Wolf Totem: A Novel (5 page)

“Didn’t you say that wolves are the protective spirits of the grassland? ” Chen Zhen asked.

“Right,” the old man said, his wide smile slitting his eyes. “That’s it exactly. Tengger is the father, the grassland is the mother, and the wolves kill only animals that harm the grassland. How could Tengger not bestow its favors on wolves?”

There was movement in the wolf pack, and the two men trained their telescopes on a pair of wolves that had looked up. The animals quickly lowered their heads. Chen searched through the tall grass but saw no more movement by the wolves.

The old man handed his glass to Chen so that he could observe the situation with a full pair of binoculars. The original double-tube glass was Soviet military issue. Bilgee had found it on the Olonbulag twenty years earlier, on an old battlefield from the Soviet-Japanese war. During World War II, a major battle between the Russians and the Japanese had occurred nearby to the north. Toward the end of the war, the Olonbulag had been the primary military artery for the Russo-Mongolian army into Manchuria. Even now there were deep ruts left by tanks, as well as the hulks of Russian and Japanese tanks and armored vehicles.

Nearly all the old herders owned Russian or Japanese bayonets, canteens, spades, helmets, binoculars, and other military equipment. The long chain Gasmai used to tether calves came from a Russian army truck. But of all the military equipment left behind by the Russians and the Japanese, binoculars were the herders’ favorite and had become an important tool for production.

The herdsmen, who treasured things they could not produce themselves, usually took the binoculars apart to make a pair of “telescopes,” for the reduced size made them easy to carry and doubled their usage. “These have helped us in hunting,” Bilgee said, “and have made it easier to find lost horses. But the wolves’ eyesight seems to have improved, and if you observe a wolf through one of these things, sometimes you’ll see that the he’s looking right back at you.”

One day after Chen had been living in the old man’s yurt for six months, Bilgee took a telescope out of the wagon box and handed it to him.

The Russian telescope was old and the copper nonskid surface had been worn smooth in places, but the powerful lens was of the highest quality. Chen treasured the gift, which he wrapped in red silk, using it only when he was helping cowherds run down strays or horse herders find lost horses, or when he went hunting with Bilgee.

Chen surveyed the area through his telescope; his latent hunting instincts were awakened as he looked through his “hunter’s eye.” These hunting instincts had awakened too late in his life, he felt, and he was saddened to have been born into a line of farmers. Farmers had become as timid as sheep after dozens, even hundreds, of generations of being raised on grains and greens, the products of farming communities; they had lost the virility of their nomadic ancestors, going back to the legendary Yellow Emperor. No longer hunters, they had become the hunted.

The wolf pack still showed no signs of attacking, and Chen was beginning to lose patience over their extraordinary ability to hold back. “Are they going to complete the encirclement today?” he asked. “Are they waiting until it gets dark to attack?”

“War demands patience,” the old man replied softly. “Opportunities present themselves only to the patient, man and beast, and only they take advantage of those opportunities. How do you think Genghis Khan was able to defeat the great armies of the Jin with so few mounted warriors? And all the nations that fell to him? Displaying only the power of wolves isn’t enough. You must also display patience. Even the largest and mightiest armies can stumble. If a mighty horse stumbles, it is at the mercy of even a small wolf. Without patience, you are not a wolf, you are not a hunter, and you are not Genghis Khan. You are always saying you want to get an understanding of wolves and of Genghis Khan. Well, then, lie there and be patient.”

There was an angry edge to the old man’s comment. So Chen tried to cultivate a bit of patience. He trained his telescope on a wolf he’d observed several times already. It lay there as if dead. After a few moments, the old man softened his tone and said, “After lying here all this time, have you figured out what the wolves are waiting for?”

Chen shook his head.

“They’re waiting for the gazelles to eat their fill and doze off,” Bilgee said.

“Are they really that smart?” Chen asked in amazement.

“You Chinese don’t know a thing about wolves. People aren’t as clever as they are. Here, I’ll test you. Do you think a single wolf, even a large one, can bring down a gazelle?”

Chen thought a moment before answering: “No, you’d need three, two to chase it and the third lying in ambush. No wolf could do it alone.”

