I Failed the College Entrance Exam and Landed in Northeast China in 1983 to Hunt in the Mountains

Cao Zihan failed the college entrance exam twice, and his parents pressured him to repeat his final year of high school for a third time.

At the end of his rope, he drowned while trying to save a girl who had fallen into the water. To his surprise, he transmigrated to the Greater Khingan Mountains in 1983, becoming a 19-year-old farm boy with the same name.

“Life without the college entrance exam is so much better!”

Faced with a bare, mud-walled house and his honest, simple new parents, Cao Zihan grabbed a hunting knife and headed into the mountains.

From making a slingshot out of a tourniquet to shoot squirrels, to learning the craft and acquiring an Oroqen composite bow, to taking down a 300-pound black bear with a hunting rifle, he steadily grew into a hunter renowned far and wide.

In an era before wildlife protection laws had been introduced, he made his living off the mountains:

A gray squirrel pelt brought in eighty cents.

Roast venison with hazel mushrooms filled the whole yard with its fragrance.

Black bear gallbladders healed an old hunter’s chronic pain.

Wild boar fat rubbed on the face kept the winter cold at bay.

From “the Cao family’s dim-witted boy,” looked down on by the whole village, to the “sharpshooter” everyone admired, Cao Zihan proved himself through sheer skill. For the first time, his taciturn father stood tall at the village entrance and proudly showed him off. His frail mother got to wear a brand-new polyester blouse, and even Wang Lijuan, the nurse at the forestry station’s clinic, began looking at him differently...

This book faithfully recreates rural life in Northeast China in the 1980s and reveals the survival wisdom behind the ancient trade of mountain hunting. Here you’ll find authentic hunting techniques, warm and simple neighborly bonds, and the stirring vow: “This winter hunt, I’m taking everyone to raid the wild boars’ den at Boar Ridge!”