29. The creatures of the Mongolian plateau

When Shandan was a few years old, a wolf broke into the village one evening, and wild animals were rare at that time.

Later, the wolf was surrounded in a yard, and the wolf was in a hurry, and there was more than one person high in a jump, and everyone gathered around and shouted, waving the "weapon" in their hands, and the wolf jumped up and down to try to escape, until it was exhausted, and finally it was killed.

Therefore, everyone celebrates while eating wolf meat. In other words, wolf meat is sour and extremely untasty, but for people who have not seen meat for a year, it is just meat.

When Sour grew up, he went out to study, and he heard that wolves appeared, but they were probably legends. Later, the government made a rule that no wild animals were killed, and there were no other wild animals except hares and sandgrouse.

One winter vacation when Shandan was in junior high school, one morning in my sleep, I heard my father shouting, "Hurry up, get up, the mountains are full of dead sandgrouse." ”

The three of them hurriedly got up to pick it up.

Later, everyone came out to pick it up, and they had already picked up two large baskets. Everyone's winter is very moist.

After a heavy snowfall, the mountains are covered with white snow, and the birds have no food to find.

A man scattered a few buckets of poisoned wheat on the snow, and the sandgrouses rushed to grab food, and there were as many dead sandgrouses in the snow as the stars of the Milky Way.

When Shandan was a child, sand grouses flew in flocks in the sky.

In winter, the grass is littered with sandgrouse's nests, shallow little round pits and circles of white lollipop-like they pull.

But since then, there have been very few sandgrouses.

Before, on snowy days, in the morning, Shandan and his sister walked along the power lines, and they could always pick up all kinds of birds that were killed and injured in the dark at night.

At that time, when it snowed heavily, Tie Dan'er used a wooden stick to prop up a basket, used a small rope to control the wooden stick, sprinkled millet under the basket, and when the bird went in to forage, quickly pulled the rope, and the bird was buckled under the basket.

When Tie Daner was a child, there were pig badgers on the grassland, and hunters at that time generally did not hunt pig badgers, because pig badgers would fight back, would fight back, and would lose their lives if they were not careful.

However, the hog badger is also the most valuable, and the fur of a pig badger can be exchanged for a year's expenses.

He once went hunting a badger with an old hunter, and it was very thrilling.

After finding out the badger's entry and exit, they dug a hiding place at a certain distance from the badger's residence.

The hog badger is a suspicious animal that checks the surroundings of its home every time it returns from an outing, and never returns if it finds something unusual.

Therefore, people cannot be approached, and hog badgers will also smell people.

Hunting hoggers is quite a difficult thing to do.

The iron eggs are big, they take the way of playing tunnels, the badger goes out to fight, and the badger stops when it returns, and it took about half a month to approach the badger's burrow.

The burrow of the badger is usually one foot deep, and there are two or three forks.

One day they heard the badger coming to the bottom of the cave, and the two hurriedly lit the fuse and hid, and after a few minutes, the gunpowder exploded, but there was no shadow of the badger.

The two of them may have been killed in the badger, and the hunter carefully went to check, but unexpectedly, the badger was not injured at all, and the "whew" pounced on the hunter, and the hunter's facial features were blurred by the flesh and blood of the collision.

Tie Dan Da only saw a black and slimy thing passing by, and he was so frightened that he crawled on the spot and couldn't move.

When the badger disappeared without a trace, the hunter's ** voice recalled the soul of the iron egg. The old hunter was blind and could no longer hunt, and Tie Dan Da no longer hunted for curiosity.

It was when Shandan was eight or nine years old, and during the summer vacation from school, she and her sister followed their parents to the fields, which were the autumn harvest season, and the grass on the edge of the fields was waist-high.

It was full of birds, and late summer and early autumn was the time when the birds laid their eggs and hatched their chicks.

She and her sister searched for bird eggs in the grass, and found a nest of four, with gray flowers, a little smaller than a quail egg, which should be the eggs of a thrush.

