Chapter 11: Plucking the Strings

The progress of the Great Blue Harrier’s training to shout farther was faster than Yue Feng had expected. With only three pieces of meat and less than ten minutes of time, it could already shout eight meters away.

Games like “Jiaoyuan” that involve falconers interacting with the falcon cannot be played too often every day. After all, every time the eagle succeeds, it will eat a lot of meat. When its stomach is almost full, the eagle will become more cunning, and training it at that time will be ineffective.

After calling the eagle for the third time, Yue Feng took the bowl of eagle food that he had prepared in advance and began to feed the eagle.

The eagle had consumed a lot of energy after catching three preys today, so Yue Feng fed the eagle plenty of food this time. The dove meat in the bowl was mixed with fine feathers wetted with blood, and all of it was fed to the Great Green Kitten. By the time the little eagle had finished eating the meat, the crop had swelled up.

Judging from Yue Feng’s rich experience, the Big Green Kitten was about 80% full after this meal!
Poor Great Green Kitten, this is the first full meal he had since he came home from casting his net.

In Yue Feng’s mind, he would consolidate the distance tomorrow, give Wuchengbao a small meal to relax for a day, and then he should be able to release the enemy when he gets out of the encirclement early the day after tomorrow!

After feeding the eagle, Yue Feng held the eagle until lunchtime.

The dish we cooked at noon was stewed chicken with potatoes. Before it was even out of the pot, the house was already filled with the aroma of chicken. In order to let everyone in the family eat meat, my mother cut the two sand chickens into small pieces. Although there was not much meat, the four of us ate it with gusto.

After the potatoes and chicken are all eaten, the chicken soup at the bottom of the bowl is also delicious. Break the steamed buns into pieces and put them into the bowl to absorb the soup. Use chopsticks to pick them up and put them in your mouth. The fresh and fragrant taste explodes on the taste buds on the tip of your tongue, which is even more delicious than eating chicken.

Although there was still not enough meat to eat, Yue Feng felt happy when he saw the satisfied smiles on his sister and parents’ faces.

As long as you work hard, life will always be good! When the eagle can be released smoothly and you start to cut the line and release it, it is time to realize the freedom of the sand half chicken!
Yue Feng muttered silently in his heart.

In the afternoon and evening, he continued to set up the eagle and flatten the eagle to illuminate the lanterns. The next morning, after the shaft was out, Yue Feng once again set up the eagle and left the village early.

It was still the hunting ground by the creek yesterday. Today, Yue Feng was busy with the hawk until after nine o’clock. He caught a total of three sand chickens and a gray magpie, and ended the battle.

The Blue Kitten ate about 80% full yesterday, and was still in a stable state when working in the fields today. After returning home, Yue Feng prepared food for the eagle and continued to consolidate yesterday’s long-distance training.

But the first time he called out “Yuan”, Yue Feng was frightened.

Every 15 meters, raise your hands to show your flesh, and they will come when you shout!
The second time he called for “far”, Yue Feng increased the distance to twenty meters. The third time he simply walked out of the courtyard gate. The result was still that the eagle flew straight towards him as soon as he gave the command, close to the ground.

In the words of an old falconer, the bow was straight and the string was steady.

Because of the work of the big blue kite, Yue Feng’s lunch food standard has increased sharply in the past two days. Yesterday he had two sand chickens, and today he had three. All of them were prepared and put in the pot, and the youngest sister was so happy to eat them.

After training Yuan, I fed him until he was 50% full, and continued the same in the afternoon and evening.

The next day, Yue Feng got up at dawn, flattened the hawk, and carried a side bag on his back. He didn’t even bring the tire line for hanging the string, and he traveled light. Since the Qingyaozi was put down to the net, Yue Feng has caught at least ten prey. That really proves what the old generation of falconers say, the more you fly the hawk, the harder it gets, the more angry it gets, and when it goes out, its eyes are rolling around, and it can detect the slightest clue or movement from a long distance.

Without the influence of the hanging string, Yue Feng had much more freedom in when to release the hawk. In the past two days, he would not let go until the hawk was within ten meters away. Today, he released the hawk from more than twenty meters away.

Small quail birds like the Sandpiper are not good at flying. Unless they start to escape in advance from a distance of forty or fifty meters, once the distance is within twenty meters, even the strongest individual in the flock will still have no chance of survival when faced with the powerful Blue Kites.

In less than one morning, Yue Feng caught nine of the groups of sand chickens that were active around the bushes in the woods near the river.

After being ambushed and captured by sparrowhawks repeatedly, this group of sandpipers have become tired and like to hide in the bushes at the slightest sign of trouble.

However, this little difficulty was no problem for Yue Feng, who was experienced in escaping. When he saw the chickens hiding in the bushes, he picked up a stick and hit them to drive them away. When the chickens came out and flew away, he raised his hand and released the eagle.

Without the influence of the hanging string, this big blue kite was able to do all kinds of somersaults in the air and catch sand chickens without fail so far, and his success rate was 100%!
Seeing this, some people may ask, how much work can a top-quality kite do in the hands of a falconer in a day? How many prey can it catch?
Yue Feng didn’t know what the theoretical limit was, but he still remembered the Little Eagle record he had set in his previous life.

One autumn, Yue Feng used a cage to catch a light-colored peach-shaped kite, which was slightly inferior to the blue kite. He took the kite out from dawn to 33 pm and caught prey of all sizes. He gave a few away on the way back to the village and stewed a large pot of them after returning home.

Before he knew it, it was almost noon. Yue Feng looked at the sand chicken wrapped tightly in socks in his backpack and felt quite satisfied. He planned to go home for dinner.

Because of catching sand chickens, Yue Feng went around to the other side of the stream. It was not cost-effective to go back the same way, so he simply walked back along the forest path beside the stream.

I hadn’t walked far when I heard a faint, sharp and crisp sound of “zizizi” coming from the other side of the hill.

The next second, Yue Feng suddenly stopped!

People who don’t live in mountainous areas may not know what animal this sound is, but Yue Feng knows that this is the famous flying dragon!
As the saying goes, the most delicious food in the world is dragon meat in the sky and donkey meat on the ground.

The dragon meat in this saying refers to the flying dragon bird.

The scientific name of the flying dragon is Hazel Grouse, a forest bird that lives in the forest. It is slightly larger than the sand grouse. The rooster weighs about one pound, while the female is slightly smaller, about seven or eight ounces.

This flying dragon bird is now a national second-class protected animal, but in 1980, there was no animal protection law. At that time point, there were plenty of them in the Changbai Mountain forests!
If you can catch a few of these alive, you can sell them for a high price!

One of the reasons why Yue Feng was not in a hurry to release the eagle to catch the more valuable flying dragon was that the newly-released eagle had not been stabilized yet. The good performance of the string-pinching eagle today also gave Yue Feng enough confidence.

Thinking of this, Yue Feng held the eagle and rushed towards the direction where the flying dragon had just called.

(End of this chapter)