Wolf Totem: A Novel

by Jiang Rong

  “It’s never been my intention to rid him of his wildness,” Chen said. “What would be the point? I just want to be in contact with a living wolf, to stroke him and hold him, to get closer to him each day, and see if I can figure him out. You can’t know wolves without going into their den. Which means you can’t be afraid of getting bitten. My only concern is that the herdsmen won’t let me raise him.”

  The cub was still trying to get out of his burrow, so Chen reached down, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and lifted him out. Zhang cupped the little animal in his hands and studied him closely as he rubbed his coat. He tried to smooth it down, but when he lifted his hand, the wolf hairs stood up wildly. “I’m embarrassed to admit that here I am, a horse herder who has to come to a sheep’s pen to touch a living wolf. Lamjav and I went out looking for litters twice but came back empty-handed. I’ll bet not one in a hundred thousand Chinese has ever actually touched a living grassland wolf. We hate them, which means we hate whatever they’re good at. Just about the only people who have learned from wolves are the nomads.”

  “In world history,” Chen continued the thought, “nomads have been the only Easterners capable of taking the fight to the Europeans, and the three peoples that really shook the West to its foundations were the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols. The Westerners who fought their way back to the East were all descendants of nomads. The builders of ancient Rome were a pair of brothers raised by a wolf. Images of the wolf and her two wolf-children appear on the city’s emblem even today. The later Teutons, Germans, and Anglo-Saxons grew increasingly powerful, and the blood of wolves ran in their veins. The Chinese, with their weak dispositions, are in desperate need of a transfusion of that vigorous, unrestrained blood. Had there been no wolves, the history of the world would have been written much differently. If you don’t know wolves, you can’t understand the spirit and character of the nomads, and you’ll certainly never be able to appreciate the differences between nomads and farmers or the inherent qualities of each.”

  “Don’t worry,” Zhang said. “I understand why you want to raise this wolf, and I’ll talk to the herdsmen for you.”

  Chen held the cub under his coat and walked over to the dog pen. When Yir saw that a wolf was feeding on her milk, the moment Chen let down his guard, she stood up and turned to bite it. But the cub held on to the nipple and wouldn’t let go, hanging from her belly like a leech, like an empty milk bottle. Yir turned around and around, swinging the wolf with her, trying but failing to bite him. To Chen and Zhang it was comical yet maddening. Chen reached down and pried open the cub’s mouth to make him let go of the teat. “A real bloodsucker,” Zhang said with a laugh.

  Chen held Yir down and stroked her gently to get her to let the little wolf drink. When the cub was full, Chen stood up and said, “I think we should let the youngsters play together.” So they carried the puppies over to dry grass, where Chen set the wolf down among them. The instant his paws touched the ground, he took off as fast as he could, away from the puppies and the men. With his belly rubbing the ground and his bowlegs churning, he looked more like a hairy tortoise than a wolf. One of the male puppies tried to run with him, but the wolf showed his fangs and snarled.

  Chen was surprised. “When he’s hungry,” he said, “anyone with milk is his mother, but when he’s had his fill, there’s no such thing as mother. His eyes aren’t fully open, but his nose is working fine. It’s a wolf’s best weapon.”

  Zhang said, “I can see he already knows this isn’t his real home, that the bitch isn’t his real mother, and that those pups aren’t his brothers and sisters.”

  “When we found him out there,” Chen said, “he already knew how to play dead.”

  They stayed four or five paces behind the cub, following to see what he would do. He crawled several yards over ground covered with patches of snow and dry grass before stopping to sniff the area. He smelled horse dung, cow patties, cow and sheep bones, and whatever else happened to be there—territory-marking dog piss, maybe. His nose led the way, and it wasn’t until they’d followed him several hundred feet that they realized he wasn’t wandering aimlessly, but had a clear objective in mind: he was running away from the yurts, the camp, the pens, and the aura of humans, dogs, smoke, and livestock.

