The taste of pheasant

He often comes to the research laboratory to inquire about the welfare, invites everyone to drink tea and chat, and occasionally invites everyone to have a drink in the pub.

Living in a small town north of the school, it takes him 3-40 minutes to drive to the school. Sometimes he also rides a bicycle, which takes more than an hour. If he drives, he leaves home at 7 o'clock; if he rides a bicycle, he leaves home after 6 o'clock. In summer, it gets bright at 5 o'clock, so getting up early to go out is not a problem. In winter, it is wet and cold, and the sky is still dark at 8 o'clock, so getting up early to go out is very painful.

The first class of the school was not so early. He left early because he hoped to avoid the rush hour traffic during work and classes, and also hoped to have more time to prepare lessons.

However, earlier, he was not so early. Ever since he fell in love with a certain graduate student, he deliberately left the house earlier in order to have breakfast with her.

Once, while driving to the school on a country road, he accidentally bumped into a small animal that suddenly jumped out of the grass. I got out of the car and checked. It turned out to be a female pheasant. She was seriously injured and was on the verge of death.

Pheasant is a common local prey and a common game on the table. He thought it would be better to take it away than to throw it into the wild.

When he arrived at the school, he gave the pheasant to the graduate student.

When she received this gift, she was shocked. She recalled the horrifying process of watching her mother kill a chicken, bleed it, and pluck its feathers when she was a child. However, the poor pheasant in her hand no longer needed to be killed and bled, it was just waiting to be plucked and cooked into a delicacy.

In the shared kitchen of the dormitory, she imitated her mother by scalding the breathless pheasant with boiling hot water, and then carefully plucking the feathers and fine hairs. The female pheasant's fur is dark brown and low-key, not as dazzling as the male pheasant, but once she dies, the color of her fur no longer matters.

She was no good at cooking and had never handled a whole chicken. The plucked pheasant was smaller than the whole chicken sold in the general market, and the knives in the kitchen were not sharp enough. She chopped the good chicken into pieces, with the bones and flesh separated. She threw all the chicken pieces into a deep pot, added onions, garlic, tomatoes, celery, carrots, potatoes, etc. and simmered them slowly.

She brought some of the pot of stewed chicken to him and distributed some to her roommates on the same floor. She ate the rest for several meals. Wild pheasant meat is tough in texture, and without bleeding, it is not delicious, not to mention that it is tasteless after being reheated several times.

Their romance came to an end when she left.

He said that he could go back to China with her to stay with her, find a teaching job, and maintain his life without any problem. She said that although he was willing to give up everything he had, she could not promise their future.

After contacting each other again after many years, he finally married a woman with black hair and yellow skin.

She thought of the cold winter days when she had breakfast with him. The mist on the window was always too thick and she could not see the scenery clearly. The taste of pheasant was a mystery that the two of them would never understand.