#头条创作挑战赛#
Krulen River
●Text, photography: Li Qi
NO.2
Saturday, July 8, 2023
Baltiger Prairie is really a great place to escape the heat, cool in the morning and evening, and the hottest afternoon is only 23° as the temperature continues to rise. Gui Lan, the owner of Lanyi Hotel, is a native of Xiqi, whose ancestral home is Hengshui, Hebei. She was born in Xiqi Adunchulu Commune (Dongfanghong Commune), she was just eight or nine years old when Tianjin Zhiqing came, and she followed the butt of Zhiqing every day, and the little girl was smart and beautiful and everyone liked it. The production team she is in is an agricultural team, and the male and female young people take off the billet to build houses and grow melons and vegetables to live in a concentrated manner, which is convenient for the young people to fall in love, and some young people have trysts at night to let her let the wind go, and if someone comes here, they will sing loudly. I have roughly analyzed the phenomenon of knowing youth in more than a dozen communes and pastures in Xiqi, and found that a phenomenon in one commune should be summarized as a category of young people's culture. The young people of the Huanghua Commune (Daniel Zhang's commune) are very positive in current terms and pursue progress politically. And the young people of the Dongfang Red Commune of Adunchulu are more open. Improper sexual relations between Xiqi Tianjin female intellectuals and local Mongolian and Han people all occurred in the Dongfanghong Commune. Both men were sentenced and not light. One of the women even gave birth to the child to the locals and left the grassland herself. Coincidentally, the family of the girl who was given away later moved to Xiqi, and the girl grew up and married Guilan's younger brother, but she had been divorced for many years. Gui Lan asked me if you wanted to meet my former brother and daughter-in-law, who is in her fifties and now sells milk in a small shop. When she said this, I was curious and really wanted to see this child thrown by this Tianjin female intellectuals in the grassland. Gui Lan said that the female intellectuals also came back to see her daughter several times. Since the family that adopted the girl later had a child of their own, the girl's life has not been so good. It is not convenient for me to say the name of the female intellectuals here, I feel that she is a big grinning person. She once said to me in the group, "Li Qi, I can provide you with the material for writing." I thought to myself that what I wanted to write most was her story, but how could it be. Guilan later opened a beauty salon in Xiqi, and did port business for many years, running between Xiqi and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and her fluent Mongolian language impressed Matt and was a very capable woman.
Guilan called me down to drink milk tea for breakfast, and the milk skin was full of dry grassland flavor.
At one o'clock in the afternoon, Guilan's husband Lao Feng drove, Guilan took a few clothes, and we went to the Krulun River. Lao Feng cast a net to fish and I took pictures with Guilan, and Guilan's greatest pleasure is to take pictures. When I was a child, I saved three cents and went to the photo studio to take a black and white one-inch photo, and when I saved four cents, I took a two-inch photo.
There are herds of cattle and sheep on both sides of the Krulun River, cow dung is everywhere on the fragrant meadows, and the distant Baugde Mountains and Khan Ula Mountains are dark blue, how familiar the friendly Balhu steppe. The bed of the Krulun River here is steep, and it was here that Daniel Zhang sacrificed more than 50 years ago to rescue the fallen sheep. The water of the Krulun River still flows day and night, taking away the story of the steppe youth. I took out my mobile phone to record 360° Krulun River and turquoise grasslands, cattle, horses and sheep, singing the song "Krulun River". "The ancient and magical Krulun River, from which it flows slowly, affectionately moisturizes the vast grassland, flowers on both sides often bloom and do not fall, singing all the way back and forth, blessing how green the steppe is, rushing to the east day and night, leaving thousands of generations of merit."
Fish just caught by the Krulen River
This year's Krulen River is a wild fish disaster, there are several off-road vehicles and motorcycles parked on the bank, and the Krulun River is here to bend, and fishermen can go down to five or six nets or less than one or two nets. Carp, crucian carp, dogfish, white carp, and sticky carp are bouncing alive on the shore. I tried to cast a net, but it didn't open at all, and I was struck with a light white sticky fish with a beard more than a foot long. Lao Feng forgot meself, endlessly cast nets to collect fish, and in less than two hours it was filled with half a woven bag, which was fifty or sixty catties. The fish of the Krulun River now swim upstream from Lake Dazhao to this section of water. Now the pastoral area also has a fishing ban period, I don't know if it is a fishing ban period now, watching these caught fish I feel a little distressed.
When I graze my cattle in the grassland, the Mongolian herders do not eat fish, because Tibetan Buddhism does not eat anything in the water. Not only did they not eat fish, but they also let the young man use his knife to clean up the fish. Today, a few fishing boys over there are Mongolians, and the times have changed, and these people's concepts have changed. Guilan tirelessly posed for me to take pictures, and the fully charged telephoto digital camera and flash battery consumed half of the power.
Last year, in Singapore, Nimen Garib, the former captain of the Xiqi Wulan Horse Riding Captain, came to bring smoked dried fish to me and Li Jijun for the New Year, and specially told me that this was fish from Xiqi Dazhao Lake. Thinking of this, he called Nimengarib. He knew that I had also returned to Xiqi, and now in Hailar, I would come back in a few days to rehearse with the Qi Wulan Herdsman, and this year is the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Xiqi Wulan Shepherd Horse. Grand performance on July 19th. Let me definitely watch the show before leaving Xiqi. When she returned to Singapore in September, she cried when she thought of her grandson, and I returned to Singapore around that time.
Krulen River
At five or six o'clock in the afternoon, the sun went to the west, obliquely shone the sun, and the grassland immediately softened, which was the best time to take pictures. More than twenty horses ran across the Krulun River, and a motorcyclist kept honking his horn and shouting loudly to drive the horses into the river. I sighed, and the steppe could no longer see the shocking scene of ten thousand horses galloping.
Only the old Feng Guilan and me were left by the river. Lao Feng always said "the last net, the last net". But seeing the carp with a white flower and red tail is "the last net and the last net".
Back at the Lanyi Hotel in Xiqi Guilan, she asked me what I wanted to eat, and I said, "Gole Ti Maha." This is the meal "lamb and noodles" that I ate every day when I was grazing in a ger.
2023.7.8 Night West Flag
【About author】Li Qi is a member of Tianjin Prose Research Association. As a Tianjin educated youth, he went to the countryside to graze in the grassland of Inner Mongolia and Humeng Xinyouqi for many years. He has worked in Daqing Oilfield, Beijing and Tianjin. His essays, poems, and novels have appeared in many domestic publishing houses and newspapers.