Smoke rises, and the whole countryside is enveloped in a soft smoke. In the early morning of the mountain village, every qiē seems so peaceful.

Dalongshan, Shuangpai Village.

This village is not big, there are 100 families scattered around, and I live in this village.

My name is He Yiming, my parents gave me this name to make me a blockbuster when I grow up, I have to wait two months to turn fourteen, I am usually a bit elfty, flexible, bold and careful, and quite scheming. The fireworks flying in the sky at the lantern festival in the village were the ones I came up with based on the Kong Ming lanterns introduced in the textbook.

I also have an older brother who is two years older than me, my brother's name is He Tiezhu, 16 years old this year, since he was a child, he began to learn boxing with his neighbor Uncle Li, and his body practice is like an iron wall, there is no tree that he can't climb, there is no wall that he can't climb, and he is optimistic and cheerful, and helpful. Speaking of our two brothers, don't look at our young age, we are well known in the village.

To borrow what our neighbors have to say about us both: both brothers are very bold and curious about anything. The "ghost grip" incident that caused a sensation in the village last year was only possible with the two brothers to figure out the truth.

There is a legend in the village: If someone goes up to the hut at midnight, a big pale white hand will stretch out from the pit and grab the person's buttocks and drag him into the pit. Since then, everyone has resolutely abandoned the trick of scaring children with tigers outside the house at night, specifically catching disobedient children, and has long regarded this legend as a ghost story to scare children.

However, someone really died in the pit that day.

I still remember that it was early one morning in October last year, and a scream suddenly came from Li's house, followed by the sound of Aunt Li crying and screaming. When my brother and I arrived, there were already a lot of people around. There was a corpse on the ground, with feces all over his body, and his pants were only half lifted, which was vaguely recognizable from his already blue and purple face, this was Aunt Li's youngest son, Li Erfat. Aunt Li was sitting on the ground hugging the child, crying very miserably, no matter how dirty the child was, Uncle Li also watched the child cry in a daze. Everyone talked about it, and they all said that this child had encountered a "ghost gripper".

Li Erpang is my neighbor and a good partner. It's hard for me to believe that my partner who was playing with me yesterday is gone today. Everyone persuaded Aunt Li one after another, washed the child's body, and put it in the west wing. Then everyone entered the main room and asked Uncle Li what was going on.

Uncle Li wiped his tears and said, "I was fine before going to bed last night, but when I got up this morning, I saw it as soon as I went to the hut...... Whining...... It must have been yesterday when the second baby went to the thatched house in the middle of the night...... Woo woo......" Uncle Li cried again.

The "ghost gripper" kills people, and my brother doesn't believe it anyway. But the few scratches left on Li Erpang's buttocks made the people around him fall into the panic of "ghost grip" for a while.

The people in the house were persuading the family of the deceased to talk about the "ghost grip", and I came out of the house and came to the location of the thatched house to see what was going on.

The thatched house of the Li family is in the southwest corner of the courtyard, and the outside is a wall made of adobe bricks. The inside of the thatched house is the same as that of ordinary people's thatched houses, a large pit is dug in the ground, two wooden planks are placed on it, and a gap is left in the middle for convenience. When the manure is almost full, it is scooped out and put in the field as fertilizer. By this time, the plank on the left side had broken and feces were everywhere. In front of the pit, next to the door, there is a small iron bucket, in which there is some charcoal and unburned branches, at a glance, you can know that Li Erpang was afraid of the dark last night, so he lit a fire to illuminate it. Behind the pit is a wall with lots of old timber and straw piled up. To the west of the wall is the courtyard of Uncle Li's house, and to the west is his own house.

At this time, Uncle Li also walked over with a cane, and when he saw me, he said slowly: "Yiming, what are you looking at?"

Seeing that it was Uncle Li coming, I hurriedly stepped forward to help, "Uncle Li, are you here too?" Alas, Erfat is my good friend who didn't expect to die so miserably, did you say that he really met the 'ghost grip'?"

"Well, I don't know. After Uncle Li finished speaking, he slowly looked at the situation of the thatched house, and finally his eyes fell on the iron bucket, and said to me: "What month was Li Erwazi born?"

"On the eighth day of the lunar month, what's wrong Uncle Li?" replied Tie Zhu.

"Hehe, it's nothing, just asking. Uncle Li said to me again: "Yes, tomorrow you and your brother will come to my place to help me dig a cabbage cellar, winter is coming, it's time to store Chinese cabbage." ”

"Yes, yes!" I replied as I thought, "It's all dead and thinking about the cabbage cellar, this old man is really interesting!"

"Well, what do you see that?" Uncle Li said suddenly.

