As soon as the summer plug-in is over, it will be the summer vacation of the work-study school. In order to reduce the burden on the family, when the captain, when the cow officer's father, let me look after the idle cow. Looking at idle cattle, the most important thing is to release them. Just like the little cowherd in the Huangmei opera "Little Cowherd", his mother woke him up from bed at dawn in the morning and went to Niuwangtang near the head of the production team a few arrows away to drag the muddy buffalo into the river, or rub the cow with grass or water it with a ladle. In any case, we must wash the cows. If I don't wash them clean, the poisonous sun will hurt the cowhide, and then I will be accused by the team cadres. After washing the cows, the next job is to let the cows eat dew grass. According to my father, cows eat grass with dew, which not only makes them fat, but also has the power to plow the fields. After the cows have eaten grass all day, it's our turn to let the cowboys go home for breakfast. Breakfast is nothing more than that kind of wheat batter, bumps, barley amaranth and so on. Indica rice porridge is rarely eaten. It's hard to swallow, but I have no choice. Those days are a good day to fill your stomach a little.
After breakfast, our cowherd will cross the river in a small wooden boat to see the idle cows. Sometimes there is no boat at the ferry, so we take off our clothes and swim across the river like jiaozi. When I arrived at Tiantou, I put the draft clip on my back, picked up the ox grass knife and gave it to ox grass for lunch. Cutting cattle and mowing grass, sometimes mowing the grass alone, sometimes several cowboys go together, and sometimes rowing around like a Yanling team. A cowherd who can spare cattle and mow cattle grass should not only master the temperament and physical condition of his own cattle, but also know whether there are cattle grass in the corner, ditch, ridge and field of the production team. Only in this way can we feed our cows well, knowing that a cow was the whole hope of a production team's productivity in those days. "There is an anvil and a knife, but the net is empty." It takes brains to find grass.
Some cowboys will play tricks when cutting cattle grass, and deceive their companions from time to time with a blind eye. That is to say, cut the grass at both ends of the ridge of the rice field covered with grass, keep the grass deep in the ridge and cut it slowly later, and when cutting grass, go to the foreign production team or foreign brigade first, that is, go to someone else's site to cut grass first. In the process of mowing cattle, shepherds sometimes quarrel or even fight because of mowing. But more often, we mow grass and graze cattle together and have fun. Cutting grass is one of the cowboy's games. This game is played by at least two people. The trophy of the game is piles of newly cut cattle grass. The way of dumping is to grab the tip of crucian carp knife by hand and carry it on the mud pond of Erdaoba River, which is neither hard nor soft. "Buried grass" is divided into six grades, namely "Liu Deng"-the handle is upright and downward for "eating"; "Deng Wu"-knife back down, knife edge up, pass the rest to "eat"; "Deng Si"-the tip of the knife is buried in the ground; "Deng San"-the tip of the knife and the handle are buried and hung like an arch bridge; "Deng Er"-the knife fell flat on the ground; "Yi Deng"-the knife fell to the ground. If there is a tie in the first place, the final will be played again until the outcome is decided. This game is very dangerous. Cowherd, who can drop the knife, can make the cowherd knife rotate at high speed in the air, producing a strong dive force, and finally reach the highest level of "Liu Deng". I don't know that a green hand who doesn't let go may cause the knife to fall on his head or hurt the nearby cowherd. I heard that there was a little girl watching the fun in the neighboring village. Her shoulder was cut by a knife that year and she was disabled for life. Sometimes cowboys will make noise about the size and poor quality of the cowherd's head, but the children's faces change with the weather in summer, then they fight and then they go crazy together.
Cut the grass in the cellar and go to herd cattle. The shepherd boy is not as romantic as the painter "Excuse me, where is the restaurant? The shepherd boy refers to Xinghua Village". However, sitting on the back of a cow with a hat and swinging a hook to catch minnows is quite comfortable. The bait is made of local materials. Cows and flies on cows are just the favorite of small fish. Squeeze out the intestines and other dirt from the caught minnows on the spot, put them on the fish skewers with eyes and sharp points, then put on a hat to dry, take them home and stew them in a pot. I remember one time when I stewed fish, the porridge pot was accidentally vomited and the fish tank sank. After my mother was so angry that she dumped a pot of red porridge, there were several cucumber marks on my little * * * *.
When the minnows were tired of fishing, we asked the cowherd to throw down the hook and sleep on the cow's back. The cattle swayed from side to side, and soon people fell asleep ... In the dream, the cowherd started to race cattle, on the ridge road in the water town of running all the way. This kind of running action is called "jumping the reins", or sitting, standing, kneeling and sideways. According to the risk factor, we can finally see who will rush to the river under the finish line quickly and steadily. This reminds me of Lin Sheng's "Lin 'an Mansion" in the Song Dynasty: "When will the West Lake dance stop? Warm winds make tourists drunk and Hangzhou a continent. "If the last sentence of the poem is changed to' riding a buffalo like a horse', it will probably be more appropriate. As for swimming, today's children may not have seen the scene of swimming on a cow. I take off my clothes when I see the cowherd and the river. Their left hand put clothes in their hats like King Tota, and their right hand gripped the reins. If the general drives the cow forward. We swam to a meadow where flowers were blooming and bees were flying. I was lying on the grass with my hat covering half my face. In my mind, the cow is eating grass slowly, and I am chewing the stem of salt grass like a cow. In my dream, I won the first prize of bullfighting, and the production team rewarded me with a hat, a quilt, a towel and a cow grass knife. Suddenly, I fell from the dreamland to another melon garden full of cantaloupes, watermelons, grandma's hum, watermelons and burnt melons. While watching the melon man take a nap, I stole my pants, tied my legs with melons and swam back to the other side. Cowboy burps while eating, just like Pan Changjiang has a frog in his mouth in the movie Hands Up. ...
