Wolf Totem: A Novel

by Jiang Rong

  Or was it a dress parade for future battles? Even that was possible. The tracks made it clear that the wolves were organized and highly disciplined. From end to end the path was a little more than a yard in width, and there were hardly any tracks outside it. If that wasn’t a march of troops in review, what was it? Chen was thinking. Wolves often fight alone, though they also hunt in small packs of three to five or do their plundering in families of eight to ten. What occurred here, with a small army of wolves, was rare. They had decided to organize themselves into a field army for mobile warfare. During the war years in China, the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies underwent a large-scale makeover, a Herculean task. Did this sort of reorganization come naturally to wolves?

  Then again, was it a victory celebration? Or signs of wild ecstasy preceding a grand feast? That was even more likely. In this murderous attack, they’d butchered every horse. Not one got away. Revenge. Slaking hatred. Total victory. An unburdening. How could they not celebrate the killing of so many horses? The level of excitement must have been fanatical as they surrounded the large cluster of trapped horses and performed their death dance.

  Chen discovered that by considering wolves’ behavior from a human perspective, some of the puzzling behaviors could be reasoned out logically. Dogs display human characteristics, men display wolf characteristics, or vice versa. Heaven, earth, and man are a unity; it’s impossible to categorically separate men, dogs, and wolves. Otherwise, how does one explain the fact that there were so many overlapping latent human traces found at the site of this horrible carnage? When confronting one another, all humans turn into wolves as an article of faith.

  As the line of men and horses followed Batu north away from the scene of the incident, Chen drew up next to Bilgee. “Papa,” he asked, “why did the wolves make that path?”

  The old man looked around and reined in his horse so they could fall back behind the other members of the party. “I’ve lived more than sixty years on the Olonbulag,” he said softly, “and I’ve seen wolf circles like that a few times before. I asked that same question of my father once. He told me that Tengger sent wolves down to the grassland as protectors of the Bayan Uul sacred mountain and the Olonbulag. Tengger and the sacred mountain are angered anytime the grassland is endangered, and wolves are sent to kill and consume the offenders. Every time they receive this gift, they joyfully run circles around it until they’ve tramped out a path as round as the sun and the moon. That circular path is their acknowledgment to Tengger, a sort of thank-you note. Once the acknowledgment has been received, the feast begins. Wolves are known for baying at the moon, which is their call to Tengger. If a halo appears around the moon, a wind will blow that night and the wolves will be on the move. They are better climatologists than we are. They make circles to mirror those in the sky. In other words, they are in perfect sync with the heavens.”

  Chen Zhen, a fan of popular legends, was delighted. “Fascinating,” he said, “utterly fascinating. The sun can be ringed by a halo, so can the moon, and when herdsmen signal to someone far off they make a circle in the air with their arm. The circle does seem to be a spiritual sign. What you’re telling me makes my hair stand on end. That the wolves out here are so mystical they make circles as signs to Tengger is downright creepy.”

  “They are supernatural,” the old man said. “I’ve dealt with them all my life and I’ve always come out second best. But even I never anticipated something like this. Wolves appear when and where you least expect them, and often in overwhelming numbers. How can anyone think they could be so potent without the help of Tengger?”

  The men up ahead stopped; some dismounted and began digging in the snow. Chen and Bilgee spurred their horses to catch up. There were more carcasses, but scattered helter-skelter in fours and fives. Suddenly, someone shouted, “Wolf! There’s a dead wolf here!”

  “According to Batu, this must have been where the wolves made their suicidal attack on the horses’ bellies,” Chen surmised, “and where the tide of battle turned, the beginning of the end for the horses.” His heart began racing, faster and faster.

  Bao Shungui waved his whip in the air and shouted from the saddle, “Don’t go running off. Come back here, all of you. Dig up a couple of these horses. Horses first, wolves last.”

  They all gathered around and began digging.

  As the animals came into view, it was obvious they’d trampled and ripped their own internal organs with their hind legs, spreading them over a great distance. It was also clear that the wolves had left them alone after they’d died. By then they’d probably joined the slaughter on the lake. These latest horses had been given a reprieve of sorts. But to Chen Zhen, who dug along with the others, these horses had died more tragically than those on the lake, their deaths an affront to all. The agony and fear frozen in their dead eyes was more conspicuous than in those of the lake dead.

