Wolf Totem: A Novel

by Jiang Rong

  The hunting party reached the cave, which had been formed by erosion and was a refuge for all sorts of grassland animals. Petrified eagle droppings were visible on many of the rocks. Bao Shungui scratched his head as he sized up the cave. “Damn!” he said. “If we try to dig it out, there’ll probably be a cave-in, and we can’t smoke it out, because there are too many places where the smoke will dissipate. Any ideas, Batu?”

  Batu probed the cave with his lasso pole. The sound of shifting rocks emerged. He shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do. The only thing that moving the rocks will do is bring them down on us and the dogs.”

  “How deep is the cave?” Bao asked him.

  “Not deep,” Batu replied.

  “Then I say we smoke it out,” Bao said. “You fellows gather some sod. After we light it, we stop up any holes where smoke comes out. I brought some pepper along. That’ll drive it out. Go on, now, all of you! Yang Ke and I will keep watch here. If a hunting party with the best hunters can’t bag a single wolf after three days of trying, we’ll be a laughingstock.”

  The hunters split up and went looking for kindling and dry sod, leaving Bao and Yang at the cave entrance. “This wolf is old and she’s sick, skinny as a rail. She hasn’t got long to live, that’s for sure. Besides, a summer coat has soft fur, and the purchasing station won’t be interested. I say let her go,” Yang said.

  Bao’s face darkened. “I tell you the truth: people are no match for a wolf. I’ve led soldiers into battle, and there’s never been any guarantee against desertion or rebellion in the ranks. But why would a wolf rather die than come out of that cave? I’m not afraid to admit that the Olonbulag wolves are fine soldiers, that even the wounded, the old, and the females can strike fear into a man. But you’re telling me that no one wants a summer pelt, which proves there are things you don’t know. Back where I come from, no one uses a pelt with thick fur as a blanket, because you can get a bloody nose from overheating while you sleep. A light coat is everyone’s favorite. Don’t go soft on me now. In war it’s them or us. You need to back your enemy into a corner and then kill him, giving no quarter.”

  Batu and some of the others walked up with bundles of dry branches; Laasurung and his party came up grasping the hems of their deels, which held sod. Bao piled the kindling up at the mouth of the cave and lit it, while the hunters knelt beside the fire and fanned the smoke into the opening with the hems of their deels. Thick smoke poured into the cave and seeped out between gaps in the rocks. The hunters began plugging up the holes with sod. It was a scene of frantic activity amid the sound of coughing, as smoke emerged from fewer and fewer gaps.

  Bao Shungui threw a handful of half-dried peppers onto the fire, sending clouds of acrid smoke into the cave; the men and their dogs stood upwind. The cave was like the grate opening of a gigantic stove, and pepper smoke soon engulfed it. The hunters had left two small gaps unplugged to release wisps of smoke. When coughs from the old wolf emerged from inside, the hunters gripped their clubs, ready to strike; the dogs were prepared to pounce. The coughs grew more pronounced. But no sign of the wolf. Yang Ke was coughing so hard that tears were running down his face. “I can’t believe her capacity to endure,” he said. “Even the threat of death couldn’t keep a human being in there.”

  Suddenly, the rocks slipped three feet or more, opening up gaps through which the smoke poured out, and before long smoke was emerging from all around. Several boulders broke loose and crashed down the mountain, barely missing the hunters who were fanning the flames. “The cave is collapsing,” Bao cried out. “Get out of the way!”

  The coughing sounds inside the cave stopped and there was no movement. Peppery smoke billowed skyward instead of entering the cave. “It looks like you lost again,” Batu said to Bao. “You were up against a suicidal wolf. She loosened the rocks around her and buried herself. She wouldn’t even give you her coat.”

  “Start moving rocks!” Bao barked angrily. “I’m going to dig that wolf out of there if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Having worked hard for several days, the hunters stayed seated. Batu took out a pack of cigarettes and passed them around. As he handed one to Bao, he said, “Everyone knows you’re not hunting wolves for their pelts, but to eradicate what you consider to be a scourge. She’s dead, so you got what you came for, right? There are only a few of us here, and we could dig till tomorrow and still not get to her. We’re witnesses to the fact that you led a hunting party against a pack of wolves, killing two big ones, sending one over a cliff and suffocating the other in a cave. And don’t forget, summer pelts are pretty much worthless.” He paused, looked around, and said, “Are you all okay with that?”

