From Robinson Crusoe

An experienced sheep farmer can tell how many lambs a ewe is pregnant with by touching her belly and observing her behavior.

Although Chen Zhou had come into contact with sheep a lot when he was in the countryside, he did not have as much experience as the old sheep farmers.

……

As she approaches delivery, the female goat walks very slowly with her bloated belly.

Perhaps it was because it had been raised for too long, and because it often ate the salt fed by Chen Zhou, at this sensitive juncture, it did not show any resistance to human approach.

Get close to the mother goat, grab its horns with one hand, and place the other hand on the mother goat's warm belly.

Chen Zhou felt that he was very much like those watermelon buyers who clearly had no idea how to choose a watermelon but still pretended to do so by tapping the watermelon with their knuckles and listening to the sound with their ears tilted.

This useless move has no effect other than making the experts laugh secretly in their hearts and deceiving themselves.

After feeling around, he could only confirm that the goat was indeed pregnant with a lamb, and would give birth in a few days.

As for other situations, he could only judge based on his "intuition" - there was a high probability that the baby would be twins.

The basis for this judgment is that "the goat's belly is too big."

……

After grapes and mice, "property" is once again about to reproduce itself.

While he was happy, Chen Zhou was also hesitating whether to temporarily move the mother goat to the entrance of the cave, tie it on the platform or tie it near the wooden house.

If the fetus is in an abnormal position during delivery, resulting in dystocia, the probability of death is very high.

In mild cases, the lamb will be suffocated to death. In serious cases, it will also affect the mother goat, resulting in the tragic death of both mother and child.

Both grapes and female mice give birth in caves.

Chen Zhou watched the entire process of Ti Zi's delivery and provided some help.

He did not pay too much attention to the female mice because he believed in the reproductive ability of wild mice.

As one of the "Four Pests", the adaptability and reproductive capacity of mice are the most beyond doubt.

The massive campaign to eradicate the four pests back then was a task that all kinds of rat poisons, rat glue, mouse traps and mouse cages in later generations were unable to accomplish. This is enough to prove the excellent performance of rats in their evolutionary journey.

Flies, mosquitoes and cockroaches, which are listed as the four pests, are also "invincible" and "inexhaustible" creatures.

If goats could have half the reproductive ability and vitality of these evil creatures, Chen Zhou would wake up laughing in his dreams.

However, since goats do not have the qualities of the four pests, in order to ensure a smooth delivery, he still has to take the trouble to bring the female goat to the cave and take good care of her.

This is not only to take care of the mother goat and the lamb, Chen Zhou also has his own little plans.

Having not drunk goat's milk for more than half a year, he began to miss the slightly muttony smell of milk.

The saltpeter ice cellar is already on the agenda. Maybe in the future we will be able to get a few cool drinks to cool off during the dry season. How wonderful life would be then.

……

Having made plans to bring the mother goat back to the entrance of the cave, Chen Zhou did not act immediately. Instead, he led Lai Fu along the mountainside to the east and looked at the platform again.

He had wandered here on a whim, and he hadn't expected to gain anything.

Unexpectedly, as soon as we crossed the ridge that blocked our view, we saw a large group of wild goats feeding on the slope below the platform.

He couldn't remember the last time he saw them. Chen Zhou's eyes were fixed on a few lambs in the flock that were only a few days old. Not far away from them was a mother goat with plenty of milk, which made him drool.

If he could capture these pairs of mother and son, the animal husbandry he had been dreaming of would be largely accomplished.

Not to mention the "goat milk freedom" that comes with the lamb, you can drink as much milk tea as you want, and you can also make your own milk tofu, milk skin and butter.

This is not a goat, this is a moving treasure house!

In the past, there were always more important things to deal with, and the focus on catching goats was not mainly due to lack of time, and partly because the flocks were less attractive.

It takes a long time to tame a half-grown lamb or an adult sheep. If they are not tied up after being caught, they will run away without a trace if they are let go.

They need to be tied up and fed with salt and water regularly.

It’s okay if it’s just one or two sheep, but if you catch more than ten, you won’t have to do any other work that day and just carry water for the sheep.

If you tie the sheep to the river, or catch goats in the rainy season, you can save the trouble of carrying water, and you also have to find a place for the sheep to shelter from the rain to prevent them from catching a cold after getting wet. It's troublesome just thinking about it.

In Chen Zhou's mind, the most ideal targets for capture are lactating ewes and lambs.

The lambs follow their mother and do not need to be specially restrained. Once tamed, two can be tamed.

Moreover, the lamb is only a few days old and has not yet developed the alert and freedom-loving nature of the flock, so it is easier to tame it.

Not to mention that female goats can produce milk and are an important force for the reproduction of the flock. Without them, it will be useless no matter how many rams you catch.

