Wolf Totem: A Novel

by Jiang Rong

  The team dug a path to allow the carts down off the ridge, and when the lead cart reached a point where it could go no farther, a line of carts stretched out behind it. The men got out and shoveled away the snow around them so that they could unload the carts.

  The men walked up to Bilgee. “All of you, see how the snow off to the west has frozen solid?” he said. “There aren’t many holes there, but there are a lot of gazelle droppings and tracks, and that means that many got away.”

  The sheepherder Sanjai said with a laugh, “I can see that wolves miscalculate sometimes too. If the alpha male had sent four or five wolves over here to close off this route, those gazelles wouldn’t have gotten away so easily.”

  “If you were the alpha male,” Bilgee snorted, “you’d starve to death. If you kill off all the gazelles at one time, what will you eat the following year? Wolves aren’t greedy like humans. They know how to figure things out, big things!”

  “There are too many gazelles this year,” Sanjai said. “You could kill a thousand more and still have plenty left. I want to get my hands on enough money to build a new yurt and get married.”

  The old man glared at him. “When your sons and grandsons get married and the gazelles are gone, then what? You young people are getting more like those outsiders all the time.”

  Seeing that the women had unloaded the carts and dug paths to the deep snow by clearing out troughs the wolves had made when dragging the gazelle carcasses through the snow, and that they’d also built up a snowbank, Bilgee looked skyward and chanted something. Chen Zhen guessed that he was asking Tengger for permission to go out in the snow and bring up the dead gazelles.

  The old man closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again and said, “There are plenty of frozen gazelles at the bottom of the snow, so don’t get greedy. When you’re out there, first free the surviving animals, all of them, before coming back to dig out the frozen ones. Tengger didn’t want those animals to die, so we must save them.” He lowered his head and said to Chen Zhen and Yang Ke, “When Genghis Khan finished an encirclement hunt, he let a small number of animals go. The Mongols have fought like that for centuries, and the reason we can have these hunts year after year is that, like the wolves, we don’t kill off all the prey.”

  Bilgee assigned gazelle collection sectors to each family, then let them go off and work on their own. Everyone followed hunting custom by leaving the nearest and most plentiful holes for the students and for Bilgee, who led Chen and Yang over to his cart, where they unloaded two large rolls of felt, each about two yards wide and four yards long. They appeared to have been sprayed with water beforehand, for they were frozen stiff. Chen and Yang each dragged one along the cleared path, while Bilgee carried a long birch club, tipped with a metal hook. Batu and Gasmai also carried large rolls of felt to the deep snow; little Bayar walked behind his parents with a hook over his shoulder.

  After they reached the edge of the deep snow, Bilgee had Chen and Yang spread one of the rolls of felt over the crusty snow, then asked Yang, the heavier of the two, to see if it could sustain his weight. It was like a gigantic skateboard. Yang stepped onto the felt, drawing crunching sounds from the snow under it, but no signs of danger. He jumped up and down. The felt sank beneath his feet slightly but not perilously. The old man quickly made him stop. “Don’t do that when we’re out on the deep snow. If you break through the felt, you’ll become a frozen gazelle yourself, and that’s no joke. Now then, Chen Zhen is lighter than you, so I’ll go dig out a couple of gazelles with him. After that, you two can go out on your own.”

  Yang jumped off and helped the old man onto the felt. Chen followed. The felt easily withstood the weight of the two men and looked as if it would hold up under the added weight of a couple of gazelles. Once they were steady, they dragged up the second roll of felt and laid it out in front of the one they were standing on. They squared the two pieces and then stepped onto the second piece. After laying down the hooked pole, they repeated the process, moving the first piece out in front of the second. This they did over and over, as if piloting a pair of felt boats, gliding toward a living gazelle.

  At last, Chen Zhen was aboard one of those marvelous creations, which grassland inhabitants had devised to transport themselves across the snow and avoid calamitous blizzards. Countless Mongol herdsmen had ridden these boats over the millennia, escaping the snowy abyss and rescuing vast numbers of sheep and dogs. It had also allowed them to drag out victims of hunts by wolves and humans and to claim spoils of war abandoned on snow lakes. Rather than keeping this Mongol secret from an outsider, Bilgee was teaching the Beijing student how to use it. Chen Zhen thus had the good fortune to be the first Han Chinese to actually navigate one of those ancient, primitive boats.

