"Mom, when can I eat?!!

Through the cracks in the rattan wall, Deng Shifeng saw that there was no furniture in this shantytown except for a bed made of straw, on which a tattered quilt and a relatively intact linen cloth and an animal skin were spread; In addition to this, several ugly clay pots and several worn-out pottery bowls were stacked aside, and a hunting bow and a small number of arrows hung from a beam supporting the shanty. There was a small pile of items piled up in the corner of the shanty, although it was tightly covered by bamboo strips, and it was impossible to intuitively know what was inside, but some memories in Deng Shifeng's mind told him that what was piled up here was perhaps the most precious thing for these people - food!

There are two Chengren and two teenagers on the edge of the fire pond, the two teenagers have their backs to Deng Shifeng and are not easy to identify the specific age, they are squatting on the edge of the fire pond while roasting the fire to drive away the cold of the winter night, but the thin clothes and the faint flame are really difficult to provide them with more warmth, the two people shiver from time to time, and the woman next to them is picking up a pumpkin with a stone knife, the stone knife is definitely not as sharp as the iron knife, so the woman is very difficult to pick up, and before the woman can talk, an adult man walked in from the door, Holding an iron pot in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other, the two teenagers jumped up happily when they saw the man return.

"Daddy's back!"

The two teenagers who stood up were not tall, and their bodies were quite thin under the bonfire due to lack of nutrition, and if they were compared with the general growth of height and weight of children in later generations, it was indeed very difficult to judge from the height, Deng Shifeng could only judge from the voice and guess of the second development of the male surname, and estimated that the two teenagers were between ten and fourteen years old, but definitely not more than fifteen years old; The children of the poor are in charge of the family at an early age, not to mention that in ancient times, fifteen-year-olds were basically the main labor force in the family; Sixteen-year-old children from wealthy and qualified families can marry wives.

The two boys, taller and older, helped their father, the man who had just come in, to take over the iron pot, while the younger boy hurriedly put the firewood prepared next to him to the fire pit and worked hard to make the fire prosperous. And the man used the kitchen knife he got back to help the woman with the pumpkin, with the help of the kitchen knife killer, after a while, when the two teenagers quickly cooperated to set up the iron pot and boil the water, the family's dinner today - pumpkin with a bunch of things that looked like rice or corn were all poured into the pot.

"Why is it so long today? I see that the fire in Zhao Laosi's family is up, didn't you let Zhao Laosi's family use the pot first?! Taking advantage of the time when the ingredients in the pot were cooked, the woman asked her man with some dissatisfaction while packing up some vegetables by the light of the pond fire.

"Zhao Laosi and his daughter-in-law are pregnant, and the last one to eat every day is too hungry, not only hurting adults but also children, so I will let his family cook ...... first" The man was a little dissatisfied when he saw the woman, explaining why the pot head came back late. Seeing that the woman's face still hadn't changed, the man was a little embarrassed, so he continued to explain: "Look, everyone is begging me for this big brother, so I have to take care of other people's ......."

The man's explanation did not make the woman's mood much better, but the woman seemed to know her man's identity and responsibilities, and did not say anything more, but the hand picking vegetables was obviously a little too hard, and the atmosphere in the shanty suddenly became a lot colder.

The cooling atmosphere between the two adults in the shanty did not affect the two teenagers on the edge of the fire, and their attention was attracted by the iron pot that began to emit water vapor from the fire, because the iron pot was filled with today's dinner, and the already hungry teenager sniffed the pumpkin aroma wafting from the air and swallowed his saliva. When the water in the iron pot rolled under the desperate licking of the flames, the little boy couldn't wait to shout:

"Mom, the water is boiling, the greens are green!!"

The mother who was interrupted by the child and protested silently helplessly put away her emotions, and whispered to her youngest son that the rice and pumpkin were difficult to ripen, and he still needed boiling water to boil for some time, while educating the child on the housework skills in cooking, he adjusted the firewood to avoid too much soot from rolling into the meal when the lid was lifted, and after waiting for five minutes, he carefully opened the lid and twisted the vegetables and spread them evenly.

The vegetables ripened relatively quickly, but even so, the mother continued to boil slowly on low heat for a few minutes before finally announcing the start of the meal, and the two teenagers, who had been waiting for a long time with broken bowls, cheered and took their respective food under the careful division of the mother.

