The word "dwarf mule" is considered a curse word in the dialects of many places. For example, in Taiwan, it means "little gangster." But in our family, or in Hunan and Guizhou, it is only used to express one meaning: mandrill.
There are many rumors about mandrills and wild monsters in various places, and they are all kinds of strange, so I will not go into details one by one.
The kind of dwarf mules I'm talking about are the mandrills rumored in the mountains of my hometown. They are only a few dozen centimeters short, always wear red straw hats, and have green or purple skin. Some people say they are red. They are furry and always
They appear in small groups and like to tease people. For example, they will turn the lunch that farmers bring to the fields into stones, or they will poop in the cooking pots of mountain people who have offended them. For example, some people in mountain villages
If you go to the fields to eat mud in the middle of the night and return home to sleep feeling very full, you are being deceived by the dwarf mule.
The red straw hats they wear are made of dragon fern grass, which is said to come from the age of dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago.
Of course, these are just legends. When I was in high school, I lived in the school dormitory, and every classmate had a lot of such stories.
I can't say it's true or false, but the students from the countryside west of Qingshan Realm said it the most.
I studied that crappy book all day long, and during dinner in the evening, I told my parents that I was going to take a trip to Qingshan Realm. It was a blessing, not a curse, but it was a curse that could not be avoided. To be honest, I was worried about the attack on the night of the first grade of junior high school.
That kind of pain left a lingering fear in my heart. The pain was simply beyond the range that humans can bear. At a certain period of time, I even thought about dying.
My mother looked at the portrait of my grandmother on the shrine without saying a word, sighing and shedding tears. My father said that my brother-in-law was at the Qingshanjie Forest Farm. If I wanted to find the dwarf mule, I would go find my brother-in-law. He was guarding the forest house at the forest farm.
, it would be nice for two people to take care of each other.
That night my father hung up the phone with my uncle, and I set out the next morning.
My uncle is a regular employee of the County Forestry Bureau. He works in remote forest farms all year round as a forest guard and forest fire prevention worker. The Qingshan boundary is a boundary to the west of the county. It is a primitive and inaccessible place with high mountains and ridges where birds and animals can hardly fly.
The county forestry bureau has a station there, and my brother-in-law is on duty in the forest guard house in the deepest part of the forest.
I set off in the morning, went to the county seat and transferred to the countryside, then transferred to the forest farm, and walked along the mountain road to the forest guard house. After a lot of trouble, it was already five o'clock in the afternoon when I arrived. It was summer at that time, and the sky was still bright, deep in the mountains.
There is no mobile phone signal in the old forest, but fortunately there are telephone lines laid in the early years, so my uncle was notified and stood at the slope waiting for me early.
I gave him some gifts I had brought, including wine and cigarettes, and he happily accepted them.
Their guard house is a plastered house (that is, a brick house). It is very different from the wooden houses I saw along the way. It has only two rooms, one kitchen and one bedroom. Inside the kitchen
A pot of meat has been cooked, and the aroma is wafting far away. There is another person inside, a thin man in his thirties, smiling at me, showing his smoky yellow teeth.
My uncle introduced me as his colleague, Li Decai, and asked me to call him Uncle Li. Li Decai quickly declined and said that I would just call him brother. He said that he had met me at my uncle’s house before, and I was a very good young man.
, eight or nine years have passed in a flash. At that time, he was still a young child that his mother-in-law did not ask for, but now his children are running around with snot in their noses.
Li Decai has a dark face, rough skin, and a scar on the left side of his face. He looks fierce, but he is actually kind-hearted.
We sat down to eat. The pot was boiling with rabbit meat, and there were two of them. They were all beaten a few days ago. The job in Shou Lao Linzi was very boring, so my uncle and the others would often use air guns to shoot some.
