Chapter 164: Seeing Gu Xiaoxia: More and More Feeling Like a Home

Tao Daqiang was carrying the roe deer in front, and Li Long was holding two roe deer horns in the back. In such a short while, less than half an hour, it was really a bit magical.

Looking at that big guy, looking at the things in Li Long's hands, the eyes of many people became enthusiastic.

They had been to the sideline team and knew how valuable this thing was.

If you can really get one, even if it's not deer velvet, it's deer horn, that's dozens of yuan!

It's worth a month of your work!

"Daqiang, where did you get it?" Someone asked immediately.

"It must be Xiao Long who hit it." Another person opened his mouth and said, "Right, Daqiang? Xiao Long, your marksmanship is not bad! Is it a small-caliber gun? Amazing, amazing!"

"Just in the ditch in front..." Tao Daqiang was still honest, pointed to the back and said, "I saw it when I was cutting branches, and just told Brother Long, I didn't expect Brother Long to hit it as soon as he went... hehe..."

Daqiang's silly smile made others feel that his luck was really good. If it were them, they would definitely be able to do it, maybe even better!

"Xiao Long, is that deer velvet in your hand? It looks like it's still bleeding..."

"That's a roe deer, right? Roe deer also have deer velvet? First time seeing it!"

Gu Bowuan was washing vegetables and preparing to cook, and after seeing Li Long holding the deer velvet, he immediately asked:

"Xiao Long, did you just cut this? Do you know how to handle it?"

"Air-dry it?" Li Long was a bit uncertain.

"At this temperature, it will rot before you air-dry it." Gu Bowuan had an expression of "I knew you would say that," then pointed to the salt jar on the side and said:

"Clean the surface, take salt, mix some mud, then paste it on the outside of the deer velvet, wrap

Li Long immediately understood that this must be the old method for processing velvet antlers. He honestly thanked Gu Bo, took some salt from a jar by the stove, and went to the stream to mix it with mud.

After wrapping the two roe deer velvet antlers well and setting them aside, Li Long drew his knife and began to skin the roe deer.

"Little Long, you're quite something! You skin that so neatly!"

"That's for sure. Little Long has hunted quite a few good things in the last half-year, hasn't he? He must have practiced his skinning technique."

Some people started burning strips of wood to weave a carrying frame, while others came over to Li Long's side to watch him skin the roe deer.

Li Long didn't pay much attention to them. After opening the carcass, he dragged out the internal organs and offal and handed them to Tao Da. Tao Da asked Gu Bo for a large basin and took the offal away to wash it.

"Little Long, how are you going to handle these internal organs and offal? Are you taking them with you?" someone asked.

"No, I'll take the stomach, you all can keep the rest to eat," Li Long said. "Da found the animal, so these organs and offal are his, and he still needs to take a leg back for his dad."

Li Long had left wild boar meat for the sideline team before, and today he had brought wolf meat, so he left the favor of the roe deer offal to Tao Da.

This stuff couldn't be kept for too long, and since everyone worked together, Li Long didn't mind sharing some of it.

After all, Li Long took a cut of the money from the work they did.

Everyone surely had their own guesses about this, but no one would speak ill of Li Long. Without Li Long, they wouldn't even have the qualifications to earn this money.

Li Long finished skinning the roe deer, and at this moment, Xu Jianjun came over and asked:

"Do you want the roe deer's gun and eggs? If you don't want them, give them to me."

"I want them." Li Long replied with just one word, not even looking at him, and continued skinning.

Xu Jianjun turned bright red, and the others had very expressive faces, though they didn't say much.

After finishing the skinning, Li Long wrapped the entire roe deer back up in its skin. Gu Bo came over and greeted him:

"Little Long, eat something before you go. The food is almost ready."

"No thanks, Uncle Gu," Li Long used to follow Li Jianguo in calling Gu Bo 'Brother', but now he had changed his form of address without realizing it. "I need to hurry and take the meat and antlers back, otherwise, if they spoil, the loss will be huge."

"Alright." Gu Bo stopped trying to persuade him; these valuable items were more important. He held up a cloth bag of mushrooms and said:

"These are wild mushrooms I picked this morning. Keep some, and take the rest to Xiao Xia."

"Sure." Li Long didn't offer any polite refusals; they were all their own people, and saying too much would only make it awkward.

Tao Da had already cleaned the stomach and brought it over to Li Long. Li Long took the stomach, stuffed it into the roe deer's cavity, then placed it on the back seat of his bicycle. With Tao Da's help, he tied it down and then greeted Xie Yun:

"Brother Yun, I'm heading off first. I'll be back in a day or two. Is there anything you need me to bring you?"

"Nothing, nothing." Xie Yun waved his hand. "We only just arrived two days ago, nothing needed."

