bookrebus Chapter 229 Another Eagle Appears, The Eagle Master's Techniques for Taming an Eagle
Chapter 229 Another Eagle Appears, The Eagle Master's Techniques for Taming an Eagle
Li Dong was wailing at home. He had never suffered such humiliation in his life. Pointing to the door, he shouted, "Just you wait! If I run into you next time, I'll give you a good beating, or I'll change my surname!"
Just then, Li Ju'an led the Lu brothers and Li Guaizi to the door. Li Dong immediately shut his mouth, not daring to utter a sound.
He thought to himself, "If they're here to cause trouble, fine, but why did they bring someone with them? And it's Li Guaizi, the hot-tempered guy everyone in the village knows. This is really bad."
Li Ju'an asked him, "Where is the place you just mentioned?"
Li Dong said he found the game and traps in the mountains, but the three didn't believe him. Now that Li Guaizi had come and mentioned the falconry, they suddenly realized it was actually possible. No matter how unwilling Li Dong was, the three dragged him along, shining flashlights in his face, and led him into the mountains.
Li Dong protested, yelling, "This can't just be left like this. Even if you force us, we can't say anything."
Li Ju'an gave a piece of wild boar foreleg meat from the sled to his father, telling him to stew it for the three children, and to add vermicelli. He said the pork stew with vermicelli would be delicious.
The three children were overjoyed. Upon hearing that they could eat meat, their mouths watered so much they could practically drool, and they clapped and cheered.
Li Dong was dishonest and greedy, but seeing the children happy softened his heart. He steeled himself and led Li Ju'an and the other three into the mountains late at night.
Good dogs know the way, so Li Ju'an had Hua'er lead the other dogs to pull the sled back to the Li family home and deliver the wild boar meat to his mother. He then called Da Hu to come with him into the mountains.
Li Dong carried a kerosene lamp and kept muttering to himself, saying that the big tree wasn't far away, it was in the red pine forest behind the forest farm.
Li Ju'an also knew this place. The forest farm was right next to the family village, and these red pine trees were adjacent to the forest farm, not far away, only half an hour's walk. The more Lu Zhiqiang looked at this place, the more familiar it seemed. Suddenly he said, "Isn't this where Chief Zhao trains his eagles?"
Zhao Pao from Yingtun was invited into the Xingan Mountains twice this year, both times for hunting. Once by the forestry farm, and once by the head of Qianjin Farm. With the Lunar New Year approaching, the hunters of Yingtun had long since returned to their hometowns. There was a hunter's hut in this forest, where Zhao and his men rested.
The hunter's cabin is now abandoned, and it's unclear when anyone will be able to enter again. Normally, the forestry only hires Zhao, the foreman, with falcons and falconers when they encounter difficult prey or other troublesome situations. Now, the area is deserted, the forest is quiet, and even the old owl and the falconer don't utter a sound.
Lu Zhiqiang grabbed Li Dong by the collar impatiently and cursed, "This is all you're trying to fool. What kind of game could you possibly have?"
Li Dong, terrified of being beaten, pointed at the big red pine tree and said upwards, "Aren't they all up there?"
Li Ju'an and his companions looked up at the tall tree and shone their flashlights up there.
The red pine is very tall, its trunk straight up and down, reaching about 40 meters in height. Even with a flashlight shining on it, you can't see the top of the tree yet.
The group squinted and searched for a long time. Li Dong pointed to the protruding black shadow on the big red pine tree and said, "There's a piece of leather hanging on it."
The three shone their flashlights at the same time, revealing various shadows of different sizes on the branches of the large red pine tree, which made their eyes widen in surprise. What was going on? The red pine was covered with traps.
Moreover, some of the traps contained skins that looked like jumping cats, as well as skins of various small animals. Li Ju'an even spotted a plucked, silly half-pound dog that looked like it had been gnawed by some kind of bird. There were also several great tits pecking at the carrion of their prey, making satisfied cooing sounds.
