While Bai Shuo was over here imagining what the small oink-beasts would look like once grown, on the other side, the oink-beasts brought back tied up were giving everyone trouble, they’d caught them, sure, but where were they supposed to keep them? If they didn’t raise them and just killed them outright for meat, that felt like a waste too, since capturing them alive had taken so much effort.
Hearing everyone else’s discussion, Bai Shuo felt they needed to build a proper enclosure.
The most abundant building materials right now were stone and earth. Building directly on the ground was the most convenient, but oink-beasts were strong, and if one broke loose, with elders and chicks all around, it would be extremely dangerous. Digging straight down into the ground was another option, but then there was the worry that oink-beasts might burrow out.
But if the two methods were combined, dig a large pit, line the sides with stone, then fix the stones in place with mud… Bai Shuo explained his idea to Hua Yong.
Hua Yong nodded along as he listened, and decided to go with Bai Shuo’s approach, after all, catching the oink-beasts had already used Bai Shuo’s plan, so raising them by his suggestion surely couldn’t be wrong either. The only question was where to build the enclosure.
Hua Yong hesitated, and in the end asked Bai Shuo about it too. He’d found that whatever he couldn’t figure out became much simpler once he asked Bai Shuo, it saved him the trouble of racking his own brain, and saved time besides. Bai Shuo might be a chick, but he had far more ideas than Hua Yong did.
Hearing this, Bai Shuo thought it over, and in the end, considering that they might fire bricks in the future, chose to dig beside the mountain on the other side of the river. The excavated soil would be set aside for later use, and first they’d wall it in with stone.
That mountain across the river wasn’t small either, but it had less stone and more sand on it, making it unsuitable for digging caves into, so despite being close to where they lived, no one had ever settled there.
The spot Bai Shuo picked was on the far side of that mountain, this way, with the mountain blocking the way, even if there was wind, the smell from the enclosure wouldn’t drift over to their side, and with a mountain in between, it wouldn’t contaminate the river water either. Most of the tribe’s water came from this nearby river and a mountain spring behind the far mountain, both needed careful protection.
Once the site was chosen, the hunting and gathering party members quickly finished their meal, then went to dig. Since there were so many people and the tribe’s tools weren’t quite enough to go around, everyone made do with whatever was at hand, split bamboo, thin stone flakes, tree branches, whatever they could find got used. Fortunately, the Feather Clan were strong, and even with subpar tools, their energy never flagged, and they finished digging the deep pit in a single night.
Next came laying the stones, lining the inside of the deep pit with a ring of stone, bonded together with mud and sand. Considering the problems of rainfall and wastewater drainage, Bai Shuo built several drainage outlets around the perimeter, the bottom of each connected by bamboo to a deeper pit outside, which would later be used for composting.
A good amount of dry grass was also thrown into the earthen pit, the oink-beasts could eat it if they wanted, and if they didn’t want it, once it got dirtied it could still be swapped out and composted.
To properly raise these few oink-beasts, the whole tribe was busy for two days. On the morning of the third day, Hua Yong led a few people to lower the oink-beasts down, tossing in some of the wild grass that the small oink-beasts liked to eat as well, Bai Shuo had spent these past few days figuring out exactly what they preferred.
The three oink-beasts hadn’t eaten for two days now, and having just gained their freedom, at the sight of food nearby, they devoured it like a whirlwind sweeping through, then circled around the pit once they’d finished, as if searching for a way up.
But Bai Shuo had dug the pit precisely to prevent them from escaping, so naturally there was no way out. To be safe, Bai Shuo hadn’t even left a spot for people to climb up and down, since the Feather Clan could simply shift into feather form to move freely up and down.
Around the deep pit was a ring of wooden posts, with willow branches and hemp rope strung between them, ensuring that even if someone forgot the oink-beasts were down there, they wouldn’t accidentally fall in. Only once it was confirmed the oink-beasts had no way to escape did the hunting party set off. Today they’d brought fishing nets again too, but unlike last time, this time each of the three parties carried one net apiece.
The Feather Clan drew inferences readily (drew inferences readily (jǔ yī fǎn sān, 舉一反三) – idiom, literally “raise one corner and infer the other three”: figuring out the rest of a pattern from a single example), since they’d managed to catch oink-beasts, surely other prey could be caught the same way. Setting aside moo-beasts, whose herds were both large in number and large in size, cluck-birds and baa-beasts seemed catchable.