  They said yes. Bao, who was as tired as everyone, took a drag on his cigarette and said, “All right, we’ll rest awhile, then get out of here.”

  Yang Ke stood stunned in front of the pile of rocks, as if a falling rock had driven his soul out of his body. He seemed about to kneel down and pay his respects to the Mongol warrior inside, but he just stood there stiffly. Finally he turned and asked Batu for a cigarette. After taking a few drags, he raised the cigarette over his head with both hands and bowed deeply toward the rock pile, then reverently wedged the cigarette between a couple of rocks, part of an apparent grave mound. Wispy smoke rose into the air, taking the old wolf’s soul skyward, up into the blue, to Tengger.

  The hunters stood up but did not add their incense to the monument. Mongols considered smoked cigarettes to be fouled; they could not be used to pay respect to the gods. But they were not offended by Yang Ke’s well-intentioned, if unclean, act. After stubbing out their cigarettes, they stood straight and looked up to Tengger; though they said nothing, the purity of their gazes sped the old wolf’s soul to its glory more quickly than Yang’s cigarette had done. Even Bao refrained from smoking more of his cigarette, which burned down to his fingers.

  “Today you’ve seen something new,” Batu said to Bao Shungui. “Genghis Khan’s warriors were like those two wolves, choosing to die in ways that kill their enemy’s spirit. You’re a descendant of our Mongol ancestors, your roots are here on the grassland, and you should be paying your respects to our Mongol gods.”

  Yang Ke sighed with quiet emotion. “Dying can be a show of might,” he said. “The wolf totem has nurtured a willingness to sacrifice one’s life in countless Mongol warriors. Did the spirit of the people wither because of the extermination of the ferocious, magnificent wolf teacher?”

  The hunting party had nearly reached the tent when Bao Shungui said to Batu, “You go on ahead. Boil some water. I’ll go get a swan and treat you to some good food and liquor.”

  “Director Bao,” Yang pleaded, “don’t kill any of those swans.”

  “I have to,” Bao said without looking back. “That’s the only way to purge the bad luck of these past few days.”

  Yang Ke followed him to try to talk him out of it, but Bao’s horse was too fast. Waterbirds, wild geese, and ducks were circling low over the water, unconcerned about the man riding up with his rifle. Seven or eight large swans rose into the air, like a squadron of aircraft taking off in formation, but with wings that fanned the air gracefully; they cast oversized shadows down on the head of Bao Shungui, who had fired three times before Yang rode up. A large white bird fell to the ground in front of Yang, startling his horse, which reared up and threw him into the damp grass on the lakeshore.

  The swan struggled, bleeding profusely. Yang had watched the death scene at the end of the ballet many times, but there was no grace, no beauty in the death throes of the bird he was looking at now. Its feet, like those of a common goose whose neck has been snapped, jerked spastically, and its wings flailed awkwardly as it tried vainly to right itself; the will to live remained strong, even as its life was slipping away. Blood spurted from the bullet wound in its snow white breast. Yang ran to catch it, but it jerked out of his reach time after time...

  Finally, Yang was able to wrap his arms around the swan. Its soft abdo
men was still warm, but the lovely neck had lost its power to form a question mark; now it was like a snake hanging limply across his wrist. He gently raised the swan’s head. A blue-black sky was frozen in its open eyes, as if it were glaring angrily at Tengger. Tears blurred Yang’s vision—a noble, pure, free soaring creature had ended up like a common chicken, killed by man.

  Yang could barely control his grief. The thought of diving in and swimming over to the reeds to sound the alarm for the other swans actually occurred to him.

  That night, as the last hues of sunset faded, Bao Shungui was accompanied only by a pot of boiled swan; no one spoke to him. The hunters ate roasted wild boar; Yang Ke trembled the whole time he picked at the meat with his knife.

  In the sky above the lake, the sad plaints of swans carried on throughout the night.

