bookrebus Chapter 416 Qin Pao Goes to Prison
Chapter 416 Qin Pao Goes to Prison
Li Ju'an quickly asked Li Guaizi what had happened. Qin Pao's eyes were as sharp as a hawk's, able to spot prey from a great distance. The hunters in the mountains all said that Qin Pao's eyesight was so sharp he could shoot without a scope, and Old Qin would jokingly punch him, saying he was bragging.
Old Qian is old and blinded by wolves, so he might misjudge his second and youngest sons, but how could Qin Pao be so foolish?
Li Guaizi explained the situation. Old Qin used to be a hunter from Changbai Mountain. He had a childhood friend who recently got a new, very powerful gun. He shot down a pangolin and showed it off in the village. The man even contacted a merchant to sell the pangolin for a good price.
Merchants from the south had never seen a pangolin before, and they were all very excited. The pangolin scales alone were snapped up.
Li Ju'an nodded and said, "Pangolins are more common in the south, but we've never seen them in this area."
"Who knows? Maybe it was smuggled in and then escaped. After that man killed the pangolin, he took the scales to a Chinese medicine shop to inquire, but the shopkeeper was too scared to accept them. He had to find a middleman to send the pangolin to a merchant who bought bear bile, and that's how he got a high price."
Pangolin scales have significant medicinal value in Traditional Chinese Medicine, possessing properties such as clearing heat and detoxifying, promoting blood circulation and removing blood stasis. Pangolin scales also have antibacterial and anti-inflammatory effects. They are rarer than turtle shells, so fewer people collect them, but they fetch higher prices.
Li Guaizi continued, "When his childhood friend came to find Lao Qin, Lao Qin had just made a pair of bear paws and was showing them off. But the two hadn't seen each other for a long time, and when they met, Lao Qin saw the pangolin and fell silent. Lao Qin wanted to trade the bear paws for the pangolin, but the man wouldn't. He then raised the price to include a dozen or so freshly hunted white-bellied pheasants, but the man still wouldn't trade and told Lao Qin to hunt them himself if he liked them."
"Tell me, how could Lao Qin possibly stand this kind of treatment?"
Li Ju'an chuckled inwardly at the sight of Qin Pao jumping up and down in anger. This was indeed very much like the temper that Qin Pao could be provoked into. A hot-tempered hunter, once his anger flared, would disregard everything and rush straight out to head into the mountains.
Li Guaizi sighed and said, "Later, Lao Qin got a new gun and some bullets, and excitedly followed his childhood friend into the deep mountains to look for pangolins. He heard from Lao Zhao in the barley field that he had seen a dragon burrowing into the ground near the barley field, and he thought that thing must be a pangolin, so he was determined to go. In the end, he didn't see any pangolins, but he did see a large herd of blue sheep."
Li Ju'an also learned about what happened next.
Old Qin could only find argali sheep in the barley fields, not pangolins.
Eight hundred meters away on another hilltop, a blue sheep, its white rump exposed, was licking salt rocks in the Gobi Desert. Old Qin lay behind a tree, aiming. After lighting a fire, the sheep was knocked down.
He hurriedly ran to the opposite hilltop, only to find that what he was shooting at wasn't a ibex at all, but a person. The person had a white gag tucked under his crotch, made of sheepskin, and there was an ibex that was lassoed right in front of him.
That person was none other than his childhood friend.
They opened fire and watched helplessly as the ibex was knocked down.
Li Guaizi sighed and said, "This is too strange. Who would have thought that his childhood friend would also come to the barley field, and happen to be crouching down to untie a rope?"
Li Ju'an was about to leave when Li Guaizi shouted at him, "Where are you going?"
"Go to the police station and ask Qin Pao for clarification."
"Damn it! You don't believe me? I really didn't make this up."
Li Ju'an went to the police station, where the officer on duty happened to be the nephew of Aunt Zhao from Xiaoling Village. The two had met before and even eaten and drunk together at a large banquet.
