From Robinson Crusoe

Chapter 102 Rat Matter
To be honest, the frying pan gave Chen Zhou too many unnecessary expectations.

On July 7, he got up early, had a quick breakfast and rushed to the beach to learn about the reward early.

In the center of the wooden and stone wall, there was still a small square paper box. It looked almost the same size as the frying pan packaging last time, but just a little longer.

Chen Zhou imagined that the reward would be practical kitchen utensils that are difficult to make, such as a grill, a pressure cooker, and an iron colander. After dismantling the wooden and stone walls and opening the package, he was greatly disappointed.

Under the yellow corrugated cardboard packaging, there is another long paper box with blue packaging.

What's in the box is not kitchenware, nor other practical tools or materials, or even toys, but a wireless mechanical keyboard.

In addition to the keyboard, the box also comes with several replacement keycaps, a Bluetooth adapter, a charging data cable, ten postcards, a key puller, a cleaning cloth and a brush.

Among all these things, only the keyboard structure is relatively complex.

The Bluetooth adapter and keycaps are basically useless.

The key puller is a steel wire key puller. After burning off the plastic handle, a steel wire about 20 cm long can be obtained.

The front of the postcard is light blue, and the back is white with black horizontal grids printed on it. It is the size of half an A4 paper and can be used for drawing or taking notes.

The cleaning cloth is the size of a palm, the fabric is pretty good and has strong water absorption capacity. Chen Zhou thinks it can be used as a dishcloth.

The brush is made of nylon and plastic, and apart from playing the role of a normal brush, it has no special uses.

Seeing it reminded Chen Zhou of his shelved "feather duster" plan. The plucked goose feathers were still at home and were probably completely dried.

Taking advantage of the free time these days, he planned to make two feather dusters.

The bedroom floor had been laid, but the ceiling had not been installed. Every day, dust would fall from above, making the bed, shelves, wooden boxes, low tables and chairs all covered with yellowish dust.

With a feather duster, cleaning is much easier.

As for the highlight of the reward - the mechanical keyboard, it is not completely useless.

After disassembling it, you can get some screws, wires, some keycaps and switches, as well as a PCB board, some plastic materials and metal materials.

Because this keyboard is a wireless keyboard, it also has capacitors, resistors, batteries, and a charging port suitable for Micro-USB data cables that other mechanical keyboards do not have.

If there were enough copper wires, magnet bars, iron bars or aluminum bars, plus washers, hot melt glue or epoxy resin, and wood available everywhere on the island, Chen Zhou was confident that he could make a simple generator.

Of course, if this simple generator is driven by human power, the current intensity generated will be weak and unstable.

It is best to install a small pulley on the shaft of the generator to generate a fast enough rotation speed to achieve stable power generation.

Without these materials, you can only rely on rewards - such as a hand-cranked generator or two large enough motors.

After being modified, the hand-cranked generator can be placed in the river to generate hydroelectric power.

But the voltage should not be too strong. Chen Zhou estimated that it would be difficult to reach the level of charging the battery.

Entering the era of electrification is a distant dream.

The easiest way to realize this dream is to wait for a mysterious reward to arrive in the form of a generator or a battery from "future technology".

The total power of the batteries does not need to be too much, 60 degrees in total is enough, and equipped with an inverter or diesel generator, it is more than enough to support several small electronic devices.

It would be even better if there were photovoltaic panels. The island lacks everything except sunlight. The dry season lasts for two or three months with no rain all day and long sunshine hours, which can better play the role of photovoltaic panels.

It’s a pity that Chen Zhou doesn’t even have small electronic equipment now, let alone good things like battery inverters, diesel generators and photovoltaic panels.

If you insist on saying there are some, the electronic wooden fish and the magic wand that comes with the leather case might be counted as two items.

Of these two things, the magic wand is still somewhat useful. After plugging in batteries, it can barely be used as an emergency flashlight. The electronic wooden fish is basically useless.

……

Apart from the batteries, the high-quality plastic removed from the keyboard can also come in handy when modifying firearms.

Some thick plastic plates can be directly cut into the desired shape with a knife. Although they are not as good as metal, they are durable and light enough.

Moreover, the internal structure of the improved flintlock is not complicated and requires very few plastic parts.

Even if there is damage, it can be replaced in time without affecting the use of the firearm.

……

After standing in the center of the wood and stone wall for a while and thinking about how to use the reward, Chen Zhou put away the keyboard and started the work of building the wood and stone wall every 15 days.

After finishing work and returning to the cave, it was dark again.

He lit the oil lamp and placed the mechanical keyboard on the wooden shelf in the storage room - he didn't have a screwdriver and didn't want to disassemble the keyboard for the time being.

Before leaving the storage room, Chen Zhou took a look at the rats in the rat pen.

