Chapter Forty-two Unbearable Memories

  The two families sat together, noisily eating deer meat stewed with potatoes and drinking inferior wine diluted with water. The two children were chattering away, playing around the stove. The witch stopped in her tracks, looked up at the goose feather-like snowflakes drifting down from the sky, stretched out her hand to catch a snowflake and spoke softly.

  "If nothing unexpected happens, these two families will probably continue like this. When the daughter grows up, she'll marry a good family or they'll take in a son-in-law who can endure hardship and carry on the family line for generations to come. Or maybe, they'll have another child, a boy this time?" The witch's tone began to turn sorrowful.

  "The unfinished venison was hanging under the eaves. The weather was cold, and the meat had frozen like a stone. In the middle of the night, a rustling sound came from outside the window of the Shi family's house. Mountain hunters were always vigilant at night. At the slightest movement, they would get up with their guns. The Shi hunter was no exception. After he loaded his gun and opened the door to take a look, more than ten yellow weasels were climbing up the ladder against the wind and snow, stepping on each other's backs, trying to reach the venison hanging under the eaves."

  "That deer was enough food for two families for a week. How could Hunter Shi just watch it being dragged away by those yellow weasels? He raised his hand and fired a shot, intending to scare them off and shoo them away. The yellow weasels were indeed clever and had sensed the hunter's anger before he even pulled the trigger. It was also their nature to avoid danger, so when they saw him about to shoot, they suddenly sprang up and scattered in all directions like a pot exploding."

  "It's just the way things are, those yellow weasels wouldn't have been shot if they hadn't jumped up. It was precisely this frantic jump that sent them under the hunter's gun muzzle, which had already been raised a few inches. After a gunshot, a group of yellow weasel corpses were left in the yard. Only the smallest yellow weasel, dragging a broken leg, escaped in a panic."

  The witch gently turned her palm over, letting the snowflake that had fallen on it drift away with the wind. By this point in the story, I was fairly certain she was telling a story about herself. More accurately, she was telling a story about her own family.

  "What happened next?" I didn't know if I should continue asking, my intuition told me that the rest of the story might not be so wonderful. But curiosity drove me to ask these three words.

  "After that, for almost a year, the fox did not dare to approach the hunter's house again. As time passed, the hunter gradually forgot about the matter. It wasn't until the following winter that the hunter went hunting in the mountains with his good brother as usual, to store some meat for the winter." The female demon stopped speaking and stood still, her teeth clenched tightly. In her mind, a painful memory from years ago resurfaced.

  "Mother-in-law, it's getting late. Let's start cooking, the kids are all crying with hunger!" That winter, in a mountain valley, in a low wooden house. A woman who had wrapped herself up warmly in her clothes said to another woman.

  "Mei's sister, I'll take the potatoes out to wash them, and tonight we'll make a stew for them to eat." In the mountains, the easiest thing to plant is soil. And potatoes have also become the most common dish or staple food for hunters three meals a day. Shifu's wife held a small bamboo sieve in her hand, with dozens of potatoes of different sizes inside, and was about to push the door to go to the yard to clean these foods.

  "I'll cut the meat, and there's some big white cabbage in our cellar at home. I'll go get it later. Those two brothers have been out in the mountains for a whole day now, they must be exhausted, let them eat something good today." The speaker was Mei Xiang's wife, northeastern women all know how to care for their own men. Big white cabbage may not be expensive, but transporting it into the mountains is no easy task. The wife gritted her teeth and decided to take out some to serve with the five-flower pork to treat her husband tonight.

  "Alright! Let those two old boys stay in the house and play, we'll take care of our own business." The mistress lifted the door curtain made of broken cotton, saying this as she walked out the door. In Northeast China, there are places where they call young girls "old boys" or "old girls".

  Bang!

  "Wife, hurry back home, Mei brothers want to kill me!"

  The wife had just stepped out when she heard a gunshot, and then saw her husband covered in blood running and shouting!

  "What? How can this be said, how can this be said?" The master's sister-in-law was just a housewife, where had she ever seen such a bloody scene? Her legs immediately went soft and she squatted at the foot of the wall, unable to move.

  "Sister-in-law, don't move, he's not my brother." Before the sister-in-law could catch her breath, another person ran over from the snowy wind. While shouting, he poured gunpowder into the barrel and poked the bullet with a ramrod. This time, the sister-in-law was completely stunned. The newcomer was none other than the Mei family brother who had just been said to want his life by her own husband.

  "Quickly open the door and come in, ah! What are you standing there stupidly for? Do you want to kill me or what?" The blood-soaked Shifu was scratching his ears and cheeks, pacing back and forth in front of his wife, but not opening the door himself.

  "Sister-in-law, don't bother with him, get down!" Mei Liehu had already loaded the gun and shouted at Shi Jia's sister-in-law who was crouching by the wall, then pulled the trigger.