  From time to time, as the felt boat picked up speed, the crusty snow beneath them cracked and crunched, and Chen felt as if he were riding on a magic carpet, gliding across the snowy whiteness below, trembling with fear, excited by a sense of danger, floating like an immortal, and immensely grateful to the wolves and human inhabitants of the grassland for introducing him to an almost mythical sort of primitive life. Eight felt boats, sixteen flying carpets, converged on the snow lake as if chasing one another, raising clouds of powdery snow and sprays of ice. Dogs barked, people shouted, Tengger smiled. Suddenly a heavy cloud passed overhead, sending the temperature plummeting. Snow that had begun to melt was immediately transformed into brittle ice, which hardened the crusty surface and tripled the degree of safety in retrieving gazelles, with no need to change tactics. The men took off their sunglasses, opened their eyes wide, and looked up into the sky. “Tengger! ” they shouted joyfully. “Tengger!” Now the boats picked up speed, their pilots emboldened, and at that moment Chen actually sensed the existence of the Mongols’ eternal Tengger, which once more caressed his soul.

  Then, without warning, shouts of joy from Yang Ke and Bayar erupted behind them. Chen turned to look. “We got one!” Yang and Bayar shouted together. “We got one!” Chen trained his telescope on them and saw that somehow, under Bayar’s direction, Yang had dug a large gazelle out of the snow. They were dragging it by its leg back to the cart, while others were running up with shovels over their shoulders.

  The felt boat had traveled far from the safety of the shore and was getting closer to one of the gazelles, a pregnant female with a look of fear and hopelessness in her eyes, an almost prayerful look. Surrounded by holes in the snow, she was standing on a crusty spot no bigger than a small table, which could give way at any moment. “Slide the hook over slowly,” the old man said. “Don’t frighten her. We’re dealing with two lives here. Life on the grassland is hard for us all, and it’s sometimes important to spare lives.”

  Chen nodded, lay down on his belly, and lightly moved the felt in front past the holes until it was up next to the female gazelle’s feet. The crust was holding. Maybe the animal had been rescued before, or maybe she recognized a slim chance of survival for the fetus she was carrying, but she leaped onto the felt and immediately fell to her knees, quaking all over. She seemed paralyzed with exhaustion, nearly frozen, and frightened out of her wits.

  Chen breathed a sigh of relief as the two men stepped lightly onto the front sheet of felt and carefully dragged the rear sheet around the holes in the snow, pushing it to the west, where the snow was harder. After repeating the maneuver a dozen or so times, they reached a gentle slope where holes in the snow were replaced by gazelle droppings and tracks. “All right,” the old man said, “let her go. If she falls in now, it will be because Tengger wanted her to.”

  Chen approached the gazelle slowly and looked into her eyes. He didn’t see a gazelle; he saw a docile deer about to become a mother. She possessed motherly beauty in her big, tender eyes. He rubbed the top of her head; she opened her eyes wide, now seeming to beg for mercy. Chen stroked the helpless, feeble creature kneeling at his feet, and felt his heart shudder. Why did he not strive to protect these warm, beautiful, peace-loving herbivores
instead of gradually moving closer to the wolves, whose nature was to kill? Having grown up hearing tales that demonize wolves, he said without thinking, “These gazelles are such pitiful creatures. Wolves are evil, killing the innocent, oblivious to the value of a life. They deserve to be caught and skinned.”

  Old Man Bilgee’s expression changed abruptly, and Chen nervously swallowed the rest of what he was about to say. He knew he’d offended the old man’s deities and the grassland inhabitants’ revered totem. But the words were out of his mouth, and there was nothing he could do about that now.