  The cub had a natural stubborn streak, Chen realized. He possessed a nature that was more fearsome and more worthy of respect than other animals. Chen had always held sparrows in high regard, for they were impossible to domesticate. As a child, he’d caught many of them and brought them home as pets. But as soon as they were in captivity, they stopped eating and drinking, refusing to adapt to their new surroundings. Their answer to the loss of freedom was death every time. He never once succeeded in keeping a captured sparrow alive. Wolves were different, he realized. They cherished their freedom, but they cherished life as well. A captured wolf ate and slept as always. Instead of fasting, it gorged itself and slept as much as possible to store up energy. Then it escaped at the first opportunity in a quest for renewed freedom and a new life. Chen felt he was witnessing the rare character and human qualities one saw in gladiators. A people who adopted the wolf’s temperament and made it their totem—beastly ancestor, god of war, and sage—would always be a victorious people.

  Chen was grateful to the cub, whose sturdy little body had the power of transporting him all the way to the heart of a mystery.

  Gombu rode up and told Chen to come with him to pair up the newborn lambs with their mothers. It took the two men no more than an hour to match all the ewes and their lambs, which nursed twice a day, morning and afternoon. Lambs that could not find their mothers would quickly starve. Pairing also gave the shepherds the opportunity to count their flock. To avoid the blistering sunlight, newborn lambs often curled up in marmot burrows, and shepherds could easily lose them if not for the pairings. Chen once went looking for missing lambs after a count and found three of them in marmot burrows.

  Gombu was satisfied with the flock. “We have good grass and water here on the Olonbulag,” he said, “so the sheep have plenty of milk and they know their own lambs. That makes things easy for us. If the grass and water quality were poor, the sheep wouldn’t have enough milk and they’d reject even their own lambs. We’re lucky we have good leaders who understand the grassland and understand wolves. They don’t focus their effort on the flocks, but on the grass and on the pastureland. When people take care of the important business, the lambs pretty much tend themselves. Shepherding is carefree work on the Olonbulag. In a few days, I’ll be able to pair the sheep and lambs by myself.”

  Gombu wasn’t one to go around boasting, but he knew the grassland like the back of his hand.

  15

  Warm, moist spring winds caressed the Olonbulag; massive, blindingly white clouds hung low in the sky. The somnolent grassland sprang to life, transformed into an alternating bright and dark, yellow and white slide show. When the clouds blotted out the sun, Zhang Jiyuan felt as if a cold wind had penetrated his deel. But when the clouds moved on, powerful sunbeams made him feel as if he were baking, sweat oozing from the pores in his face and on his hands, until even his deel felt sun-baked. But then, as soon as he started unbuttoning it to let in some air, another cloud would move in and transport him back to a cold spring day.

  The ice was softening, the snow melting, revealing vast stretches of yellowed grass. Early buds that had appeared before the latest snowfall had turned yellow, with a tinge of green. The air was suffused with the heavy odor of rotting vegetation; spring runoff once again flowed in the streams, down from the mountains to saturate the marshes and create pools in which white clouds were reflected. The Olonbulag seemed to dance in the air.

  Zhang and Batu had been hidden in the tall circle grass for more than an hour, waiting for wolves. The horse massacre, followed by the “false report” in the reedy valley, had made it impossible for Batu to hold his head up among the herdsmen, and the anger building inside him was directed at the wolves. As for Zhang,
since he’d had no success in the encirclement hunt, only a wolf kill would reestablish his reputation. So following several days of rest, they returned to the hillside near the big lake with their semiautomatic rifles. Batu was sure that surviving wolves hated the thought of letting all the remaining horse carcasses sink into the lake. The snow was melting and the water was rising, but there was still some meat on the lake’s edge, where the wolves could get to it, though not for long.

  The pools of water on the mountain, bright one moment and dark the next, made the men’s eyes tear up as they searched the hillside with their telescopes, noting every suspicious spot—black, gray, or yellow. Batu suddenly lowered his head and whispered, “Take a look to the left.” Zhang gently shifted his telescope, holding his breath but unable to keep his heart from racing as he watched a pair of wolves emerge slowly from behind the hill, first their heads, then their necks and chests.

  The hunters’ eyes were glued on their prey. The wolves stopped when the front half of their bodies were out in the open and cautiously surveyed their surroundings. Instead of moving farther out of the tall circle grass, they lay down and kept out of sight, as if they were the hunters, not the hunted. Two men and two wolves lay hidden in the grass, waiting for their chance. The wolves were in no hurry. They were content to see what tricks the humans had up their sleeves, and patient enough to wait till dark.