The old man shook his head. “Would you believe that one ferocious wolf can bring down a gazelle all by itself?”

“Really?” Chen said, finding it hard to believe. “I can’t imagine how.”

“Wolves have developed a special skill. In the daylight, a wolf will concentrate on a single gazelle but do nothing until nightfall, when the gazelle will look for a place with tall grass out of the wind to lie down and sleep. That still isn’t the time to strike, because even though the gazelle is asleep, its nose and ears remain alert. At the first sign of danger, it will leap up and run off, and the wolf won’t be able to catch it. So the wolf waits, all through the night, lying nearby. At sunrise the gazelle gets up with a full bladder, and now the wolf is ready to pounce. A gazelle can’t urinate while it’s running, so before it’s gone far, its bladder bursts, its rear legs cramp up, and it stops. You see, a gazelle can run like the wind, but not all the time, and wise old wolves know that’s when they can bring one down alone. Only the cleverest gazelles are wise enough to forsake the warmth of sleep to get up to relieve themselves at night. They never have to worry about a wolf running them down. Olonbulag hunters get up early in the morning to claim gazelles taken down by wolves, and when they open up their bellies, there’s urine everywhere.”

Chen Zhen laughed softly. “I couldn’t have come up with that strategy under the threat of death. That’s remarkable. But Mongol hunters are crafty too!”

The old man laughed. “We’re the wolves’ apprentices, so we have to be.”

Finally, most of the gazelles looked up. Their “drums” were tauter than ever, more than a night with a full bladder. Some were so full their legs were splayed in four directions. The old man looked through his telescope and said, “They’re so full they can’t run. Watch closely. It’s time for the wolves to strike.”

Chen tensed. The pack was slowly tightening the semicircle; there were now wolves to the east, north, and west of the gazelles. A line of mountains lay to the south. Chen assumed that wolves on the other side of the mountain were waiting for the main body to drive the gazelles toward where they lay in wait, and the slaughter would begin. Herdsmen had said that wolves often employ this tactic. “Papa,” he said, “how many wolves are there behind the mountains? Enough to close the circle on all these gazelles?”

“There are no wolves behind the mountain,” the old man replied with a sly smile. “The alpha male wouldn’t send any over there.”

“Then how will they close the circle?” Chen asked doubtfully.

“At this time, in this place, they can get more with a three-sided encirclement than a full circle.”

“Then I don’t understand what they’re doing.”

“One of the biggest and best-known snowbanks on the Olonbulag is on the other side of that mountain. The grazing land here is a windward slope, and during a blizzard the snow is blown to the other side of the mountain, turning it into a basin with snow from a depth of waist-high to higher than a flagpole. Pretty soon the wolves will drive the herd to the other side of the mountain. As they press forward, they’ll tighten the circle. What do you think it will look like?”

Everything turned dark for Chen, as if he’d fallen into a snowdrift that kept out all light. If he’d been a Han soldier in ancient times, he was thinking, he could not have seen through this strategy, this trap. Now he began to understand why the great Ming general Xu Da, who had driven the Mongols back onto the grasslands, had won every battle he fought south of the Great Wall but had seen his armies annihilated on the grassland. He also understood why the other great Ming general, Qiu Fu, with his hundred thousand soldiers, had driven the Mongol hordes to the Kerulen River in Outer Mongolia, only to be ambushed. When he was killed, his army’s morale plummeted, and all the Han soldiers were taken prisoner.

“In war,” the old man said, “wolves are smarter than men. We Mongols learned from them how to hunt, how to encircle, even how to fight a war. There are no wolf packs where you Chinese live, so you haven’t learned how to fight. You can’t win a war just because you have lots of land and people. No, it depends on whether you’re a wolf or a sheep.”

The attack was launched. The wolf with the gray neck and chest led two large wolves on the western flank in a lightning assault on a hilly protuberance near the gazelle herd. This, obviously, was the final gap in the three-sided encirclement. By occupying this hill, the wolves completed the encirclement. This sudden action was like sounding the bugle for all three sides to charge. The wolves, which had patiently lain in wait for so long, rose up out of the grass and charged the gazelles from the east, west, and north. Never had Chen Zhen witnessed such a terrifying attack. When men charge the enemy, they shout “Charge!” or “Kill!” Dog attacks are accompanied by frenzied barking to intimidate and instill fear. But when wolves attack, they do so in silence—no shouts, no wolfish howls. Warrior wolves!