"Alright then, I'll check in with everyone back home, and if there's any news or messages, I'll bring them to you."

Li Long got on his bicycle, shouldered his gun, and headed out of the gully.

Watching him ride away, Xu Jianjun shook his head and said:

"He's so young, that gun is useless to him anyway."

"Would it be useful if you had it? Are you saying you're not up to the task?" someone who disliked him said, half-jokingly.

Tao Da didn't participate in their gossip and took the offal to help Gu Bo.

Xu Jianjun, however, didn't want to let him off and asked loudly:

"Da, you were the one who found this roe deer. Little Long said he'd leave a leg for your family, but those antlers are the most valuable part. Did he take them all?"

"The roe deer was hunted by Little Long. Without Little Long, even if Da saw it, he'd just be staring blankly, right? Besides, didn't Little Long say he left the offal here, and there's still a leg going to his house..."

Xie Yun was dissatisfied with Xu Jianjun's stirring of trouble and said loudly:

"Little Long is being righteous enough by doing this. You all think about it: if someone told you where there was game and let you go hunt it, after you finished, what would you give that person?"

"Yeah, that's true!" The others put themselves in his shoes. If they had hit the prey, would they give the other person the offal and a leg?

"Probably not, a leg would be about it."

Tao Da turned his head and said:

"Brother Long even gave me one of the antlers, saying it would clear the debt my family owes him... I couldn't accept it. He gave me too much."

"You heard that!" Xie Yun turned to look at Xu Jianjun, then looked at the others. "Little Long is a righteous man, let's not talk behind his back anymore. When you find something, you can actually ask Little Long to hunt it. You might not be able to hit it yourself, but if you find Little Long, at least you'll get a good share of the goods."

He thought to himself that if he found something, he would definitely ask Li Long to hunt it.

He had been working in the sideline team for several years and had seen too many people who bragged loudly but were the first to turn cowardly when things actually happened.

He also believed that among these people, at least half would try to take it for themselves if they found something; keeping it all was more in line with most people's character.

"Are those deer antlers really that expensive?" someone exclaimed. "Dozens of yuan for one?"

"It depends on the size." Gu Bo said from over there while washing vegetables. "Deer antlers are sold by the ten or hundred grams when weighed. If you're talking about kilograms, one kilogram would cost at least a hundred or so yuan, of course, that's for dried ones." "That's not cheap either!" The person who asked didn't know the price of deer antlers; it was his first time at the sideline team, and it was this sentence that brought the matter into the open. "The money from selling a pair of roe deer antlers is more than you can earn in a year!"

This was what everyone was thinking.

Gu Bo smiled, Xie Yun also smiled, and Tao Da simply lowered his head to work without a word.

Who is stupider than whom?

Li Long pedaled his bicycle, riding like the wind toward the county seat. Arriving at the courtyard, he put the pair of antlers into the side room. In the yard, he cut a wolf leg and a roe deer leg and tied them up, then locked the door and went east to Liang Wenyu's parents' house.

It was noon, and every household had already finished lunch and was resting.

As Li Long's bicycle entered the yard, Liang Wenyu got up. Liang Donglou was closing his eyes to rest, and he heard the sound outside.

"Wenyu, I just got back from the mountains. This is a wolf leg, and this is a roe deer leg, caught just today. Keep them to eat, I'm taking the rest back."

"You just got back?" Liang Wenyu noticed Li Long's dusty appearance. "Come inside and drink some water."

Liang Wenyu truly felt the changes in Li Long. He was certain that Li Long coming to deliver meat wasn't something his sister had urged him to do; it was Li Long's own idea.

In the past, Liang Wenyu had been somewhat puzzled by his father's initiative to help the Li family, but now he understood a little better.

Firstly, the Li family were relatives, his brother-in-law's family, and secondly, the Li family knew how to be grateful.

!.

"No, I need to hurry back and process the meat. Although it's not very hot, meat can't be left out for long."

The Li family wasn't short of meat, but they wouldn't waste it either.

"Little Long, that's hard on you." Liang Donglou walked out of the room and said, "Come sit when you're free. You go ahead and get busy."

"Alright, Uncle Liang, I'm going." Li Long greeted him, pedaled his bicycle out of the yard, and turned away in a flash.

Although he could have returned directly to the team from here, Li Long took a detour and circled around to the Hongqi Township Middle School.

By this time, the afternoon classes had already started. When Li Long arrived at the female teachers' dormitory, he found Gu Xiaoxia wasn't there.

Could she have gone to teach?

Just as Li Long was planning to go to the classroom to look for her, he saw Gu Xiaoxia walking over from the office.