  “These wolves were crueler even than the Japanese devils,” Bao Shungui shouted in anger. “They knew that all they had to do was rip open the bellies and let the horses die under their own hooves. I’ve never seen anything more sinister, more savage in my life. Those wolves embody the spirit of Japanese samurai. Suicidal attacks don’t faze them, and that makes Mongol wolves more fearful than any others. I won’t rest till I kill every last one of them!”

  “If a man or a race lacks the death-before-surrender spirit, a willingness to die along with the enemy, then slavery is the inevitable result,” Chen said. “Whoever takes the suicidal spirit of wolves as a model is destined for heroism, and will be eulogized with songs and tears. Learning the wrong lesson leads to samurai fascism, but anyone who lacks the death-before-surrender spirit will always succumb to samurai fascism.”

  Bao Shungui held his breath for a moment. “You’ve got a point,” he said.

  Uljii, looking grave, said to Bao, “How could Batu and the others have beaten off a diabolical, suicidal attack like this? He fought them from the grazing land up north all the way here. I don’t know how he did it. He survived thanks to the protection of Tengger. Have the inspection teams see this, and I’m sure they’ll reach the right conclusion.”

  Bao Shungui nodded his agreement. He turned to Batu. “Weren’t you afraid the wolves would do this to your horse?” he asked in a conciliatory tone.

  “I was so fixated on trying to get the herd past the lake, I didn’t have time to think about anything else,” he replied naively. “We came so close.”

  “Didn’t the wolves come at you?” Bao asked.

  Batu lifted up his herding club, with its iron rings, and showed it to Bao. “I knocked out the fangs of one wolf with this,” he said, “and broke the nose of another. They’d both have gotten me if I hadn’t. Since they didn’t have one of these, Laasurung and the others had no way to protect themselves. They didn’t desert me.”

  Bao took the herding club from him and felt its heft. “A good club!” he exclaimed. “A very good club! It takes real ferocity to knock out a wolf’s fangs with this. Good! The fiercer the better, where wolves are concerned. Batu, you’ve got guts, and you know how to fight. When they send the inspection team, I want you to tell them how you fought the wolves, tell them the whole story.”

  Bao handed back the herding club and turned to Uljii. “These wolves of yours are supernatural,” he said. “Smarter than humans. I see how they did it. They had a clear goal in mind, to drive the horses into the lake at any cost. Look...” He began counting on his fingers. “Here’s some of what the wolves knew: weather, topography, opportunity, their and their enemy’s strengths, military strategy and tactics, close fighting, night fighting, guerrilla fighting, mobile fighting, long-range raids, ambushes, lightning raids, and concentrating their strength to annihilate the enemy. They made plans, they set goals, and they undertook a measured campaign of total annihilation. It was a textbook battle plan. You and I are military men, and in my view, except for positional and trench warfare, they were as conversant with guerrilla tactics as our Eighth Route
Army. I used to think that wolves were foolhardy fighters that went after an occasional sheep or chicken. Obviously, I was wrong.”

  “I haven’t felt far from a battlefield since the first day I was sent to work here,” Uljii said. “I fight wolves year-round. I take my rifle with me wherever I go, and I’ve become a better marksman than when I was a soldier. You’re right, the wolves know military strategy and tactics, at least the most important elements. After fighting them for more than a decade, I’ve learned a lot. If I was ordered out on another bandit annihilation campaign, I’d be one of the best.”

  “Are you saying that men have learned how to wage war from wolves?” Chen Zhen asked, his interest growing.

  Uljii’s eyes lit up. “Yes. Much of what we know about waging war we learned from wolves. In ancient days here on the grassland, the herdsmen fought farming people from down south using tactics they’d learned from wolves. You Chinese learned more from nomadic peoples than how to dress in short clothing, or how to use a bow and arrow on horseback, what you call ‘barbarian attire and horse archery.’ You also learned a lot about warfare. When I was studying livestock farming in Hohhot, I read books on warfare, and in my view there’s little difference between the arts of warfare described by Sun-tzu and those employed by wolves.”

