Chapter 34: Blowing
A few days later, Wolfpi finally brought back two live animals: a roe deer and a large boar.
In Chen Jian's view, however, they might as well have been dead. Roe deer were timid and terrified of people, making them impossible to domesticate. To even attempt raising them would require a fence three meters high. The big boar was also extremely wild; if put in the pigpen, it would likely gnaw the piglets to death. They could only be slaughtered.
That evening, as the men practiced their drills by the river, the clansmen lit the bonfire and killed the boar. Chen Jian decided he would make a drum out of the pigskin.
The drum was an instrument of war, but it was also one of humanity's earliest musical instruments. The *Book of Documents* once mentioned that the earth drum and kui-grass drumsticks were the music of the Yi Qi clan. They used this music, made from earth and grass, to worship the heavens and pray for favorable weather, likely because the sound of drums was so loud that the gods could hear it.
Chen Jian didn't expect the gods to hear his drum, but he hoped his clansmen would hear it in future battles.
This was intended to be a serious matter, but the incident that followed left a deep impression on the clansmen and taught them a new word—one not created by Chen Jian.
The pig had been slaughtered, and a large pot was filled with its blood. Next to it, a large pottery cauldron of water was brought to a boil in preparation for scalding and scraping the carcass. Several children were kicking a shuttlecock Chen Jian had made for them, while the younger ones played a game of eagle-catches-the-gosling. The wolf cubs circled the dead pig, hoping for a share of the meat.
Because he wanted to make a drum, Chen Jian found a slender, pointed piece of wood and pierced an opening from the pig's hind leg all the way into the abdominal cavity. After pulling out the stick, he put his mouth to the hole and began to blow air into it. This would inflate the pig, making it easier to shave the hair and ensuring the skin would be smooth. Only a smooth hide could be used to make a drum that would produce a loud, clear sound.
However, perhaps because the pig was a bit too big, or perhaps because his technique was too clumsy, he puffed his cheeks and blew for a long time until they ached with exhaustion, but the carcass barely expanded.
All the clansmen tried, but only Wolfpi could do it. After blowing hard for a while, the pig's body immediately swelled to a much larger size.
Amidst a round of applause, Wolfpi became even more determined. When he finished, he sat panting, his vision swimming with black spots, but he was immensely proud. Seeing how hard he had worked, everyone praised him. He was a little hypoxic at the moment, so he just managed a faint smile.
But after he recovered, he pointed at one of the houses and shouted, "This little pig is nothing! Even if it were as big as that house, I could blow it up!"
The people of the two gathered clans were stunned for a moment. Then, the people from the Shi clan, remembering how Wolfpi had bragged about shooting down a house-sized falcon during the mountaintop meeting, burst out laughing.
"Blow! Keep blowing!" someone yelled.
Everyone laughed so hard their stomachs hurt. They suddenly felt that the word "blowing" was a perfect fit for boasting.
Chen Jian was practically lying on the ground with laughter. He thought to himself that it was a good thing there were no cows around, or Wolfpi would have definitely pointed to one and claimed he could blow it up. If that had happened, the modern idiom for bragging would have been born right there.
Embarrassed by the laughter, Wolfpi squatted down beside Chen Jian to help shave the pig's hair. The hot water released a terrible smell from the carcass. Uncastrated boars had a pungent, fishy odor, but castration was a skill Chen Jian didn't possess, so that would have to be a task for a future generation.
Watching Wolfpi shave the pig and thinking about his earlier boasts, Chen Jian suddenly asked, "Brother, have you seen any particularly large birds recently? No bragging now, tell me the truth."
Wolfpi was about to gesture wildly with his hands and feet, but he caught himself and rubbed his hands together in embarrassment. "There are big eagles. And I saw a few big birds with very long legs in the reed pond by the river."
"Then go and get a few."
Wolfpi had wanted to shoot those water birds before, but Chen Jian had forbidden it. "How many do you want?" he asked.
"A dozen or so. The longer the legs, the better. The bigger the wings, the better. It doesn't matter if they taste good or not."
"Alright. I'm not blowing smoke. I saw a bird with legs *this* long a few days ago. If you don't believe me, you can ask them."
Everyone roared with laughter again, and Wolfpi's embarrassment deepened. To help him out, Chen Jian said, "Come on, let's butcher the pig."
With work to do, the clansmen stopped laughing. A few people came over to skin the pig and remove its organs. The women ran to the stream far away to clean the intestines, as the smell was too strong to have nearby.
Chen Jian kept the pig's bladder. To everyone's amusement, he and Wolfpi took turns blowing it up until it was taut. The clansmen laughed again, and this time, Wolfpi laughed along with them. The children gathered around, fascinated by the inflated bladder, and begged to play with it, but Chen Jian refused.
A few days earlier, he had tallied the number of mud bricks the children had helped move. He calculated that they had enough and set aside a few hundred. The number was so large that Yuqian had used small wooden sticks for counting, with each stick representing a group of bricks instead of a single one. In this way, she had managed to count a number of bricks that exceeded one thousand.
To Chen Jian, her method was naive, but in this era, it was brilliant. It was the conceptual seed of multiplication. He could use this example to explain the idea to the children who were ready for it. He possessed the knowledge, but his way of thinking was different from the people here. To use an unsuitable analogy, a Nobel laureate wouldn't necessarily make a good kindergarten teacher.