  Circle grass was the name the Beijing students had given this variety of meadow grass. Commonly seen on the Mongolian grassland, it was prettier but stranger than most grasses. Level stretches of grass on the pastureland or hillsides were notable for occasional patches of waist-high grass, straight and even, like densely packed rice plants or clumps of squat reeds.

  Circle grass wasn’t just attractive; it was also a strange plant that grew in discrete patches. Circle grass, circle grass, a circle of grass, from the outside densely packed, like a curtain of reeds, but empty on the inside, as if nothing grew there. It grew in a true circle, as if laid out carefully with a compass. The size varied, from a couple of hand-spreads to a radius of a few feet. Herdsmen out with their sheep or horses rested on its springy stalks. It didn’t take the students long to appreciate the circle grass, which some of them called sofa grass or armchair grass.

  With its unique shape and construction, it was a natural hiding spot for humans and for wolves, a place either to rest or to set an ambush. Wolves had ruled the grassland much earlier than humans and were the first to discover and utilize circle grass. Batu said they preferred to hide behind patches of the grass, from which they could surprise passing herds of gazelle or flocks of sheep. Zhang Jiyuan had found wolf droppings in the center of patches, proving to him how much they liked such places, and Bilgee said they were hiding places Tengger had given to the wolves.

  Now both humans and wolves were well hidden; the wolves could not see the men, who had no clear shot at the wolves, though they had seen them briefly. Batu was hesitant and Zhang was getting worried. Might the wolves have seen the men earlier, when they’d first moved into the circle grass? One military notion they had taught the Mongol fighters was that on the grassland anything is possible.

  Batu considered the situation and decided against any action. With his eyes on the hill across the way, he told Zhang to commit the features of the other hillside to memory as they quietly backtracked to where they’d left the horses, removed the fetters, and led them down the slope, then turned and headed southwest on foot. Not until they were downwind and far enough from the wolves did they mount up and circle around toward the wolves’ hiding spot. Their horses made no sound on the damp ground, aided by the soughing of the wind.

  Batu carefully charted the hills as they went, and within half an hour they were on the far side of the slope nearest to the wolves. Batu slowly led his horse up the slope. Just before they reached the top, he stopped, but instead of fettering his horse, he wrapped the reins around its front legs and tied a slipknot. Zhang did the same.

  After releasing the safeties on their rifles, they walked ahead, bent at the waist. Once they’d reached the peak, they crawled on their bellies until they spotted the tails and hindquarters of the wolves in the circle grass, no more than a hundred yards away. Their vital spots—heads, chests, bellies—were hidden by the grass.

  Apparently, they were still focused on the spot where Batu and Zhang had come from, since they were looking that way through gaps in the grass, their ears pricked up and turned in the same direction. They were attentive to the rest of their surroundings as well, sniffing the air from time to time to detect signs of danger.

  Batu signaled Zhang to aim at the closest wolf, the one to the left. He’d take the other one. The wind continued to blow, bending the circle grass in a low arch, brushing the stalks against one another, and keeping the wolves well hidden. Zhang closed one eye, and could no longer see the wolf.

  They waited for the wind to let up. Batu told Zhang that when he heard Batu’s gun fire, he was to pull the trigger. Zhang knew that even if he missed, Batu could easily get off another shot. He was, after all, one of the brigade’s finest marksmen; within a range of two hundred yards, his aim was deadly. Many of the hunters said that wolves aren’t worried about a hunter with a rifle at five hundred yards, or even four hundred. But when the distance closes to three hundred or less, they run off. This behavior, they said, came about because of Batu. Less than two hundred yards separated them from the two wolves in the grass, so Zhang calmly took aim on his unmoving target.

  The stalks straightened up in a sudden lull in the wind, but just as the animals’ bodies were exposed, a slender wolf burst out of a patch of circle grass off to the right and ran downhill, in front of the two hidden wolves, which leaped up as if snakebit, pulled in their necks, lowered their heads, and followed the third wolf down the slope. The slender wolf had obviously been standing guard for the other two and spotted the hunters at the moment they had the wolves in their sights. The largest of the three animals, the one being guarded, was no ordinary member of the pack, but one of its leaders. All three ran for the steepest hillside in the area.

