by Li Juan
After that I started to steal Plum Blossom’s food to give to Panda Dog. This is why I said Plum Blossom led a decadent life—the kitten never had to worry about food. Meat chunks, offal, baursak, milk-soaked nan … they were piled before him all day long.
For a kitten, meals like these were sheer excess. But for an adult dog, it was barely enough to get stuck in her teeth.
* * *
A FEW DAYS LATER, passing by the dog burrow, I stopped to watch Panda Dog as she crawled out bit by bit. Only then did I notice that the burrow had collapsed!
I panicked and ran over to investigate. As it turned out, there was no wood supporting the structure; Cuma had simply laid a manure slab over the hole, and at some point it had snapped at the center, collapsing inward. I felt around inside—luckily, no puppies had been crushed!
I tried repairing the burrow, but it was beyond my ability. Cuma had dug the dog burrow like a tunnel, horizontally into a large manure mound. Therefore, to fully reconstruct the hole, the several-foot-high pile of manure needed to be shifted, a mammoth project. Moreover, the puppies were still inside and I didn’t dare make any big moves. If I botched the repair, there might have been nothing left.
Anyhow, after a difficult struggle, I managed to prop up the roof by four inches, enough for Panda Dog to slip in and out without too much trouble. But I was still worried.
I pleaded with Cuma to help with the repairs, and he replied angrily, “Do I have nothing else to do? Am I working for the dog now?”
I regularly added new manure slabs to the burrow and gave it a shove to check whether it was stable. At night, I covered the hole with a small plastic sheet (the only one left) to block the wind—if only as a symbolic gesture (it only covered half the opening)—and piled clumps of manure around to secure it. Out in the wilderness, it was even hard to find tattered old clothes or broken felt rugs.… I hated my powerlessness, unable to protect anything.
The others said, “Enough is enough! It’s just a dog.”
And Cuma said, “Do people have it any better?”
Four days later, something unimaginable happened. When I went to check on the puppies, I found two more! I counted them again and again; I was right—there were six! Before, there’d been two black ones and two spotted ones. Now there were two black ones and four spotted ones.
When I broke the news, no one believed me.
It must have birthed the first four puppies, then, realizing how dangerous the cold was, closed her birth canal. It waited out the most difficult days before giving birth to the last two.
It was an ordeal for me too, waking up at midnight, listening to the puppies squealing, worried whether the dog burrow had collapsed again. It was stressful beyond words, but I couldn’t muster the courage to leave my quilt. What’s more, had I gotten up from the bed in the dead of night for a dog, the others would have hated me. Fretting about this and that without actually doing anything about it, tying oneself up in knots—who doesn’t hate that kind of person?
Cuma reassured me, “Don’t worry, she’s wearing a dog-skin jacket!”
But the puppies had no jackets! They were so thinly dressed.
Worst of all was that from the second week onward, Panda Dog no longer slept with the pups. Instead, she returned to the warmth of the burrow’s roof to sleep alone. She likely wasn’t producing enough milk and her empty teats were in pain from the suckling, so she was afraid to be near the pups.
The puppies whined all night from within their barely covered sheep manure mound—from the cold, or the hunger, or both. Every day, I slept restlessly. Even in my dreams, I kept thinking, who knows how many have already frozen to death when it’s cold enough to freeze a droplet of water in an instant.
Yet, it all came back to these words: life is far more resilient and more tenacious than I give it credit for. All the puppies lived. And a week later, the weather became much warmer, even slipping into positive numbers on the odd midday. The puppies remained curled tightly together in a heap, growing up in the land of dreams. The ones that cried the loudest were always the two or three nearest the entrance, squealing as they tried to burrow deeper into the huddle. Once they reached the warm center of the burrow, they stopped crying, and it was time for those pushed to the outside to yelp and complain.
