Chapter 192: As Long As Winter’s Time Doesn’t Suddenly Lengthen, There Won’t Be Any Problems
The colors in the forest gradually changed from lush green to golden yellow, and finally bit by bit turned to lead gray.
In autumn, it was always a bit busier than in spring and summer.
Su Ran needed to stockpile food for herself and Hui, as well as food for the small animals at home.
The storage room was already piled with more than twenty full large animal hide bags. They contained ground green soap fruit powder, as well as white bean fruits that Su Ran and Hui had picked one by one.
These white bean fruits were not only Su Ran and Hui’s food for the winter, but also food for the white wild chickens at home.
The more than twenty animal hide bags were all piled against the wall at the innermost part of the room inside the storage room, occupying one-third of the storage room’s area.
This year, Su Ran did not use wooden baskets or wooden buckets or other tools to store food, but switched entirely to animal hide bags, saving quite a bit of space inside the room.
The weather had completely turned cold, and the leaves in the forest had all fallen off.
The beastmen began to intensify their hunting, storing prey for overwintering.
When Su Ran and Hui were hunting prey, they also did not forget to go to the seaside to collect seafood and freeze it.
And this time, most of the time, it was Hui who hunted in the woods near the seaside, while Su Ran wore thick clothes and searched for seafood in the crevices of reefs on the beach.
After Hui hunted the prey, he would first pile it in the rain shelter by the seaside, and when the time was about right, he would first send Su Ran back, then make several trips back and forth from the seaside to transport the hunted prey back in batches.
And after the food storage was mostly complete this year, Su Ran made several new pairs of thick cotton shoes, hats, and gloves for winter.
The new year’s cotton fruits had ripened, but after Su Ran picked them, she found that the needed clothes and quilts had already been made last year, and they could still be worn this year.
But she did not want to waste this cotton, so in the end she put all the picked cotton into bags, thinking that when winter came and she did not go out, she could try making tools at home to spin all this cotton into cotton thread.
With cotton thread, she could try making cotton clothes and cotton cloth, and also make some improvements to supplies for her menstruation.
In the first few days after winter began, Hui went to the place in the forest where there had been a fire and dragged back more than twenty dead trees that the beastmen had dug up and broken for digging the firebreak.
The dragged-back trees were piled in the open space to the left of the house.
In the following days, Su Ran and Hui selected two dead trees whose trunks looked a bit drier, and using a saw blade and claws, little by little sawed the trunk and branches into wooden stakes, divided them into several sections, then split them into wood segments with an axe, and piled them under the shed to the left of the house for storing firewood.
And just these two trees had already filled up the rain shelter for storing wood.
Even some of the sawn branches that could not fit were placed by Su Ran in the rain shelter in front of the house.
The more than twenty trees that Hui dragged back were all medium-sized, each as thick as two people could encircle, bird’s nest trees.
Calculated by the amount Su Ran and Hui needed to constantly light the stove and burn firewood every day in winter, these more than twenty trees were about enough for them to burn for one winter.
Early this morning, after Su Ran got up, she first lit the stove in the room.
Floating ice had begun to appear on the river water below the river beach, and Su Ran always felt that this year’s temperature seemed a bit colder than last year.
This made her a bit worried.
But thinking of the rooms and cellar full of stored food, she felt slightly relieved.
Being a bit colder was not scary, as long as the winter time did not suddenly lengthen, there would be no problem.
Although today’s weather was cold, it was a rare clear day in the recent period.
Su Ran took out the planting boxes that had been used last year for growing vegetables inside the room from the storage room.
She planned to continue growing two boxes of fresh vegetables inside the room, so that when she wanted to eat fresh vegetables, she could pick them right away, and it could also add some fresh color inside the room.
The soil for planting vegetables was dug directly from the vegetable garden behind the house.
The soil in the vegetable garden had been fermented by her with animal feces, so now using it for planting vegetables meant no need to add more fertilizer on top.
To avoid making the inside of the room smelly.
In the two planting boxes, Su Ran planted one box of housheng vegetable, and the other box half wild cabbage, then scattered chili fruit seeds in three pits and finger onion seeds in three pits.
Each of these pits had three seeds; if they could grow smoothly, leaving three seedlings of each would produce enough fresh fruits for her and Hui to eat.
Su Ran did not plant vinegar fruit, because she did not like sour things. So it was not used much in cooking, and what was stored at home now was already enough.
Su Ran had Hui carry the two wooden boxes after sowing back into the room, and place them in the same position as last year.
Then she watered the planting boxes, and finally cleaned up the soil crumbs that had been spilled on the ground when filling soil into the planting boxes just now outside the room.
After tidying up, Su Ran straightened her body, raised her head with her hand shading her brow, glanced at the bright sun in the sky, and then exhaled.
The breath from her mouth already carried white vapor, but in just this short while, Su Ran’s nose tip had already been frozen slightly red.
She rubbed her nose, then went back into the room to find Hui.
Hui was putting new wood into the stove.
“Hui, let’s catch a few fish to bring back and have grilled fish for lunch!”
This morning, Su Ran and Hui had gotten up relatively late, so mealtime was also late.
By now it was almost noon, but neither was very hungry yet, so Su Ran did not want to bother making a proper meal.
Moreover, she estimated that it would not be long before the river water completely froze over, so now while fresh fish could still be caught to eat, they should eat it more times.
Su Ran and Hui took tools and went to the riverside.
Her fishing tool had evolved from the initial fishing line, to wooden basin and wooden basket, and now to a net bag woven from sheep wool yarn.
The net bag was sewn onto a Y-shaped branch, and the branch was very long, enough to extend the net bag to a slightly deeper place in the river water when catching fish.
But before Su Ran and Hui reached the riverside, Hui, walking at Su Ran’s side, suddenly looked toward their left side and let out a puzzled “wu?”
“What’s wrong?”
Su Ran followed his gaze; that direction was the woods separating their house from Xiao Ju and A Jin’s house.
And as Su Ran’s sight went that way, she immediately saw through the gaps in the woods two figures standing by the riverbank on the other side of the woods.
It was Xiao Ju and A Jin.
“A Jin is also catching fish wu~”
Hui said softly, looking over there.
Those two were indeed catching fish.
The closer Su Ran and Hui walked, the clearer they could see.
Far from just catching fish!
It was more like fishing! A Jin had already plunged straight into the water!
Su Ran looked at the water splashes stirred up and A Jin’s bare upper body, and suddenly shivered!