Night is the time when mice are most active. If you find them in the wild or in a dilapidated house in the countryside, you can often hear the sound of them grinding their teeth or running back and forth as they gnaw on wooden boards on the roof or on the ground.

But Chen Zhou's family does not have such worries.

Because not far from the rat pen, there lived two big cats.

Grapes had very early shown an extraordinary interest in the mice in the rat pen. If it had not been for the stone walls and slabs blocking its way, the immature young mice would have probably been eaten alive by it.

Xiao Huihui was not very interested in mice at first, but recently, influenced by grapes, his desire to hunt has become stronger and stronger.

It is fat and long, and can crawl directly on the stone slabs and observe the mice below through the gaps.

Put yourself in the mouse's perspective, and imagine yourself being locked up in a prison from which you cannot escape. In the long crack in the sealed sky, there are often scary "rat-eating beasts" looking down with the eyes they look at for food, and the "meowing" sounds of the beasts that scare the mice can be heard all around.

You can imagine how much pressure these mice are under.

Although people often say that mice are as timid as mice, Chen Zhou feels that mice are not timid at all.

When he was a child living in the countryside, his grandmother's house had a warehouse specifically for storing grain. After the corn was harvested in the fall, the corn kernels were piled up in the warehouse.

The mice fed on the corn during the winter and grew fat and big. The one that impressed Chen Zhou the most was a big white-haired rat.

That guy is huge, as big as the big black cat at my grandma's house.

When Chen Zhou went to the warehouse to move watermelons in the summer, the mouse stood on the windowsill, looking at him with its dark eyes, without any fear at all.

My grandmother came from the old society. When she was a child, her family was poor. She never went to school and was illiterate. She was somewhat superstitious and said that the mouse was a fairy and had become a spirit, so it should not be offended. She did not allow Chen Zhou to hit it.

But my grandfather was a staunch atheist. He bought several mouse stickers and put them in the warehouse, trying to catch the mouse.

But the rat has become very cunning.

Maybe because it had seen too many traps, the white-haired mouse had learned its lesson and was never fooled. Instead, it let the mouse trap two kittens, and it took a lot of effort to get them out.

If you have a cat at home, the most convenient rat poison should not be used indiscriminately as it can easily be accidentally ingested by the cat.

Grandpa then bought a mouse cage and mouse traps, but they didn't work, especially the mouse traps. I don't know how smart the mouse is, it would actually use a clod of soil or cement to trigger the mouse trap, then eat the bait on it and run away.

As for the cats in the house, only the biggest one dared to fight the mouse, but it lost more than it won and even had half of its ear bitten off by the mouse.

After several attempts and many twists and turns, and half a semester of tossing and turning, the big white mouse is still unharmed and is living a better and better life.

But if you walk on the road at night too much, you will eventually encounter ghosts.

After the summer vacation in Chen Zhou's fourth grade, on the first weekend of school, when he went home for the weekend break, he saw the skin of the white-haired mouse hanging on the wall of the warehouse.

When I asked my grandfather, I found out that this incident was very strange and bizarre.

His grandmother was bitten by a dog when she was a child and was very afraid of dogs, so her family never kept dogs.

The village has a good atmosphere, there are no thieves, doors are usually closed but not locked, and nothing is stolen from the house. People who keep dogs mainly listen for noises and are convenient for greeting people who come to visit.

There was a family living on the back street of Chen Zhou's grandmother's house, his great uncle, who kept a big wolfdog with shifty eyes.

This guy is also very smart.

It would share its dog food with the hens, and then secretly bring the hens into the doghouse to feed them with eggs.

He would also unhook the collar and chain, sneak out to play in the middle of the night, come back during the day, and hide in the doghouse pretending nothing happened.

At that time, Chen Zhou's grandmother had five or six cats, and all the cats were eating under the trees in the yard.

Every day, Chen Zhou’s grandmother would mix rice with vegetable soup and put it under a tree, and wait for the cat to come back and eat there by itself. If the family improved the food, the cat would also eat a few pieces of fat meat or gnaw on the bones left over by humans.

There was only a wall between them, and the big wolf dog often climbed over the wall and ran to Chen Zhou's grandmother's house to steal cat food.

It just so happened that the big white-haired rat saw that humans could do nothing to it, so it became more and more courageous and began to covet the cat's food.

It was destined to suffer this disaster.

According to Grandpa Chen Zhou's description, around the 14th and 15th day of the lunar calendar, the moon was full and the mouse went under a tree to steal cat food in the middle of the night and unfortunately ran into the big wolfdog.

The big wolf dog is full of bad intentions. It is not even afraid of its owner's sticks and whips. It often steals chickens and chases geese. It bullies village puppies and often forms gangs to rob people. When it sees a mouse stealing its food, it will pounce on it and bite it.