Therefore, the moment he saw the lambs and goats running around on the ground, Chen Zhou immediately made up his mind to capture them and prepared to take action on the night of September 9.

……

It is easy to kill a sheep but difficult to catch it alive.

Without a tranquilizer gun, there are basically only four ways to capture wild goats alive - traps, entrapments, fences, and poles.

Chen Zhou had tried to catch sheep with traps before.

But he only used the noose, and after the rainy season, he basically did not maintain or rearrange the noose, so all the noose he had arranged before lost their effectiveness.

This time, he wanted to use traps as the main method to catch sheep, supplemented by luring. If that didn't work, he would make a sheep-catching pole or a net.

Now with the rattan weaving guide, he feels confident when it comes to weaving nets or knots.

As for catching sheep with a fence, it would take a lot of time to build a fence on the mountain that only people can enter but not exit, and then drive the sheep into the fence. Chen Zhou didn't think he had that ability alone, even with Lai Fu.

……

When he returned to the cave to set up the trap tools, he took the female goat with him. The male goat probably followed behind from a distance because he was worried about his wife.

Walking in front, Chen Zhou looked back at the billy goats from time to time, thinking that he must tie up both of them after returning home.

There is a large field of crops growing under the platform, but it cannot withstand the damage caused by these two guys, not to mention that there are many autumn apricot trees planted on the open space on the other side of the hillside. If they are eaten by the sheep, he will be heartbroken.

……

Fortunately, the weather was nice and we returned to the cave smoothly. It didn't rain at all.

There were even rare stars and moonlight in the sky, the wind died down, and the island was much quieter than before.

They tied up the she-goats and the he-goats at the edge of the forest, far from the fields.
Lighting the oil lamp, Chen Zhou prepared his sheep-catching equipment.

His initial plan was to set up a few simple noose traps, then spend time making a live trap, in which he would place some coarse salt to lure the goats in.

There is a lot of wood available at home that can be used to make live traps.

Most of them are substandard wooden boards left over from flooring, and they can be used after being processed with a hand saw.

But Chen Zhou didn't want to waste precious nails, so he hoped to use rope knots to reinforce them instead of nails.

However, although he has a sufficiently detailed textbook on rattan weaving, he has not yet read and practiced it step by step. Therefore, it takes more time to learn and apply it on the spot by tying knots to make live traps.

...Based on Chen Zhou’s understanding of the sheep.

Before nightfall, the cunning beasts would leave the platform and go to the other side of the mountain, not returning until the sun rose.

Night is a great time to set traps.

Studying late into the night, in the spirit of "sharpening the knife before battle, even if it's not sharp", Chen Zhou quickly learned several simple knotting techniques and tried to put them into practice. The result was very satisfactory, as it was indeed better than the slipknots or dead knots he usually used.

Feeling that he had firmly memorized the knotting technique in his mind, Chen Zhou picked up his backpack, took the salt used to lure wild goats, and packed some leftover hazelnut skins and pine nut shells.

These nutritious nuts are loved by goats, especially roasted pine nuts, which exude a pine oil aroma even with only a layer of shell left, which may be more tempting to goats than salt.

In fact, it would be more convenient to catch sheep if there were corn kernels.

Based on Chen Zhou's understanding of sheep, corn kernels are extremely attractive to sheep.

Sheep eat corn kernels regardless of whether they are hungry or full. He has heard many times in the village that some people's sheep have died of overeating after eating corn kernels. Corn kernels are particularly effective in luring goats.

It's a pity that there is no corn on the island. Otherwise, not only could you use it as bait to catch sheep, you could also roast it, steam it, or make it into bait for fishing.

He stuffed several large balls of hemp rope and cut canvas strips into the backpack, put the hand axe on his waist, picked up the prepared wooden board, and held the oil lamp in the other hand.

After greeting Lai Fu, Chen Zhou set off directly.

……

The reason why Chen Zhou did not make the live trap in the cave and then bring it to the place where the trap was set was because he felt that this was "like taking off pants to fart - a waste of time."

The manufactured live capture cages are huge, and at most you can only carry two, which will seriously affect the travel speed. It is better to carry the raw materials directly.

At the same time, Chen Zhou also brought a hand axe. If there were not enough materials at the place, he could use local materials to chop and cut some branches and sticks.

……

After traveling all night, when the moon was at its highest point, Chen Zhou arrived at the place where the sheep had rested.

There is sheep dung everywhere, and a faint smell of goats.

Putting down the wooden board, Chen Zhou wandered along the hillside looking for places to set traps and live traps. Under the light of the oil lamp, he saw a lot of undried feces.

Most of them are in granular form, which means the person having the bowel movement is in good health.

