It was an early autumn morning, and our party went down the river at six o'clock from the beach in Ma Huashan, Xingping. Although it is just autumn, there is a thin mist floating on the river, and the wind blows on my face, making me feel chilly wrapped in a scarf. On the right side of the river bank, there are peaks with unique karst landforms, high or low, bright or dark, all standing quietly in the water, tall and straight. On the left bank are cobblestone beaches and clusters of bamboos. The top of bamboo hangs slightly, forming a beautiful arc.
At the moment, the sky is changing every minute. There is a faint morning light ahead, and the mountain shadow gradually becomes clear from the haze. Strangely, the farther away they are, the brighter they are, and the mountains overlap from light blue to blue. Slowly, the river was covered with layers of sunlight, covering the shadow cast by the mountain. Crimson and orange are swaying up and down in the sparkling water waves, and the quiet river seems to wake up instantly and hear the sound of waves greeting each other.
When our boat approached the river bank, the sun rose from the mountains and rivers of Ran Ran, changed from orange to bright yellow, and slowly reflected half the sky. The green hills recede, the river is wide, thick clouds hold a red sun hanging in the air, and the sun in the water draws a golden light, like a river full of broken gold, sprinkled in silky smooth waves.
At this time, a bamboo raft carrying a fisherman and his cormorant appeared in the morning glow. From a distance, bamboo rafts, fishermen and cormorants seem to be a motionless silhouette. The fisherman's hat, bent over, bamboo poles propping up the boat, cormorants standing in tandem, and laundry baskets at the stern are all integrated with the mountains and rivers in front of him, as if they had been printed each other for thousands of years.
The people on the shore were fascinated by the illusion in front of them, and they didn't realize that the scenery had moved until the bamboo raft began to go down the river. Someone blurted out "stop, uncle, stop!" " "I paused, subconsciously followed the bamboo raft, ran out of the dozens of meters, and saw the bamboo raft moored on the beach. Finally, I saw that the fisherman was a man with a white beard floating on his chest, wearing a black cotton-padded jacket, crimson trousers, rain boots, a slightly hunched body and wrinkles etched by wind and frost, all of which indicated that he was an elderly man.
The bamboo raft is bound and connected by six bamboos, with one end tilted against the stone beach and the other end shaken by the running water of the river. The old man stood on a bamboo raft, holding up a bamboo pole in one hand and making two cormorants stand in tandem. Cormorants are covered in gray-black feathers, with a long neck and a pointed mouth, flapping their wings in mid-air. The old man tried his best to stabilize the bamboo pole, let the cormorant leap and spread its wings on it, and then carried the bamboo pole on his shoulder, and the cormorant's claws firmly grasped the smooth bamboo pole. The old man has a bamboo pole in one hand. The cormorant spread its wings, flew away from the bamboo pole, dived into the water, and returned to the bamboo raft in the blink of an eye, apparently finding nothing. The whole process seems to be a dance between the old man and the cormorant, and the tacit cooperation is like a pair of long-term partners, a gesture, a look, and mutual understanding.
On the way back, the driver said that cormorants are also called osprey. A long time ago, every fisherman kept several cormorants to catch fish. Now there are fewer fish in the river, and not many can be caught every day. This traditional fishing method has been eliminated. The old man is a famous local fisherman. He is over 90 years old. He has been fishing on the Lijiang River all his life. As long as the weather is fine, he takes his cormorant to the river for fishing every day. "What if he doesn't go fishing? A cormorant eats two kilograms of fish a day! " The driver said.
I think I may never see the old man and his cormorant again next time. Just like the rising and setting sun every day, just like a river that never stops flowing forward, no matter how reluctant we are, everything that was born, lived and existed will inevitably change, change and disappear, and only the memory that remains in our hearts is forever. ......
Goodbye, forever Lijiang River, forever fisherman!