Chapter 28: Basket
The werewolf’s intelligence once again refreshed Su Ran’s cognition of beastmen. Su Ran felt that the werewolf’s learning ability was a little stronger than Xiao Ju’s.
After the werewolf learned to use human language to say each other’s names, it was like opening the door to a new world of language, and Su Ran’s teaching speed suddenly picked up.
So they sat seaside, eating roast meat on one side while Su Ran taught the werewolf to speak on the other.
In half a day’s time, the werewolf had already learned the two people’s names, as well as single-word names like sea, tree, sheep, ox, fire, and so on.
And Su Ran repeatedly taught the werewolf the pronunciation of “sea” many times.
She needed to make the werewolf remember the meaning and pronunciation of this word firmly, to make it convenient for the next time to continue having the werewolf bring her seaside.
And during this period, Su Ran had also baked out another mug of salt.
She put the crushed salt powder into the chewing gum jar, then filtered another full mug of seawater and continued to boil salt.
Now the time was a little after one in the afternoon. Su Ran decided to boil this mug of salt and then go back.
“Ran Ran!”
The werewolf sat beside her, repeatedly chanting the learned vocabulary in its mouth without getting tired of it. Su Ran couldn’t help but smile and respond to it: “Yes, Ran Ran!”
As soon as she finished speaking, the werewolf immediately grinned.
Really like a little child.
Of course, in non-attack state!
Su Ran thought.
This was considered a break time for teaching, but Su Ran still couldn’t rest.
She first used the tactical knife to cut off one big leg from the four-eared ox, the leg meat connected to the entire hip, which was about a quarter of the four-eared ox’s body meat.
Then she crushed some red fruit and green fruit and smeared them on the beef, sprinkled on salt, simply marinated it for a while, then skewered it on branches and put it over the campfire.
At this time, the big fire for roasting meat had died down a lot, and Su Ran added some branches to the campfire underneath.
While there was still time to boil the salt, she wanted to roast as much beef as possible for dinner, so she wouldn’t have to make fire again when she went back.
She felt that the weather these few days really seemed to be getting hotter and hotter.
If the food was left for too long, it probably wouldn’t keep.
Su Ran guessed that the time she crossed to this world was probably late spring and early summer. Otherwise, those already ripe fruits wouldn’t grow so fast.
“Gray.”
She called out to the werewolf who was still over there foolishly pointing at the waves and chanting “sea~”.
The werewolf turned its head, looked at her, wagged its tail: “Wu? Ran Ran?”
“I’m going to the woods to find some things.”
Su Ran pointed to the woods and said again: “Tree.”
The werewolf looked in the direction she pointed, wagged its tail, and blankly followed by chanting: “Tree!”
Su Ran smiled at its appearance, said nothing more, but took the entrenching tool she brought and directly turned towards the woods.
She had just seen a kind of half-person-high shrub in the woods.
Although the shrub branches were not as good as the willow branches there at the bird’s nest tree, they still had good toughness.
In the absence of willow branches, she felt that those shrub branches would also be very suitable for making a basket.
That kind of shrub grew at the edge of the woods, and she soon found a large patch.
She held the entrenching tool in her hand.
This entrenching tool had a multi-functional design.
The main part was a shovel and a hoe design; when using one part, the unused other part could be folded up along the handle.
And on the two side edges of the shovel head, one side was serrated to be used as a saw blade, and the other side functioned as a bottle opener.
Su Ran directly used the serrated side. She reached out to grab a handful of that shrub, and used the saw blade to forcefully saw twice at the bottom of the shrub.
At the beginning, she had some trouble controlling the strength and technique, but as the number of times increased and more shrub branches were sawn off, Su Ran became more and more adept at using the saw blade on the entrenching tool.
After feeling it was about enough, Su Ran divided these shrub branches into two piles.
Then she drew out one shrub strip from each, tied the two piles of branches into bundles respectively, and said to the werewolf who had followed curiously while she was collecting shrub branches and was squatting on the side watching: “Gray, help carry this back, okay.”
“Wu?”
The werewolf tilted its head towards her and shook its ears.
At this time, it could already understand that Su Ran was calling its name, but it still didn’t understand the words after that.
Su Ran didn’t waste words, but directly dragged one bundle of shrub branches and stuffed it into the werewolf’s embrace.
Now the werewolf understood. It happily “Ao wu”ed at Su Ran, then slightly exerted force with its arms and directly clamped this bundle of shrubs with one arm and picked it up.
Then, when Su Ran was about to pick up the other bundle, it immediately followed and picked up the other bundle as well.
The two returned to the campfire side. Su Ran first turned the ox leg meat roasting on the fire, glanced at the seawater that had boiled down to less than one-third, then sat on the ground to start preparing to weave the basket.
She first picked up the shrub strips and used the tactical knife to shave off all the forks and leaves on each shrub strip cleanly.
This kind of shrub had few forks on each branch, mostly leaves growing from the base to the tip.
One leaf consisted of five small leaves, with a cluster of tiny blue flowers with extremely small petals in the middle of the five leaves.
After the leaves were shaved almost clean, Su Ran began to weave the strips.
The skill of weaving baskets was something she had learned a little from Grandpa when she was in junior high school.
At that time, Grandpa’s family was still farming, and on the mountain north of the village, every household planted a small plot of apple trees.
And when harvesting apples, a kind of vegetable basket woven from strips was used.
This kind of basket was not difficult to make, and the old man was reluctant to spend money, so these tools that could be made by himself were always done by hand.
Su Ran happened to go back on vacation at that time and caught Grandpa weaving a basket, so she learned along with Grandpa on a whim.
Although she didn’t learn it very well in the end, she still remembered the method.
She first crossed several shrub strips and stacked them together, then used one tree branch to weave in and out between the several shrub strips in circles; after one shrub strip was used up, she added a new one.
After several circles, a round base was coiled out.
After coiling the basket base, she pressed up the parts of the initially crossed and stacked tree branches that hadn’t been woven in, shaping them to gather, then continued to weave the basket body with new shrub branches.
Because there would be a lot of things to hold, this time the basket she wove was a bit deeper than an ordinary basket.
After feeling the woven basket body was about done, she began to close the mouth of the basket.
But she didn’t forget to add a handle.
So after more than half an hour, Su Ran’s first purely handmade basket was successfully completed!
