Lu Yuan had barely stepped out of the courtyard gate when two hurried sets of footsteps sounded behind him.
“Brother-in-law! Wait!”
Lin Sanniu came running over, panting heavily as he grabbed the sleeve of Lu Yuan’s worn-out rain cape.
Right behind him, Eldest Brother Lin Daniu hurried out as well, still clutching half a piece of firewood he had not finished chopping. His face was full of worry.
“Brother-in-law, what are you going to do? If something is bothering you, tell your big brother!”
Lin Daniu stared fixedly at the rusty woodcutting knife in Lu Yuan’s hand, afraid that the scholar, having suffered such a great injustice, might be planning to end his own life.
Lu Yuan was stunned for a moment. Seeing how nervous the two brothers were, his heart warmed.
He could not help laughing as he held out the broken bamboo basket in his hand.
“Big Brother, Third Brother, you misunderstood. I’m not going to die. I’m going to the river behind the village to get us something to eat.”
Something to eat? At the frozen river?
Lin Sanniu looked at Lu Yuan as if he were an idiot. A frozen bubble of snot almost formed beneath his reddened nose.
“Brother-in-law, you didn’t burn your brain last night, did you?”
“In weather this cold, the river is frozen so solid that even an ox cart could run across it. Where are you going to find food? Are you planning to chew on ice?”
Lu Yuan patted Sanniu on the shoulder and brought out the perfect excuse he had already prepared.
“When I was studying at the county school, I happened to read a fragment of an ancient book called Qimin Yaoshu.”
“It recorded a method called ‘breaking the ice to catch fish in winter.’”
“Yesterday, when we came from Yuanhe Town, I observed the terrain of the river behind Qingshui Village. I have an idea, so I want to give it a try today.”
In truth, Lu Yuan was not completely certain that it would work.
But his modern knowledge of biology and physics told him that as long as the bottom of the river had not frozen solid, this method could work.
Seeing how confidently Lu Yuan spoke and hearing him mention an “ancient book” they had never heard of, the Lin brothers looked at each other.
In the eyes of ancient farmers, anything a scholar had read in a book was practically a magical technique handed down by the immortals.
“All right! Big Brother will go with you! You’re still recovering from your illness. I can’t let you smash open the ice yourself!”
Lin Daniu was a straightforward man. He took the woodcutting knife from Lu Yuan and strode ahead to clear the way.
Qingshui Village was nestled between mountains and water. The river behind the village was fed by flowing water from the deep mountains.
Normally, the river was clear, but now it was covered by thick snow and solid ice, stretching out like a vast white sheet and radiating an unbearable chill.
The three men trudged through the snow, sinking deeply with every step, and soon reached the riverbank.
In fact, ancient farmers rarely went fishing in the river.
First, they did not have fine fishing nets. Such expensive items could only be afforded by professional fishermen.
Second, wild carp and grass carp had many bones, and during summer they carried a strong muddy smell. Poor farming families who lacked oil and salt had no way to cook them properly.
More importantly, the ice was simply too thick in winter.
Most farming families could barely gather enough basic iron tools, so who would be foolish enough to use precious agricultural tools to smash through ice as hard as stone?
If someone slipped and fell into an ice hole, there was almost no chance of survival.
Lu Yuan did not recklessly step onto the river.
He stood on the bank and narrowed his eyes, carefully observing the direction of the river with the experience he had gained from modern field exploration.
“Big Brother, over there!”
Lu Yuan pointed toward a bend in the river.
It was on the sunny side. Although the surface was frozen, they could faintly see several withered aquatic plants trapped beneath the ice.
“Where aquatic plants grow thickly, the ice is relatively thinner. Since it faces the sun and is sheltered from the wind, the water temperature there will also be slightly higher,” Lu Yuan explained casually.
Although Lin Daniu and Lin Sanniu did not understand much of what he was saying, they obediently followed him.
“Clang! Clang!”
Lin Daniu swung the chipped, rusty woodcutting knife and smashed it against the ice.
Ice fragments flew everywhere. After smashing for the time it took to drink a cup of tea, they finally managed to break open an ice hole about the size of a washbasin.
Deep river water surged upward through the opening, releasing wisps of freezing mist.
Not far away, several villagers who were gathering firewood on the back mountain while wrapped in tattered straw mats happened to see what was happening.
“Look! What are Daniu and the others doing? They’re smashing the ice!”
