Nowadays, civilized society attaches great importance to human rights, and if a person's body is found in a certain place, the public security department will immediately come to the scene to investigate, cordon off the scene, and file a case for investigation. And when I was an educated youth, my experience of inspecting corpses in that relatively backward place is still very touching in retrospect.
That was more than 50 years ago, when I went to the countryside in the southern farm of Qiongzhong County, Hainan, in a company of 20 teams on the border, less than 20 kilometers from the border between Qiongzhong County and Wanning County. We are in a tropical primeval mountain forest, a place where there are many trees and few people. During that time, several people from Lianjiang, Guangdong Province, carrying fishing eagles and bamboo rafts, hunted fish along the upper reaches of the Wanquan River, and found a naked corpse in the middle of a section of the river where the stones were exposed, and then told the Miao compatriots in the nearby villagesThis section of the river is also the boundary river between Qiongzhong County and Wanning County, and the discovery of naked corpses on the boundary river reached our regimental headquarters (at that time it was still a corps formation).
It was during this period that a Guangzhou educated youth (Shi Zhengtian) of our company was repatriated to the farm company by the detention station because he did not return to the city and committed a crime in Guangzhou, and escaped from the company after a short time. Therefore, when the regiment headquarters heard that the body was found at the boundary river, the first thing that came to mind was whether Shi Zhengtian was killed while fleeing.
After finishing work that morning, I was hiding in the boy's room with a few Shantou educated youths for dinner, when the ** of the regiment headquarters hit the company and ordered the company to send a cadre to take a Guangzhou educated youth to the Jiehe River to identify the bodyAt that time, I was the only one in the Guangzhou educated youth of the company, and I was the best choice. At that time, before I finished lunch, Shi Xiuqing, the deputy company commander, came to the boy's room to call me and briefly explained some informationI hurriedly finished the rest of the meal and set off with the deputy company commander.
After about ten minutes, we reached the last company of the farm (Team 21), and the road was at the end, and then turned right into the path in the primeval forest. After 30 minutes, I passed by the last Miao village (Luping Village), and then there was no shop road before the village.
Qiongzhong belongs to the tropical rainforest place, although there are very rampant mountain locusts, but there are no man-eating beasts, walking in the mountains and forests is not so afraid. After a period of farm life, I have become Xi to walking in the mountains and forests, and I have also learned to defend against mountain locustsBut in order to prevent being bitten by poisonous snakes, most of the time I look down at the road, anyway, in the mountains and forests, I rarely meet people.
I opened the road in front, the deputy company commander followed behind, in a hurry I was walking with my head down, at this time in the afterglow in front of me seemed to feel that there was a dark shadow in front of me, when I looked up there was a Miao cell standing on the path less than 3 meters away from me, in this rare place suddenly a person appeared near you, and it really frightened me very much.
Miao compatriots' clothes are all black (dirt-resistant), they never wear shoes, they walk without sound, they don't understand the language, and they never take the initiative to greet people, so when they meet on narrow mountain roads, they often stand on the side of the road first, silently waiting for you to find him before staggering. My excessive horror scared him at the time.
We are almost in the area of Wanning, which is a coastal county, and the terrain of the mountains is gradually flattening as it extends to the coast, and the pace of our walking is also accelerating. After passing through another mountain forest, my eyes were wide and bright, and I had reached a river 100 meters wide. After 3 hours of walking and a hot day at that time, I couldn't wait to pick up water by the river and drink it, only to learn afterwards that the carrion was 40 meters upstream from me.
After drinking the water to slow down, I raised my eyes to observe, and there was a clear river of different depths, sand and gravel in the riverbed, and small fish swimming leisurely in the waterThe width of the river varies from 60 to 200 meters, and the river section is irregularly distributed with an irregular number of stones outcropping from the water, typical of a mountain stream. There are two bamboo rafts by the river, and a fishing eagle is squatting at the head of each of the two bamboo raftsA few people squatted by a stone stove by the river, a little further from the water, and I think these are the legendary fish hunters from Lianjiang.