Every time they find an egg, they will shine it in the sun, if it is relatively clear, it means that the bird is not yet formed, and they can eat it, if the inside is opaque, it means that the bird has been formed, and they will gently put it back.

The father also said that it was the egg of the thrush, and the bird in it had not yet taken shape, so they happily continued to search, and the sister was on the ridge, and the shandan was under the ridge, searching every inch of grass, and they were two or three feet apart.

Suddenly, Shandan saw a dark green flower snake about half a meter long scurrying past his sister's feet, and Shandan was stupefied.

When she realized that the snake had already fled quite far, her sister looked at Shandan's panicked appearance and asked, "What's wrong?"

Shandan pulled her and ran, ran to her parents in one breath, and Shandan immediately fell to the ground.

When Shandan explained the reason, his father said that it was a cauliflower snake that did not bite and was not poisonous, and Shandan relieved himself, but fortunately, it turned out to be a false alarm.

Another time, it was also the autumn harvest season, and Shandan and his sister were about to herd cattle for their father, and the father was helping to harvest the crops, and they ran from the field to the meadow, and in the neat golden wheat ridges, Shandan saw a pink snake wriggling forward in an S shape, and Shandan shouted, "Be careful! ”

My sister rushed forward, and she saw the snake too!

They described the appearance of the snake to their father, who said that the snake was quite venomous, the locals called it 7 inches poisonous, because this snake specifically attacks the face part of people, and when threatened, it can jump up and be as tall as a person, and the person bitten can not last more than 24 hours, but generally does not take the initiative to attack people, unless the person is very close to it, it will attack people when it feels that it is in danger.

The father said that it was good that they only passed by it very quickly, otherwise the distance was so close that it was the range of its attack, this kind of snake attack people often has no warning, and it will be completed in a few seconds after falling together, and it will flee quickly after biting people, and it will not be caught by anyone. There are also people who have been bitten, but relatively rarely.

One year there was a great drought in the grasslands, the pastures withered, and many prairie rats starved to death.

Snakes, which are the natural enemies of prairie rats, are also hungry and panicked, and wander to the village to steal chickens to eat.

A man in the neighboring village of Tara Miao was bitten by a poisonous snake when he was enclosing chickens to the chicken coop at night.

The leg was soon swollen and cracked, and the skin was covered with large froths.

The whole person was unconscious, saying that he wanted to find the snake that was biting, and it was life-saving to crush the snake's head and apply it to the wound, but where could the snake be found?

The local method is to pull the belly of a goat apart, insert the injured foot into the belly, and the goat's internal organs will suck out the snake venom from the wound, and the person will be saved.

However, in the end, that person did not escape and died.

One autumn harvest wheat, in the harvest of the pulled wheat, Tie Dan'er immediately wrapped a cauliflower snake on his arm, the snake became tighter and tighter, the arm soon became bruised, no choice but to use a sickle to cut off the snake's head, the head of the snake is still wrapped around the arm, and finally had to use fire to burn the snake's tail to pull the snake down.

Iron Dan'er has had leg pain for many years, and there is a cure in the countryside that is to soak in snake wine and drink it.

In the summer vacation of Shandan's sophomore year, it had just rained one day, and the children in the village said that there was a snake next to the well, Shandan and his sister hurriedly found a wine bottle to catch the snake, pressed the mouth of the snake tail bottle with a shovel against the snake's head, and the snake obediently drilled into the bottle, and then poured the high liquor into it and then added Gu Haiping's traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of rheumatism, such as fengfeng, and sealed it, and placed it in a cool place for a year to drink.

Snake wine is a good medicine for low back and leg pain, and Shandan Da's leg pain is much better.

Of course, it also has a lot to do with the fact that he no longer herds sheep and is no longer exposed to wind and rain.

Nowadays, snakes are hard to find in the barren grasslands of the Mongolian plateau.