“Ah, this family must have gone crazy from the cold. They’ve become so desperate for fish that they’re trying to catch them in the middle of winter!”
“Forget it, forget it. Hurry up and gather the firewood so we can get back home and stay warm.”
The two villagers hunched their shoulders and walked away, openly mocking them.
Lin Sanniu had good hearing and heard every word.
He gritted his teeth angrily and could not help muttering, “Brother-in-law! Look at the stupid idea you came up with! Now the whole village gets to laugh at our family!”
“You’re already sick. Instead of lying on the warm kang, you insisted on coming out here and making trouble!”
“If fish could really be caught this way, the villagers would have already emptied the river. Would there even be any left for us?”
Lu Yuan was not annoyed by his brother-in-law’s complaints at all.
He knew that the boy was the typical kind of person who had a sharp tongue but a soft heart. When they had been smashing the ice earlier, Sanniu had actually worked the hardest. The back of his hand had even been cut by flying ice shards.
“Third Brother, you can’t judge everything by appearances. Watch carefully.”
Lu Yuan crouched down and grabbed a handful of black mud mixed with dried grass from the riverbank.
Then he took a small handful of shriveled grain husks he had found abandoned along the road yesterday. He kneaded them together with the mud and rolled them into a ball.
Plop!
He threw the mud ball into the ice hole.
Immediately afterward, Lu Yuan turned the broken-bottomed bamboo basket upside down over the ice hole and weighed down its edges with stones.
“Brother-in-law, why did you throw a ball of rotten mud in there?” Lin Sanniu asked, completely confused.
A confident smile curved across Lu Yuan’s lips.
In his mind, he silently explained: This is based on the principle of dissolved oxygen.
Once the ice sealed the surface of the river, the water underneath became extremely low in oxygen.
When an ice hole was opened, fresh air entered the water. The fish nearby would rush toward the opening to breathe, swarming toward the “air vent.”
The ball of rotten mud mixed with grain husks was meant to imitate the microorganisms found around the roots of aquatic plants, serving as additional bait to attract the fish.
Of course, he would never explain any of that to them.
“The Qimin Yaoshu says this is called the ‘air-attraction method.’ The fish become suffocated beneath the water, and when they smell the scent of earth, they come up for air.”
Lu Yuan lied without even blinking.
Time passed second by second.
The northern wind howled like knives against their faces.
Lin Sanniu stomped his feet from the cold and continuously rubbed his ears.
“Brother-in-law, it’s almost been the time it takes to burn a stick of incense, and we haven’t even seen a fish scale! Let’s go back. It’s too cold!”
Even the usually steady Lin Daniu rubbed his frozen hands and sighed.
“Brother-in-law, I think whatever was written in that ancient book was probably made up by some rich scholar. We can’t take it seriously.”
“Let’s go home. Don’t freeze yourself into another illness. I won’t know how to explain it to Qingyue.”
Just as the brothers had completely lost hope and were turning around to gather their things—
“Splash!”
The previously still ice hole suddenly erupted with violent splashing!
The water churned violently, as if something beneath the surface were desperately thrashing about.
Lu Yuan’s eyes suddenly lit up.
His reaction was as fast as lightning.
Before Lin Daniu and Lin Sanniu could recover, he lunged forward, grabbed the edges of the bamboo basket with both hands, and pulled it up with all his strength!
“Whoosh!”
Freezing river water splashed across the snow, instantly forming beads of ice.
Amid the huge splash, three enormous dark shapes, each thicker than an adult’s calf, were thrown onto the pristine white snow.
“Flop! Flop!”
Three enormous fat carp, each weighing a good five or six pounds, thrashed violently in the snow. Their scales shimmered with an alluring golden-red glow beneath the winter sunlight.
Silence.
Aside from the sound of the huge fish slapping against the snow, not a single sound could be heard along the riverbank.
Lin Daniu remained frozen in the position he had turned around in, his entire body resembling a stone statue. His eyes were so wide they looked as though they might fall into the snow.
Lin Sanniu’s mouth was hanging open so wide that his jaw almost dropped to the ground. It could have fit a large egg.
“This… this… damn…”
His tongue seemed to have tied itself into knots. He pointed at the three giant carp in the snow but could not form a complete sentence.
“Oh, my heavens!”
