Wolf Totem: A Novel

by Jiang Rong

  With a sigh, Yang said, “There’s no way a stupid horse can win on the field of battle. But the main reason the horses are stupid is stupid people.”

  Smiles of resignation all around.

  Zhang Jiyuan continued, “A fighting spirit is more important than a peaceful laboring spirit. The world’s greatest engineering feat, in terms of labor output, our Great Wall, could not keep out the mounted warriors of one of the smallest races in the world. If you can work but you can’t fight, what are you? You’re like a gelding, you work for people, you take abuse from them, and you give them rides. And when you meet up with a wolf, you turn tail and run. Compare that with one of those stallions that uses its teeth and its hooves as weapons.”

  Yang Ke was in total agreement. “Ai, the work on the Great Wall was dead labor, while those battles on the grassland were full of life.”

  Gao Jianzhong rode up on an oxcart. “We’ve struck it rich!” he shouted excitedly. “I stole a bucketful of wild duck eggs!” His three comrades ran over and took down a water bucket filled with seventy or eighty duck eggs, yellow liquid seeping out through the cracks of the broken ones.

  “You’ve just wiped out a flock of wild ducks,” Yang Ke said.

  “I wasn’t alone. Wang Junli and a bunch of the others were doing the same thing. Near the southwestern lake, in the grass by a little stream, you couldn’t walk more than ten steps without coming upon a nest of a dozen or so duck eggs. The first people there stole buckets of them. Actually, they saved them from horses that were trampling the grass on their way to the water. The area is littered with eggshells and yolks. What a waste.”

  “Are there any left?” Chen asked. “We can go get more and salt the ones we don’t eat now.”

  “No more around here,” Gao said. “How many do you think were left after four herds of horses had passed by? But there might be some on the eastern shore.”

  “Come on, all of you,” Gao ordered. “Separate the broken eggs from the unbroken ones. I haven’t eaten a fried egg in a couple of years at least. Let’s put away as many as we can. Fortunately, we’ve got plenty of mountain onions in the yurt. Wild onions and wild eggs, a true, and absolutely delicious, wildwood meal. Yang Ke, you go peel the onions; Chen Zhen, you break open the eggs; Zhang Jiyuan, you get a basket of dried dung. I’ll do the cooking.”

  About half of the eggs were broken, giving each of the friends eight or nine. It was a party atmosphere, and in no time the fragrant, oily smell of onion-fried duck-egg pancakes filtered out of the yurt and was spread by the wind. Dogs picked up the scent and crowded up to the yurt entrance, salivating and wagging their tails; the wolf cub strained noisily against his chain, jumping up and down and growling viciously. Chen decided to save a little for the cub to see if he’d eat something fried in sheep fat.

  While the men were gobbling up pancakes, they were interrupted by a shout from Gasmai outside. “Aha, all that good food and you didn’t invite me over!” She opened the door, walked in with Bayar, and pushed the dogs out of the way. Chen and Yang made room for them in the seat of honor.

  Chen handed them both some pancakes and said, “I didn’t think herdsmen ate stuff like this. Here, try it.”

  “I smelled this all the way over at my place, a good thousand feet away, and it made me drool. So here I am, my little mutt and all. Not eat these? I sure do.” She picked up a pair of chopsticks and dug in. “They’re delicious,” she said. Bayar wolfed his down, never taking his eyes off the stove, worried there wouldn’t be more. Herdsmen eat a morning meal of curds, meat, and tea, then don’t eat again until the main meal in the evening. So mother and son were hungry.

  “This is really good,” Gasmai said, “like eating ‘restaurant food,’ without having to go into town. Today I’m going to stuff myself.”

  “I’ve got a bucketful here,” Gao said with a little laugh. “If we run out of broken eggs, we’ll cook the whole ones. You won’t leave hungry, I guarantee it.” Putting the broken eggs to one side, he cracked open half a dozen whole ones and made pancakes just for Gasmai and Bayar.

  “But Papa won’t eat these,” Gasmai said. “He says that eggs belong to Tengger and should be left alone. What that means is, I’ll have to come over here to eat.”

  Chen said, “Last year I was there when Papa asked the family of someone at headquarters for a dozen chicken eggs. What was that for?”