It was more than twenty days before the puppies could fully open their eyes, the lids parting ever so slowly. But every one of them was healthy and plump, a hefty handful. (Only I would hold a puppy in my hand. Everyone else thought it was disgusting, as if suckling pups were the filthiest things in the world, unfit to be touched. When Cuma’s youngest, Zhada, wanted to look, he dragged a puppy out of the burrow with a stick, then poked it back in when he was done looking.…) Clearly, I was the squeamish one!
But their survival didn’t stop me from worrying: almost a month old and soon to be weaned. What would they eat after that?
Once again, I was worried over nothing. After they were weaned, they were given away!
Which family’s sheepdog had puppies on what day in what month—this was valuable information to know. Our Panda Dog was one of the central characters in the local gossip. A month after the puppies were born, a continuous stream of guests arrived asking for pups. Some even traveled from distant pastures nearly a day away on horseback. It was said that puppies born on the coldest days make for the best dogs, more robust and resilient than other pups.
After the people who came chose a pup, they stuffed at least ten to twenty yuan into Cuma’s hand. This was a voluntary contribution; there was no bargaining involved.
Cuma said that they weren’t actually selling the dogs. According to ancient tradition, if a person who wanted a dog didn’t leave something for the previous owner, the dog they took would be equally irresponsible and refuse to guard the home or bark at intruders!
He said that in the past, people normally gave a shirt or some such, but now they just give money directly.
Four dogs were given away, leaving two behind. I wanted one of the spotted dogs, Cuma kept one of the black ones.
“Don’t you already have a dog?” I asked.
“Who knows for how long?” he asked. Then, without skipping a beat, he took out his knife and swiftly sliced off the black puppy’s ears. A dog’s lot.
For how long? Isn’t that true for everyone? Hence, the effort to make new life.
* * *
I COULDN’T TELL if Plum Blossom understood Panda Dog’s plight. He was afraid of dogs. When they crossed paths outside, Plum Blossom recoiled, puffing up his pink blossoms and growling intimidatingly at the dog. The dog approached nonchalantly and stuck out her nose to sniff the kitten, then sniffed again—not food. Situation confirmed, Panda Dog continued on her way. Plum Blossom viewed this encounter as a personal victory, offering a few more roars before dashing back into the burrow.
As his courage grew, he began to show some goodwill. When the starved Panda Dog planted itself at the burrow’s entrance, blocking people’s way in and out in the hope they might take pity on it, Plum Blossom would join the roadblock. Except that, in order to maintain the same height and vantage point as Panda Dog, Plum Blossom crouched on one of the slim wooden posts. From there, he locked his eyes intensely with Panda Dog, and if she was close enough, he extended a paw to try to touch the dog.
Plum Blossom and Panda Dog were both incredibly well-behaved. There was no table in the burrow, so the tablecloth was laid across a wooden plank on the floor. When we all sat around to drink tea, the kitten stalked around the periphery, not daring to step beyond his domain. The edge of the tablecloth served as a clearly defined boundary. Only when food fell and rolled beyond that boundary did Plum Blossom, in a flash, pounce and partake without hesitating.
During the winter slaughter, when the bed was covered with horse bones and intestines, the kitten slunk left and right between them, patiently, afraid to touch a single treasure, even when there wasn’t another soul in the burrow. In those days, all the unprocessed meat was pi
led up in the yurt where it was left unguarded. Panda Dog crouched outside the yurt’s flap all day, staring in with hungry eyes. She never dared to take even one step closer.
It was not hard to imagine that to have achieved such excellent behavior, they must have experienced countless beatings.
Plum Blossom’s blessed life in the earthen burrow
The roof of our earthen burrow was Panda Dog’s heated flooring.
15.