Following the direction of Uncle Li's finger, I saw two dead rats in the pit, "A few dead mice, is there anything wrong?"

"It's not a mouse, it's a mouse, look!" Uncle Li's voice raised a lot.

The rat was on top of the plank, well? What is that? I also noticed that because the left board was broken, there was a little hole in the dirt that had been pressed under the woodblock, and something seemed to be moving in the hole.

I hurried closer to take a look.

"Snake ...... It's a snake's tail!" I couldn't help but shout.

My brother was the first to hear the noise. The others also ran over when they heard the commotion. After I explained the situation to my brother, we both didn't care about the smell, and my brother stepped forward and pinched the snake's tail with his fingers, which was only more than half an inch long, and directly dug the hole with his hands. The snake was frightened, and drilled into it with all its might, but no matter how hard it tried, it couldn't break free from my brother's pincer-like fingers.

Since the soil of the hut was very wet, the cave was soon enlarged, and when I saw that the snake's body was leaking a few more inches, I grabbed it with my other hand and pulled it out.

Good guy, a big black snake of about one meter was pulled out by me, and I pulled the snake by the tail to turn the snake up, and then slammed it on another plank, and then turned a few times and fell to the ground. This is the experience of catching snakes, as long as the snake breaks the bones, it will fall and dislocate, and then another round, all the bones will be scattered, and you can't move if you want to.

"Pheasant neck!" shouted someone who knew the snake. As soon as I heard the words "pheasant neck", my hand holding the snake trembled, and immediately asked the people around me to stay away from me, and then wheeled the snake up again and threw it hard a few times.

"Pheasant neck" is the most poisonous snake in the region, a bite will be fatal immediately, this snake is generally less than one meter, the whole body is pitch black, there is a circle of red spots around the neck, because it always raises its head up, especially like a pheasant, so it got such a name. It's almost rare to see this kind of snake now, and I just heard my grandfather say that there is such a snake in the local area, but I've never seen it, I didn't expect to meet it here today, and it's such a big one, and I'm very nervous, so I directly asked my brother to fall a few times. It wasn't until the snake was motionless that he was told to stop.

I looked at the rats in the thatched pit, and then looked at the snake, and came to a conclusion that everyone agrees, that is, it is autumn, it is the season when the snakes and rats are the most, last night this snake came to catch mice, and the second fat who came to the thatched house because it was dark, did not notice the snake below, was bitten on the buttocks and passed out, and then the plank was crushed, fell to the bottom, and finally died of poison. After the truth is revealed, everyone's panic about the "ghost grip" will naturally disappear.

The next day, a warning was posted on the bulletin board in the village: There are many snakes in autumn, pay attention to the thatched houses.

Since then, my brother has become a role model for his peers. Catching snakes with bare hands, and it is also a "pheasant neck" that makes people frightened, and now I think about it and my back is cold, I don't know where the courage came from, if I knew in advance that this is a "pheasant neck", it is estimated that our brothers will not go up to anything.

In addition to being bold and careful, helpfulness has also given my two brothers a good reputation from the villagers. Uncle Li is nearly eighty years old, he moved to this village ten years ago, has no children and no daughters, and is a five-guarantee household in the village. Since we live next door to my house, our two brothers always come to help when there is a big or small thing, and at the same time, Uncle Li also taught us two brothers to do a dozen boxing, which makes us both run next door to play whenever we have time.

The day after I grabbed the "pheasant's neck", my brother and I came to Uncle Li's house as promised and helped him dig a cabbage cellar.

In the winter of the mountain villages, there are few kinds of vegetables, and the common vegetables are only a few kinds of Chinese cabbage, radish, potatoes, etc., while in the mountain villages, Chinese cabbage is basically the mainstay, and every household has to dig a cellar to store Chinese cabbage before winter. The so-called cabbage cellar is usually to dig a large pit two to three meters square in the ground, more than two meters deep, set up a top with wood, cover it with plastic sheeting, and then spread a layer of soil on it, which is breathable and insulated, which is most suitable for storing vegetables in winter.

Just do it, don't look at my age, I haven't done much hard work, but digging a vegetable cellar is more than enough. It only took an hour to dig a two-meter-square pit in the southeast corner of the yard, and the depth was about two meters.

I was already sweating profusely at this time, and I asked, "Uncle Li, you see that it is almost so deep, you should be enough for one person!"

"Let's dig deeper, expand the bottom outward, I want to buy more cabbage!" Uncle Li replied with a smile: "If you're tired, come up and drink saliva first, hehe, young people are so impatient!"

I was just about to answer when I heard a "tom" and a large hole appeared in the southeast corner of the vegetable cellar. Immediately afterwards, I heard my brother Tiezhu scream and fell through the hole under his feet.