  “One of the horses was sick,” Gasmai said. “Too much internal heat. He pinched the animal’s nose closed so it would raise its head, then broke a couple of eggs against its teeth and poured the contents down its throat. After he did that a few times, the horse was cured.”

  Yang Ke leaned over and whispered to Zhang Jiyuan, “Now we’ve done it. Thanks to us, the herdsmen will start eating things they never used to eat. In a few years, not only swans but even wild ducks will disappear from the grassland.”

  Bayar’s spirits rose with each bite. With grease running down his chin, he said, “I know where there are more of these. Make us one more serving, and tomorrow I’ll take you there. You’ll find plenty in abandoned marmot holes on hillsides. I saw some by a stream when I was looking for stray lambs this morning.”

  “Great!” Gao Jianzhong exclaimed. “There’s a hillock near the stream with lots of holes in the sand, which means the horses will stay clear of the place.” While he was frying the pancakes, he told Chen to break open a few more eggs. In no time, a new thick, oily egg pancake came out of the pan. Gao cut it in two and gave half to Gasmai and half to her son. Sweat beaded their heads as they ate. Oily smoke rose from the pan, into which the next bowlful of eggs was dumped with a sizzle.

  After Chen took out the spatula, he said, “Now I’m going to treat you to something different.” First he put in some sheep fat, then broke a couple of eggs, frying them until they were lightly cooked. Gasmai and her son got up on their knees to look into the pan. They stared wide-eyed at what they saw. Chen gave each of them one of the fried eggs, over which he sprinkled a bit of soy paste.

  “This is even better than the pancakes,” Gasmai said. “Two more, please.”

  “In a minute,” Yang said with a laugh, “I’ll fry you some eggs with leeks, and when you say you’re full, we’ll have old Zhang make a bowl of egg-drop soup. We all have our special dishes.”

  Fragrant, oily smoke filled the yurt as the six people ate until they could eat no more and laid down their chopsticks. The wildwood feasters had gone through more than half of the eggs in the bucket.

  Gasmai said she had to leave; there was much to do in the wake of the recent move. She belched contentedly and said with a laugh, “Don’t breathe a word about this to Papa. Come over to my place in a few days, and I’ll treat you all to a meal of curds mixed with fried rice.”

  Gao reminded Bayar, “Don’t forget to take me looking for more eggs tomorrow.”

  Chen ran out and stuffed a big piece of egg pancake into Bar’s mouth. Bar spat it onto the ground; but after inspecting it, sniffing it, and licking it, he decided it was edible. Beaming happily, he picked it up and ate it slowly, wagging his tail in thanks to Chen.

  Once their guests had left, Chen ran over to see how his cub was doing.

  It was gone! Chen broke out in a cold sweat. Panicked, he ran up close, where he discovered that his cub was hiding in the tall grass. He figured that the two strangers and all those unfamiliar dogs had frightened him. Obviously, he knew instinctively how to hide from danger. Chen breathed a sigh of relief. The cub looked around and, seeing that the strangers were gone, jumped to his feet and began sniffing Chen’s body, heavy with the aroma of fried eggs. He licked Chen’s oily hands.

  So Chen went back inside, asked Gao for half a dozen eggs, which he threw into the pan with plenty of oil, and made egg pancakes for the cub and the dogs. That wasn’t nearly enough to fill them, but he felt a need to at least let them have a taste. Grassland dogs seemed to prefer snacks over regular meals, and giving them snacks was one of the best ways to bond with t
hem. When he was finished, Chen divided the pancakes into four large pieces and three smaller ones. The large pieces were for the three dogs and the cub, the three smaller ones for the puppies. The dogs were still hanging around the doorway, refusing to leave, so Chen held back the piece for the cub, crouched down, and tapped each dog on the head with his spatula to have it wait its turn and not take food from one of the other dogs. He gave the biggest piece to Erlang, who took it in his mouth and wagged his tail spiritedly.

  After the dogs had left to frolic in the grass, and the pancakes had all cooled down, he put the last big piece in the cub’s bowl and walked over with it. Yang Ke, Zhang Jiyuan, and Gao Jianzhong followed, all wanting to see if the cub would eat the egg pancake, something no grassland wolf had ever seen or eaten. “Little Wolf,” Chen called out, “Little Wolf, time to eat.” He’d no sooner placed the bowl into the pen than the cub came running as if it were chasing down a newborn lamb, grabbed the oily pancake in its mouth, and gobbled it down; it took no more than a second.

