Wolf Totem: A Novel (4 page)

The old man sighed. “This spot is a gift to the Olonbulag people and animals from Tengger, our sustenance. In the past, herdsmen made an annual trek to the top of that mountain to worship Tengger and the Mountain God. But with the current political situation, no one has dared go up for a couple of years. But we still worship in our hearts. This is our sacred mountain. Even if there’s a drought and no grass to forage, the mountain is off-limits to herdsmen from spring to autumn. Preserving it is particularly hard on people who tend horses. The wolves also preserve the mountain, and once every five or six years they go on a killing spree of gazelles, their sacrifice to the Mountain God and Tengger. The mountain doesn’t only save people and their animals; it also saves the wolves, who are cleverer than both. In the past the wolves arrived ahead of the people and their animals, and during the day they hid among the rocks on the mountaintop or behind the mountain, where the snow had turned to ice. They came down at night to dig up cows and sheep that had frozen to death. Wolves won’t bother people and their animals as long as they have food to eat.”

Patchy clouds floated above. The old man gazed up into the icy blue of Tengger, a look of devotion on his face.

The snows had come early this year and had stuck, covering the bottom half of the grass before it turned yellow; now the grasses were like greens trapped by ice. The subtle fragrance of tasty grass emerged from the hollow stalks and the cracks in the snow. The smell of grass drew starving gazelles across the border from the blizzard-ravaged neighbor to the north; to them the spot was a wintry oasis—they ate until their rounded bellies looked like drums, making running all but impossible.

Only the alpha male and Bilgee knew that the gazelles had made a tragic mistake.

It was not a particularly large herd. During his first year on the grassland, Chen had often seen herds of ten thousand or more. A cadre at brigade headquarters had said that during the three difficult years in the 1960s, soldiers from northern military regions had come in vehicles and mowed down vast numbers of gazelles with machine guns to supply food to their troops; as a result, they drove the surviving gazelles out of the area. But in recent years, given the tense military situation in the border regions, large-scale hunts had ceased, and the Olonbulag had witnessed the return of gazelles in spectacular numbers. Chen frequently encountered large herds when he tended his flock, a vast sea of yellow close to the ground, passing by his sheep, relaxed and carefree, but causing his animals to huddle together in fear, watching bug-eyed with a mixture of alarm and envy as their wild cousins raced past, free as the wind.

Mongolian gazelles ignore unarmed humans. On one occasion, Chen Zhen had ridden down the middle of a dense herd with the idea of roping one to get a taste of gazelle meat. He failed. The fastest four-legged animal on the grassland, the gazelle can outrun hunting dogs, even wolves. Chen whipped his horse and charged the herd, but they kept passing on both sides, no more than ten or twelve yards away, then flowed back together ahead of him and continued on their way. He could only watch in awe.

The gazelles they were observing now may have comprised no more than a medium-sized herd, but Chen was sure it was too big for a pack of wolves numbering in the dozens. People had told him there is no animal more determined than a wolf, and he was eager to see not only how great the wolves’ appetite and determination might be but also what kind of hunters they were.

For the wolves, this was too great an opportunity to miss. Their movements were slight and slow. When the male gazelles looked up, the wolves flattened out and did not move; even the steam in their breath was light and gentle.

The herd continued its desperate grazing, and the human observers settled in to see what was going to happen.

“Gazelles are a scourge on the grassland,” the old man whispered. “They run like the wind and eat all the time. Just look how much good forage they’ve already gone through. The brigade has done everything it can to keep this pastureland in good shape, but the gazelles will have destroyed nearly half of it in days. A few more herds like this, and the grass will be gone. The snows have been heavy this year, and a blizzard is always a possibility. Without this pastureland in reserve, we’d probably not survive—neither us nor our animals. Luckily, there’s the wolf pack. Within days this herd will be driven off, those that aren’t killed, that is.”

Surprised by this comment, Chen looked at the old man and said, “No wonder you don’t hunt wolves.”

“Oh, I hunt them,” the old man replied. “But not often. If we killed them off, the grassland would perish, and then how would we survive? This is something you Chinese cannot understand.”

“It’s starting to make sense to me,” Chen said. He was getting excited, without quite knowing why. The vague image of a wolf totem formed in his head. Before leaving Beijing two years earlier, he’d read and collected books on the inhabitants of the grassland, and had learned that they revere a wolf totem, but only now did he have an inkling of why they treated the wolf, a beastly ancestor, an animal despised by the Chinese and by all people who tilled the land, as their totem.