At this point, after watching the idle cattle for a summer and returning to the warehouse after the appearance of golden rice, the cattle began their hard work again-ploughing the stubble land. I saw a large piece of black mud between the ups and downs of the plow blade, extending from one end of Nagata to the other. Then, the members used a combination of manual harrow and cow-pulling iron harrow to break the big mud stubble as strong as steel tile into small pieces and plant winter wheat. In a heavy rain, while herding cattle, the shepherds picked up the stems of wild horses on muddy heads, and the harvest was full. When the mud is frozen for nine winters, the members will dry the mud in the mud pond for most of the winter, wading on the ridge like crucian carp, descending in formation like geese, covering the ridge beach one by one, and the women and children who put mud will quickly put the mud cloth evenly. After freezing, the members beat the mud residue with a wheat rake, which not only enriched the field, but also played a role in rooting the wheat seedlings, just like covering the wheat seedlings with an antifreeze quilt. At that time, the cows had already entered the barn for the winter, and the cowherd boys also ended the happy days of the past games.
In the evening of winter, whenever I hear cows barking in the cowshed in the field, I know it's cows calling me "wind talk", which means it's cold outside. It wants me to untie the pile rope and lead it into the house. After school, I went straight to Tiantou with my schoolbag on my back.
In the evening, my father and I sat around the tea stove lit by cow dung cakes, and listened to my father's story of raising cattle in the evening self-study under the dim light of the lantern in the cowshed. What do you mean, "people rest in the light and cows rest in summer"? It is said that farmers, no matter how busy their farm work is, have to rest in Tomb-Sweeping Day to worship their ancestors, quietly avoiding the cadres of large and small teams to burn paper money for their deceased relatives. On the long summer day, the cow had to have a rest, because the cow was going to the ploughing and harrowing seedling pond, and heavy farm work was still waiting for it. What do you mean "it won't fall off before the summer solstice"? Before the summer solstice, mosquitoes existed. Cowherd often used rice to light cigarettes to repel mosquitoes. If the cow is soaked in mud, it can prevent mosquito bites, but it will cause the soles of the cows to be soaked soft. In the wheat stubble field in Niu Geng, cattle's feet are easily punctured by wheat ears, which will affect the busy farming in three summers and even the whole farming. What do you mean "the first frost won't fall"? The natural solar terms have cooled down. What do you mean by "don't go into the river in early winter"? If the cows in beginning of winter want to cross the river, they must be transported by ship, and a layer of grass should be spread in the cabin, which not only prevents slipping and keeps warm, but also helps the cows to lie down and relieve fatigue. What's more, "you shouldn't plant zongzi after eating the Dragon Boat Festival" and "you can plant thousands of hectares after eating the Mid-Autumn moon cakes", and so on. Cattle have been basking in the sun all winter and eating grass in front of the haystack. As soon as the bird returned to the forest in the evening, sparrows looking for residual grain on the grass kept singing and jumping in front of it. In fact, in winter, cows eat more than grass. In order to gain weight, the bean cake and rapeseed cake produced by the production team are extracted by soybean oil and planed into the shape of bean curd, which becomes good feed for cattle fattening. That bean cake was delicious after it was baked with fire, and it was really an excellent snack for cowboys in that era of lack of materials. What surprises me most is that in order not to turn the cowshed into a cow urine field at night, my father will give cow urine in the septic tank every midnight, and he keeps mumbling to urge the cow to "urinate less", to the effect that the cow should urinate quickly and the owner should be sleepy. It really works. Cow urine, like cow drink, is less than half a bucket in one bubble. In the days of the cowshed, my father also told me mysteriously that when the cow died, it would not look up at the sky and cover its eyes with rotten clothes. I don't know why cows can't look at red clothes, or they will be chased. No wonder Spanish matadors always tease cows with red cloaks when fighting. I remember that year, an old cow died in the production team, and the decomposed beef was sold by the representatives of the production team in the team and the surrounding teams, only a few cents a catty. Those members who have long been thin enough to get beef without pork fat have no money. As a result, they didn't sell dozens of pounds. Except for the cadres of the large and small teams who ate a little for free, the rest of the production teams cooked a big pot, and the majority of members happily touched the cow's head meat.
Afterwards, some commune cadres investigated where the old cow was. Father told the truth. But the commune cadres criticized him. Because the cows were old, dead or eliminated at that time, it was necessary for the production team to apply, the brigade to report, the veterinary station to identify, the commune to sign and seal, and the county to file a case. Father doesn't read much and can't manage that much. To this end, he was removed from the post of captain of the production team by the commune. Years later, whenever someone mentioned the old cow, my father would always sigh. Maybe he thinks he is old ... Today, like the disappearing plain eagle, the buffalo in Shuicun disappeared with him.