To be precise, using a fishing net to catch cluck-birds was actually slower than simply chasing them down directly, but what the net brought back was alive, and could be raised. Raising them meant deciding when to eat and when to slaughter, being able to eat fresh meat mattered a great deal to everyone.
The current methods of preserving meat were fairly simple, mostly air-drying naturally or smoking it and hanging it up, but once processed this way, the food was only suited to boiling, roasting it again would make it extremely tough. During the rainy and snow seasons, everyone’s food choices were especially limited, basically just sun-dried and smoked jerky along with whatever fruit hadn’t spoiled.
Jerky was edible, sure, but the taste was worlds apart from fresh meat, and given the choice, few people were willing to eat that unpalatable jerky.
And so, starting with those three oink-beasts, other live game began appearing in the tribe. Of the game brought back, everyone silently agreed that the small ones went to Bai Shuo, and the large ones belonged to the whole tribe.
The ones preparing food for the game were still the chicks. Before, the chicks had spent a good half of each day playing, but now, their daily workload had doubled. To lighten things for the chicks, the gathering party took over the job of collecting firewood entirely, leaving the chicks to just pick wild grass.
With free time again each day, the chicks began searching around for ripe fruit.
While eating a redtop fruit gone purple-red with ripeness, Bai Shuo realized something, the redtop fruit season was about to end.
Although most plants could grow throughout the growth season, their flowering and fruiting periods weren’t all the same. Redtop fruit bore fruit relatively early, by the time it started fruiting, most fruit trees hadn’t even flowered yet.
And bearing fruit early also meant the season ended early. Now that other fruits were gradually appearing, redtop fruit was growing scarcer by the day, at most another month, and there’d be no more redtop fruit to pick.
Thinking that he’d have to wait nearly half a year before eating it again, Bai Shuo felt it was a shame. Never mind that there were now many other varieties of fruit, as the first fruit to appear after the snow season, redtop fruit’s status was something no other fruit could replace. In this particular season redtop fruit felt optional, but by the time snow season came, just thinking of its taste would make anyone’s mouth water.
Some time back, Bai Shuo had thought about making dried fruit, but the method turned out to be thoroughly unrealistic, not that it failed, exactly, it succeeded, it’s just that he’d started with fifty redtop fruits, and after drying them, only seven were left.
While washing them, someone ate two. While patting them dry, two more got eaten. While arranging them on the rack, another two disappeared. Charcoal roasting was hard to control for temperature, so during the process he’d tested the moisture level, tasting quite a few in doing so, at the time he, Bai Su, Bai Le, and Wu Yan had all been roasting together, and sitting by the fire, one taste here, one taste there, and the rack had emptied without anyone quite noticing. The dried fruit came out perfectly, and everyone ended up stuffed too.
The taste really was excellent, in fact, the longer it roasted, the better it tasted, even better than fresh, it’s just that everyone had eaten a bit too much.
Really, it couldn’t be helped, if anyone was to blame, blame the lack of a sealed oven. Dried fruit giving off such a rich, fruity aroma, one bite releasing a mouthful of concentrated juice and sweet, fragrant flesh, who could possibly resist that?
Based on last time’s experience, Bai Shuo concluded that roasting dried fruit was fine if you wanted to eat it right then, but roasting it to save for later, forget it, that was basically impossible. If he really wanted to make dried fruit that way, whether there’d be enough left to eat at all was a real question. Sun-drying fruit was even less feasible, imagine a whole rack of freshly washed redtop fruit, and how much of a temptation that would be for chicks coming back tired and thirsty from a day’s work.
So this plan was ruled out entirely, perhaps other high-yield fruits could be made into dried fruit, but redtop fruit, at least until cultivation could be expanded, was hopeless.
Bai Shuo recalled methods he’d heard of before, and in the end settled on a relatively simple one, preserving fruit in mud. Mix soil and rice husks together, shape into small clay jars, let them dry, then place the fruit inside and seal the opening with mud. The method was fairly simple, and importantly, the time spent in contact with the fruit was short, so there’d be no risk of eating one after another without being able to stop.