  The men looking on were disappointed. “I feel sorry for the thing,” Zhang said. “He’s content just to have food in his belly. Look up wolf in the dictionary, and you won’t find the word savor.”

  Looking pained, Gao said, “All those good duck eggs gone to waste.”

  “Who knows,” Chen explained to ease their disappointment, “maybe wolves’ taste buds are in their stomach.”

  That got a laugh out of them.

  Chen went back into the yurt to straighten things up after the move. His friends decided to go tend to their animals, but before they left, Chen said to Zhang, “Want me to grab your horse by the ears to help you climb into the saddle?”

  “No need,” Zhang replied.

  He picked up some clean clothes, borrowed a copy of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, and went outside.

  He mounted up and led the horses in the direction of the mountains to the southwest.

  21

  Chen Zhen saw that several clusters of sheep had left the lakeshore ahead, so he rounded up his flock and led them to the lake. Once they were on the move, he rode over ahead of them. A small herd of horses, having drunk their fill, was standing in the water, resting with their eyes closed, unwilling to return to dry land. Wild ducks and a variety of waterbirds were swimming on the lake, a few of them actually sporting around the horses, flitting beneath their bellies and between their legs. Swans cruised on the surface in the center of the lake away from the horses and on the opposite shore, where reeds still grew.

  Suddenly, the silence was shattered by loud bleating on a sandy ridge on the northwestern shore, as Chen’s sheep smelled the water. In the summer, sheep were watered every other day, and the animals were voicing their thirst. They ran to the lake, raising a cloud of dust. The herdsmen and their livestock had been on the new land slightly more than a week, but the grass near the lake had already been trampled into the sandy soil by all the cattle, sheep, and horses that had drunk there. The sheep rushed into the lake, crowding the horses as they greedily lapped up the water.

  Chen’s sheep had barely climbed to the top of the ridge after drinking their fill when another flock of thirsty animals ran noisily to the lake’s edge, raising another cloud of dust.

  Laborers had set up four or five tents on a gentle slope a few hundred feet from the lake, where dozens of men were hard at work digging trenches. Under Bao Shungui’s direction, they were building a dipping pool for sheep, a wool storage shed, and a provisional headquarters building. Chen saw some of the laborers and members of their family dig trenches and plow plots of land for vegetable gardens. Another group of laborers had dug a stone quarry on a distant hill and were loading bright yellow rocks and flagstone onto large wagons, which were driven back to the work sites. Chen hated to see scars opened on the virgin land, so he turned back to his sheep and herded them off to the northwest.

  The flock crossed a mountain ridge into a grassy basin. Bilgee had asked that the livestock not graze exclusively in the basin; since the summer days were so long, he said, the animals should be taken as far away as possible. That way there would be no need to move again as summer turned to fall. He planned to have the animals make several large sweeps of the basin and its outlying areas to keep the grass from growing out of control and patting down the loose soil as a means of mosquito control. Chen’s flock, forming a crescent, moved slowly toward mountains to the west.

  In the glare of sunlight, the thousand or so sheep and their lambs sparkled like a field of white chrysanthemums, in stark contrast to their green surroundings. The lambs, whose coats were getting fluffy, alternately suckled and grazed the field. Their round tails were filling out and were nearly as big as those of their still-nursing mothers. Chen felt his eyes fill with the golden luster of yellow daylilies, which had just bloomed on the mountainside. Tens of thousands of bushes, two feet tall, offered up large, trumpet-shaped yellow flowers, with long, thin new buds dotting the branches below, ready to open soon.

  Chen got up, mounted his horse, and rode over to an even denser field to pick the flowers, which had been introduced into the Beijing students’ diets: lilies and lamb dumplings, lilies and mountain onion salad, lilies and shredded lamb soup, and more. After going without vegetables all winter, they took to the wild greens and flowers like sheep to grazing land. The local herdsmen were amazed, since wildflowers were not something they ate. Before Chen left the yurt in the morning, Zhang Jiyuan had emptied out a pair of schoolbags, denying him the pleasure of reading while he tended the flock, so he and Yang could bring back a load of wildflowers before they withered and died. He blanched them in boiled water and dried them for the coming winter. In a few days they had already filled a sack half full of dried flowers.

