blow down overnight, and that night there came tigers, and the big tigers drilled into the holes, so that I and the children were so frightened that we didn't even have our souls. The next day, the young man went out to cut down some trees, did a day's carpenter's work, and made a gate for the entrance of the cave, so that we could sleep peacefully at night.

However, living in a cave was very uncomfortable and unaccustomed. There is such a large area in the cave, only about ten square meters, and the ground is covered with thatch, and the thatch is covered with bedding. These thatches and bedding are spread on the floor all day and night, and they cannot be cleaned up casually, because once they are cleaned up, it is very troublesome to re-lay them. At night, the family sleeps together. When I got up in the morning, the thatch and bedding still had to be laid there. It's so dirty and messy in the hole, it's so inconvenient, and there is no place to move your feet in the whole hole.

That morning, as soon as I got up, because I had been in a bad mood for several days, I looked at the scene in the cave in front of me, and thought about how I had lived so hard, so badly, I couldn't help crying. When the children saw me crying, they were crying by my side.

After a while, the young man came into the house from outside, and when he saw that I was whining and crying, he came and picked me up, and asked, 'Mother, why are you crying?' and I lay on his shoulder and cried, 'I don't want to live here, I want to live in a tiled house.' The young man said, "Don't cry, don't cry, I'll build you a tiled house." ’

The young man was really brute and began to build a tiled house on the same day. He dug up a tile-burning kiln on the edge of the forest at the bottom of the slope, made a wooden roller for making tiles, selected some soil and mud, rolled it with a wooden roller, and then cut it into a tile-like blank with a brick knife, dried the billet, neatly placed it in the kiln, and sealed the kiln door. A large amount of firewood was put in from the top of the kiln, and my children and I kept adding fire to the kiln. A few days later, the tiles from a kiln were burned.

Then the young man mixed the clay and straw and began to make adobe. When the adobe had dried, the young man cut down some tree trunks and made the trusses and beams. By this time, my children and I had already dug the foundation. However, it takes a lot of force to erect the frame and beams, and the young man alone can't do it, so our whole family helped pull the rope, and it took half a day to fix the frame and beams.