In the days that followed, Chen Shengjun never dared to appear before Yuan Chun again.
That afternoon, after work, the village chief held a meeting and announced, "The autumn harvest is in three days. I'll give everyone three days off so you can all go back and prepare for the harvest."
Even on holiday, the villagers weren't idle. The men went up the mountain to chop firewood, and the women went up to pick mushrooms and dig wild vegetables.
Everyone tried to bring back as much food as possible.
Once the harvest began, no one had time to go up the mountain anymore. Even young children had to go to the fields to glean wheat. So, to avoid running out of food and going hungry during the harvest, everyone in the family, from dawn till dusk, went up the mountain.
Yuan Chun had been eating wild vegetable dumplings for several days and was already craving meat.
The meat at this time wasn't like the meat of the superhuman beasts after the apocalypse—it was hard to eat, difficult to chew, and not fragrant, like eating old tree bark.
The game on the mountain is incredibly delicious. If it weren't for the fact that Chen Shengjun had taken advantage of her, and her grandmother and the other women had kept a close eye on her, she would have come to the mountain to hunt long ago to improve the family's meals.
Fortunately, the opportunity came.
On her first day on the mountain, Yuan Chun secretly slipped away while Grandma Feng and the others were engrossed in digging for wild vegetables. An hour later, she returned with two rabbits, three pheasants, and more than twenty wild eggs in her basket.
Perhaps because so many people came to the mountain to dig for wild vegetables, Grandma Feng and the others didn't even notice that Yuan Chun had disappeared. When they returned home at noon, Yuan Chun pulled out five small game animals from the bottom of her basket, stunning the entire Feng family.
"Yuan Chun, this...you caught all of these?" Liu Qingqiu exclaimed in surprise at her daughter's good luck.
When digging for wild vegetables and mushrooms on the mountain, who wouldn't want to catch a pheasant or rabbit to enjoy? But pheasants can fly, and rabbits are fast; they're not so easy to catch.
They had seen them before, but they couldn't catch them.
We could only watch helplessly as they disappeared before our eyes.
If we were lucky, we might even collect some wild eggs.
But my daughter caught three pheasants, two rabbits, and dozens of wild eggs. Her luck was simply phenomenal.
"Big sister, you're so amazing! How did you catch that?"
"Big sister, teach me! I want to catch pheasants and rabbits too!"
"Meat, so much meat! Big sister, I want to eat meat!" Several children excitedly surrounded a pile of small prey, drooling and chattering.
Grandma Feng slapped her thigh and whispered, "Oh dear, keep your voices down, keep your voices down! If someone hears you, you can forget about eating all the meat yourself."
At this time, the government strictly controlled the game, and the game hunted in the mountains had to be handed over. Of course, you didn't have to hand over a small game, but Yuan Chun had hunted quite a lot. If someone found out and got jealous, they might force them to hand it over, and their family really couldn't keep it all to themselves.
The Feng family immediately fell silent,
but the joy in their eyes remained.
Qiu Guihua, being the most efficient, quickly went to the kitchen to boil water and prepare the pheasant.
Feng Dasheng also efficiently prepared two rabbits.
That evening, the Feng family didn't cook meat. Firstly, they couldn't bear to cook it, wanting to save it for the autumn harvest to nourish everyone. Secondly, cooking meat would release a strong aroma, and the Feng family didn't want to cause trouble at this time.
However, during the autumn harvest, some well-off families would buy some meat in advance, so the aroma wouldn't arouse suspicion.
Although they didn't cook meat, Grandma Feng boiled seven wild eggs for the children.
Yuan Chun and Ding Chunli each received one.
In the afternoon, Yuan Chun hadn't been on the mountain long when she tried to sneak away, but Grandma Feng called her back, "Yuan Chun, where are you going to dig? There are plenty of wild vegetables here."