Perhaps it was because he had drunk yao dew before leaving home, but He Yi did not feel tired during this trip up the mountain. He did not climb the neighboring peaks, yet he still walked a considerable distance. After wandering around for a while, he found a place frequented by wild chickens and set up a snare trap.
First, he dug two holes and inserted thick branches to serve as wooden stakes, pounding them into the earth until only short lengths remained aboveground. Then he drove a bamboo pole diagonally into the soil, tied a cord to its upper end, and bent it back under tension. He fastened the other end of the cord to one of the stakes he had just secured and connected it to the line on the other stake.
He also needed to make a slipknot loop, arranging it loosely in a circle on the ground with the straight line between the two stakes running through its center. He placed bait beneath that line. When a wild chicken or some other small animal touched the line across the middle, the taut bamboo would suddenly spring free, pulling the slipknot tight and trapping the animal in an instant.
He Yi had learned this from a game. His memory of it had never been very clear, and he remembered only the general idea. On several previous occasions he had been unable to recall the exact route of the cord or how to tie the slipknot, yet now every detail came back with extraordinary clarity.
He Yi breathed out and carefully tried setting it up. After about half an hour of fiddling, he finally managed it. He tested the arrangement twice, taking it apart and putting it back together, and once he saw that it worked, he left it alone.
“That should do.” He Yi looked at the reasonably convincing snare with satisfaction and rose to move some distance away. The wild chickens would hardly approach while he stood right beside it.
But before he had gone far, a fragment of something suddenly flashed through his mind. He Yi froze on the spot and replayed it carefully.
Strangely, he had no memory of this fragment whatsoever and could not recall ever having seen it. It seemed so unfamiliar that he almost mistook it for a memory belonging to the original owner of his body.
But the fragment was a short video teaching people how to make a leaf trap for catching chickens, a remarkably simple yet effective method. Since it was a short video, it could not possibly have come from the original owner.
“…Have I ever watched this video?” He Yi played it over and over in his mind, seeing every detail clearly. No matter how he considered it, it felt like the first time he had ever seen it, without the faintest trace of a prior memory.
He thought for a long time about when he might have watched it, but could reach no conclusion. He decided to put the mystery aside. The trapping method shown in the video interested him much more.
There was nothing else to do while he waited. Why not try it?
With that decision made, He Yi found an intact leaf and dug up an earthworm. He whittled a thin bamboo skewer, pushed it through the worm, then threaded it through a leaf shaped into a cone. When a chicken pecked at the bait inside, the leaf would cover its face and block its sight.
The method was so simple that He Yi made several and set them on the ground. But unlike the snare trap, this so-called “a leaf before the eyes” trap required someone to remain nearby, so he had to crouch in hiding a short distance away.
Waiting was tedious and long. The trees provided shade in every direction, making the place cool and pleasant, but that still did not dispel his restlessness. Mosquitoes and other insects were plentiful in the brush, and he had to rub plant juice on his hands and feet to relieve the itching.
He had no idea how long he waited. Just when his patience was nearly exhausted, two pheasants flew in and landed several paces from the snare.
He Yi immediately perked up and watched their movements closely. They seemed uninterested in the slightly odd-looking snare and even wary of it, so they circled around. After ambling forward a few steps and reaching the leaf traps scattered on the ground, however, both birds lowered their heads and began pecking.
The moment they pecked down, He Yi held his breath. Every muscle in his body tightened, hope and nervousness mingling on his face as he prepared to spring into action.
The pheasants did not know someone was watching them so intently from nearby, but even if they had noticed, it would have been too late. As they swallowed the worms threaded onto the bamboo skewers, the cone-shaped leaves settled against their beaks. The long edges of the leaves blocked their vision, perfectly achieving the effect of “a leaf covering the eyes.”
One after the other, the two pheasants stood rooted to the spot. Their claws shifted uncertainly, but they did not know where to go. They shook their heads again and again without realizing they needed to spit out the skewers, looking completely dazed and helpless.
Now! He Yi softened his steps and moved toward the motionless pheasants. He was cautious but not slow. The birds heard faint footsteps, yet instead of darting away with their usual quick reflexes, they only began struggling a beat after He Yi grabbed them by their wings.
Unfortunately for them, it was too late. He Yi swiftly stuffed the two pheasants into his carrying basket one after the other and tied down the woven bamboo lid tightly so they could not escape.
Only then did he finally release the breath he had been holding. A smile spread across his face.
He hadn’t expected it to go so smoothly.
He Yi glanced at the snare. He would have no time to come back and collect it tomorrow, so he dismantled it, slung his basket onto his back, and walked down the mountain with the birds fluttering against his back.
Now that he had the ingredients, the next step was cooking.
But how was he supposed to make roast chicken? He did not seem to have the necessary equipment. He could roast it directly over an open flame as before, but a whole chicken was much larger than a dove and would be difficult to cook evenly. He did not know how to make charcoal, could not immediately obtain a grill or metal skewers, and had neither an oven nor a clay roasting pit.
How had people in ancient times made roast chicken, then? Surely they hadn’t always eaten it in such a primitive way.