The wild animals were hidden and no one cared about them. The vegetables were all picked from the vegetable field nearby and were fresh. I opened the wine I bought and chatted with them while drinking. My uncle already knew the reason for my visit, and with his help
She was drunk and scolding my grandma: "She is just an old beggar who engages in bugs and superstitions all day long. Now she is dying and she is harming you!"
I was already a little afraid of these things at that time, and since she was also my grandmother, I didn’t continue what he said. Instead, Li Decaishun cursed a few times. We ate meat and drank wine, and then talked about the dwarf mule.
I asked my uncle if he had ever seen one. He laughed loudly and said that he had lived for almost fifty years and had never seen one. It was all made up by others and spread rumors.
He has spent his whole life in deep mountains and old forests, protecting forests from fires and catching wood thieves. If he believed this, he would have been scared to death.
Li Decai, on the other hand, glanced at me with a hesitant expression. I asked him if he had seen it, and he said no.
After dinner, I took the initiative to clean up, but my uncle refused and said he would take me outside for a walk while it was still bright. When I left the house, it was a little dark outside, and I couldn’t see the sunset low in the forest. I could only see the morning glow on the opposite side.
The mountain was shining brightly against the sky. We walked slowly along the mountain road covered with fallen leaves and green grass. My uncle coughed as we walked. He was a long-time smoker, but he did not dare to smoke when patrolling in the mountain forest.
Just cough.
The forest guarding house is on a hill. We walked a few hundred meters. My uncle was telling me some interesting things about guarding the forest. In fact, the work was very boring. I had to walk on iron legs every day. I was very cautious and very tired.
, but he told me something about a nearby village, which really interested me:
The village closest to here is called Segai. Segai is located deep in the mountains. The fields are terraced fields and the forest is a state-owned forest farm. Therefore, it is very poor. Some people go out to work and never come back in their lives. The village
There was an old bachelor who stayed there because his wife was there. He worked hard in the fields. No woman wanted to work with him at the age of 38. One day the year before last, he suddenly went to the gold shop in the county town to sell gold.
, it’s such a big lump, worth hundreds of thousands. Last year, the gold price was 240 per gram, and his lump weighed more than three kilograms. Later, Huang Laoya from the gold shop sold it to 200, and he got almost the same.
300,000.
I said good luck, I don't know where this guy picked it up.
The uncle said yes. Everyone said he was lucky. There was smoke in the ancestral grave. After he came back, he was going to go to the town to start a small business. But good fortune and misfortune depend on it, and people just can't be too proud. Later, Huang Laoya brought him
A group of people came to him and said that the gold he gave him was put in the safe and turned into cow dung that night. How could the gold turn into cow dung if he asked him to pay back the money? He was clearly bullying an old bachelor.
As a result, a bunch of people couldn't come to an agreement, so Huang Laoya beat the old bachelor, and later a lawsuit was filed. For some reason, the court found the old bachelor guilty of fraud, and he was released this year.
I said how could such a judgment be made? When the goods were inspected, they must have been of real gold and silver. Otherwise, would a man as smart as Huang Laoya give money? The uncle smiled and said that Huang Laoya had an uncle who worked for him.
He pointed to the sky, shook his head and smiled, and said nothing. I watched the light in the forest dimming little by little, and said, "It's too dark, go back."
So we walked back one foot deep and one foot shallow.
**********
I stayed in the forest guard house for two days, patrolling the forest during the day, and reading at night. The humidity in the mountain forest was high, mosquitoes were infested, and there were many snakes. The conditions were actually very difficult, but I didn't care. I went south to work.
I suffered even more hardships back then. I slept under bridges, in parks, and in unfinished buildings. There were beds and mosquito nets here, which was actually enough. Because there was no TV, life in the mountains was actually very boring. I could only read books.
Staying in the mountains, with only two companions, and not talking, everything is quiet, only the insects in the forest outside are singing. When my heart calms down, it is easy to read while holding a book.