The old man looked at Chen; his broad smile turned his eyes to narrow slits. “You Beijing students threw up your yurt more than a year ago,” he said, “but you don’t have enough felt padding around it. We’ll take a few extra gazelles back with us this time and trade them at the purchasing center for some felt. That way the four of you will be a bit warmer this winter.”

“That’s wonderful,” Chen said. “We’ve only got two layers of felt now, and even our ink bottles freeze inside the yurt.”

The old man smiled again. “Well, take a good look, because this pack of wolves is going to hand you a nice gift.”

On the Olonbulag at the time, a full-grown frozen gazelle, meat and hide, sold for twenty yuan, equivalent to a herder’s wages for two weeks. Considered choice material, its hide was used to make pilots’ jackets. But China’s pilots could not get them, since the gazelle hides produced in Inner Mongolia were for export only, a commodity of exchange with the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries for steel, automobiles, and munitions. The choice meat cuts were canned and exported. The remaining meat and the bones were targeted for domestic consumption but only occasionally appeared in butcher shops in the Mongolian banner territories, where ration coupons were required.

In the winter of that year, great quantities of gazelles had streamed across the border, creating excitement among leaders of the various Mongolian banners. Purchasing stations made space in their storerooms for the carcasses. Officials, hunters, and herdsmen were like fishermen who had been told the fish were schooling. Nearly all the hunters and herders had saddled up the fastest horses and were heading out with hunting dogs and rifles to kill as many gazelles as possible. That did not include Chen Zhen, who had his hands full with his sheep and, of course, had no rifle and no ammunition. Besides, a shepherd was given only four horses, while the horse herders had seven or eight, and as many as a dozen for their exclusive use. So the students could only look on enviously as the hunters went out.

A couple of nights before, Chen had visited the yurt of the hunter Lamjav. The gazelles had only been in the region for a few days, yet he had already bagged eleven, once bringing down two with a single shot. For a few days of hunting he had earned nearly as much as a horse herder made in three months. Proudly he told Chen that he’d already taken in enough to supply himself with liquor and cigarettes for a year. After a few more days out on the grassland, he planned to buy a Red Lantern transistor radio, leaving the new one at home and taking the old one to the herders’ mobile yurt. That night, for the first time in his life, Chen had a true taste of the wild grassland. There is no fat on gazelles, and the leanness of their meat, which tastes like venison, can be attributed to their perennial battle with wolves.

Once the gazelles had migrated onto the Olonbulag, the Beijing students were demoted to second-class citizens. In their two years on the grassland, they had learned to tend cows and sheep by themselves, but they were incompetent hunters, and in the nomadic existence of people in eastern Inner Mongolia, hunting ranks higher than tending livestock. The Mongols’ ancestors were hunters in the forests surrounding the upper reaches of the Heilong River who slowly migrated onto the grassland, where they lived as hunter-herdsmen. Hunting was a significant and often a major source of income. On the Olonbulag, horse herders held the highest status among the herdsmen, and most of the hunters came from their ranks. Hardly any of the Beijing students managed to rise to that level, and for those few who did, the best they could hope for was an apprenticeship to a full-fledged herder. And so, on the eve of the big hunt, the students, who had begun to consider themselves a new breed of herdsmen, were left out completely.

After finishing his meal, Chen took the gazelle leg Lamjav had given him and, somewhat dispirited, ran over to Bilgee’s yurt.

Even though the students now had their own yurt, Chen often went to visit Bilgee, whose yurt was larger, nicer, and much warmer. The walls were hung with Mongol-Tibetan religious tapestries, and the floor was covered with a rug that had a white deer design; the tray and silver bowls on the squat table and the bronze bowls and aluminum teapot in the cupboard were polished to a shine. In this remote area, where “heaven is high and the emperor far away,” the Red Guards’ fervent desire to destroy the Four Olds—old ideas, culture, customs, and habits—had not yet claimed Bilgee’s tapestries or rug.

The four students in Chen’s yurt had been classmates at a Beijing high school; three of them were sons of “black-gang capitalist roaders” or “reactionary academic authorities.” They shared similar circumstances, ideology, and disgust for the radical and ignorant Red Guards; and so, in the early winter of 1967, they said good-bye to the clamor of Beijing and traveled to the grassland in search of a peaceful life, where they maintained their friendship.