  Yang was awakened in the middle of the night by the wolf like howls of the dogs. Then they stopped and Yang heard faint, distant, intermittent sounds of mourning—desolate, weathered, and stifling. The bleak chill of the sorrowful howls tore through him. The old wolf that had gone over the precipice hadn’t died after all; after crawling half the night, severely injured, it made it over the mountain and was, no doubt, wailing in front of the burial spot of its mate, heartbroken, soul-stirred, devastated. He surely lacked the strength to move the rocks in order to see his mate one last time. A swan’s lamentation over the death of its mate and the heartbreaking cries of the old wolf came together in pulsating waves of mourning.

  Yang Ke wept until daybreak.

  Several days later, Laasurung returned from headquarters to report that Bao Shungui had taken half a cartload of herbaceous peony roots into town.

  20

  On the highlands, the early-summer sun lit up an archipelago of floating clouds above the basin, so bright the people below could barely open their eyes. The air was filled with the smell of mountain onions and wild garlic as sheep and their lambs grazed the land, heavy and acrid. The people had to blink to moisten their burning eyes. Chen Zhen closely observed the new grassland and the camp, still fearful that the mother wolf would come looking for her cub and take her revenge on his sheep.

  More than thirty yurts belonging to Second Brigade had been thrown up at the base of a gentle mountain slope on the northwestern edge of the basin, the two-yurt hots separated from one another by less than a thousand feet. The camp occupied a small fraction of the area, on the orders of Bilgee and Uljii, as a precaution against attacks by wolves, both from the new camp and the old, even, perhaps, a combined attack. There was no way, Chen felt, that an Olonbulag wolf pack could penetrate the line of defense. If they tried, dogs from all corners would launch a counterattack. That thought lessened his worries, and he squinted a bit to take in the beauty of the grazing land.

  Herds of cattle and horses and flocks of sheep and goats were already making their way onto the new grazing land; what had been virgin land only the day before was now a pasture on which sounds of singing, whinnying, bleating, and lowing were carried on the wind; joy was in the air, emanating from the people, the horses, the sheep and goats, and the cows.

  Chen and Yang’s flock, exhausted after their long trek, was grazing on a slope not far from the men’s yurt. With an emotional sigh, Chen said, “This new summer land and the old one are as different as night and day. I feel a sense of pride, as if we were reclaiming new land somewhere, the rewards far outweighing the losses. Sometimes I think it’s all a dream and that we’ve taken our flock to the Garden of Eden.”

  “That’s how I feel,” Yang said. “This is an almost otherworldly place, a grassland of swans. All that keeps it from being perfect is the presence of Bao Shungui, the Chinese students, and the other outsiders. The Olonbulag shepherds would have no trouble living in peace and harmony with the swans. Just think how romantic it would be to tend our flock as swans glided across a blue sky. In a few years, marrying a Mongol girl brave enough to grab a wolf by the tail, and fathering some half-breed kids who wouldn’t shy away from crawling into a wolf den is all I’d need in life.” He breathed in the smell of fragrant grass.

  “If even a Tang prince wished he could be a grassland Turk,” he said, “why not me? Out here dogs are needed and are loved, unlike places like Beijing, where all you hear is people talking about ‘smashing someone’s dog head.’ For a ‘reactionary academic authority’ like me, a ‘damned cur,’ there’s no place better to put down roots and start a family than the grassland.”

  “You say it’d be better without the Chinese students, but you’re one, aren’t you?”

  “Ever since I prostrated myself at the feet of the wolf totem,” Yang said, “I’ve been a Mongol. These people place the big life of the grassland above their own lives. I can’t help seeing people who come from farming districts as evil. No wonder the nomadic shepherds have fought farmers for thousands of years.”

  Chen said, “Farmers and shepherds have been doing that throughout history, stopping only long enough to intermarry and live together peacefully for a while. Truth is, we’re all descendants of unions between people on the Central Plain and those on the grassland. Uljii said that this new grazing land will serve the people and their livestock for four or five years. He should be reinstated as a reward for what he’s done here. What worries me is whether he and Bilgee have the power to overcome the forces that want to make the grassland theirs.”

