Chapter 383: The Idea of a Beast Entering the Village to Beat a Dog (2)_1
Most families in Liu Yang Village couldn’t even afford enough rice to fill their stomachs, let alone spare grain to feed dogs. The village dogs were all skin and bones, their daily fare limited to licking pot washing water or circling around the outhouse, perhaps gnawing on a couple of bone scraps without a trace of meat during the festivals. That was the best they could hope for. As a result, these dogs only served as door guards, nothing more.
Some households, lacking silver to celebrate the New Year, would even trade their dogs—thin as firewood—for a couple of jins of pork. The ultimate fate of those dozen or so canines raised in the village was mostly to end up in someone’s belly, be it their owner’s or someone else’s. To suggest that the Mo Family had tricked these dogs away for money would have been laughable even to a three-year-old child. Those handful of dogs together might be worth a few hundred wen at best, and the Mo Family was hardly in need of such meager assets, so why bear the stigma of such an act?
Seeing that Wang Dali was at a loss for words, people lost interest in his argument and the decision to have Little Flower lead a patrol of the village dogs was settled. The villagers began discussing the formation of teams.
The Mo Family had only Mo Qingze as a young and able-bodied adult, but he was due to return to the Academy early the next morning, so naturally, the villagers weren’t going to delay him over such a trivial matter. They joked that with Little Flower around, it was as if they had several young men.
Mo Qingze expressed his gratitude to everyone and did not insist furthermore.
Each household in the village provided one able-bodied man, and with over a hundred households, that made a total of one hundred and twenty men. They were divided into teams of twenty, resulting in six teams altogether. Two teams would patrol each night, taking turns between the first and second half of the night, so everyone could rest for half the night and avoid freezing out in the cold.
Not long after Mo Qingze returned home, families with dogs brought them over, each dog leashed with a rope.