"You're here? From the mountains? You haven't been home yet, have you?" Seeing Li Long's appearance, Gu Xiaoxia understood. "Come, come to my dormitory and wash up."

"No, I brought you some things." Li Long pushed his bicycle to the door of the dormitory, stood it up, pulled out his knife, and asked:

"Do you eat wolf meat?"

"No." Gu Xiaoxia hurriedly waved her hand.

"Then I'll leave you some roe deer meat." Li Long cut a large piece from the roe deer's body, about three to five kilograms, and placed it on the cutting board in Gu Xiaoxia's dormitory. "Cook this for dinner or lunch. If you can't finish it, give some to your colleagues, or you can make it into cured meat."

Then he took the cloth bag Gu Bo had given him off the bicycle and said:

"These are mushrooms Uncle Gu picked in the mountains that he asked me to bring down for you. He's in high spirits up there, so you don't need to worry."

"Alright. Come over here, I've drawn some water for you, wash up." Gu Xiaoxia had already poured water into a washbasin and brought over a towel and soap. "Look at you, covered in dust."

As she spoke, she naturally took her own towel and brushed the dust off Li Long's clothes—this made Li Long freeze for a moment.

It seemed like fragments of some movies in his mind, where a wife would do this for her husband when he returned from work. This scene was so familiar.

He paused for a moment, then simply started washing up at the basin—to be honest, he hadn't felt it in the mountains, but once he started washing his face properly, he realized the dust on his face could be rolled into a pill.

After just a simple wash, the water in the basin had already turned gray. Gu Xiaoxia smiled, picked up the basin, changed the water, and as she handed him the soap, she asked:

"Is it very hard in the mountains?"

"It's alright." Li Long wasn't being pretentious. After washing thoroughly and drying with a towel, he picked up the washbasin, walked a few steps outside to pour it on the ground, then put the basin on the rack and said to Gu Xiaoxia:

"My friends in the mountains built me a winter shelter, it's like a wooden villa. When you're free, I'll take you to see it. Now that the wild mushrooms are out in the mountains, there are plenty of wild vegetables, and the scenery is good, perfect for a trip."

"Can I go see it when I'm free?" Gu Xiaoxia revealed a longing expression. "I haven't even left the county yet."

"That place isn't considered leaving the county either, but the scenery is different from here." Li Long had originally just said it casually, but he didn't expect Gu Xiaoxia to be genuinely interested, and his heart skipped a beat. "Then, when a Sunday comes, shall I take you to see your dad?"

"Okay!" Gu Xiaoxia nodded repeatedly. "Then I'll prepare well these next few days! How about next week? I have nothing to do next Sunday..."

"Sure." Li Long said with a smile, "My time is flexible anyway, it just depends on you."

"Then it's a deal!" Gu Xiaoxia looked at Li Long earnestly.

"Alright." Li Long walked to his bicycle and said, "You process this meat, I have to take the rest back to tidy up. I'll come find you when the time comes."

"Okay."

Gu Xiaoxia watched Li Long leave until he was out of sight, then went into the dormitory to start organizing the meat and mushrooms.

The wild mushrooms had all been processed one by one; the parts with soil on the stems had been trimmed off, looking very clean, uniform, and beautiful.

The meat was cut from the fatty parts, with both bone and meat, a quite large piece. If it didn't spoil, this piece alone would be enough for her to eat for a week or two.

As Gu Xiaoxia cut the meat, she began to calculate what to bring for her father.

She also wondered if Li Long would think the pair of shoes she made for him were ugly when he got home.

Li Long rode very fast and arrived at the village ten minutes later. He went to the Tao family first, but seeing Tao Jianshe wasn't there, he rode back to the Li family.

There were no students on the road; those in preschool were in preschool, those in primary school were in primary school, and Li Juan and the others hadn't finished school yet. The adults were all working in the fields. Li Long returned to the courtyard and found the door locked, so he found the key by the window, opened the door, and began to process the meat.

This was the hottest time of the day. Although Li Long had eaten two pieces of mutton in the morning, he felt hungry after such a long time.

But flies were coming, and he knew he had to process the meat as quickly as possible, otherwise, if the flies laid maggots on it, although the meat would still be edible, it would be so disgusting.

While swatting away flies, he peeled off the last bit of skin from the roe deer, then dismantled the remaining three legs and divided the meat. By the time the roe deer and wolf meat were processed, the sun was already slanting to the west.

A large portion of the meat had been salted, the rest had been cleaned and was ready to be braised, and there was one leg he planned to send to the Tao family later.

Finally, he could rest. It was only at this moment that Li Long felt he was truly exhausted.

The kind where you could fall asleep just by closing your eyes.

In the future, he would never rush like this again.

It was too exhausting.

(End of chapter)