  “But there’s no mention of the grassland people or wolves in Chinese books on war,” Chen Zhen said. “That isn’t fair.”

  “We Mongols suffer from cultural backwardness,” Uljii replied. “The only book of any value we’ve introduced to the world is The Secret History of the Mongols.”

  “Apparently,” Bao said to Uljii, “when you’re engaged in livestock farming out here you need to study wolves and how to wage war. If you don’t, you suffer. It’s getting late. What do you say we go take a look at that dead wolf? I need some more pictures.”

  After the two leaders rode off, Chen Zhen leaned on his shovel and stared into space. The battle-site investigation had increased his fascination with the people of the grassland and the military miracles performed by Genghis Khan. How could he and his progeny have swept across Asia and Europe with fewer than a hundred thousand fighters? They exterminated hordes of Western Xia’s armored cavalry, a million troops of the Great Jin, a million waterborne and mounted forces of the Southern Song, the Russian Kipchaks, and the Teutons of Rome. They occupied Central Asia, Hungary, Poland, and all of Russia; they attacked such large civilized nations as Persia, Iran, China, and India. Beyond that, borrowing the Chinese policy of marrying their daughters to minority nationalities, they forced the emperor of Eastern Rome to give the hand of Princess Maria to the great-grandson of Genghis Khan. The Mongols founded the largest empire in the history of the world. How could a nomadic, uncivilized, backward race of people with no writing system, one that used arrows tipped with bone, not steel, be in possession of such advanced military capabilities and wisdom? That was one of the great unanswered questions of history.

  Chen’s experience with wolves during his two years on the grassland and the countless tales he’d collected, plus the brilliant annihilation of the gazelle herd he’d witnessed and the classic example of warfare against the herd of horses, had pretty much convinced him that the answer to the military marvels of Genghis Khan lay with the wolves.

  On the grassland there are no tigers or leopards or jackals or bears or lions or elephants, Chen Zhen was thinking. They could not survive the brutal climate; but even if they could, they could not adapt to the cruel wars of survival, and would not be able to withstand assaults by grassland wolves and grassland humans, finalists in the heated competition for grassland primacy. Wolves are the only match for humans in the struggle for survival. Although there are wolves nearly everywhere on earth, they are concentrated on the Mongolian grassland, where there are no moats or ramparts, common to advanced agrarian societies, or great walls and ancient fortresses; it is the spot on earth where the longest-lasting struggle between wise and brave combatants—men and wolves—has taken place.

  Chen felt himself to be standing at the mouth of a tunnel to five thousand years of Chinese history. Every day and every night, he thought, men have fought wolves on the Mongolian plateau, a minor skirmish here, a pitched battle there. The frequency of these clashes has even surpassed the frequency of battles among all the nomadic peoples of the West outside of wolf and man, plus the cruel, protracted wars between nomadic tribes, conflicts between nationalities, and wars of aggression; it is that frequency that has strengthened and advanced the mastery of the combatants in these battles. The grassland people are better and more knowledgeable fighters than any farming race of people or nomadic tribe in the world. In the history of China—from the Zhou dynasty, through the Warring States, and on to the Qin, Han, Tang, and Song dynasties—all those great agrarian societies, with their large populations and superior strength, were often crushed in combat with minor nomadic tribes, suffering catastrophic and humiliating defeat. At the end of the Song dynasty, the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan invaded the Central Plains and remained in power for nearly a century. China’s last feudal dynasty, the Qing, was itself founded by nomads. The Han race, with its ties to the land, has gone without the superior military teachings of a wolf drillmaster and has been deprived of constant rigorous training exercises. The ancient Chinese had their Sun-tzu and his military treatise, but that was on paper. Besides, even they were based in part on the lupine arts of war.

  Millions of Chinese died at the hands of invasions by peoples of the North over thousands of years, and Chen felt as if he’d found the source of that sad history. Relationships among the creatures on earth have dictated the course of history and of fate, he thought. The military talents of a people in protecting their homes and their nation are essential to their founding and their survival. If there had been no wolves on the Mongolian grassland, would China and the world be different than they are today?