It should be the last to eat, the family is not in a hurry to eat, and the mother also scolded the two sons not to eat too fast, but for a few hungry people, how long can a pot of pumpkin and millet greens be eaten? In less than five minutes, this poignant dinner was over. The mother, who was good at running the house, poured half a bowl of water shabu-shabu into the empty pot, and poured the last bit of food sticking to the pot into the bowl along the thing that I don't know if it was called soup or shabu-shabu water.

"Don't make a fuss, this is for your dad!" The mother's rough hand slapped away the little son's timidly hand that reached out to the sea bowl and scolded.

"It's okay, let's divide it for the children, it's not in the way if you don't have this mouthful." Unlike his mother, who scolded him with a straight face, the father looked at his two children with a loving smile, the light of Tanghuo reflected on his angular face, and his dark eyes shone with a fatherly love that was warmer than Tanghuo.

"Don't talk nonsense, you will go hunting in the mountains tomorrow, climbing the mountain, opening a bow and shooting arrows, which is all strength work, and you can't continue your strength if you eat less! And in case of encountering wild boars, leopards and wolves or something, in case the man like the old Li family in the east just didn't have the strength to run two steps less and didn't have time to jump over the trap...... was caught up and bitten to death by a blind bear...... How do you let me and the child live ......" The man didn't mention it, but as soon as he mentioned it, the woman crackled and spat out her dissatisfaction like a cannonball with a medicine line, and in the end, the woman's voice became obviously choked......

"Okay, okay, I'll just drink it......" The man saw that the woman's emotions were a little out of control, and hurriedly comforted his woman, and the two children also knew that their father was going to hunt tomorrow to do a big thing, endured the unfilled stomach, swallowed all the worms and saliva back into the stomach, and then turned his head and stopped looking at the bowl of food that was not food.

All this that happened in the shanty fell into the eyes of Deng Shifeng, who was peeping outside, although he already knew that these people lived very difficult and difficult when he watched from a distance on the mountain, but everything he heard and saw under the real close observation still made his nose feel sour.

Before the crossing, Deng Shifeng had learned a little about the hardships of the lives of the ancient people from some materials, what several families shared a pot and a knife, and they did not eat enough to cover their bodies, but those are all black-and-white text introductions in the books that make people have no real experience, but today, Deng Shifeng has seen and heard everything in these legends at close range, can this not make Deng Shifeng feel shocked in his heart? !

The tenacity of the Chinese people is world-famous, in the case of extreme hardship, the Chinese people can do everything they can to survive, looking at this extremely simple shack, looking at the home that can be described as the four walls of the family, looking at the simple dinner of a family of four, it is not difficult to understand the hardships of the life of the people at the bottom, but just like that, the Chinese people are still digging in the soil with tenacious vitality and self-reliance to survive. And in addition to self-survival, there is also a very important event is reproduction, Chinese can continue all the time, indispensable to the parenting and pulling, like the scene of the father loving the mother in the shanty, in such a difficult living conditions parents still do not forget their children, how can the parenting grace be forgotten?!

Listened to the conversation between the two adults outside, but what disappointed Deng Shifeng was that he was not able to get more valuable information and clues from the conversation, the content of the conversation between the two people was more about how to get more food and how to block the cracks of the shanty, and let the children play less and get more firewood to come back for the winter. Years and months are more valuable information.

Since he couldn't get what he wanted here, Deng Shifeng didn't plan to hang himself on a tree, he quietly left the shanty, cautiously approaching the other shantytowns with bonfires in the hope of getting what he wanted. It's just that this kind of passive listening and not active questioning and collecting information process requires something called "luck", like the protagonist in various novels, hiding under the bed can overhear something shocking and confidential is absolutely difficult to do without luck, Deng Shifeng spent nearly two hours thereafter, in addition to further gains on the population composition and distribution in the village, he wanted to know a few important questions at all......

The work and rest of the ancients was very simple, after taking turns to eat dinner, each family turned off the fire and went to sleep, and some people who had wives might be able to hold their wives and do some things they loved, but if they didn't have wives...... It's best to plug your ears so that you can't stand the irritation coming from the side. And this result made Deng Shifeng quite entangled, he finally came down but the harvest was poor, those population composition data did not have much effect on him, he was not here to conduct the census! For this reason, Deng Shifeng was extremely entangled, he was unwilling to retreat and lose an opportunity, after thinking about it, he gritted his teeth and got into the middle of a pile of firewood and haystacks, preparing to collect more information again at close range during the next day......

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