It was almost four o'clock in the afternoon, and in order to be able to rush back to the company before dark, I didn't care about resting, and walked over to the few Lianjiang people to ask them"Is there a corpse here?"A young man stood up and pointed to a pile of rocks in the middle of the river and was about to speak, when an older man also stood up and said something to the young man in their dialect, and the young man stopped talking, and several of them paid no attention to meIt is probably a superstition or a customary statement, and you can't talk nonsense when you encounter a corpse outside so as not to cause trouble.
Fortunately, the young man had already pointed the direction before, and I said to the deputy company commander"Let's go to the middle of the river".The deputy company commander said a little scared"You can go and find out if it's Shi Zhengtian, I won't go, I'll take a rest".So I had to pull up my trouser legs, step on the irregular stones, and slowly wade to the middle of the river by myselfFortunately, the water is clear to the bottom, and the water is not deep, only up to the thighs.
When they came to the pile of rocks in the middle of the river, they saw a naked corpse lying on its stomach, with a third of the corpse in front of its waist soaked in water, and its back, upper limbs, and right lower limbs had dried up and turned bronzedThe left lower limb is soaked in water, the left calf is only bone, and the dry right foot is covered with a brown 25cm neutral plastic sandalThe skull twisted to the left, and because the skull was soaked in water, the whole skull was only a milky white skull, except for two eye frames with two gray carrion balls embedded in itFour teeth were lost in the front row of the upper jaw. At this point, the visual autopsy was preliminarily completed, but the gender could not be distinguished, and he returned to the river to find a branch and waded back to the corpse, passing the branch under the corpse's abdomen, trying to pry the corpse back for observation. When the corpse was pried about 30 centimeters above the ground, a strong smell of corpse reached the nostrils, and the corpse could not be put down before observation, so it could only hold its breath and bend down to examine the abdomen of the corpse. At this time, the internal organs of the corpse were decomposed, like a paste made from black sesame and rice, and a gray paste poured out of the belly, which had no belly, and seeped out between the ribs in the ribcage. The outer *** was completely decomposed and there was no way to identify the gender, so I had to put the body down gently;It was later determined that the deceased was male from the width of the pelvic bone.
Although the regiment headquarters did not instruct how to conduct the autopsy, I thought that since I came, I would collect as much information as possible, so I pulled the branch from under the naked corpse, first put the branch in the water and pulled it, washed the carrion on the branch, and then measured the height of the corpse with the help of the branch. I had rarely come into contact with human corpses in the past (I only went to the hospital once when I was in middle school to see an autopsy), and I was still a little scared of the foul-smelling rotting corpse in front of me, so I took a branch and placed it next to the corpse to show that the corpse was about 160 centimeters tall.
From the analysis of the scene, it has been ruled out that the deceased is Shi Zhengtian, whose height is 176 cm. The deceased is believed to be a Han male, as most of the local ethnic minorities do not wear shoes. It is possible that the deceased was a man from a farm in the upper reaches of the river, who took off his clothes when he went out to cross the river alone, and drowned while crossing the river with his clothes raised with one hand, and was then washed into a pile of rocks in the middle of the riverJudging from the degree of decomposition of the body, it should have been more than half a year since the deceased was killed.
At that time, human life was like grass and suke, especially in the far mountainous areas, and even the local township (Sihe, Zhongping Town) did not have a public security department's dispatched agency, let alone on the border of the Jiehe, but the farm sent someone to verify whether it was the employee of his own farm, and he would not report to the case and investigate;The poor dead man really became a lonely ghost.
The cameo was made once"Coroner"The process was just over ten minutes, it was already four o'clock in the afternoon, and there were still three hours on the way back, so we were not allowed to stay longer, so I called the deputy company commander and hurriedly walked back to the companyWhen I returned to the company, it was just dark, but I could still vaguely see the road, and the deputy company commander did the work of reporting to the regiment headquarters, that is, I reported it and did not make a text archive.
I also want to mention that the deputy company commander may have thought that what we did was to collide with a ghost, and when he came back, his wife secretly burned incense in the boy's room to ask the gods to bless him, but the next day he still fell ill and had a fever. Maybe it's fear and fatigue. A young man from Chao'an said to me"It's okay if you don't burn incense when you come back from carrying the dead body, you are a good person, and the ghosts are afraid of you".I think it's just human consciousness and perceptions at work.