Emily Clark is a beautiful Uyghur girl!

She had just finished sucking delicious sheep’s milk under the belly of a dairy ewe, and now, with a dirty face and two white streaks of snot under her nose left after being wiped away, she grinned at Ethan Brooks.

She was also missing two front teeth...

“Brother, let’s go catch marmots!”

Facing her brother’s gloomy gaze, Emily Clark hurriedly wiped her nose with the shiny, greasy sleeve of her leather robe, once again showing her strange and fawning smile.

“I just washed your robe for you the day before yesterday, even used wood ash. In just two days, how did it end up like this again?”

“Uyghur people don’t wash robes!” Emily Clark retorted stubbornly.

Ethan Brooks’s robe wasn’t exactly new either. Compared to Emily Clark’s new robe, his looked even older. Even so, you could still see the original wrinkles of the sheepskin on Ethan Brooks’s robe, and even the soft wool at the cuffs was still distinct, unlike the wool at the cuffs of Emily Clark’s sheepskin coat, which had already matted into felt.

As her brother, Ethan Brooks felt it was his responsibility to teach Emily Clark to love cleanliness. How could a girl not care about being clean?

So, on a sunny morning, on a hillside covered in fresh spring grass, Ethan Brooks raised his palm, and Emily Clark’s heart-wrenching cries rang out once again. Ethan Brooks knew he was not the biological son of his mother Sarah Miller; Emily Clark was her real daughter.

However, Sarah Miller insisted that the black-eyed, black-haired, yellow-skinned Ethan Brooks was the child she carried for nine months, and that she had seen with her own eyes Ethan Brooks crawl out of her belly... So, as the one being raised, Ethan Brooks couldn’t really object.

Dragging Emily Clark to the side of Grasshopper Lake, he took off her leather coat, wrapped the naked, dirty six-year-old girl in his own robe, and roughly washed her face, hands, and feet. Very soon, a chubby, rosy little face appeared before him.

Sarah Miller often said she was a rare beauty among the Uyghurs, and Ethan Brooks was an unprecedentedly handsome man among them, so Emily Clark should be the future number one beauty of the Uyghur tribe!

Ethan Brooks didn’t understand why his purely Tang features would affect the looks of Emily Clark, who had light yellow hair and two green eyes. He felt it was simply a scheme by Sarah Miller to use Emily Clark’s appearance to cover up the origins of Ethan Brooks.

It was a clumsy scheme, but the people in the tribe really believed it. Many women would even swear that when Sarah Miller’s belly was big, they had used their feet to roll Ethan Brooks out of her belly with a wooden stick.

After hearing this legend, Ethan Brooks finally understood why Uyghur people only stayed in their mother’s womb for nine months.

Emily Clark was an exception!

After carrying Emily Clark for nine months, when a group of Uyghur women, led by a shaman, came with wooden sticks to help Sarah Miller give birth, seven-year-old Ethan Brooks stood guard at the tent entrance with a knife, waving it like a madman until he injured the shaman’s buttocks. Only then did he prevent Sarah Miller from having her belly rolled with a stick to get Henry Clark out, and thus Emily Clark was born at full term.

A full-term child is indeed stronger than those rolled out with sticks.

When Henry Clark was just learning to crawl, she could accurately find the ewes with milk in the sheepfold, and instinctively latch onto the udder to drink. After drinking her fill, she would curl up under the ewe’s belly, sleeping warmly with the other lambs...

No matter how many times Ethan Brooks carried her back from the sheepfold, she would always make the same choice whenever she had the chance.

Sarah Miller was very proud. She believed that only a mother as tough as herself could give birth to two such healthy children who hardly needed any care.

As for Ethan Brooks, there was nothing more to say. He had never soiled her with his pee or poop. Even when he was just a little ball of flesh, he knew to hum or cry to express his need to go.

When he could walk, he knew to hold his own bowl to drink sheep’s milk, would look for all sorts of strange foods by himself, and whenever he had the chance, would fiercely pounce into the arms of any woman with milk, pulling open their clothes to look for milk to drink.

With Ethan Brooks as such a shining example, Emily Clark’s habit of seeking out dairy ewes didn’t seem like a big deal to Sarah Miller.

Ethan Brooks found it hard to accept—he knew his own family’s situation. If he hadn’t done those things back then, with Sarah Miller’s rough way of raising children, he wouldn’t have survived to this day.

Fortunately, Emily Clark was a very healthy child. From birth until now, she hadn’t even been sick once. It had to be said that sometimes, silly children really are watched over by the heavens.

Ethan Brooks had done the math with the women around him: for every ten children born to the Uyghurs, two mothers would die in childbirth, and three children would die young.

And that was for children born between spring and autumn; if born in winter, the mortality rate was about a third higher.

And for a baby to survive to Emily Clark’s age of six, the number would be cut in half again.

Sarah Miller, like other Uyghur women, only knew how to give birth, not how to raise children. If it weren’t for Ethan Brooks, Emily Clark would have died eight times over by now.

Rather than saying Emily Clark was Sarah Miller’s daughter, it would be more accurate to say she was Ethan Brooks’s child, since he had basically taken care of her since birth.

“Brother, can we eat marmot?”