For Chen, Old Man Bilgee’s yurt was like a tribal chief’s headquarters where he benefited from his host’s guidance and concern; it was a safe and intimate refuge. There he was treated as a member of the family; the two cartons of books he’d brought from Beijing, especially those dealing with Mongol history, in Chinese and in English, had established a close bond between him, a Han Chinese, and his Mongol host, who often entertained guests. Among those guests had been musical performers whose songs were replete with Mongolian history and legends. As soon as he saw Chen’s books, in particular those with maps and illustrations, Bilgee became interested in Mongol histories written by Chinese, Russian, Persian, and other scholars. With his limited Chinese, he took every opportunity to teach Mongol to Chen, wanting to have everything in the books explained to him; he reciprocated by telling Mongol stories to Chen. Over the two years, these conversations in Mongol and Chinese between the two men—one old, the other young—had progressed smoothly.

Chen did not want to leave Bilgee’s yurt, but the quantity of livestock kept growing on the lush pastureland. The number of sheep in his flock, after the birthing of the latest batch of lambs, exceeded three thousand, far more than any one shepherd could tend. So they were divided into smaller flocks, requiring Chen to leave his patron’s yurt and follow his sheep. He and his three classmates set up a yurt and began living on their own. Fortunately, the two camps were close enough that the bleating of sheep and the barking of dogs in one camp could be heard in the other, so they met on their way out in the mornings and back at night. A man could reach his neighbor’s place before his saddle was warm. Chen often visited the old man’s yurt to continue their conversations, but now he wanted to talk about gazelles, and wolves.

Chen parted the door curtains, thick felt sewn into auspicious patterns with camel hair, and joined Bilgee in a cup of butter tea.

“Don’t envy people just because they’ve bagged gazelles. Tomorrow I’ll take you out and you can get a wagonload of your own. I’ve been up in the mountains the past few days, and I know where to find them. This will be the perfect opportunity to get firsthand knowledge of a wolf pack. That’s what you’ve been wanting, isn’t it? You Chinese have the courage of sheep, who survive by foraging grass. We Mongols are meat-eating wolves, and you could use a bit of wolf courage.”

Early the next morning, they traveled to a southwestern mountain slope, hiding themselves to watch. The old man had brought neither a rifle nor a dog along, only his telescopes. Chen had hunted with Bilgee before, but only for fox, and this was the first time he’d gone out empty-handed. “We’re not going to try to bring down a gazelle with a telescope, are we?”

The old man smiled and said nothing. He was always happy when his apprentices came loaded with curiosity and doubts.

Finally, when Chen spotted the wolf encirclement through his telescope, the old man’s hunting plan became clear, and Chen was delighted. Bilgee flashed a crafty smile. Chen forgot the cold the moment he spotted the wolves; blood seemed to race through his veins, and the terror he’d experienced the first time he saw the big wolves vanished.

There wasn’t a breath of wind deep in the mountains; the air was cold and dry, and Chen Zhen’s feet were nearly frozen. The blasts of cold air were getting stronger. If only he had a wolf pelt to lie on! He turned to the old man and whispered something that had been bothering him: “Everyone says that wolf pelts make the warmest bedding you can find anywhere, and the people around here, hunters and herdsmen, kill plenty of wolves. But I’ve never seen them in a herdsman’s home. Why is that? The only pelts I’ve seen are a wolf-skin mat in the home of Dorji and a pair of chaps his father wears over his sheepskin pants, with fur on the outside.”

The old man replied, “Dorji is a northeastern Mongol. They’re farmers who own a few cows and sheep, but they’ve been around Chinese so long they’ve begun following Han customs. People who come here from the outside have forgotten the Mongol gods and their own origins. When someone in their family dies, they put him in a box and bury him in the ground, instead of feeding him to the wolves, so of course they don’t see anything wrong with using wolf pelts as chaps. Here on the grassland, wolf pelts are the thickest and the densest, so there’s nothing better for keeping out the cold. Two sheepskins put together won’t keep you as warm as a single wolf pelt. But we don’t use them as bedding. We respect the wolves too much. Any Mongol who doesn’t isn’t a true Mongol. Out here, a Mongol would freeze to death before he slept on a wolf pelt, since doing so would offend the Mongol gods, and their souls would never go to Tengger. Why do you think Tengger bestows its favors on wolves?”