  Glaring at Chen, the old man said angrily, “Does that mean that the grass doesn’t constitute a life? That the grassland isn’t a life? Out here, the grass and the grassland are the life, the big life. All else is little life that depends on the big life for survival. Even wolves and humans are little life. Creatures that eat grass are worse than creatures that eat meat. To you, the gazelle is to be pitied. So the grass isn’t to be pitied, is that it? The gazelles have four fast-moving legs, and most of the time wolves spit up blood from exhaustion trying to catch them. When the gazelles are thirsty, they run to the river to drink, and when they’re cold, they run to a warm spot on the mountain to soak up some sun. But the grass? Grass is the big life, yet it is the most fragile, the most miserable life. Its roots are shallow, the soil is thin, and though it lives on the ground, it cannot run away. Anyone can step on it, eat it, chew it, crush it. A urinating horse can burn a large spot in it. And if the grass grows in sand or in the cracks between rocks, it is even shorter, because it cannot grow flowers, which means it cannot spread its seeds. For us Mongols, there’s nothing more deserving of pity than the grass. If you want to talk about killing, then the gazelles kill more grass than any mowing machine could. When they graze the land, isn’t that killing? Isn’t that taking the big life of the grassland? When you kill off the big life of the grassland, all the little lives are doomed. The damage done by the gazelles far outstrips any done by the wolves. The yellow gazelles are the deadliest, for they can end the lives of the people here.” The old man’s wispy goatee quivered, worse than the gazelle at their feet.

  Chen Zhen was deeply moved by the old man’s monologue; it beat on his heart like a war drum, persistent and painful. The inhabitants of the grassland were far ahead of any race of farmers not only in terms of battle strategies and strength of character but in their modes of thought as well. This ancient logic went to the core of why, over millennia, there has been constant and violent conflict between the carnivores and the herbivores. The old man had delivered his monologue as if he were standing on the Mongol plateau and looking down on the plains of Northern China: commanding, wolf fangs bared, forceful and resonant, pointed and convincing. Chen, who had been a skilled debater, could say nothing. Much of his worldview, based on the Han agrarian culture, crumbled in the face of the logic and the culture of the grassland. The nomadic inhabitants safeguarded the “big life”—the survival of the grassland and of nature were more precious than the survival of people. Tillers of the land, on the other hand, safeguarded “little lives”—the most precious of which were people, their survival the most important. But, as Bilgee had said, without the big life, the little lives were doomed. Chen repeated this over and over, and it pained him somewhat. But then he was reminded of the large-scale slaughter of tillers of the land by nomads throughout history, and the actions they took to return crop-lands to pastureland, and the doubts returned. He’d always considered these actions to be backward, regressive, and barbaric. But he was forced to reconsider his position after being scolded by the old man, who had employed the yardstick of big and little life. Both Easterners and Westerners all refer to the land as the mother of humanity. How then can anyone who does injury to Mother Earth be considered civilized?

  Timidly, he asked, “Then why is it so important for you to free this gazelle?”

  “Gazelles attract wolves,” the old man said. “Wolves hunt the gazelles, and that makes for fewer losses of cows, sheep, and horses. The gazelles also provide extra income for the herdsmen. In fact, many Mongols rely on what they earn from hunting gazelles to build their yurts, get married, and have children. Half of a Mongol is hunter. If we could not hunt, our lives would be like meat with no salt, tasteless. We Mongols go crazy if we can’t hunt, partly because that safeguards the big life of the grassland. We hunt animals that eat our grass many times more than we hunt animals that eat meat.” He sighed. “There are so many things you Chinese don’t understand. You read books, but what you find in them is false reasoning. Chinese write their books to advocate Chinese causes. The Mongols suffer because they can’t write books. If you could turn into a Mongol and write books for us, that would be wonderful.”

  Chen nodded as he thought back to all the fairy tales he’d read as a child. The “gray wolves” were stupid creatures, greedy and cruel, while foxes were clever and likable. Not until coming to the grassland did he realize that in nature there is no wild animal that has evolved more highly or more perfectly than the gray wolf. Books, and especially fairy tales, he saw, often misled people.

  The old man helped the gazelle to her feet and nudged her out onto the snow, in a spot where the tips of a few weeds poked through the surface. The hungry pregnant gazelle bent down and gobbled them up. Chen hurriedly pulled up the felt. The gazelle took a few wobbly steps, spotted the tracks of other gazelles, and ran off toward the ridge without looking back; she quickly vanished in the mountains.