  Suddenly, everyone was running and shouting, startling Chen out of his thoughts. He jumped into the saddle and followed the crowd.

  Two dead wolves had been excavated, part of the cost of driving the horses onto the lake. Chen went up near one of them as Batu and Laasurung swept snow off one of the carcasses and described the suicidal belly-ripping battle. The wolf was slimmer than most, a female. The rear half of her body had been battered bloody by horse hooves, but her teats were still visible.

  “What a shame,” Bilgee said. “Her cubs were stolen from their den, that’s for sure. She and the other mothers who had lost their offspring called this pack together to get their revenge. For her, there was no reason to go on living. On the grassland it’s not a good idea to overdo anything. A cornered rabbit will try to bite a wolf, so how could a frantic female wolf not fight to the death?”

  Chen turned to some of the students. “History books tell us that wolves have strong maternal instincts,” he said. “There are recorded instances of wolves raising human children. The ancestors of the Huns, the Gaoju, and the Turks were wolf children, all raised by wolf mothers.”

  “What’s all this nonsense about wolf children?” Bao Shungui interrupted. “Wolves kill and eat humans; they don’t raise them as their own. For people and wolves, it’s a life-or-death relationship—you or me. I’m the one who ordered people out to snatch the wolf cubs. In years past, it was an annual hunt that kept tragic encounters with wolves at a minimum, a fine tradition. But keeping them at a minimum isn’t enough; we need to wipe them off the face of the earth! Let them get their revenge? We’ll see how they do after I’ve killed them all! I’m not going to rescind my order. Once this business is cleared up, I’m sending the people out again. Every two families will be responsible for one wolf-cub pelt, and if they can’t manage that, they can substitute an adult pelt. Otherwise I’ll deduct work points!”

  Bao took a picture of the dead wolf, then had the carcass loaded onto a cart.

  The men then moved to the second wolf. In his two years on the grassland, Chen had seen lots of wolves, alive and dead, and
plenty of wolf pelts, but nothing like the animal that lay at his feet. Its head was nearly as big as a leopard’s, its chest even broader. Once the snow had been swept away and its grayish yellow fur fully exposed, Chen noticed countless thick, black, needle-like hairs poking up through the yellow fur on the neck and down its back. The rear half of the torso had been kicked bloody by horse hooves, leaving a puddle of red ice on the ground.

  Batu pushed the frozen animal, but did not succeed in moving it. “This one wasn’t as smart as the others,” he said as he wiped the sweat from his forehead. “It didn’t get a good bite on its target. If it had, big as this head is, it would easily have ripped open a horse’s belly and then tumbled to the ground and gotten away without injury. It might have inadvertently clamped onto a bone. Served it right!”

  Bilgee squatted down and studied the animal, pulling back the fur on its neck to reveal a pair of bloody holes as thick as two fingers. The students were astounded. They’d seen holes like that before, on the necks of the sheep taken down by wolves, two on each side, the marks of four wolf fangs across the carotid arteries.

  “This wolf didn’t die from being kicked by a horse,” Bilgee said. “Mortally wounded, maybe, but it was killed by another wolf after it had eaten its fill of horseflesh.”

  “Wolves are worse than outlaws!” Bao Shungui cursed. “They even kill their own wounded!”

  Bilgee glared at Bao. “Dead outlaws don’t go up to heaven. Dead wolves do. This wolf was mortally wounded by a horse. It didn’t die right away, but it had no chance of living. What’s better, hanging on and suffering, or dying? A live wolf suffers from seeing one of its own like this, so it puts it out of its misery, releasing its soul to Tengger. That’s an act of mercy, not cruelty, and a means of keeping the dying animal out of human hands and certain humiliating treatment. Wolves are unyielding creatures. They’d rather die than suffer humiliation. And an alpha male won’t let that happen to a member of his pack. You come from a farming community. How many of you would choose death over indignity? Old-timers out here tear up when they ponder this aspect of the wolf’s nature.”