After reading more, I discovered that "The Twelve Methods of Suppressing the Mountains" is actually not a pure book about witch doctors and goddesses, but a mixture of Taoism, primitive witchcraft, Buddhism, and head-lowering techniques.
It is a hodgepodge of occult science, even mixed with anecdotes and wild things. The person who wrote it is called Mr. Shange, and there are a lot of notes mixed in. The person who added it should be called Luo Shiba.
Gradually, I began to read with gusto.
As the reading progressed, I began to enter a whole new world, and I felt that my daily life seemed to be completely overturned. There were many things in it that I thought were fake at first glance, but there were also some that seemed to make sense, and there were some things about health care in it.
Things like poisoning, lowering heads, raising imps, and making zombies are so disgusting to watch.
There are also records about mandrills. This is a little person who can freely travel between the spiritual world and reality. They are cunning by nature, but they are not cruel. They like to tease people, hold grudges, and like to eat pine cones and sweet potato vines. They only appear and disappear.
In the inaccessible mountains and old forests, he would occasionally visit the homes of mountain people and play tricks on humans.
I stayed for two days without seeing the legendary dwarf mule. On the third day, I returned to the county with my uncle. He went to hand over the goods, while I purchased a few kilograms of pine cones, a basket of sweet potato vines, incense candles, local eggs, and red thread.
, new glutinous rice, hunting knives, binding ropes and nets... Then I went home and picked out a few painted yellow talismans from my grandmother's relics. After preparations were completed, I returned to the forest guarding house in the mountains on the fourth day.
The moon was very bright that night, so I sprinkled pine nuts and sweet potato vines on the slope not far from the forest guard house, and then squatted quietly.
There are wild animals in the mountains and forests, and my uncle is worried about me. He could have gone back to the county to rest for ten days, but later he heard that there was a case of murder and dismemberment in Qingshan.
I watched together in the dark. There were many and fierce mosquitoes in the mountain, but we didn't dare to move. My uncle applied a layer of black grass residue on me, saying it could prevent insects. I waited quietly, feeling
Everything in the open space is clear to my mind. As I said before, I have worked in many factories.
When I was working in a circuit board factory, I looked at the boards every day to look for defects, which strained my eyesight, so I developed a little myopia, and things in the distance were blurry. But now in the dark night, although the moonlight is very bright, I can still see it very clearly.
can see tiny things ten meters away,
The same changes have happened to my body, which is getting stronger and stronger, more energetic, and my mind is clearer.
I gradually believed what my grandmother said before she died: She left me a legacy, but if I want to inherit this legacy, I still need to pass a test. If I pass it, everything will be fine. If I can’t pass it, I will have to face it.
die.
It was late at night, the crescent moon was setting in the west, and there was nothing in the quiet night except the chirping of insects and their squeaking. My uncle was old, and he became too sleepy after less than an hour, so I drove him back to sleep. The humidity in the mountains
It was heavy and the night was as cold as water. I listened to the humming of insects, but my heart was very calm. As if I had some premonition, I waited quietly. Starting from 9 pm, I waited for 7 hours until about 4 am.
A dark shadow appeared on the slope of the mountain.
The appearance of the black shadow made my nerves tense immediately.
However, when I took a closer look, I discovered that it was a mountain mouse as plump as a kitten. The mouse was scurrying around on the slope, now knocking pine nuts, now chewing sweet potato vines, and even using its hind legs to plow.
earth.
I didn't move my body and took out the new glutinous rice mixed with local egg white from the bag. My stomach hurt, not serious, but just like diarrhea. I couldn't help but fart bit by bit without making any sound, so I started to fart more.
The smell made me feel uncomfortable, and even the mosquitoes that had been surrounding me dispersed.
After a while, several dark shadows emerged from the bushes.
I couldn't see the color, but with the help of the blurred moonlight, I saw that these black figures were about thirty centimeters each, walking upright, and there were messy horizontal lines on their heads, which were the outlines of straw hats.
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