Everyone
CATTLE, SHEEP, CAMELS, HORSES—they all eat nothing but grass. Herding is easy: you take them out in the morning, bring them back in the evening. If that’s what you think, then you’re a fool! Is there a means of production in this world that doesn’t require wisdom and attention to minute details? Unless you were born into a family of herders, mastering their techniques would require massive effort. Even if you could major in herding at college, reading books for four years would get you absolutely nowhere. And if you continued on to a postgraduate degree, it’d still be no use. It’s simply too hard.…
I asked Cuma, “Why bring the camels home at the end of the day, but not the cattle? Is it because the cattle know the way home, but not the camels?”
Cuma explained, “What do you mean they don’t know the way home? They don’t want to come home, because the grass is everywhere, and they’re not cold.”
This explanation left me just as puzzled as before. What did a lot of grass have to do with not coming back? If there were less of it, would they come home? Surely less grass would mean they would have to search for it even longer, right? Moreover, what did “not being cold” have to do with it? Wasn’t it just as cold everywhere?
Of all the livestock, cattle and goats feared the cold the most, followed by horses. But the cattle and goats all spent the night in a roofed shelter, while the horses slept in the open.
I asked Cuma, “Why don’t the horses have a house?”
His reply: “Because horses have no stomach.”
Even more enigmatic.…
Eventually, I figured it out. His first reply referred to the fact that camels are greedy eaters so they are reluctant to come home. Even though they wore felt coats that allowed them to stay out overnight, if their blankets were torn or lost, and they didn’t return to have it mended, it would have been too cold for them.
His second reply referred to the fact that horses don’t have rumens, the large first compartment of the stomach of a ruminant, only intestines that digest grass quickly. They can’t be penned in, they have to eat nonstop and excrete nonstop. No wonder there’s the saying, “A horse with no grass to eat at night will never grow fat.”
* * *
PER MY OWN OBSERVATIONS, of all the livestock, the cattle had the best eyesight. During the night, back when we were traveling south, moving from camp to camp, the horses calmly ground their teeth, chewing grass; the sheep opened their eyes in the dark, waiting for the light of day; and the camels lay as still as mountains; only the cattle, one after another, began to stir. First, they edged close to the tent where we were sleeping, rummaging for food, jostling the stove, and making a racket before gradually wandering off into the distance. At three in the morning, when everyone woke up, the men dismantled the tent and loaded the camel, Kama packed the bedding and kitchenware, and I went to herd the cattle.… The sheep, horses, and camels were all exactly where they were the night before, only the cattle were already five hundred yards away!
For some reason, calves were always better looking than adult cattle, although it’s hard to say why. Upon closer inspection, the biggest difference seems to be in the profiles of their faces—calves have down-turned noses whereas adult cattle have upturned noses. As for why down-turned noses look better than upturned noses, I have no idea.
But what use are good looks? The little calves were the worst! They knew that there was one of me and three of them (two belonged to Cuma’s family, one to Shinshybek’s). So the moment I started to chase after them, they split up and went in three different directions. Chasing calves used up so much energy that blood no longer reached my stomach, my hunger quickly intensified, and when I got home, I had to eat a huge meal.…
Although they were only calves, they were unbearably stubborn. With my hands on their rumps, I pushed with all my might but they barely budged a step—it was exhausting. Cuma offered a wry suggestion: “Climb on. Mount it and it will listen.” He sounded totally serious—I almost fell for it.
Ginger gets spicier with age, but cattle only grow more spineless the older they get. When I brandished my stick to chase after the cattle, they would first gauge the thickness of the stick before deciding whether or not to resist. Those hardheaded calves, on the other hand, resisted no matter what. It didn’t matter who won or lost, they invariably took it as a victory. It was insufferable.
I eventually learned that when cattle-chasing, you can’t just run in a straight line. That only pushed them farther afield. You need to be strategic. First, stroll nonchalantly in the opposite direction until they lower their guards, and when you are far enough away, circle back around until you’re directly in front of them—then chase!
What inevitably followed was this: after my Herculean efforts herding them out to the open plains, past the dune ridge to the east, I would turn around and return home. But as soon as I got back home, they would be there too … and I had to move them out all over again.