Although the mouse is huge and can fight with the cat, this wolfdog weighs more than 80 kilograms, often digs holes and climbs over walls, has a strong body and quick reactions.

The extreme size difference prevents mice from taking advantage of their intelligence.

Moreover, there was no rat hole under the tree, the terrain was open, the moonlight was bright, and the vision was clear, so it had nowhere to escape even if it wanted to.

In just a moment, this once-powerful white-haired mouse ended its sinful life and was caught in the mouth of a big wolfdog, killing it.

The big wolfdog was a very picky guy when it came to food. He disdained to eat rat meat. After killing the guy who stole his food, he threw the white-haired rat aside and started eating cat food.

Grandpa Chen Zhou witnessed all this from the window inside the house. Seeing that the big wolf dog had done a great job by killing the white-haired mouse, he did not go out to drive it away, allowing it to eat the whole bowl of cat food in peace.

The next morning, he skinned the white-haired mouse and hung it on the wall of the warehouse.

This incident was considered a legend in the village. Almost everyone had heard the bizarre story of the big wolfdog and the white-haired rat spirit, but the big wolfdog's fate was not very good.

Two years later, Chen Zhou's great uncle bought a batch of sheep. In the winter, when the sheep gave birth, the lambs often went missing in the sheepfold.

Because the big wolf dog had a long criminal record, the family's first suspect was it.

But there was no surveillance in the countryside at that time, and no actual evidence could be found in the wolf's den, so no one had any reason to trouble it for a while.

After a period of time, several lambs in the family went missing one after another. Uncle Chen Zhou could no longer bear it, so he trapped the big wolf dog in its den and beat it to death.

Unexpectedly, the lambs did not stop disappearing after the big wolfdog died, forcing Uncle Chen Zhou to bring the lambs back into the house and raise them for a whole winter before he could recover some of the losses.

It was not until two years later that a family in the village who raised chickens suffered from the death of more than 60 chickens in the winter. After setting up a tight net, they finally caught the culprit - a lynx.

This guy only drank the blood of the chicken and didn't eat the meat. He killed an average of ten chickens a day, causing heavy losses to the family.

The villagers were so angry that they didn't care that it was a protected animal. They picked up shovels, pickaxes and hay forks, trapped it in the chicken coop and beat it to death.

After the lynx died, someone weighed it and found that it weighed at least 60 kilograms.

Sixty kilograms for a cat is different from sixty kilograms for a dog.

Lynx has amazing jumping ability and can climb walls and run across rooftops while carrying its prey in its mouth. Not to mention a small stupid chicken, even a goose weighing more than ten pounds is no problem for it.

People in the village said that the lamb in Chen Zhou's great-uncle's house was actually taken away by a lynx that year.

Of course, no one knows how the lamb disappeared.

It is possible that it was taken away by a big wolfdog a few days ago and by a lynx a few days later.

There was no surveillance at that time, and many past events were ultimately hidden in the fog.

……

The eight mice raised in Chen Zhou's home now resemble their white-haired predecessor.

I have been with cats day and night, and they have gotten used to it. They just keep silent on weekdays, rarely grind their teeth, and don't run around often. They are far away from the bedroom, so it's relatively quiet.

He moved the stone slab on the rat pen and looked into the increasingly crowded "rat dormitory" with a lantern.

Before he could check whether there was enough food left in the pen, Chen Zhou was surprised to find that the two male rats had already ridden on the female rats and started breeding the next generation for his poison-testing rats.

"Great! This time I'll have sixty or seventy little mice. I'll finally have a feast."

Chen Zhou was delighted to see the mouse he had raised with great effort for more than a month now doing its job.

After making sure that the mice had enough food, he put a few rabbit meatballs and some dried fish into the mouse pen to provide nutrition for the hard-working "breeding males".

After taking care of the poison-testing rats, he carefully took away the oil lamp and gently covered the stone slab, fearing that he would disturb the rats' work, and then returned to the bedroom to rest.

Sitting on the bed and carving marks on the pineapple wood block, Chen Zhou suddenly realized that he had spent three hundred days on the island without realizing it.

In just over two months, he would have spent his first year on this isolated island.

In this nearly one year, he accomplished many things that he had never dared to imagine before.

Carrying a whole shipload of supplies, digging and building shelters, hunting, planting and harvesting food, raising goats...

They also rescued a dog and two cats, caught chinchillas and mice, and raised them until they could reproduce the next generation.

Compared with Robinson Crusoe of the same period, his progress in all aspects has been qualitatively improved. On the one hand, this is due to the advantages brought by the original work, and on the other hand, it is also due to his hard-working hands and more advanced way of thinking.

The sharp tip of the dagger pierced into the pineapple wood wedge, and sawdust of increasingly darker color slipped through his fingers.

Turn off the lights, and another day passes.

(End of this chapter)