The wolves flew out of the tall grass like torpedoes armed with the sharpest, most fearsome teeth and menacing glares, heading straight for the herd.

Stuffed from overeating, the gazelles were thrown into a panic. Denied their primary weapon—speed—they were now little more than sheep, nothing but meat on the hoof. Chen imagined their great terror. Souls had probably already fled from most of them and were on their way up to Tengger. Many merely stood where they were and quaked; others crumpled to the ground as if kneeling, their tongues out, their short tails twitching.

Chen was witness to the wolves’ intelligence and patience, their organization and discipline. Faced with a combat opportunity that came around only once every few years, they were still able to wait patiently, keeping their hunger and their appetite in check, then disarm the enemy—the herd of gazelles—with ease.

Now he understood how the great, unlettered military genius Genghis Khan, as well as the illiterate or semiliterate military leaders of peoples such as the Quanrong, the Huns, the Tungus, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Jurchens, were able to bring the Chinese (whose great military sage Sun-tzu had produced his universally acclaimed treatise
The Art of War
) to their knees, to run roughshod over their territory, and to interrupt their dynastic cycles. They had the greatest of all teachers in military strategy; they had an excellent and remarkably clear model of actual combat; and they had a long history of struggle with crack lupine troops. To Chen, these hours of exemplary combat tactics had proven more enlightening than years of reading Sun-tzu or Clausewitz. He had been smitten by the study of history at a very young age, obsessed over solving one of the great mysteries of world history: Where had the tiny race of people who had swept across Asia and Europe and created the Great Mongol Empire, the largest landholding in the history of the world, learned their military secrets? He had asked that question of Bilgee more than once, and this old man, whose educational level was low but whose erudition was broad, had gradually answered all his questions by enlightening him on the combat methods of wolves. Chen felt a sense of deep veneration for the grassland wolves and for the people who worshipped the wolf totem.

The battle and the observation continued.

The moment had finally arrived when the herd of gazelles began to stir. Only those older members with previous battlefield experience and the herd leaders had been able to resist the seduction of fragrant, mid-winter grass and had not eaten a quantity that would impede their speed; they immediately took off running toward the mountains, at the same time urging the rest of the herd to run for their lives. But they didn’t have a chance, given their full bellies, the deep snow, and the angle of the slope. It was a bloodbath, a punishment by the wise on the stupid and careless. In Bilgee’s view, this was a sacred cleansing of the grassland, a good and benevolent deed.

Ignoring those fallen gazelles who had eaten so much they could not run, the wolves went straight for the standing clusters of animals. The larger wolves quickly brought down victims and bit through their throats, sending crimson streams gushing into the air and staining the snow. The frigid air suddenly filled with the heavy stink of blood. The gazelles, with their keen sight and smell, were so terrified by this strategy—killing the chickens to frighten the monkeys—they broke for the mountain. Several large bucks led families of gazelles up to the top of the slope, where they stopped and ran around in circles, unwilling to go down the other side. Obviously, the lead animals had discovered the danger in the white snowdrift, where not a single stalk of grass was visible; the older animals, who were familiar with the landscape, had seen through the wolves’ strategy.

All of a sudden, the closely packed group of gazelles turned and came back down, like a landslide, as a dozen or so large males weighed the dangers they faced. They decided on the least risky choice by turning to break through the encirclement.

The bucks knew that their fate hung in the balance. In groups of four or five, shoulder to shoulder, they lowered their heads to create a phalanx of deadly horns and charged the wolves. Other gazelles that could still run fell in behind them.

Chen knew the damage those horns could do. On the grassland, herdsmen used them as leatherworking needles; so sharp they could penetrate cowhide, wolf skin would be no problem. The counterattack worked as they tore a hole in the encirclement, through which a yellow flood poured. Chen Zhen tensed, afraid that this rent in the line would ruin the wolf pack’s plans.