In this day and age, life was hard for people in these mountains, let alone for dogs.

They didn’t get to eat kibble or raw chicken carcasses. Most of the time, they couldn’t even get cornmeal scalded with boiling water. What they usually ate was steamed potatoes and steamed squash.

But when hunting dogs were headed for the mountains, there was a specific way to feed them. You couldn’t feed them until they were full, but they couldn’t go on an empty stomach, either. You couldn’t feed them too well, but you couldn’t feed them too poorly, either.

Wang Meilan, however, was experienced. She got up early in the morning and scooped two bowls of cornmeal from a cloth grain sack. She put it in a basin with steamed potatoes, poured boiling water over the mixture, and used a large iron ladle to mash the potatoes and mix them evenly with the cornmeal. After sprinkling in a little salt, she carried the basin out of the house.

Wang Meilan divided the food in the basin, giving half to Hua Gou and the other half to Qing Gou.

The two dogs finished eating quickly. Because Wang Meilan hadn’t given them much, they were only half-full. Still hungry, they licked their food bowl with their tongues until it was spotless.

Just then, Zhao Jun came out of the house. He was dressed in a padded cotton jacket, padded cotton pants, and cotton shoes, with a dog-fur hat on his head and leggings wrapped around his calves.

"Baoyu! Baoyu!" Zhao Jun shouted from beside the wall, calling for Li Baoyu.

"Brother!" Li Baoyu’s voice came from the Li’s House. He came running out, frantically trying to put on his hat as he moved.

"Let’s go!" Zhao Jun called out to him. He then walked over, unchained Hua Gou and Qing Gou, and tied hemp ropes to their collars. He led them out of the yard.

As Zhao Jun left his house, he saw Li Baoyu coming out, leading Da Huang.

The two of them led their dogs out of the village. They entered the mountain logging area and followed the path up toward Sector Forty-Six. Along the way, they untied the dogs’ leashes.

Once freed from their restraints, the three dogs vanished. Before long, the Yellow Dog returned and stuck close to Li Baoyu’s side, practically glued to him.

The two of them had just reached a ridge. Looking down from their high vantage point, Li Baoyu saw Hua Gou and Qing Gou sweeping through the gully below.

Li Baoyu pointed in Qing Gou’s direction and said to Zhao Jun, "Brother, Daqing is really something else!"

On their last few hunts in the mountains, Daqing had already shown the makings of a lead dog, and both Zhao Jun and Li Baoyu had high hopes for him.

Zhao Jun stomped the snow from his pant legs and looked where Li Baoyu was pointing. He frowned slightly. "The trail’s a bit weak..."

The words were barely out of Zhao Jun’s mouth when Daqing seemed to intentionally prove him wrong. The dog sniffed a dry twig, then suddenly lifted its head, looked to the southwest, and bolted.

Just then, Hua Gou seemed to catch the scent too. It raised its head, sniffed the air, let out a single bark, and took off in hot pursuit of Daqing.

But that one bark was all it took for the Yellow Dog, who had been at Li Baoyu’s side, to follow them.

"This fast?" Zhao Jun and Li Baoyu exchanged a surprised glance. They hurriedly looked for a suitable sapling, cut it down, and mounted an Invasion Blade on the end.

It was no wonder they were caught off guard. They had only been in the mountains for half an hour; neither had expected to find prey so quickly.

Once they had their blades mounted, each man grabbed an Invasion Blade. Instead of descending into the gully, they moved along the ridge, heading in the direction the dogs had gone.

They hadn’t gone far when they saw a line of wild boars on the opposite ridge, running toward its crest.

There were more than ten boars in the sounder. The smaller ones ran in front, the larger ones in the back. As the herd charged, they kicked up clouds of snow that filled the air.

The sounder had just passed when the three hounds appeared, chasing them up the ridge. Hua Xiao’Er, running at the very front, lunged and bit the large boar that had fallen to the rear.

This great boar was enormous, definitely weighing over four hundred pounds. As the saying goes, great strength is never a disadvantage, but it wasn’t fast.

Hua Xiao’Er leaped and sank its teeth right into the big boar’s rear. The boar, in pain, bucked its hindquarters and spun around with a vicious toss of its head.

Hua Gou dodged to the side like a cat. The wild boar’s attack missed. Just as it was about to turn and chase after the sounder, a black shadow descended.

Daqing latched on with a vicious bite, clamping down on the boar’s ear. The boar cried out in pain and tossed its head. There was a dull THUD, and Daqing, weighing nearly one hundred and twenty pounds, was sent flying.

’It’s over!’ On the opposite ridge, Zhao Jun closed his eyes, his heart sinking.

It wasn’t that Zhao Jun thought Daqing’s life was in danger.

In fact, Daqing had been thrown more than a meter away and landed with a sharp YELP. But it scrambled back to its feet, shook its head, and rejoined the fray.

But Zhao Jun knew. ’This hunt is probably going to fail.’

This wasn’t a case of him losing his nerve before the fight even started; he just knew that this was a battle they were destined to lose. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

’There’s no way my three dogs can pin down a boar this size.’

’If they can’t pin it, we can’t get a blade in. That’s the drawback of not having a gun.’

But even so, with the dogs fighting for their lives up ahead, a hunter had no reason to turn back.

Especially in a situation like this, when the dogs grew discouraged from a failed hunt, their master had to be by their side.

"Let’s move!" A fire lit in Zhao Jun. He roared, raised his blade, and broke into a run.

"Huh?" Li Baoyu was taken aback. He remembered on their previous hunts, Zhao Jun had specifically told him not to rush or run too fast right when the dogs started barking.

The prey would be constantly on the move, and the hounds would follow.

The crucial point was that two legs could never outrun four. By the time a man reached the spot where the dogs and boar had been fighting, they would have already moved the battle elsewhere.

Therefore, the hunter should wait until they’d been fighting for a while, until their stamina drained and they reached a stalemate in one spot. Running then would be just in time.

But since Zhao Jun was already charging ahead, Li Baoyu naturally wouldn’t be left behind.

Sure enough, before the two of them could get close, the sounds of the fight shifted northward.

Zhao Jun and Li Baoyu changed direction again, but they had hardly started running when they heard the barking turn toward the east.

Snow falls deep on the high mountains; frost bites hard in the lowlands.

Even with the same snowfall, the snow in the mountains was deeper than the snow below.

Zhao Jun was running through ankle-deep snow, each step a struggle. After nearly twenty minutes, he was gasping for breath, his hot exhalations pluming in the air. He couldn’t run anymore.

Meanwhile, the great boar was asserting its dominance. It repeatedly flung Qing Gou and Yellow Dog aside, then forced Hua Gou back with a shake of its head before breaking out of the fray and making a run for it.

Although the boar, weighing over four hundred pounds, had tusks, they had curved inward with age, making them less of a threat than the tusks of a boar in the three-hundred-pound range.

It was a stroke of luck for Daqing that despite being tossed by the boar twice, he hadn’t been injured.

Yellow Dog, on the other hand, had been scraped by the boar’s tusk, which opened an inch-long gash on its back. Fortunately, the wound wasn’t deep and was only bleeding slightly.

Before Qing Gou and Yellow Dog could even get back on their feet, Hua Gou was already in pursuit.

Before long, the three dogs had surrounded the wild boar again, and the fierce struggle resumed.

The great boar fought as it fled, crossing two ridges and battling its way for over a mile and a half. It was only when the three dogs were utterly exhausted that they finally gave up, watching helplessly as the boar escaped. Then, dejected, they trotted back to Zhao Jun’s side.