  “You’re a dyed-in-the-wool Utopian!” Yang exclaimed. “My father told me once that China’s future lies in reducing its peasant population to under five hundred million. But I’m afraid the population explosion among peasants can’t be brought under control, not by the Mongols’ Tengger and not by our Old Man in Heaven. Over the past two decades, vast numbers of peasants have gone to work in factories, moved into cities, and started school, and then they’ve done all they can to drive the intellectuals into the countryside to become second-class peasants. They forced millions of students like us out of the cities. What power do a couple of Mongols like Uljii and Bilgee have? It’s the mantis trying to stop a wagon.”

  Chen glared at him. “Apparently, you don’t see the wolf as a real totem after all. Do you really know what it is? It’s the spiritual power of one to ten, or a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. It’s what protects the big life of the grassland. Heaven has always seen that the big life manages the little life, that the heavenly life manages the human life. Without heavenly or earthly lives, what kind of tiny life would there be for people? If you truly revere the wolf totem, then you need to stand by heaven and earth, by nature, by the big life of the grassland, and you must struggle as long as a single wolf exists. Trust in the concept that fortunes change. Tengger will protect the grassland. By standing on the side of the big life, the worst that can happen is you’ll die along with the force trying to destroy the big life, and your soul will ascend to Tengger. That is a worthy death. Most grassland wolves die in battle!”

  Yang Ke was silent for a long spell.

  Chen leashed the cub on orders from Uljii. The leash was fastened to a leather collar around the cub’s neck on one end and a metal ring placed loosely around a three-foot mountain elm post that was buried two feet in the ground. A metal cap atop the pole, strong enough to hold an ox, kept the ring from sliding off the post; the cub could run around without shortening the leash or being choked.

  And so a week before the move, the cub lost his freedom, became a prisoner restrained by a five-foot-long metal chain. It pained Chen to watch the little wolf turn his anger on the leash, which he did all that week, his slobber dripping from half its length. Try as he might, he could neither bite through the leash nor uproot the post, and he was forced to pass the days in an open-air circular prison, ten or twelve feet in diameter. Chen kept increasing the amount of time he spent walking the cub to make up for torturing him with a leash. The cub was happiest when a puppy was let into the pen to play with him, though he inevitably wound up sending his playmate scurrying off with a series of yelps and painful bites, and w
as once again all alone. Erlang was the only adult dog who occasionally wandered into the wolf pen, sometimes to rest for a while and let the cub jump on top of him or nibble at his ears or tail.

  The cub’s most important daily activity was staring at his food dish, which rested beside the yurt, waiting impatiently until it was filled and carried over to him. Chen could not tell if the cub knew why he had become a prisoner, but the hateful glare in his eyes was unmistakable, as if he were saying, “The puppies get to run free; why can’t I?” He took his anger out on the dogs, occasionally drawing blood. Given the primitive, nomadic conditions, raising a wolf near dogs, sheep, and men required inhumane treatment. If Chen let his guard down for even a moment, the wolf was likely to attack the sheep or the men, and that would seal his doom. He whispered this to the cub many times, but of course that had no effect. Chen and Yang began to worry that this sort of treatment might adversely affect the young wolf’s development. Depriving him of his freedom by tethering him to a chain removed both the conditions and opportunity for his personality to develop naturally. Would a wolf raised under such conditions still be a real wolf? Chen and Yang felt, however dimly, that they had, as the saying goes, mounted the wolf and didn’t know how to get off. Maybe the seeds of failure had been sown in their experiment from its inception. Yang was inclined to give up, but Chen would have none of it. In truth, Yang too was growing increasingly attached to the cub.

  It was time for the cattle to mate. One of the bulls came frighteningly close to the wolf cub, sending him cowering into a clump of tall grass. Then when the frenzied bull mounted one of the cows, the cub was so frightened he burst out of the grass, trying to get away, but was jerked to a halt by the taut chain, which nearly strangled him; his tongue shot from his mouth, his eyes rolled back. Not until the bull took off chasing another cow did he calm down.

  By this time the cub had more or less gotten used to his prison site and had begun to romp and tumble in his pen. The ground was covered by grass that grew a foot or more, making the pen much more comfortable than his first pen, with its dry, sandy ground. Here he could lie on his back, looking up into the sky, or lazily chew the grass; he could play for half an hour all by himself. So full of vitality, he had found a spot and a sport that would let him come alive, and so he began a regimen of running in the pen several times a day, hugging the outer wall and running around and around, seemingly never tiring.