Wolf Totem: A Novel (10 page)

His comments were met with silence. He gave the command to head back. The exhausted but happy people pushed the heavy, overloaded carts to help the drivers navigate the hills and ridges, then mounted their horses or climbed aboard the carts and headed back to camp.

Chen Zhen felt the sweat on his body chilling. He could not stop shivering. Everywhere—on the lake and off, on the ridges and the paths through the snow—the humans had left their imprint: bonfire ashes, cigarette butts, and liquor bottles, plus tire ruts all the way back to camp. Chen kneed his horse to ride up to Bilgee. “Papa, this time the wolves lost. Will they seek revenge? You’re always saying they have long memories. They remember their food and their fights—how about their enemies?”

“We dug out a lot of gazelles, but left more than half the number for the wolves. Next spring the wolves will feast on frozen gazelle and won’t stick around to trouble us. Besides, they did us a favor, so we should leave them something. Don’t worry, the wolf leader knows what to do.”

A blizzard swept the area that night, and the students’ yurt sweltered. Chen Zhen put away his copy of
The Secret History of the Mongols
and said to Yang Ke, "The man Bilgee mentioned, the one who picked over the food left by the wolves was Budoncher, Genghis Khan’s great-great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather. Genghis Khan’s family was part of the Borjigin tribe, whose historical founder was Budoncher. Subsequent generations would witness monumental changes.”

“That must mean that if there’d been no wolves, those great war counselors and leaders, there’d have been no Genghis Khan, no golden tribe, and of course no wise and brave Mongol fighting horsemen,” Yang said. “Wolves have certainly played a prominent role in the history of the Mongol people.”

“Why stop there? They’ve played a prominent role in the lives of the Chinese, in the lives of all the world’s people. The arrival of Genghis Khan and his Mongol horsemen on the scene led to a rewriting of the history of China, from the Jin and Southern Song on. So too the histories of Central Asia, Persia, Russia, and India. Gunpowder, invented in China, was introduced to the West by Mongol hordes as they cut their murderous swath through Europe and Asia, bringing down the castle of feudalism in the West and sweeping away all obstacles to the emerging system of capitalism. Gunpowder then made its way back to the East, where it blew open the door to China and, ultimately, ended the reign of the Mongol horsemen and turned the whole world upside down. But the historical impact of wolves has been written off by historians. If Tengger had recorded events, wolves on the Mongolian grasslands would have had their place in the annals of history.”

Gao Jianzhong, the cowherd, could not contain his excitement over the arrival of the largesse. “What are you two doing, dredging up the ancient past? Our first priority ought to be to dig all the gazelles out of the snowbank and get rich.”

Chen Zhen said, “Heaven keeps its eye out for the wolves, and we should be grateful for this cartload of gazelles. The blizzard will blow for three days at least, adding a couple of feet or more to the snowbank and filling in the depressions. Looking for gazelles in that would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.”

Gao walked out of the yurt and looked up at the sky. “It’s really going to blow for three days,” he said when he was back inside. “I should have been there today. Damned if I wouldn’t have planted poles in the largest depressions.” He sighed. “I guess I’ll have to wait till spring. But then I’ll go out, fill up a cart, and personally take it to the purchasing station at the Bayan Gobi Commune. If you two say nothing, no one else need know.”

The livestock made it through the latter half of winter without incident. The Olon wolf pack followed the gazelles far away, where it dispersed. The great blizzard did not come.

Over the lonely winter, when Chen Zhen was neither tending the sheep nor on night watch, he made his rounds of the grassland, searching out tales of wolves, spending most of his time on the legend of the “flying wolves.” Known throughout the Olonbulag, it had recent origins and, as it turned out, was set in the area of Chen’s production brigade. He was determined to get to the bottom of the legend and satisfy his curiosity as to how wolves were able to “fly” on the Olonbulag.

Soon after their arrival, the students had been told by herdsmen that Tengger had sent the wolves down to Earth, which meant they could fly. Over the centuries, when a herdsman died, his body was taken into the wilds and laid out in open view for the wolves to dispose of. The “sky burial” was completed once the wolves had eaten every morsel of human remains. It was called a sky burial owing to the belief that the wolves could fly to Tengger, taking the human soul back with them, just like the magic eagles of Tibet. But when the students labeled this as superstition, one of the “four olds” attacked during the Cultural Revolution, the herdsmen insisted that wolves could fly. As recently as the third year of the Cultural Revolution, they said, a pack of wolves flew into Second Brigade Cherendorji’s stone enclosure, where they ate a dozen sheep and killed more than two hundred. After satisfying their appetite, they flew away. The stone wall was six or seven feet high, too high for a person to climb over, so how did the wolves get in there if they didn’t fly?