  The sheep grazed on the field behind Chen as he quickly filled a bag with flowers. While he continued to pick, he spotted some wolf droppings by his foot. He bent down and picked up a piece to examine it closely. It was gray, about the length of a banana, and already dry, though he could tell that it was still relatively fresh. He had just sat down to study it when it dawned on him that this must have been a resting spot for a wolf only a few days before. What was it doing there? He checked but found no bones or animal fur, so it wasn’t where it had eaten a kill. Small clusters of sheep often passed through the area, with its tall flowers and dense grass, so maybe this was the wolf’s hiding place, an ideal spot for an ambush. Suddenly quite nervous, he stood up and looked around, happy to spot some shepherds surveying the surroundings while they rested. Since his flock was several hundred feet behind him, he relaxed and sat down again.

  Chen was familiar with wolf droppings, but this was his first opportunity to study them up close. He broke off a piece; inside he found gazelle fur and sheep’s wool, but not a shard of bone. There were a couple of field-mouse teeth and a few calcified chunks of wool. He crumbled the piece in his hand, but that was all it contained. The meat, skin, bones, and tendons of the sheep and mice the wolf had eaten had been completely digested, leaving behind only the fur and teeth. When he looked even closer, he saw that only the coarsest hair had passed through the wolf’s body. No dog had as effective a digestive system as that, he knew, since you can normally find undigested items like bone and kernels of corn in their droppings.

  The efficiency with which wolves, the grassland’s sanitation workers, disposed of everything—cows, sheep, horses, marmots and gazelles, wild rabbits and field mice, even humans—was astonishing. As the animals passed through the wolf’s mouth, stomach, and intestines, the nutrients were removed, leaving behind only bits of hair and teeth, not even enough to feed germs. The grassland remained clean down through the ages thanks largely to its wolves.

  The wildflowers swayed in a breeze. Chen crumbled the last of the wolf dung, which was carried off by the wind, settling to the ground to become one with the grassland, leaving no waste at all. With wolf dung it was truly a case of ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

  Chen was by then deep in thoug
ht. Over the centuries, the herdsmen and hunters of the grassland returned to Tengger with no burial and no markers, and definitely no mausoleums. Men and wolves were born on the grassland, lived there, fought there, and died there. They left the grassland exactly as they found it.

  Every month, or at least once every season, a grasslander was given a sky burial to send his soul to Tengger. Chen lifted his hands to the blue sky and said a silent wish that all those souls were at peace.

  Summer days are dreadfully long on the Mongolian grassland. The sky is light from three in the morning till nine at night. The sheep are not taken out until eight or nine o’clock, after the sun has burned off the frost. At night they are not returned to their pens until after dark, since the period between sunset and darkness is when they eat the most ravenously and fatten up. Tending sheep in the summer takes nearly twice the time as it does in the winter. Summer is the shepherds’ least favorite season of the year. After breakfast, they go hungry until nine o’clock at night; all day long they bake under the sun, fight off the urge to sleep, go thirsty and hungry, and are bored stiff. At the height of summer, the mosquitoes turn the grassland into a torture chamber. Compared to the draining days of summer, the long cold winters are happy times.

  Before being exposed to the hordes of mosquitoes, Chen had believed that hunger and thirst took the greatest toll on people. Herdsmen, on the other hand, tolerated hunger and thirst well, even though most of them were bothered by stomach ailments. During their first summer, the students took dry food along when they let the sheep out to graze, but eventually they followed the local custom of going without a midday meal.

  While Chen was standing there in the tall grass, Dorji rode up and asked how he’d like some roast marmot. Chen salivated over the prospect. "They’re all over the place,” Dorji said. "That mountain ridge to the west is pockmarked with marmot holes. Let’s survey the place today, then lay out a dozen traps tomorrow. We’ll catch some by noon, and we can have roast marmot for lunch. That’ll take care of our hunger and keep us from napping in the middle of the day.” Dorji looked out at the two flocks of sheep, his and Chen’s, and saw that none of the animals were up and grazing. So the two men rode over to the mountain ridge, where they hid behind some limestone boulders, in sight of the sheep behind them and the marmot holes in front. They took out their telescopes. The ridge was still, the dozens of marmot holes seemingly empty; sunlight glistened on the bits of mineral ore in the limestone.