Hunting in the Mountains in 1958: It Began When a Pretty Widow Took Me Home

In the autumn of 1958, the whole village is chewing tree bark and drinking the northwest wind. Chen Qingshan, a veteran who hasn't eaten for three days, is mobbed in the street by a crowd of widows because of his sturdy six-foot-two frame!

Liu Xiu'e, the pretty widow from the west end of the village, fights her way through with a door bar and stuffs the last half-piece of life-saving coarse-grain flatbread in her family into his mouth. "Brother, if you'll stay and be the man of our household, the three of us can eat a little less. You won't go hungry!"

Looking at the two little girls with their ribs showing, then at the militia searching the village with gongs and the stingy team leader blocking household registration, Chen Qingshan snatches up a rusty woodcutter's knife. His eyes suddenly see through the mist on the back mountain...

Four hundred steps away, a thick, dark aura coils around something as thick as an arm: a lone, two-hundred-pound black wild boar!

And below the cliff beside it, a basin-sized milky-white glow shoots into the sky. It's an exquisite, seven-leaf wild ginseng plant that's been growing for over a hundred years!

"Captain Li, I'll carry two hundred pounds of wild boar meat into the brigade courtyard tonight. You can stamp my household registration letter on the spot!"

The whole village laughs at Widow Liu for bringing home a bottomless pit who'll eat her out of house and home. But that very night, the smell of rich stewed meat wafts from the Chen family's chimney. A four-hundred-pound black bear, pairs of flying dragons, and more than a thousand yuan from selling ginseng keep pouring into the house...

Then one day, when Chen Qingshan roars into the village in a rare eight-horsepower diesel tricycle, and even Third Master Ma, who monopolizes the county's fur trade, has to make way for him, the villagers who once looked down on him are completely dumbfounded. "We thought you were just some drifter. Did you haul the entire Changbai Mountains away?"