  Batu and Gasmai also brought up a live animal, a half-grown gazelle. Gasmai muttered, “Huolehei, huolehei” (Mercy, mercy), as she picked it up in her arms, set it down on the snowy ground, and sent it off running toward the ridge with a pat on its rump.

  Chen gave Gasmai a thumbs-up. She laughed and said, “Its mother fell into a hole in the snow, and it just kept running around, not wanting to leave. We had a terrible time trying to catch it, until we managed to hold it down with our poles.”

  The other snow boats drew near, and the surviving gazelles on the snow lake eventually formed a small cluster that went over the mountain ridge and disappeared. The old man said, “Those animals have learned something here. In the future, the wolves won’t be able to bring them down.”

  4

  Finally, the people were able to claim their well-deserved New Year’s provisions. The freezing air over the snow lake was becom-ing heavier, the snow on the surface harder. The old man said to the hunters, “Tengger is urging us to move quickly.” So the men ran to their spots, and the hunting ground once again steamed with exuberance. Bilgee led Chen Zhen to an average-sized depression in the snow, where they stopped. “Don’t look for the largest depressions,” he said, “because they usually contain seven or eight suffocated gazelles, and all that heat keeps them from freezing right away. As the heat builds up overnight, the animals get bloated, their legs turn rigid, and the skin over their abdomens turns purple. As much as half the meat on them is bad by the time they finally freeze. So what you get is a frozen gazelle with half its meat inedible. At the purchasing station, you’ll get less than half the price of a whole gazelle, money for the hide only, not a cent for the meat. But rotting meat is the wolves’ favorite, and the gazelles buried here will be on their mind all winter. So we’ll leave the choice wolf food for the wolves.”

  The old man lay down on the felt and thrust his hooked pole into the depression, which was at least six feet deep. He probed and probed until he abruptly jerked the pole upward. “I’ve hooked one,” he said to Chen. “Help me pull it up.” They began raising the animal, dropping it back a little between pulls to let the displaced snow fill the gap beneath it. They stood on the felt, bending over to pull the pole up; before long, the snow-covered head of a dead gazelle broke the surface. The hook had caught the animal in the throat, which preserved the integrity of the hide. Chen bent over, grabbed the gazelle (which weighed fifty or sixty kilos) by the head, and pulled it onto the felt. It was completely frozen, its abdomen neither di
stended nor purple; it had died and frozen quickly. “A perfect specimen,” the old man said. “It’ll bring the highest price.”

  “There are more down there,” he said, taking a deep breath. “You try to snag one. It’s like hooking a bucket at the bottom of a well. When you’ve found the right spot, pull with all your might. Don’t hook it where you’ll spoil the pelt and lower the price.” Chen agreed eagerly, took the pole, thrust it into the depression, and began to probe. He could feel two or more gazelles down there but kept moving the pole around to outline the shape of one of them. When he felt the throat, he jerked the pole upward until it felt well snagged. At long last, Chen had caught a “big fish” in a snow lake on the Mongolian grassland. It too weighed in at fifty or sixty kilos, a quarry that could outrun even the fastest horse. Filled with excitement, he shouted to Yang Ke, who was still on the lakeshore, “Look, I caught one, a great big one! It was quite a fight!”

  “Come back here, would you?” Yang Ke replied, fit to be tied. “Come back and let me have a shot at it! And let Papa get some rest.”

  Excited shouts rose on the lake and on the slope as large gazelles with plenty of meat and unbroken hides were brought to the surface and, one after the other, snow rafts sped to the shore. Some of the fastest workers were already out on their second voyage. The raft manned by Batu, Gasmai, and Lamjav was the most efficient. They snagged the largest gazelles unerringly and with amazing speed. When they pulled up medium or small-sized animals, or full-grown ones with distended or purple abdomens, those that would not bring in good prices, they tossed them back down into the empty depression. A rich harvest, normally only seen in the springtime, when baby lambs are born, spread across the barren, snowy plateau. Even predators sometimes turn into prey, Chen thought with grim satisfaction.