Bai Shuo had never used this method before and wasn’t sure it would actually work in the end, so he made a dozen or so clay jars, and once they’d dried, put the slightly tart redtop fruit inside and moved them into the cave. He decided that from here on, he’d preserve a batch like this every day.
At the same time, Bai Shuo was also thinking about preserving other foods.
Right now the highest-yielding food was leaf-greens, not one specific food, but a general term for all edible leaves, similar to how modern leafy greens were referred to as a group. There were many varieties, and most leaf-greens were still growing right now. This year, with more tools like backpack-baskets, sometimes the gathering party brought back more leaf-greens than could be eaten, and the leftovers went to feed the oink-beasts and cluck-birds.
Bai Shuo decided to make pickled dried greens. He didn’t dare sun-dry fruit, but greens were no problem, if anyone wanted to eat them, they absolutely could, as much as they liked.
So that evening, once the gathering party returned, Bai Shuo picked out a few whole plants of several varieties, washed them clean, hung them outside to dry for a day, and once the greens had dried, took them down and boiled them briefly, let them sit overnight, then took them out to dry again the next day. Once dry, he steamed them in a pot, then continued drying, repeating the steam-and-dry cycle three times.
Many leafy greens could be made into pickled dried greens this way, and the few varieties Bai Shuo used all worked out, though the flavors differed slightly. After weeding out two varieties that turned somewhat bitter, Bai Shuo began collecting seeds from the other three types of leaf-greens.
Most leaf-greens here had a growing period of only two or three months, meaning they could mature twice within a single growth season, if there was enough water for irrigation to make use of the dry season too, they could achieve three harvests a year. So collecting seeds now and planting them, they’d mature in a few months, still in time to process.
The gathering party had long since gotten used to him occasionally requesting one or two kinds of plants or seeds. This time there were a few more of them, but it wasn’t difficult either, during the season when leaf-greens matured in large numbers, finding seeds was easy.
The seeds brought back were all planted nearby. These leaf-greens grew fast, so there was no need to worry about yield, just watch out for pests. Bai Shuo had the chicks gather up wood ash from around the tribe and scatter it over the fields, to sterilize and disinfect the soil and help prevent pests and disease, though since wood ash was highly alkaline, they couldn’t apply too much at once.
Once this was done, Bai Shuo led the chicks back toward the tribe, and before they’d even made it back, they ran into Bai Liang, who came rushing out in a panic.
“Bai Shuo, something’s wrong, something’s wrong with the oink-beasts!”
“What happened?” Hearing there was a problem with the game, Bai Shuo picked up his pace, asking Bai Liang what was going on as he walked.
Seeing him walking too slowly, Bai Liang simply scooped him up and ran toward the enclosure.
The other chicks, not knowing what had happened, hurried to catch up.
As Bai Liang carried Bai Shuo along, he explained.
Oink-beasts and baa-beasts were both fairly large, and Hua Yong didn’t feel comfortable letting the chicks, elders, or those in poor health feed them, so each day one member of either the hunting or gathering party was left behind to feed the game being raised, which also counted as their rest day.
Today it was Bai Liang’s turn. He’d fed the game that morning and gone back to the cave to sleep, and never expected that when he woke up and went to check again, more than half of what he’d fed them that morning was still sitting there uneaten. This was nothing like what everyone else had described, where they’d eat however much you gave them. Not only were the oink-beasts refusing to eat, they were also pacing around restlessly. Seeing this, Bai Liang panicked at once and rushed out to find Bai Shuo.
Hearing the explanation, Bai Shuo let out a breath of relief. “It’s probably fine.” As long as they weren’t fighting, it should be okay, a lack of appetite could have other causes.
Led by Bai Liang to the enclosure, Bai Shuo stood outside the fence and looked down, sure enough, there was still plenty of food left inside, and two oink-beasts were pacing around, from time to time climbing onto the others.
“They’re not trying to escape, are they?” Watching the one climbing over and over, Bai Liang was full of worry, he’d thought staying behind at the tribe to feed the game would be an easy, relaxing job, and had never expected this kind of shock.
“No…” Bai Shuo watched the oink-beasts at the bottom of the pit and worked out the reason.
They weren’t trying to escape. It was that after being separated from the small oink-beasts for so long, having weaned them, their heat had come on.