Director Uljii had taken all the leaders over to see, including even the head of the police station, Harbar. After taking pictures and measurements, they agreed that the wall was too high for the wolves to jump over, and noted that there were no breaches through which they could have gotten in. Several days of investigation turned up no explanation for how the wolves had gotten in and out. But the herdsmen knew.

The tale had stuck in Chen’s mind for a long time; now, as his fascination with wolves grew, it resurfaced. So he saddled up and rode out to see the wall with his own eyes. After examining it carefully, he was no closer to an explanation than anyone else, so he went to talk to the old-timer Cherendorji.

“I still don’t know which of my idiot sons offended Tengger,” the old man said, “but my family is cursed even today.”

The old man’s son, who had attended middle school, said, “The affair can be blamed on stupid pasture regulations. There were no such walls on the Olonbulag before, but headquarters decided to build stone enclosures in the birthing meadow, both to protect the sheep and to cut back on expenses by reducing the work points given out for night watches. The wolves can’t climb the walls, they said, so there’ll be no need for night watchmen, and everyone can sleep easy at night. So we closed the gate and stayed inside our yurt. That night I heard the dogs bark and I knew something was wrong, as if a pack of wolves was in the vicinity. But since headquarters had said there was no need to go on watch, we didn’t even go out to check. Unfortunately, when we opened the gate in the morning, we were struck dumb by the sight of all those dead and dying sheep. There was blood all over the ground, as thick as two fingers in places, and more on the stone wall. The marks of four fangs stood out on the necks of the dead animals, whose blood had even flowed outside the wall. There were also several piles of wolf dung . . . Later on, headquarters changed the regulations, requiring people who lived near one of the enclosures to recommence night watches, for which work points would be given. More and more stone and rammed-earth enclosures have been built on the birthing meadows in recent years and, since there are night watchmen again, there have been no more stories of wolves flying into an enclosure and eating our sheep.”

But that wasn’t enough for Chen Zhen, who went around asking other herders. All of them—men and women, young and old—told him that wolves could fly. They also said that when a wolf dies, its soul flies up to Tengger.

Eventually, Police Chief Harbar was released from confinement in the banner interrogation unit and sent back to assume his position again. Taking a pack of Beijing cigarettes with him, Chen went to call on the chief to get an explanation as to how the wolves had “flown” in and out of the enclosure.

Chief Harbar, a graduate of the Inner Mongolian Police Academy and fluent in Chinese, said, “The case is closed. Unfortunately, the scientific explanation has no standing on the grassland, and most of the herders don’t believe it. All but a few educated and experienced hunters, who accepted the results of the investigation, were convinced that the wolves could fly. If we respect the beliefs and customs of the local population” he laughed—“then the wolves flew into the enclosure. There’s a bit of truth to that, since wolves do sail through the air a long ways.

“The herders were in a state of anxiety that day,” he went on, “believing that Tengger was angry enough to send down a scourge. They left their herds up on the mountain and rushed back to see what was happening. Women and old men went down on their knees to Tengger. Children were so frightened they didn’t cry even when grown-ups slapped them. Worried that the commotion would adversely affect production, Director Uljii gave me two days to solve the case. I called the cadres together to safeguard the site, but it had already been corrupted. All the clues on the ground outside the enclosure had been trampled on by people and sheep, and I had to examine every inch of the stone wall with a magnifying glass. Finally, on the outside of the northeast corner of the wall, I found two faint, bloody wolf-paw prints. That solved the case. Can you guess how the wolves got in?”

Chen shook his head.

“I determined,” Chief Harbar said, “that one large wolf had leaned its front paws against the wall, rear legs on the ground, and made its body available as a springboard. The other wolves ran full speed, jumped on its back and shoulders, and sailed into the enclosure. From inside, wouldn’t it look like they flew in?”

