Beiguancun The magical legend of the lion baby
Written by Liu Chuanmin.
The lion baby is the name of the people of Beiguan VillageIn fact, it is a stone lion。It squatted in the south depression about 500 meters from the village, next to the path to Nanguan Street, about two feet away from the boundary of the connected Nanguan Street.
It is said that it is a lion baby, but it is actually a stone lion shape, and the face shape is not very clear due to years of wind, frost, rain, snow, sun and rain, and can only see the general outline. There is a flat surface the size of a basketball on the top of the head, perhaps because it has been touched by passers-by, and the top of the head has always remained smooth and bright blue-gray. If I didn't look at the top of my head, I always thought that the lion baby was carved from white stone, and after studying chemistry, I realized that this stone lion was carved from a large piece of bluestone. The white strips around the body are acidic gases (such as sulfate sulfate, carbonic acid) and calcium salts in bluestone, etc., which react chemically to produce acidic salts (such as calcium sulfate, calcium carbonate) and other substances. This caused the lion baby to become white stripes.
The lion baby is 1.5 meters high above the ground, and its hips squatting on the ground are larger than the waist circumference of a woman who is pregnant with Rokka. When I was in middle school on Nanguan Street, I always had to touch the lion baby with my hand, and sometimes I would climb on top of the lion baby and sit and play. When and for what reason the lion baby fell on this empty fieldNo one in the village could tell。Even Fa Rongye, who is nearly 90 years old, said that when he was young, the lion baby was squatting in the south recess.
The people of Beiguan Village see the lion baby as magicalIts magical story has been passed down from generation to generation for many years. Of course, I didn't believe in these legends, but in the autumn of 1975, a bizarre incident occurred that gave me a new understanding of the miracle of the lion baby. In the autumn of this year, there was no rain for several months, and seeing that the winter wheat could not be planted, everyone from the captain to the members of the club was anxious. Uncle Wang, the captain, hesitated for two days, but decided to plant the wheat in the ground first. When the ploughshare turned up the white loess, the woman who followed the sowing behind the plough kept muttering: If there is no moisture in the soil, I am afraid that I will not even be able to harvest the seeds next year.
It happened that this happened to be here, when the last piece of underground was planted on the night, there was no sign of the day, and in the second half of the night, the wind suddenly rose, and a large dark cloud blew from Nanshan, like a traveler who was tired of walking, rested on the top of the head of Beiguan Village, and the accumulation became thicker and thicker. For a while, thunder sounded, and heavy rain poured down, and this heavy rain lasted for more than two hours. At dawn, the clouds cleared, the sun rose in the east, and the air was unusually fresh. When people were ecstatic and stepped on the mud to check the moisture in the field, they found that the field of Nanguan Street, which is connected to my village, was full of white life, and not a drop of rain had fallen. It really responds to the proverb: the white rain is not a furrow. The east and west sides and the three production teams in the north were stained with the light of Beiguan Village, and a large area was wet. Uncle Wang said loudly to the onlookers with a peach blossom on his faceThis is the lion baby blessing our Beiguan Village windThe lion baby is the god of our village
A few elderly people shouted: This kind of thing has happened several times before, it is not strange.
The next day, the lion baby had an extra circle of red silk thread around her neck.
A few days after the heavy rain, the lion baby was inexplicably stacked in a field, not far from Nanguan Street, and reversed its direction: facing north and back south. The captain immediately took more than a dozen young and strong male members, used wooden sticks to pry leather ropes, and spent two hours to move the lion baby back to its original position inch by inch from the Fengbei team's field, and faced south and north. When it was over, the captain shouted loudly to the people on Nanguan Street who were working in the field: If you see someone moving the lion baby again, don't blame me for being unkind.
I'm a little puzzled, why do I care so much about the direction of the lion baby. The old man said that the lion baby faces south and faces north, which means: eat Nanguan and Beiguan. I don't believe it, how can a lion baby who can't eat and can't eat is poor in Nanguan and Feibeiguan? There are a lot of Nanguan Street classmates in the class, and I can't tell that they are poorer than me, and most of them are much richer than me in terms of food and clothing.
This time the lion baby was artificially stacked, and everyone knew the whole picture of the lion baby, it turned out that its height was not one meter five, and there were thirty centimeters buried in the ground.
No one can verify the past and present life of the lion babyBorn in the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty, Fa Rongye, said that he had a lion baby when he was a child. Based on this, it can be concluded that the lion baby has experienced at least three dynasties of the Qing Dynasty and New China. Unfortunately, in the early years of the 21st century, 20 years after the reform and opening up, the lion baby was stolen on a deep winter night. The first person to find out that the lion baby was missing, and it was the old man Xu Xu who went to the fields every day in the village. He called a few old men who were also wandering in the field, followed the deep rut marks, and looked all the way to the Weiqiao Highway on Nanguan Street, where the rut marks disappeared.
There are only seventy or eighty-year-old people in the village and children who go to school. When he told the young offspring who was working outside and came home for the New Year that the lion baby was stolen, the offspring looked indifferent.
said that the lion babies have weathered into stone bumps, who likes to take it.
If you don't see it, it's gone, what's a pity, blame the old people for making a fuss.
said that the lion baby has been there for a long time, who takes it seriously.
A young offspring actually applauded, saying that the wheat harvest every year was because the lion baby was in the way, and the machine couldn't turn around, and he had long wanted to get the crooked cowardice away, but it was too heavy to move, and now it's okay, the thief baby got the crooked cowardice away for me.
I don't know if it was because of the massive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides or other reasons, the lion baby has been particularly weathered in the past one or two decades. In 1997, when I went back to my hometown for the funeral, I saw that the lion baby had been changed beyond recognition, and the path next to it had long been abandoned, and few people walked. The lion baby's whole body was dirty, and the top of Cheng Liang's head, which had been stroked countless times before, became rough. The plump buttocks that had previously been plump were sunk in a full circle twenty centimeters from the ground. It is not an exaggeration to say that there are "stone bumps", and it may be more appropriate to use strange rocks.
This lion baby who has become a "stone pimple".In the end, it was stolen as a cultural relic。But in terms of year, the lion baby is a cultural relic, and even a cultural relic worthy of archaeologists' research and researchIt's a pity that future generations no longer attach importance to it
As a "lion baby", perhaps it has already completed its mission. Nowadays, even if it doesn't rain for a few years, the people of Beiguan Village will not worry about eating. The story of its birth is unknownBut its former magic will definitely be passed down from generation to generation in the people of Beiguan Village
About the AuthorLiu Chuanmin, a native of Changshouyuan, Weinan, Shaanxi. He currently lives in Urumqi, Xinjiang. His works have been published in newspapers and online platforms. Contributing author of "Weinan Literary Circle".