Chapter 52: The Crime of Gender 52
But this meat can’t just be given away freely. Qin Shuangshuang thought about it, and decided to keep a few bags of jerky and dried mushrooms and wild vegetables for her family, while moving the rest to the ancestral hall. Her house was close to the hall, allowing her to move these items discreetly.
When the time comes, she would have the village chief and a few respected elders supervise making one pot of meat soup daily, then gather the villagers and give each person a bowl—adults with big bowls, children with small ones. This method would be fairer than distributing the meat directly.
Having made up her mind, Qin Shuangshuang moved the meat into the ancestral hall. The hall had three rooms in succession; the innermost was for placing ancestral tablets, which she couldn’t enter, but she could access the first two rooms. Qin Shuangshuang stacked the meat and dried mushrooms and wild vegetables so high in the second room that it was completely filled!
The village chief had aged significantly during this time, and along with not getting enough to eat, he was gaunt and almost unrecognizable, even walking with a tremor, his once spirited demeanor gone.
However, upon seeing the sacks of jerky piled up by Qin Shuangshuang nearly filling the entire room, a spark of hope instantly lit up in the village chief’s lifeless eyes!
Tears welled up in his eyes, and his throat moved with emotion as he said hoarsely to Qin Shuangshuang, "Shuangshuang girl, you are the savior of our whole village. If we can get through this hardship, no one in our village will ever forget your life-saving grace!"
"Don’t mention grace and all that. When my mother and I were struggling, wasn’t it also thanks to you and the good-hearted folks in the village that we managed to survive? These are the things I hunted and preserved when I went into the mountains.
Last year, the drought affected everyone’s harvests, and I worried that the food everyone gathered might not last until this year’s harvest, so I kept this jerky aside, who would have thought it would turn out to be life-saving now with this year’s drought again!"
The village chief, excited, rubbed his hands together, saying "good" repeatedly, then hurried out and personally rang the big bell at the entrance of the ancestral hall.