Chapter 204: Fire Attack on Badger’s Den

Soon, Jingjing came into the house.

“Brother! My sister-in-law burned her feet. Xiaoyu came to our house just now to borrow badger oil! I told him that we don’t have badger oil, but you can go up the mountain to pick some badgers for her tomorrow!” Jingjing said to Yue Feng who had just woken up.

“Huh? What? Who burned their feet?” Yue Feng scratched his head and didn’t react for a moment.

“My sister-in-law Xiaona! Wang Mingyu just came over and told me! This is a great opportunity for you to show off! My sister-in-law must have given you this opportunity on purpose, you must seize it!”

Emotional intelligence is indeed innate. Jingjing is only seven years old, but she can see through people’s hearts and see the essence through phenomena.

“What’s wrong? Jingjing, what are you whispering about with your brother?” Meng Yulan asked when she heard the brother and sister whispering.

“Wang Mingyu came over just now and said…” Jingjing repeated it again.

“Son, your little sister is right about this matter, you have to go!”

After listening to this, Meng Yulan felt the same as Jingjing did, that this was an opportunity.

Badger oil is indeed a great cure for burns, but there are hundreds of households in Xing’an Village. Wang Xiaona’s father is the village secretary. If he wants to get some badger oil, several hunters in the village might have some in stock. But Wang Xiaona asked her brother to come to Yue Feng for help. This is almost an obvious decision, and she is really giving Yue Feng an opportunity.

Yue Feng nodded: “Okay, after dinner I’ll go ask Xiaowen and the others if they know where there are badger holes, and then I’ll go dig a few badgers back tomorrow!”

“Why are you still eating? Go ask first and then eat when you get back! You don’t even pay attention to your own business, you are screwed!”

Meng Yulan was not very satisfied with her son’s somewhat Buddhist behavior and felt that his attitude was a bit too cold.

“Okay, okay, I’ll go now!” Yue Feng nodded, put on a thick cotton jacket, held his child in his arms and left the house.

When we arrived at Xiaowen’s house, the card game in the east room was still going on, but the two brothers Xiaowen and Xiaowu were both at home, and the three of them were having dinner. They had a pot of wild boar meat stewed with potatoes and a plate of tofu with green onions. The meal was not bad.

“Brother, have you eaten? Eat something first?” Xiaowen asked while handing chopsticks to Yue Feng.

“Don’t bother. I came here to ask you two brothers if you know where the badger hole is! Xiaona burned her feet with boiling water, so I asked me to give her some badger oil!”

This sentence contained a lot of information. After hearing it, Xiaowen looked at his brother and they were both quite excited.

“Brother…you and Wang Xiaona…” Xiaowen hesitated to speak.

Yue Feng nodded: “It’s a little bit unclear, but we haven’t made a promise yet! Don’t ask around, tell me the truth, if you don’t know, I’ll go to Uncle Zhao’s house and ask!”

Xiaowen replied, “There is a nest of badgers outside Fang’an Village, on the northwest side near the riverside stall of Muling River! Xiaowu and I planned to go there to pick some oil and eat some meat in the fall, but then we were releasing hawks and didn’t have time to take care of it! I just don’t know if anyone else has picked them up. If not, they should still be there.”

“Okay, then tomorrow morning, you guys go to my house with your pickaxes and let’s try to dig it out!”

“Okay! Badgers are not rare. If there are none over there, we can look upstream along the river. We will definitely find a nest or half a nest of them! This is easy to do, don’t worry!
When are we going to eat your wedding candies? If we want to get down to business, it’s my brother Feng who has quietly found wives for the brothers!”

“Go away, are you making fun of me? Be careful or I’ll punish you!” Yue Feng’s face turned red from being embarrassed by Xiaowen, and he waved his hands in annoyance.

“Haha, we are all grown men, why are you still blushing? Does our uncle know about this? What’s his attitude?” Xiaowen knew that Yue Feng would definitely not hit him, so he continued to gossip.

“What are you asking? I’m leaving now. Have your meal. Remember to come to my house early tomorrow morning and bring your pickaxe with you!”

Yue Feng fled in panic.

The next morning, the two brothers Xiaowen and Xiaowu arrived at Yue Feng’s house on time, fully armed.

The status of badgers is similar to that of pheasants and rabbits in the fields. In fact, because they are more harmful to crops, their status is even lower in the eyes of farmers. They are like rats that everyone shouts and beats.

They are omnivorous animals that dig burrows and live in groups. They are active at night in summer and autumn, and store fat by eating a lot. When the temperature drops in winter, they hibernate like bears deep in caves, relying on their stored fat to survive the winter.

The two brothers Xiaowen and Xiaowu, one holding a round-headed shovel and the other holding a pickaxe, while Xiaotao brought a large pair of tongs used to clamp pig legs when slaughtering pigs during the New Year from home. The four brothers left the village with murderous intent and headed straight for the badger hole that Xiaowen had discovered in the fall.

In theory, digging for badgers is usually done before the snow falls in autumn. In winter, the ground is frozen solid, and digging holes is extremely laborious and difficult.

But now we are forced to do something, and we have to complete the must-do tasks issued by Laozhangganzi’s family no matter how difficult it is.

When Xiaowen brought Yue Feng and the others to their destination, they looked around and stopped at a hidden cave entrance.

“The entrance of the cave is quite intact. This nest of badgers should not have been touched!” Xiaowen said confidently. Yue Feng also walked around the entrance of the cave. There were no footprints on the snow around it, but the area near the entrance was still clean and fresh, and it was not completely covered by snow.