To encourage his younger siblings, Chen Jian had also asked his uncle to take a day to build two seesaws for them. He had also made them a small wooden horse, soaking the wood for the curved base and then bending it over a fire. He was inspired by the story of Zeng Zi killing a pig, wanting to teach the children from a young age that promises must be kept; whenever he said he would reward them, he always followed through.
With the ability to bend wood, the principle of the potter's wheel, and the technique of mortise-and-tenon joints, the concept of a wooden wheel was now basically achievable. The rest was just a matter of technical details.
The children now had many toys, and he had even made a preliminary model of a balance scale. He had promised the children a fun new toy, but he couldn't just give them a small potter's wheel to play with. He didn't want to bring out a shoddy toy after his brothers and sisters had been looking forward to the scale, only to have the children tell him, "This isn't fun at all."
Chen Jian had other uses for the pig bladder. After letting the air out and putting it away, he shooed the children off. The clansmen chopped the pig into eight large pieces, some to be roasted with salt and pine branches, others to be rendered into lard and stored in pottery jars.
Chen Jian got the pigskin he wanted. Acorn, following his instructions, had already made a drum body by joining two large water tanks, with a few holes drilled in the lower section.
Finding a place where he was alone, Chen Jian stretched the pigskin over the top and tapped it with a small clay mallet. A dull, vibrating sound emerged from the small holes, amplified by the large container below. He was very satisfied. Before the clansmen returned, he removed the pigskin and went back to his other tasks.
True to his word, Wolfpi brought him back several long-legged cranes and large eagles. The meat was stewed, the feathers were fletched onto arrows, and only a pile of bones remained.
More than twenty crane leg bones and eagle wing bones were lined up in a long row. Chen Jian carefully began drilling holes in them. He could play the flute, but he had never made one before. He could only try to space the holes out little by little through trial and error.
The materials were all high-quality: straight leg bones, reed membranes for the flute, glue made of honey, and a pig's tooth for grinding the mouthpiece plug. The maker, however, had a pair of clumsy hands. The first few flutes he made could produce a sound, but it was a sound that could wander off to the horizon.
It was impossible to make a perfect flute on the first try. So every night, the people around the fire would hear short, humming notes. The flutes Chen Jian discarded were given to the children to play with. Though they couldn't produce a proper melody, they were much better than the willow bark whistles, giving his younger siblings another toy.
The children's collection of toys was growing, but it was far from the scene Chen Jian envisioned. He dreamed of children gathering to play Go on a nineteen-by-nineteen grid, solve nine-linked ring puzzles, or play with Luban locks, but he could only make one of these things for now. The nineteen intersecting lines of a Go board aligned with his tribe's myths of black and white bears, and their banner of the yin-yang fish was also black and white. But he didn't have time to make the round pieces. He wanted to subtly influence his people, to guide them toward the primitive philosophy of yin-yang duality. So even though he could use pieces of pottery and wood as game pieces, he wasn't going to do it yet.
For now, everything had to be figured out from scratch. It was one thing for the tribe to learn; it was another, more difficult thing to integrate what he knew with their world.
The younger children didn't understand his grand intentions. Chen Jian simply drilled one or two bones each day and blew a few notes for his own amusement. He was content to hope that, eventually, everyone could have one.
The children's flute dreams were finally shattered after more than ten days. That day, Yuqian took the drawing of the moon she had made on bark, wanting to tell her brother that she knew the moon became full again after a certain number of days. It had taken her a long time to figure out the answer to Chen Jian's question.
She ran over excitedly, only to see her brother practically dancing with a severed bird leg bone, blowing a few strange-sounding, short notes from time to time.
The clansmen had all gone to bed. They had grown accustomed to the noise of the children's whistling over the past nights, and their expectations for the bone flute were no longer very high.
Yuqian walked up to her brother and shouted, "Brother, brother, look! I know how often the moon is full!"
Chen Jian hastily tucked the flute into his waistband, realizing this was important. Yuqian held up the bark, pointing to the crescent and full moons drawn on it. "Look, the moon is round. Every moon on the bark is a day, and this circle with nothing inside means you can't see the moon at night. If you count them all, there are 29. That means the moon becomes round again every 29 days!"
Chen Jian nodded as he listened. After praising her, he pointed to the hollow circle and asked, "Does that circle have a meaning? Did you think of it yourself?"
"Yes. You asked me to record how many fish and deer we catch every day on the slate. Sometimes there are no deer, so I can't write one, two, or three. I just draw a circle on it, which means there are no deer."
Chen Jian was ecstatic. "Why not just leave it blank?" he wondered.
"Then it would be out of alignment," she explained. "If it's messy, I feel very uncomfortable. It's like a wolf is scratching inside my chest. It's an itchy feeling."
Chen Jian looked at his sister, dumbfounded. "When did you develop this problem?"
"After seeing the houses lined up on the cliff and watching you all standing in a line by the river, I started to really like things that are neat. The other day, I fired a pottery bowl, but there was a little piece of gravel sticking out of it. I couldn't sleep lying there. I had to get up and smooth it down before I could fall asleep…"
Chen Jian laughed and hugged his sister, spinning her around twice. He looked at the concept of zero, born from a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and was filled with emotion.
Yuqian didn't know why her brother was so happy. Chen Jian spun her around again before setting her down. "Go and tell your aunts that they don't need to get up early tomorrow. They can have a day off. We have enough houses for now. The day after tomorrow, we have something big to do."
"What is it?"
"We are going to worship our ancestors. We will thank them for guiding us to survive."
"Okay!"
Yuqian hugged the piece of bark like it was a baby and ran back to the women's house.
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