  "Squeak!"

  "Plum Blossom Ninth Child..."

  The gunshot rang out, but the one who fell to the ground was Mei's wife, who had opened the door and walked out after hearing the noise. The woman covered her chest, leaned against the door frame, and slowly slid to the ground. In the end, she still stretched out her hand and called out her husband's name, wanting him to come and support her!

  The hunter who was standing at the door earlier had transformed into a lame yellow fox and let out a sharp cry as it burrowed into the snow den, disappearing without a trace.

  "Wife, wife, what's wrong with you? What are you doing out here? What are you doing?" Mei Youhu's eyes stared at the dozens of bullets that had been shot into his wife's body, and he couldn't even bother about the escaped yellow weasel anymore. He threw away the hunting rifle in his hand, rushed forward a few steps, and hugged his own wife tightly into his arms, wailing loudly.

  "This is all retribution, retribution! The ones that came to our house are the descendants of those Huang Daxian who were beaten to death by your brother last year. They have come to seek revenge." Mei Jiuer's wife tightly grasped her husband's hand, with blood foam at the corner of her mouth, speaking non-stop.

  "I will never get along with you!" Mei Jiuer heard his wife's words, raised his head and let out a long roar at the mountains behind the house. From then on, the feud between the Mei family and Huang Daxian was thus formed.

  Until midnight, the stupid wife of Shi's family couldn't wait for her husband to come back. Her mind was a complete blank, and she even forgot to cook dinner, just holding her daughter in a daze, sitting in the house. On the contrary, it was the continuous crying and shouting of "mother" from Mei's family next door that made her remember that Mei's family was having a funeral.

  "Big brother, big sister is gone too. You don't care about your own body, but you should also take care of the big girl, right? I made some corn porridge for you two to eat. Tomorrow, I'll go to the mountain and find the child's father back, and then we can discuss how to handle big sister's funeral." The wife of the teacher dragged her daughter home in a state of panic, and the two of them lit up the stove at home. After hastily drinking a bowl of corn porridge, they took two more bowls over to Mei Jiu'er's house next door!

  "Today, something happened, sister-in-law, you should be prepared! I followed Big Brother into the mountain, and didn't notice anything unusual. Until Big Brother turned around and shot me. He even said in a low voice, 'See how I'll kill your whole family', that's when I realized something was wrong. I chased him, he ran. Chased all the way to the door, I shot and killed my own wife..." Mei Jiuer lifted his iron-green face, sat beside his wife's body on the doorstep, and said to Shifu's sister-in-law.

  "Big brother, don't scare your sister-in-law. Are you saying that your big brother might... have died outside?" As soon as the mistress of the house heard Mei Jiuer say this, she felt like the sky was going to collapse. She leaned against the door frame and stumbled, and the bowl in her hand fell to the ground and shattered into pieces.

  "What are you scared of? What are you scared of?" Mei Jiuer's gloomy face, under the light of the oil lamp, looked even more ferocious. He stood up and walked to Shi Jia's wife's side, grabbed her arm and pressed her against the door frame of the mortuary, shaking her back and forth as he roared. However, his voice grew fainter with each roar. His face also gradually became pointed, like a yellow weasel's.

  "Ah! You're not Mei Jiuer, you're not Mei Jiuer, you're that yellow weasel! Let me go, let me go!" The mistress of the house looked at Mei Jiuer, who was gradually revealing her true form in front of her, and struggled to push her away. Because the face that looked exactly like a yellow weasel's was now almost close enough to bite her neck artery. This yellow weasel, disguised as Mei Jiuer, wanted to bite the mistress of the house to death.

  "Bang!" Just as the teacher's sister-in-law was desperately resisting, a gunshot rang out from outside the door. The teacher's sister-in-law looked again and found that she was holding a yellow weasel over two feet long in her hand, and one of its hind legs was lame!

  "Is that your family?" He threw the yellow weasel, which had been beaten into a sieve, to the ground and looked out the door in the dim light of the oil lamp. The teacher's wife saw her own husband.

  "Stop, don't come any closer!" The man standing in the shadow outside the door stopped his wife's advancing footsteps.

  "What's wrong with you, husband? Do you know how scared I and the child were today?" The wife stepped forward recklessly, crying as she walked.

  "The master of the house is no longer in this world, and this is just his corpse with a lingering wish. Originally, I didn't want to get involved in this matter, but I couldn't bear his pleading. And I'm afraid that if he's not fulfilled, he'll bring disaster to one side in the future, so I took action to help." A woman wearing a five-colored brocade dress walked in from outside the door and blocked the way of Shi Jia's wife, saying this to her.

  "Your wish is fulfilled, from now on dust returns to dust and earth returns to earth, you can go!" Blocking the way of Shifu's sister-in-law, Popo turned her head and gave a low shout behind her back.