Such calls attracted more carnivorous tits, and the red pine was densely covered with them, making the group of people's scalps tingle and fall silent.
Li Ju'an asked Li Guaizi, "Brother Li, was what you saw really a falcon?"
Li Guaizi patted his chest and guaranteed, "It's definitely a falcon. I'm a bird hunter in the mountains. Wild eagles are different from domesticated ones. You can tell the difference just by looking at their movements."
In Eagle Village, falconers raid eagle nests to extract sub-adult eagles, then train them to maintain their wild instincts. If you start training them from newly hatched, helpless eaglets, problems arise. These eaglets don't need to be trained; they immediately recognize their owner, but they've lost their hunting instincts and become mere ground-dwelling animals, potentially struggling to learn to fly.
Zhao, the foreman, wanted the wildness in the falcons, so he would specifically go to the wild, raid falcon nests, and catch sub-adult falcons. After catching them, he would tie their wings, though sometimes it didn't have to. This was because falcons at this age had very poor flying ability, possessing only a wild, defiant spirit.
When Li Guaizi started talking, he mentioned the difference between trained eagles and wild eagles. He said seriously, "That goshawk, you can tell at a glance that it's a trained hunting eagle. There must still be falconers left in the mountains in Eagle Village, they haven't left yet."
Suddenly, after thinking for a moment, Li Ju'an looked up and said, "Don't eagles always stay with their falconers?"
The falconers in different villages prefer different types of eagles. Some eagle-farming villages prefer golden eagles and gyrfalcons, while others prefer smaller falcons. For example, golden eagles can live forty or fifty years. If a hunter can train an eagle well, he can use it for a lifetime; it truly is a case of "the hunter is gone, but the eagle remains," with one eagle passed down through three generations.
In most cases, eagles only follow people for five or six years before being released back into nature to reproduce.
The reason why the falconers in the villages of Yingtun do this is because it is a rule passed down from their ancestors, just like the saying in the hunters' village: "Hunt the big ones and leave the small ones."
After five or six years, the eagles are released to breed. A year or two later, a steady stream of eaglets hatch, are raised to sub-adulthood, and then used by hunters in the eagle-farming village to raid their nests, retrieve the eaglets, and train them further. This is the wisdom passed down through generations in the villages of Eagle Village—not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Li Ju'an suddenly asked, "Does this eagle fly more to the left?"
Li Guaizi was surprised and said, "That's amazing! How did you know? It's like you saw it with your own eyes."
The falcon did indeed circle to the left most of the time, and even though it could have flown in a straight line, it would deliberately turn left, circle twice, and then continue flying. With such a strange flight path, it was hard for him not to notice.
Li Ju'an said, "That's right. This eagle was indeed left behind by Chief Zhao. But we really can't blame Chief Zhao."
After asking around, they learned the truth. The falling out between Li Ju'an and Zhao, the foreman, stemmed from a fight between Zhao's falcon and Flower Ear. The falcon and the dog fought fiercely, and Flower Ear's back was scratched and mangled by the falcon's talons, requiring a full month of rest. The falcon wasn't faring much better; Li Ju'an shot it in the left wing, the bullet piercing through, before Zhao treated it and released it.
A while later, when the group saw Zhao again, they noticed that he now had a new, larger, and more imposing eagle perched on his shoulder. The old, wounded eagle must have been abandoned.
None of them expected to run into their old nemesis in the red pine forest of this forest farm.
Li Dong pointed to the red pine tree and said, "See that? It's covered with traps that this eagle brought back. If you shake this tree, and you're lucky, a trap might fall down."
He grabbed a willow stick and struck the trunk of the big red pine tree hard. With two loud "bangs," a trap actually fell from the tree.
The trap, carrying its prey, smashed a crater in the thick snow. Li Dong, clutching his dog-skin hat, narrowly escaped being hit, clutching his head and crying out in alarm.
Lu Zhiqiang laughed at him, saying he was really risking his life for a prey that had been eaten by a shriveled animal.