It is impossible for all the Karaqin tribes to be concentrated in Qingcheng, and there will always be many small tribes scattered around.

There should also be several or more than a dozen Tartar families choosing a leeward and sunny place to build yurts together for the winter.

It's just that the Tartars who have done too many bad things are not steady, and they intentionally or unintentionally stayed away from the border wall of the Ming Dynasty, so there was no yurt built by the Karaqin Tartars within the distance that the cavalry could move in a day.

The Ming army and the Tartars are natural enemies, and the proud Ming never exchanged women for peace, and conquest is the only choice, so they often fought with the Tartars for more than 200 years.

The Tartars regarded the Ming army as their first enemy, and studied their opponents all the time, and they all knew the characteristics of the Ming cavalry.

The Ming army basically did not dare to camp in the prairie in winter, and they all came out to take a turn, and after finding the yurt, they rushed up to kill people, robbed cattle and sheep, and then retreated back to Guancheng.

The Karaqin people gave up a safe distance of 200 miles, resulting in the "Red Banner Army's" 11 groups of sentry horses returning empty-handed.

Huang Han was not discouraged, and the knights carried out a frontal search of dozens of miles to this area, at least they were familiar with the terrain, which was conducive to the army's calm retreat after completing the tactical task.

It doesn't hurt to find the specific location of Qingcheng for the time being, as long as you can capture a few Tartars alive, these Tartars will know where Qingcheng is without exception.

The way of life of the Tartars is different from that of the Han people, who may not have left the villages and towns where they live in their entire lives, while the Tartars will follow their parents to live in the grass as soon as they are born.

They must have traded in this only place with shops and fixed merchants within a radius of several hundred miles.

Because the Tartars were not self-sufficient, they had to exchange their cattle and sheep for salt, tea, iron pots, grains, flour and other necessities of life, which were essential for trading.

Indeed, as long as you get close to Qingcheng yurts, you will keep appearing, after all, this is the central area of the Karaqin people.

On a sunny slope more than 100 miles southwest of Qingcheng, there are more than a dozen families of Tartars who have built more than 30 yurts of different sizes to live in a concentrated manner, and they have nothing to do and drink and have fun every day.

The yurt is made of a special wooden frame, crossed with wicker to form a skeleton, and then wrapped with two to three layers of wool felt, which is not only easy to build, but also easy to disassemble and move, and is suitable for rotational grazing life.

Theoretically, the transportation capacity of a settlement area can bring all the yurts they dismantled, daily necessities, and food, so the Mongols have quite a lot of carts.

Half of these dozen Tartars were young and strong in November last year and followed Jiannu into the customs to rob the Ming Dynasty, and each of them grabbed a lot of gold, silver, cloth and silk, and also grabbed the Han people as slaves.

This year, the Karaqin Tartars had a good time, and because too many Tartars had grabbed gold and silver treasures, the Tartars who did not go to Daming and lost the opportunity to rob were not too unlucky.

The Karaqin people had more gold, silver, and tradable goods in their hands, which directly led to an increase in purchasing power.

As long as the cattle and sheep grazing by the Tartars are sent to Qingcheng, they will be sold at a good price more than 30% higher than in previous years.

Qingcheng also has a hot spot that attracts nearby Tatars to trade, that is, the price of Han slaves is particularly cheap, two or three fat sheep can be exchanged for a Han man, and a mare can be exchanged for a delicate-skinned Han girl.

Mongolia is also a hierarchical people, large and small Taiji manage the tribes, Taiji is equivalent to the low-level king of the Mongols, but some small Taiji tribes only have one or two hundred control string tartars.

For example, Lin Dan, the descendant of the Golden Family, is the largest Han among the Mongols at present, but he can't obey the public, and he is often beaten by Jiannu, and he loses the opportunity to dominate more Mongols.

In the absence of sweat and large and small taijis, each Tartar settlement will have a well-established chieftain, regardless of size.

These were of course the Tartars of high status or high military value, and they were part of the tribal chieftains, or perhaps the centurions and tensmen of the Tartar army.

The steppe peoples are basically military and civilian, they get on the horse and pick up bows and arrows and Mongolian scimitars, and they are warriors when they go to the battlefield, and they are herdsmen when they return to the yurts to drive cattle and sheep to find water sources, and pastures.

About 200 miles northeast of the border wall of Da'ankou, this Tatar settlement is equivalent to a small tribe, and the scale is not large.

The leader was a centurion under the age of forty, whose name was Hegoret, and a dozen or so controllers in this settlement had followed him into the Daming Pass to burn and loot.

Not long ago, Hegrah took the young people of the tribe to Qingcheng to trade, exchanging cattle, sheep, and horses for liquor, tea bricks, sugar, and other consumer goods, and also exchanged them for seven young Han women and five Han men who looked relatively strong.

In fact, they didn't need to sell their cattle and sheep for a living this year, and the gold and silver treasures they looted were enough to support them to live a prosperous life for a few years.

It's just that the cattle and sheep need to be slaughtered when the time comes, and there is a bottom line for the number of litters left for winter, and the manpower in the tribe is too busy to stay, and the Han people who have just been caught are not yet able to adapt to the technical work of serving livestock production.

The Tartars drank and had fun in the yurts, the Han Chinese male and female slaves huddled in the corners, and the smoke rising from the yurts spread far and wide.

There are more than 40 adult men in more than a dozen Tartar households, and each family has two or three Han slaves, and there are nearly 50 adult Han men and women in total, and there are no Han children and old people.

One of the five Han Chinese men Hegel exchanged for sheep is Xiang Chengliang, a native of Gyeonggi and in his twenties.

He is a child who has only passed the county test and has not even passed the government test, his hometown is in Zhangjiawan, Beitongzhou, last year he was caught by the Houjin Army as a coolie, and this spring he was carried by the Tartars to the vast prairie.

He had already been sold three times by the Tartars, during which he saw two Han women who could not bear the inhuman torture commit suicide, and he also saw a Han man of his age die of exhaustion.

Xiang Chengliang, who used to run outside the mouth often, had a good physique, and even he thought that he should be lucky, he worked as a cow and a horse every day, and slept in the haystack without food, but he didn't die of illness or exhaustion.

This time he was the trade again, and a month earlier, he and four other Han men and seven women had been taken out of Qingcheng by their new owner, Hegod, all the way to the southwest, to a place they did not know at all.

Xiang Chengliang thought in his heart that as long as he went south, after all, it meant that he was close to his homeland, and he was a slave to the Tartar for nearly a year, serving the cows, horses and sheep all day long, not only improving his riding skills, but also understanding some horse nature.

He had been planning to escape, looking for an opportunity to steal two good horses with fast feet, and he had been transferring to the south.