As he walked, He Yi racked his brain for a way to cook the chickens. Before long, he remembered a rather famous dish: beggar’s chicken.
But all he remembered was that the chicken was wrapped in mud and baked over fire. As for the rest… the rest…
He Yi suddenly had a flash of inspiration. Just as with the short video about the leaf traps, he unexpectedly recalled the notes his younger sister had taken while traveling around with a food program. In one small corner, she had recorded the steps for preparing beggar’s chicken.
“…” How strange. At the time, he had only flipped through those notes in passing without reading them closely, yet now he remembered them vividly, almost the way he could recite the first sixteen characters of the Thousand Character Classic after reading it to Xue Ci so often.
He Yi quickened his pace homeward, repeating the steps in his mind for fear that this strange, unfamiliar memory might vanish as suddenly as it had appeared.
When he got home, he found Xue Ci doing something unusually unrelated to studying. He was lying on his mat with several stalks of straw, trying to weave them together. Xue Ci had heard He Yi’s footsteps from far away. Ordinarily, he would have rushed out to greet him, but this time he could not bear to get up and was still struggling with the uncooperative straw in his hands.
Then Xue Ci noticed movement inside the carrying basket. Clutching his bundle of straw, he walked barefoot over to He Yi. “You caught wild chickens?”
“Mm. I made traps and caught them myself.” There was unmistakable pride in He Yi’s voice, but he suppressed the corners of his mouth that threatened to rise, watching Xue Ci out of the corner of his eye and waiting for a reaction.
Xue Ci did not offer the praise He Yi had anticipated. Instead, he frowned and looked at He Yi with a hint of hurt. “Why didn’t you take me when you went up the mountain?”
“…” Oh no. He Yi had wanted to surprise Xue Ci, so he had not told him anything at all.
He Yi could not bear to see Xue Ci look like that. With his handsome, bright features, he looked almost like a poor little creature who had been abandoned whenever his brows drooped and his eyes grew sad. Hoping to comfort him, He Yi blurted out his plan without thinking. “I didn’t mean to leave you behind. I just wanted to give you a surprise and make another meat dish for dinner tonight.”
Only after speaking did He Yi realize what he had said. He had originally intended to send Xue Ci away and let him discover the honey-glazed roast chicken only after it was ready. Now that he had revealed the plan, it would hardly be a surprise. Then again, they did not have much time left together. Deliberately avoiding one another would miss the point entirely.
“What meat dish?” Xue Ci’s gloom vanished. His almond-shaped eyes shone, and he abandoned the straw in his hands to tug eagerly at He Yi and ask again.
He Yi noticed the straw Xue Ci had tossed aside. His gaze darkened slightly, and he fell into thought. When Xue Ci received no answer, he tugged at He Yi’s sleeve once more. He Yi returned to his senses and deliberately kept him guessing. “Take a guess.”
Making beggar’s chicken was not especially complicated. In his sister’s notebook, the entire method occupied only a small corner of a single page, with the steps summarized in a few short lines.
It called for lotus leaves, pork caul fat, and yellow clay. He had no way of obtaining caul fat at short notice, so he decided to try ordinary rendered pork fat instead. He had scallions, ginger, sesame oil, and salt, but he had none of the other ingredients such as soy sauce, sugar, or yellow rice wine.
Traditional beggar’s chicken did not use honey. But He Yi knew how much Xue Ci loved it, and he had promised to make him a dish using honey. He was determined to brush a layer over one chicken and make honey-glazed roast chicken. He was not particularly worried that the experiment might fail. There were two chickens, so he could leave one without honey. At least one of them should be edible.
He Yi had become proficient at slaughtering chickens, plucking their feathers, draining the blood, and removing the innards. But he was missing so many seasonings that he had to settle for a rough marinade. He rubbed salt all over the inside and outside of the chickens, stuffed slices of ginger and lengths of scallion into their cavities, and left them for half an hour.
Soy sauce was expensive, but it would make cooking much easier. He really ought to buy a jar next time, He Yi thought.
Xue Ci crouched beside him, utterly absorbed. He had no idea what He Yi was making, but simply watching him work was interesting enough.
After marinating the chickens, He Yi had no caul fat to wrap around them. Caul fat was intended to prevent scorching, so he smeared melted pork fat over the skin instead, not knowing whether it would have the same effect. There was no point worrying about it now. He Yi’s approach to cooking could be summed up in one word: reckless. Once committed, he simply plunged ahead without agonizing over every possibility.
He chose one chicken and spread all the remaining white honey in the jar over it. Once coated, the birds had to be wrapped. Without lotus leaves, he used bamboo leaves instead, blanching them in boiling water before winding and wrapping them around each whole chicken. Finally, he covered the leaves in a thick layer of wet yellow clay and put the parcels into the fire to cook for one or two double-hours.
The recipe in the notebook had actually been written for an oven. He Yi could only make a rough conversion to the methods he had heard of, estimating the cooking time in a simple, rather crude fashion.
In any case, after a little over an hour, he planned to dig them out and take a look. If the clay cracked, he would patch it. If the meat inside was not cooked, he would leave it over the fire longer.
After a full double-hour and another quarter-hour, the honey-glazed roast chickens finally emerged from the fire.