Amazed by what he was hearing, Chen said, “Those Olonbulag wolves are incredibly smart. Almost as soon as the stone enclosures went up on the grassland, they figured out how to deal with them. It’s like they’re bewitched . . . The herders aren’t that far off when they say that the wolves can fly. And when they fell out of the sky in the midst of the sheep, the flock must have been scared half to death. The rest was easy. After a killing frenzy, they ate their fill, all but the poor wolf springboard on the other side of the wall. It got nothing. It must have been a special animal, devoted to the pack, obviously an alpha male.”

Chief Harbar laughed heartily. “Wrong,” he said. “The way I see it, that wolf flew in and ate just as much as the others. You should know that these wolves have a strong collective spirit; they stick together. It’s not in their nature to abandon one of their own. A wolf on the inside acted as a springboard for another one, which had eaten its fill, to leap back across the wall. Then it acted as a springboard for the hungry wolf to fly into the enclosure and eat its fill. Those two bloody paw prints were left by the second wolf. How else would they have been bloody? The first wolf hadn’t made a kill when it was the springboard, so its paws were clean, no blood. Right? Think about it. They played a neat trick on the people. The pack was inside the enclosure, where it killed at will. The people built the wall to keep the wolves out, but wound up keeping the sheepdogs out instead. I guarantee you that Cherendorji’s dogs’ anger pushed their noses out of joint. They weren’t smart enough to follow the wolves’ example; nor would they if they could have, because once they flew inside, they’d have been no match for the smarter wolves.”

“They’re smarter than me too,” Chen said. “But one problem remains. How did the last member of the pack get out safely? Where was its springboard? ”

The question delighted Chief Harbar. “People really are stupider than wolves,” he said. “That’s what puzzled everybody back then too. That is, until Director Uljii went into the enclosure, sloshing through all the blood. He discovered a pile of six or seven sheep carcasses up against the northeast wall, and everyone assumed that the last wolf was one of the smartest and most powerful pack leaders. All by itself, it had made a springboard out of a pile of sheep carcasses and flown out of the enclosure. There were those who didn’t think one wolf could have managed it alone, and that several of them had done the piling, then jumped out. When it was all over, Director Uljii summoned the team leaders to the site and described to them how the wolves had leaped into the enclosure, and back out. That brought a sense of calm to the pasture. Cherendorji was not punished, but Director Uljii made a self-criticism, acknowledging that he’d underestimated the wolves, that he’d taken them too lightly.”

Chen Zhen’s hair stood on end. Although he accepted the chief’s conclusion, from that day on fantastic images of flying wolves frequently visited his dreams, and he often woke up drenched in cold sweat. No longer did he treat grassland legends simply as entertainment.

Several days passed, and Chen decided to get a close look at the brigade’s two open-air sky-burial sites. One was on the northern slope of Mount Chagantolgai, the other on the northeastern slope of Black Rock Mountain. At first glance the two burial sites looked pretty much like other hillside grazing land. But up close, there were distinct differences. Both were far from the ancient nomadic trails, in a bleak location north of the grasslands’ sacred mountains, close to wolf territory and to Tengger, thereby shortening the distance that souls had to travel to reach heaven. In addition, the ground was rocky and uneven, bumpy enough for the carts.

For centuries on the Olonbulag, when a herder died, people stripped him naked and tied his body up in a roll of felt, although sometimes they left the corpse clothed so they could forego the felt. Then they loaded the corpse onto a cart on which a long board had been laid across the shafts and made secure. In the predawn hours, two senior male members of the family, each holding one end of the board, drove the cart to the sky-burial site, where they whipped their horses into a gallop. Inevitably, the deceased bounced out of the cart, and that was the spot where the soul would return to Tengger. The two relatives dismounted and, if the corpse was naked, unrolled the felt and lay the deceased out on the grass, facing the sky, exactly the way he (or she) came into the world, naked and innocent. At that moment, the deceased belonged to the wolves, and to the gods. Whether or not the soul of the deceased would enter Tengger depended on the virtues, or their lack, of the life lived. Generally speaking, that would be known within three days. If, by then, nothing but bones was left of the corpse, the soul of the deceased had entered Tengger. But if the deceased remained more or less whole, the family was thrown into a panic. There were, however, many wolves on the Olonbulag, and Chen had never heard of a single person whose soul had not entered Tengger.