There are also some unformed feces, which means that the person defecate has had gastrointestinal discomfort recently, or the grass he eats contains too much water and has slight diarrhea.

Among the many black and brown feces, there are some very conspicuous bright yellow strips of feces, which are excreted by the lambs in the suckling stage.

This type of feces is only excreted by lambs when the mother goat's milk is too thick and nutritious.

……

The distribution range of the lamb's feces can give us a rough idea of where the mother goat is active.

Using stones to mark out several suitable positions on the ground, Chen Zhou returned to the wooden board, holding an oil lamp to illuminate the surroundings, and silently calculated how many live traps he could make with these materials.

This time he carried a total of nine boards. According to his previous estimation, these boards could barely make the frames of two live traps.

As for the walls around the frame, you need to cut thick wooden sticks to supplement them.

After calculating again and sketching out the general outline of the live trap and the length of the wooden board required in his mind, Chen Zhou did not dare to delay and directly pulled out his hatchet and started working.

Modern spring mechanisms were not used, and the structure of the original live trap was not complicated, mainly using a pull-wire trigger mechanism.

As long as the animal entering the cage pulls the string connected to the food bait, the door will close.

For Chen Zhou, this trigger mechanism is the simplest and most practical, and it is also the only live-catching cage he can make.

……

He found a few isolated trees near the mountainside, chopped them down with an axe, trimmed the twigs from the branches, made them into sticks of suitable length, and then transported them in batches back to the pile of planks.

After preparing the materials, he inserted a two-meter-long "Y"-shaped wooden stick into the ground and hung an oil lamp on it as a simple lighting tool. Right there on the hillside of this isolated island surrounded by twinkling stars, Chen Zhou began to make the first live trap in his life.

Traps like live traps are usually more effective for dealing with small animals.

It is especially effective when catching medium-sized and greedy animals such as squirrels, honey badgers, cats, and mice.

When facing larger cattle and sheep, live capture cages will be limited by the materials, which may cause the prey to escape easily.

If the live-trap cage is made of welded steel, it will be fine as it can trap the Siberian tiger. However, a wooden live-trap cage can hardly withstand the struggles of the animals inside.

When Chen Zhou was making the live trap, his biggest concern was its sturdiness.

After all, this is the area where sheep move around. If a female goat or other members of the flock are trapped in a wooden cage, it is possible that the head sheep or a big ram in the flock will attack the live capture cage.

In order to prevent the cooked duck from flying out of the pot, Chen Zhou used almost all the rigging and canvas strips he brought with him to tie the live capture cage so firmly that it was as solid as a rock.

Even the six "walls" of the cage are made of more wooden sticks, with the main goal of increasing the quantity without raising the price.

Be sure to keep the greedy goats from getting in but not getting out.

……

When making the first live trap, a lot of time was wasted due to lack of experience.

By the time he made the second live trap, Chen Zhou was able to do it with ease and much faster.

It was almost dawn when both cages were completed.

The night was the darkest at this time, and most of the oil in the oil lamp had been consumed, leaving the light dim.

The wind started to blow again in the wild mountains and wilderness, and faint drops of water appeared in the air.

Looking up at the sky, Chen Zhou discovered that the moonlight and stars in the sky had been blocked by clouds at some point, and the oil lamp illuminated only him and the second live trap he had just made.

The clattering sound in the distance, like the sound of horse hooves, is the sound of Lai Fu running. I don't know what he is chasing.

There was a pile of leftover wooden sticks of unqualified length on the ground, and dozens of canvas strips in the backpack.

Not wanting to waste these materials, Chen Zhou made a small live-catching cage before the flock of sheep arrived. He put the last handful of coarse salt and a few pine nut shells into it, hoping that this small cage could catch a lamb for him.

……

At daybreak, he picked up the tools left on the ground and set several snares along the path the sheep had taken.

By the time the snare was set, a drizzle had already fallen from the sky.

When he went out, he did not wear a leather raincoat or a wide-brimmed hat, for fear that the rain would get heavier and he would get soaked and catch a cold. He did not have time to look for the wild goats coming from, and Chen Zhou left here with Lai Fu, who had played all night and had a great time.

……

When we returned to the cave, the rain wasn't heavy enough to even soak our clothes.

Entering the bedroom, without the breeze blowing, a belated fatigue suddenly surged over him - he hadn't slept the whole night.

I was outside, exposed to the wind, but I never stopped thinking and working, so I didn't feel very sleepy.

After returning home, Chen Zhou realized that his stomach was empty and he was extremely hungry.

His mind, which had been clear just a moment ago, was now in a mess, and he felt a slight pain. In addition, his clothes were damp and wet, making him feel extremely uncomfortable. (End of this chapter)