Lin Daniu suddenly lunged forward and hugged one of the still-thrashing carp tightly against his chest. Tears immediately streamed down his face.
“A five- or six-pound carp! If we take this to town, one fish could easily be exchanged for twenty pounds of coarse rice!”
He suddenly raised his head and looked at Lu Yuan.
His expression had completely changed.
He looked at him as though he were some immortal who had descended from the heavens.
“Brother-in-law! You’re my real brother-in-law!”
Lin Sanniu excitedly grabbed Lu Yuan around the leg.
“Where is that Qimin Yaoshu? I want to memorize it too!”
Lu Yuan was amused by him. Enduring the numbness in his hands, he laughed.
“All right, stop shouting. Hurry and try a few more times while there’s still oxygen underneath.”
For the next half hour, the three of them repeated the same process.
However, the large school of carp seemed to have been startled. After several more attempts, they only managed to catch a dozen or so palm-sized wild crucian carp.
“That’s enough.”
Seeing that the Lin brothers’ hands had turned purple from the cold, Lu Yuan decisively called a halt.
“It’s too cold. If we stay any longer, our fingers will freeze off. We can’t be too greedy. This is enough to give our family several days of full meals. Let’s go home!”
The three men found a sturdy tree branch and threaded the fish through their gills with dried grass.
Each carrying a string of heavy spoils, they strode back toward the Lin family home.
Meanwhile, in the small courtyard of the Lin family in Qingshui Village, the atmosphere was gloomy and full of worry.
Father-in-law Lin Dashan squatted in a corner, using his rough hands to repair a broken wooden stool with one missing leg. He remained silent.
Second Brother Lin Erniu was in the middle of the courtyard, vigorously chopping firewood for the heated kang, as though trying to vent all his worries and frustrations on the logs.
At the kitchen door, Second Sister-in-law Li Shi held half a bowl of shriveled grain husks and carefully fed them to the only two old hens in the courtyard.
Those two hens were the Lin family’s only source of cash income.
Normally, no one in the family was willing to eat their eggs. They saved every egg to take to town and exchange for needles, thread, oil, salt, and other necessities.
Now, Mother-in-law Wang Shi stood at the entrance of the main room with a small bamboo basket hanging from her arm.
At the bottom of the basket lay five lonely eggs.
Wang Shi’s eyes were red. She carefully covered the five eggs with a piece of worn cloth.
“Mother, are you really going to exchange them for grain at Auntie Wang’s house next door?” Li Shi put down the bowl of grain husks and walked over reluctantly.
“Do you not know what that widow Wang is like? She’s stingy to the bone!”
“These five eggs could be exchanged for a pound and a half of cornmeal in town. But in her hands, getting one pound would count as her showing mercy!”
Wang Shi gave a bitter smile and sighed. Deep wrinkles appeared around her sunken eyes.
“Do you think I don’t know what she’s like? But with the snow and ice everywhere, it would take two hours to go back and forth to town.”
“Besides, wherever we go to exchange them, people won’t even bother with us if we don’t have enough goods.”
“So what if we lose a little? At least we can make a thicker gruel and somehow get through today.”
As she spoke, Wang Shi lovingly touched the small bamboo basket and turned around to open the courtyard gate.
Li Shi turned her head and secretly wiped away a tear.
Lin Dashan stopped chopping wood and let out a long sigh filled with self-blame and helplessness.
Just as Wang Shi’s hand touched the door latch—
“Creak!”
The old wooden gate was suddenly pushed open from outside.
“Father! Mother! Second Brother! Second Sister-in-law! Hurry and look at what we brought back!”
Lin Sanniu’s loud, excited voice instantly echoed throughout the entire courtyard.
Wang Shi jumped in surprise and instinctively took two steps backward.
Everyone in the Lin family stopped what they were doing and looked toward the gate.
Lu Yuan, Lin Daniu, and Lin Sanniu strode into the courtyard.
Each of them was carrying a thick tree branch.
Hanging from the ends of the branches were three enormous fish, still vigorously thrashing their tails, their scales glittering beneath the sunlight. Each fish was thicker than a man’s calf.
“Clatter.”
The small bamboo basket nearly slipped from Wang Shi’s hands.
The mallet in Lin Dashan’s hand struck his own foot, yet he seemed completely unaware of the pain.
Li Shi covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes wide with shock.
The entire Lin family courtyard instantly erupted with a chorus of stunned gasps.