Night Angel in the Mountains
My hometown is in Jingting, in the foothills of the Dabie Mountains, just 20 kilometers from Jingting County, surrounded by mountains, creating a separate world here. The weather changes with the seasons and differs from the outside world. Spring comes late here; summer afternoons have many showers; autumn is always short, and winter sees thicker snow.
Besides the generations of farmers who have cultivated the land, there are also various wild animals in the mountains, including pigs, rabbits, wolves, badgers... Hawks circling in the sky, swallows and cuckoos in the spring, and magpies and white-headed wrens... Small fish and shrimp in the river, eels, yellow croaker and tortoise... They maintain a distance from humans, living a secluded life, truly born, but they are all like Schrödinger's cat, locked within the box. When humans open the box, the balance is always broken.
At night, groups of hungry wild boars would come out of the forest to forage for crops. When the villagers discovered them, they were already gone, leaving only a mess. It is difficult for people to catch them, and they can only fight wits with them. Some clever villagers assemble broken copper and iron into devices resembling wind chimes and place them in the fields; others weave bamboo into straw, lighting it up at night to ensure the safety of the crops. Some brave ones even hold a night watch with flashlights.
When I was young, my elders told me a story about wolves. Once, at dawn, a wolf pack entered the village. They pushed the pigs from the pigsty up the mountain. The wolves pulled and pushed the frightened pigs, and the cries of the pigs disturbed the people. The villagers drove the wolves away using various tools.
Wolf packs are rare, but wild boars will naturally become the targets of hunters. Hunters use guns or hunting clamps to catch them. I don't have a dedicated hunter near my home. Villagers take advantage of 'opportunities' to catch them to meet the protein needs in impoverished times. Therefore, wild boar meat is often circulated, and wild boar belly is considered a good medicine for nourishing the stomach. In my opinion, this is just as illusory as swallowing snakes in one gulp. Wild boar meat has a wild flavor, and it's difficult to eat raw, so it's usually marinated and cooked with a lot of seasonings, which tastes much worse than ordinary pork.
Although I have eaten wild boar meat, I have never seen a live wild boar. Here, the villagers' prey is not just wild boars, but also wild deer, wild chickens, wild rabbits, thorny porcupines, fruit bats, hedgehogs... This made me realize that there are also these harmless creatures in the surrounding mountains. Besides the yellow rats that sneak into chicken coops and the squirrels that occasionally appear on trees, I have never seen others in the wild. Birds are probably the most free beings in these mountains; they only need to follow the laws of the forest and are not disturbed too much by humans, unless a careless little bird builds its nest in a place frequently visited by bears. I like to go along the sound to find them. Fortunately, I once saw a busy woodpecker and a white-hatted white-headed wren, but I still don't know what the cuckoo that urges villagers to sow crops during the spring planting looks like; they are not as bold as magpies or swallows that fly to your face, they just hide in the forest.
In the valley stream, there are small fish and shrimp. The fish are really very small, and the shrimp are very few. Olden days, they were mainly the children caught a few in the summer when they were playing in the water. Later, people used electric devices to turn batteries into electric fish. People used fertilizers and pesticides in farming, and the fish and shrimp were destroyed. Fortunately, the situation has improved now, and no one uses a lot of catches to satisfy the really limited harvests. There are also crabs in the river. In the summer, people would catch them, coat them in flour, and fry them. In autumn, they were covered with parasitic insects and no one dared to take risks to catch them. Wild turtles are rare; I only heard that someone caught one in the hole of a bridge.
If these are people opening 'Schrödinger's cats', then the recent interactions between humans and bats should be precisely uncovering Pandora's box. There are also bats in my hometown, which locals call 'eaves rats'. Some live in caves in the mountains, and some live very close to us. Before, people would install lucky decorations made of baked clay on the doors of their houses, and the hollowed-out middle became an ideal nest for bats. In the summer nights, they would fly out of it, and you can't see their heads and faces, you can only see their flying, like a group of night angels, releasing an aura of distance. This caused people's innate fear of the night.
I have never heard anyone catch a 'eaves rat'...
