Han Cheng looked at the small amount of charcoal in the wooden basket, the ashes in the kiln, and the half-burned or simply unburned wood piled around him, and scratched his hair in distress.
This is the eighth time he has failed to make charcoal in an earthen kiln.
None of these charcoal burnings were successful. Although he has been constantly adjusting the timing of burning the fire in the earth kiln based on his past charcoal burning experience, the progress has not been great.
This eighth time the kiln was opened to burn charcoal, compared with the second time, there were only a few extra pieces of carbon...
He took a deep breath and let it out, deeply feeling the difficulty of picking apples without standing on the shoulders of giants.
The world is so big, so naturally Han Cheng is not the only one who is distressed. The leader of the Sheep Tribe is also very distressed at this time.
Like Han Cheng, he squatted on the ground and pulled his messy hair with his hands from time to time.
In front of him was a corner of the cave.
The part that was originally connected to other places in the cave is now separated by some rough walls made of stones, forming a relatively independent space.
The leader of the sheep tribe, dressed in sheepskin, squatted on the ground and could smell some unpleasant smells from the gaps in the stone wall.
Of course he wasn't bothered by the smell. In fact, the smell on his body wasn't much better than the smell coming from him.
He squatted here for a while and then stood up.
The scene in this independent space appeared in front of him.
The twelve sheep whose bodies were so stained that their original colors could hardly be distinguished were frightened by the leader of the sheep tribe who suddenly stood up, screaming and squealing as they huddled together and shivered.
These sheep are very thin and skinny, looking like skeletons of long hair.
The troubles of the leader of the sheep tribe come from these sheep.
Of course, at the beginning, the leader of the sheep tribe and everyone else were only happy about these sheep.
Every autumn is a harvest season for the tribes living on this land, especially for the sheep tribe.
Because every autumn, they can harvest enough sheep.
This will account for a large part of their future food.
In the past, in order to prevent the captured sheep from escaping, they would choose to kill all the sheep.
In the end, the uneaten mutton will often go bad, even if the weather is cold in winter, because there is a long period of time between when they arrest the sheep and when winter actually comes.
In the past, although the people of the Sheep Tribe would be troubled by this matter, there was no good way to solve it.
Because this is what people in their tribe have done since they can remember.
Food is precious, especially in winter. At this time, even food that has deteriorated and rotten becomes extremely precious and no one is willing to throw it away.
The sheep tribe, whose mutton accounts for half of their winter food, is even more reluctant to throw it away, because if they do, many people in their tribe will starve to death!
The Sheep Tribe can easily obtain a large amount of meat in the autumn and has enough food to survive the winter. This is the reason why the tribe's population has never been considered top-notch among several nearby tribes.
Because every year when winter is about to pass, some people in the Sheep Tribe die, mostly the elderly and minors.
The sheep tribe will grieve for the dead, but at the same time they are sad with a sense of normality.
Or it can be said to be helpless.
There is a saying that has been circulating among the Sheep Tribe, and even the oldest person in their tribe doesn’t know when this saying started to be passed down.
It was said that it was too easy for the people of their tribe to obtain food, so the gods punished them...
The people of the Sheep Tribe firmly believe in this. In their view, this is indeed a punishment, because the dead will become extremely thin, even if they eat a lot of food...
Of course, the people in the sheep tribe didn't know that this was because they ate too much rotten food. They started keeping some of the sheep alive this year, not wanting to solve the problem.
Most of them were inspired to do this after seeing the large herd of deer from the neighboring wealthy tribe. Another small part of them got it from the neighboring tribal leader. Live sheep can get more money than dead sheep.
The promise of many potteries.
This discovery from a neighboring tribe made the people of the sheep tribe extremely happy, because they suddenly found that they had found a way to solve the problem of mutton deterioration later.
The meat of dead sheep will become smelly over time, but this will not happen to living sheep.
This is a very simple truth. It's not that they don't understand it, but they have never thought of it in the sheep caught by their own tribe.
Every year, according to the passed down experience, all the captured sheep are killed...until this year during the celebration, we saw a large herd of deer owned by a neighboring tribe...
Xiao He succeeds and fails Xiao He. The whole sheep tribe was really excited about raising sheep at the beginning, because after they started raising sheep, they realized another benefit, that is, waiting until the cold weather passed.
Their tribe can also have sheep, so that once the cold season is over, if you want to eat mutton, you will not have to wait until the next autumn...
In order to raise these sheep, they also built a sheepfold modeled after the deer shed of the neighboring tribe.
They didn't have that kind of high courtyard, so they built the sheepfold into the cave where they lived.
They could not build a strong sheepfold with wood. After seeing the neighboring tribe build something similar to the place where deer lived with stones, they came back and started to build sheepfolds with stones...
All this seems beautiful, but the distressing things are becoming more and more serious as the weather gradually gets colder.
This distress is the collection of fodder, or the death of the sheep.
At the beginning, they thought that raising sheep was indeed a good idea. They only needed to get grass for the sheep to eat every day.
But after doing this for a while, it stopped working because their tribe raised a lot of sheep and had to get a lot of grass to feed them every day.
As the weather got colder and all the forage around the tribe was collected, the burden of collecting grass became heavier and heavier.
These sheep didn't have enough to eat or drink, and they ate old yellow grass every day, so they began to lose weight at a speed visible to the naked eye.
And as time went by, sheep began to die one after another.
Of course the dead sheep and sheep tribe will not let go, but there is not much meat on them compared to the autumn.
Raising sheep not only results in loss of meat, but also brings suffering to the people in the tribe.
In previous years, as soon as the cold winter arrived, they would block the entrance of the cave with stone slabs, and then start the long cat winter around the fire.
But this year it won't work, because they have to go out to feed the sheep, and everyone is freezing. Some people have started to develop frostbite on their hands and feet.
This is the trouble of the leader of the sheep tribe.
He didn't understand that a path that obviously looked good turned out to be what it is now after it was actually put into practice.
The neighboring tribe has so many deer, how do they survive the winter?
After the leader of the sheep tribe scratched his hair again, he began to ask people to prepare food. He decided to go to the neighboring friendly tribe to find out.