Badgers in a semi-hibernating state also need to breathe deep in their caves. Once the cave entrance is covered, the oxygen concentration will definitely be affected, so badgers have the habit of cleaning the cave entrance after snow to maintain a certain level of ventilation.

“Find other exits around, block them all, and then we’ll start!” Yue Feng shouted.

“Brother, there’s no need to go through so much trouble to dig out the badger. Just use the pickaxe to dig. Once you dig to the bottom, you’ll naturally find the badger!”

Xiaowu thought Yue Feng didn’t know how to pick badger shells, so he gave him a few special explanations.

Yue Feng smiled and shook his head: “It’s freezing cold, how long will it take to dig with a pickaxe? Just listen to me, I have a trick for this thing! First find all the holes, block them, leaving this main entrance, use a pickaxe to enlarge the hole, and then look at my magic weapon!”

“Okay, I’ll listen to you!”

The brothers got busy, searching everywhere in a radius of ten meters with the main entrance as the center, and soon found two suspected exits.

All the entrances to the cave were blocked, and the brothers expanded the main entrance to about half a meter wide according to Yue Feng’s request.

The ground was frozen hard, and digging a hole was not an easy job. The guys took turns digging with pickaxes, but every time they dug down only a little dirt and debris. The hole was obviously not big, but it took more than an hour to expand it to the size Yue Feng required.

After completing the preparations, Yue Feng took out an iron cage containing two house mice from his bag.

In order to catch these two live mice, Yue Feng put a lot of effort last night. He used peanuts fried in soybean oil as bait, untied Black Wolf, and the man and the dog squatted in the warehouse for half the night before they caught these two big mice. It was because Black Wolf was smart that he knew that his master wanted to catch them alive and did not kill them. If it were another dog, the mice would probably be dead if they were caught.

Yue Feng put on gloves and took out a live mouse from the cage. He then tied a piece of rags to the mouse’s tail with wire, wrapped the cloth with three layers of pine cones and red peppers, tied them tightly with wire, and then lit the fire starter.

As mentioned before, the pine torch is soaked in pine oil, so it is very easy to ignite. After it is ignited, it will burn immediately, accompanied by a large amount of black smoke and the pungent smell of pine oil.

Yue Feng saw that the fire starter was almost ready, so he immediately stuffed the mouse into the badger hole.

The mouse, with its tail on fire, broke free from its human restraints and saw a familiar cave. It dragged the pine needle into the cave without hesitation.

Yue Feng had used this trick of setting fire to attack badger caves in his previous life and it had always worked. Later on, he even had the chance to use bait cages to catch big rats and raise them in advance.

I remember one time when Yue Feng was already married, it was freezing cold outside, and several of his card-playing buddies were playing cards at home. When they were chatting, one of them said he had found a badger hole. It was almost time for dinner, and the guys suddenly wanted to eat badger stewed with radish, so Yue Feng took his men and went there carrying a mouse cage.

It took less than two hours to get there and back. Yue Feng and his team had captured seven badgers, two large and five small, all in their nests. After bringing them back, in addition to stewing them with radishes, each person also got a good share of badger meat.

From then on, whenever someone found a badger’s den, Yue Feng would take people to search the house. Badgers were almost extinct in the area of ​​dozens of miles around Xing’an Village.

When pine oil seeds are wrapped in rags or other fire starters, they produce a lot of smoke. Rats are scared and hide in their holes, filling the entire hole with thick, choking smoke.

Smoke goes upwards, and mice are small, so they will definitely drill deep into the caves at the bottom. At this time, even if the bedroom where the badger hibernates is relatively hidden, it cannot escape the influence of smoke and fire.

When pine oil seeds burn, they will also ignite the peppers wrapped in them. The smell is so sour that even humans can’t stand it, let alone badgers with extremely keen sense of smell.

After more than ten minutes, Yue Feng discovered that smoke began to come out of the cracks in the soil of the three blocked cave entrances, so he asked his friends to block the main cave entrance and make preparations in advance.

Soon, a badger weighing about seven or eight pounds, with smoke coming out of the cave.

Yue Feng was quick-witted and swung the stick in his hand, hitting the badger on the back of the head. The badger didn’t react and kicked his legs.

At this time, the effect of Yue Feng’s plan to expand the width of the cave entrance came into play. People stood on both sides, and when the badgers came out of the cave, they could be seen from the outside before they even showed their heads. As soon as they came out, they would hit them head-on with a stick and knock them down directly. It was simple and crude, but the effect was good.

Xiao Tao, who was holding a pair of pliers, immediately grabbed one of the badger’s legs with the pliers and pulled it out. Xiao Wen, who was standing next to him, directly took out the leg plug to bleed the badger and cut it open. It was a one-stop service.

Just like playing whack-a-mole, one came out and was knocked over. In total, four half-grown badgers were knocked down in the snow.

Yue Feng took a close look at the sizes of the four badgers and felt something was wrong. These four badgers were all small guys. Logically, there should be at least a pair of the largest badgers in a den.

Could it be that the badger’s den has another exit, or is the big badger smarter and, after smelling the smoke, temporarily blocked the bedroom with soil?

Without seeing the real master, Yue Feng used his second trick! !

Two chapters of 6000 words have been completed, and there is another chapter in the afternoon.

Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival. I wish my parents, who provide me with food and clothing, a happy reunion and everything goes well! !
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(End of this chapter)