There were many times when, from the top of a sand dune, I’d look around and the calves were nowhere to be seen! Worried, I’d scramble down to search everywhere, looking east, looking north—nothing. Returning home to warm myself up, I anxiously quaffed two bowls of tea before setting out again and kept searching until dark. By the time I returned home utterly exhausted, I’d find them waiting happily in the cattle burrow … like a mirage.
The second most annoying thing was the patch-faced young bull that remained under maximum security for the whole winter. This was because, late one night, the beast charged into the yurt and chewed open sacks of corn and flour (we had just arrived and the cattle burrow hadn’t been cleared, the temperature wasn’t too cold, so the cattle slept outside for the time being). After that quiet night of feasting, the location of that hidden treasure was permanently etched into his memory. Whenever an opportunity arose, back it went to wreak havoc. Our yurt only had a felt curtain, there was no wooden door. No amount of rope or wooden planks could withstand a bull calf. Think of its sheer might! A modest ram was all it took for him to enter. Our only recourse was to always be on guard, beating it back as soon as it got close. Whenever it wandered within ten steps of the yurt, we beat it and chased it so that, eventually, the notion of “forbidden” was etched into its mind.
Alas, the corn that had spilled everywhere could still be shoveled up and patiently cleansed of sand (which Cuma spent hours separating with water!), but the spilled flour was ruined. What a shame!
* * *
THE CAMELS WERE FREE SPIRITS, anarchic and uncontrollable. Otherwise, why was it that nine out of ten visitors we had over for tea were out looking for their camel rather than a cow or a horse? Furthermore, of all the livestock, only the camels had their owners’ phone number, name, and village written in big, bright characters on their sides. Clearly, they didn’t simply wander off, they wandered far off.
Shinshybek had lost three camels in two years. Afraid of losing any more, he monitored his camels even more cautiously than we did our young bull. Every evening he went to the trouble of making sure they spent the night within the burrow settlement. After herding them back, he folded one of their front legs and tied a rope around the thigh and shank so that the camel could only crouch. Even if one managed to stand, it wouldn’t get far on three legs.
Herding camels was a source of considerable tension between the two families. Shinshybek’s family thought that, like herding sheep, the work of herding camels should be divided equally. Cuma, on the other hand, insisted that since we had far fewer camels than they did, dividing the labo
r equally would have been outrageously unfair. Besides, Cuma had never lost a camel and often mocked Shinshybek for making a big deal about it.
In the same vein, Shinshybek had never lost a cow to the cold and therefore put little thought into keeping the cattle warm. Unlike our family, who covered the cattle burrow’s skylight and hung a padded curtain over the doorway every night, their cattle burrow didn’t even have a roof! It was wide open.
In any case, whenever it was Cuma’s turn to herd camels, he became grumpy. He complained as soon as he entered the door, “This old brute is spent! Over there—three! Over there—five! There, there, and there—one each!” He pointed every which way and added, “More tiring than sheep!”
Herding sheep, you only had to follow them around slowly, but herding camels required cracking the whip, letting the horse gallop, cursing your ma and cursing your pa, a never-ending contest of wit and brawn.
Camels were an odd bunch, perpetually in a state of discord, forever engaging in separatism; not at all like horses, sheep, or cattle that always traveled in a group.
Besides being members of the free-spirit clan, the camels might also be considered members of the beggar clan. When a flock of camels wobbled their way over, each wearing a patchwork of rags … Oy, it was their fault for being too big—where would you ever find a whole piece of cloth big enough to tailor an outfit for them! The only way was to cobble together a patchwork of old cotton jackets, old felt scraps, and old tekemet. And the camels never took care of their blankets, always rolling around on the ground (where clothes were most likely to tear off) until they were covered in wet cow dung. Then they’d stand and scratch an itch against a friend’s body, soiling the other camel’s blanket too.