He slipped a cigarette to Aunt Zhao's nephew, nodded, and went inside to check on Old Qin.
Old Qin was sitting in the police station, dejected. Fortunately, many people in the station knew him, but this time there was no leniency. Nobody understood how it could be such a coincidence that he hit his childhood friend who had come all the way from Changbai Mountain, if he had no grudge against him.
Even a familiar face from the bureau pulled up a small stool and sat down in front of Qin, asking in a serious tone, "Qin Pao, we've known each other for over ten years, so just tell me the truth. Do you have a grudge against your childhood friend?"
Qin Pao buried his face in his hands in anguish, his hair turned white overnight, and he looked ten years older. The man, having gotten no answers, exclaimed in disappointment, "Qin Pao, you're confused! You're really confused!"
Li Ju'an ran to see Qin Pao, who was still in the same state, looking extremely pained. He buried his face in his hands, clutching his hair in agony, without uttering a word.
He couldn't understand how such a bizarre and incomprehensible thing could have happened after he went into the mountains and came out.
"Brother Qin."
Li Ju'an glanced at the stool, then finally sat down on the same side of the long bench as Qin Pao. He offered him a cigarette. Old Qin didn't take it, staring blankly at the ground, then suddenly spoke.
Old Qin's voice was deep and hoarse as he slowly said, "I'm not going to hunt pangolins in the barley field, I'm going to catch wolf eyes."
Li Ju'an didn't expect him to say that. "There are no pangolins in the barley fields. Even if there were, it would be a fabrication. Did the wolf's eyes hit you?"
Old Qin shook his head and said painfully, "I saw the wolf's eyes."
He took a deep breath, thinking of the wolf Eyes, whom he had raised from a sub-adult cub to adulthood, and couldn't quite describe the feeling. His most prized wolf Eyes was even smarter than the lead dog and the alpha wolf, understanding things instantly, but now it was harming the villagers every day. The forestry station had organized several wolf-hunting expeditions specifically to capture Wolf Eyes.
As a result, the wolf failed to catch the eye, but it did kill many of the alpha wolves in the pack.
With the alpha wolf dead, Green Skin wandered aimlessly without its leader, and the wolf pack called Wolf Eyes grew larger and larger.
Qin Pao recounted the story again.
What he said was almost identical to what Li Guaizi said. The only difference was that he wasn't going to the barley field to find pangolins; instead, he had heard from his childhood friend that wolves and bears had been following them along the way, and he wanted to go with his friend to shoot out the wolves' eyes.
“We didn’t see Wolf Eyes, but we did see those two bears. They were huge! We hadn’t seen them for a year, and they were almost the size of adult bears, standing as tall as a person. We shot at the bears from across the mountain, hitting them all three times. The two bears limped away. Old Chen saw that it was getting dark, so he suggested that we go to the barley field to spend the night and then track down Wolf Eyes and the bears the next morning.”
"It wouldn't be right to go empty-handed to ask for lodging, so we thought we'd hunt a mountain goat and bring it to the villagers to ask for a light."
Qin Pao and his childhood friend Lao Chen each set a trap. Suddenly, Qin Pao spotted a white-rumped ibex licking a rock on a distant hilltop, and fired a shot.
When he jogged to the opposite hilltop and saw what was going on, he realized he was in trouble. It was his childhood friend Old Chen's sheepskin gloves that had caused the problem. Old Chen had already lassoed a ibex and wanted to bend down to untangle the wire, but the sheepskin gloves were too thick and uncomfortable. So he took off the gloves, tucked them under his thighs, and then bent down to untangle the wire.
He looked across the hilltop and just happened to see the argali's body, head, and white rump. The shot was very accurate, just grazing the edge of the white glove, killing his childhood friend Old Chen instantly.
Qin Pao buried his face in his hands in anguish, tears streaming down his face, and cried out, "I want to escape, I'm scared, I really want to run away. Who can I blame? Who can I face? How can I face Old Chen's children and his wife? He has an eighty-year-old mother to care for. Who can I face?"