  Batu jumped to his feet and cried out, “To the horses!” They ran around to the rear of the hill, pulled the reins loose, and jumped into their saddles. The chase was on. But when they reached the top and looked down the dangerously steep slope, Zhang felt as if he were staring into an abyss, and reined in his horse.

  “Grab the saddle horn and ride!” Batu shouted, showing no fear. With typical daredevil, death-defying Mongol spirit, he turned his horse’s head to one side and raced downhill.

  A thought crossed Zhang’s mind: Courage and cowardice are decided at moments like this. He clenched his teeth and loosened his reins as he raced downhill, normally a taboo among horsemen, especially on unfamiliar territory, where a marmot burrow or a rabbit or field mouse hole could trip up a horse and send it and its rider down to certain injury or death.

  Zhang’s horse tore down the hillside so fast that it felt as if they were in a free fall. The angle was so steep that he could not stay in the saddle without grabbing the horn and leaning until his back was touching the horse’s rump and the stirrups were touching the animal’s ears. He was virtually lying on his mount. He fought to keep his legs close to the horse, a survival trick all horsemen knew. If he lost his courage at that moment, all his desires would go straight to Tengger. Several days later, when he learned that there had been at least half a dozen marmot burrows and mouse holes on that slope, he broke out in a cold sweat. But Batu told him that Tengger favors people of courage and had moved the dangers out of his way.

  When he reached the bottom of the hill, Zhang had nearly overtaken Batu, who looked back, surprised, and smiled. For Zhang, the smile was more radiant than a gold medal.

  Roundup horses on the Olonbulag all experience the same emotional response to a mission such as this—impatience when things are going well and dejection when they’re not. When Zhang and Batu’s horses saw they had shortened the distance
between them and the wolf by a third, their excitement became a stimulant, and at that moment they could have outrun a gazelle. The gap shrank even more before the wolves reached the next hilltop. Batu sized up the terrain and the location of the wolves. “They’re about to split up,” he said. “Forget about the small one and focus on those two big ones. Watch and see which one I shoot, then fire at the rocks in front of them, starting with the one on the right.” They raised their rifles. The horses’ steady gait made it easy for their riders to take aim and fire straight. By this time the wolves knew the strength of their enemy and were running as fast as they could to the hill ahead. Neither the horses nor the wolves could keep up their frenetic pace for long, and Batu was waiting for one of the wolves to peel off in a new direction, which would reduce its chances for survival. If they all took different directions, the one that went to the right was the one he’d take down.

  Seeing they were unable to outdistance their pursuers, the wolves were about to split up, a guarantee that at least one would get away. When the distance had shrunk to about three hundred yards, the ones flanking the head wolf peeled off and ran in opposite directions. Batu fired at the one on the right. He missed. Zhang took aim and pulled off two shots at a spot in front of the wolf; one hit the ground, the other a rock, sending sparks and shards of stone flying. The terrified wolf stumbled, and it no sooner was running again than Batu’s rifle rang out. It crashed to the ground, hit on its right side. Zhang cried out happily, but Batu did not share his delight. “No good,” he said. “The pelt is ruined.”

  Both riders turned to take out after the lead wolf. “Let’s not use our rifles on this one,” Batu told Zhang. “I know another way to bring him down.” Energized when they saw that their riders had dispatched one wolf, the horses ran up the hill with amazing speed, at the cost of considerable stamina; within a few dozen yards, they were gasping and snorting, their speed in rapid decline. The lead wolf, on the other hand, displayed greater talent for climbing by increasing the length of its stride and putting on a burst of speed that not only opened up the distance but also lent it new confidence in its ability to get away. Batu and Zhang whipped their horses and dug their heels into their sides. Unused to being whipped, the horses ran like the breeze, their slobber catching on the wind. But the wolf was running with greater ease by now, without slowing. Zhang looked down at the wolf’s tracks and could tell that its strides were longer than those of the horses, and when he looked up, he saw that it had nearly reached the hilltop; once it crossed the peak, the hunters would not see it again.