Wolf Totem: A Novel

by Jiang Rong

  Yang Ke, on the other hand, thought it was a great idea. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “I’ve got a pointed rod, sort of like a bayonet. I don’t believe the two of us can’t handle one female wolf. We’ll also take a chopper and some double-kick firecrackers. By hacking with the chopper and setting off the crackers, there isn’t a wolf alive we can’t scare off. And if we manage to kill one in the process, everyone will be talking about us.”

  “Dream on,” Gao said sarcastically. “You need to be careful a wolf doesn’t turn you into a one-eyed dragon or give you rabies. That’d put an end to your scrawny life.”

  Yang wagged his head. “Back at school, during the Red Guard faction fights, four out of the five members of our group were wounded. I came through without a scratch. So I know I’ve got luck on my side. Lamjav likes to say I’m a grass-eating sheep and he’s a meat-eating wolf. But if we go out and come back with a wolf cub, he won’t be able to say that anymore. I’d do it even if it cost me an eye.”

  “Great!” Chen said. “You’re in? Don’t back out later.”

  Yang banged his mug down on the table. “When do we go? The sooner the better. After this, maybe they’ll let us join their wolf-encirclement hunt, something I’ve dreamed of doing.”

  Chen stood up. “How about as soon as we finish eating? We need to do some scouting first.”

  After wiping his mouth, Gao said, “Gombu will have to watch the flock for you, and that means our yurt will lose a day’s work points.”

  Yang replied snidely, “You’re so damned petty. What about that time Chen returned with a wagonload of gazelles—how many work points was that worth? You’re pathetic!”

  Chen and Yang were saddling their horses when Bayar rode up on a big yellow horse. He told Chen that his grandfather, Papa Bilgee, wanted to see him. “It must be important if Papa sent for me,” Chen said.

  “Maybe it’s about the hunt,” Yang said. “Go on. While you’re there you can get some hints on what we need to do to get one of those cubs.”

  Chen jumped into the saddle. Since Bayar was too short to remount his horse on his own, Yang offered to give him a boost. Bayar said no. He led the horse over to the wagon, stood on one of the shafts, and climbed into the saddle. The two horses sped off.

  8

  Before Chen had dismounted, he smelled the meat cooking inside the old man’s yurt. Strangely, it didn’t smell like mutton, so he rushed inside. "Not so fast,” Bilgee barked. Chen stopped and immediately noticed that three sides of the floor covering were rolled up, and a new horsehide was spread out in the middle, on top of which lay seven or eight wolf traps. Steam rising from the pot filled the yurt with a rank odor; inside a black, oily liquid bubbled. Gasmai was on her knees next to the stove, her face covered with grimy sweat as she stoked the fire with dried dung. Her five-year-old daughter, Checheg, was playing with sheep bones, sixty or seventy of them. Batu, who was still recuperating at home, his face a patchwork of new skin, was polishing traps with Bilgee’s wife, Eeji. Chen sat down beside the old man.

  “What are you cooking? Wolf traps?” Chen asked jokingly. “You must have strong teeth.”

  Bilgee’s eyes narrowed when he laughed. “You’re half right. I am cooking traps, but my teeth are no good. If it’s good teeth you want, look at the traps. Good ones, wouldn’t you say?”

  “But why are you cooking them?” Chen asked.

  “To catch wolves,” Bilgee answered. “Let me test your sense of smell. What kind of meat is that?” Bilgee pointed to a bowl beside the stove. Chen shook his head.

  “It’s horsemeat. I brought it back from the frozen lake. First I cooked a pot of horsemeat in water, and then cooked the traps in the soup. Know why? It’s how I get rid of the rusty smell.”

  “I see!” Chen grew excited. “So that’s how you get the wolves to step into your traps. I guess we’re smarter than wolves, after all.”

  The old man stroked his gray beard. “Not if you think like that. They have a keener sense of smell than dogs, and if there’s so much as a trace of rust or human odor, you’ve wasted your time. Once I cleaned my traps until there wasn’t a spot of rust anywhere. No wolves. Eventually, I figured out why. After setting the traps, I coughed up a bit of phlegm, and if I’d scooped it and all the snow around it up, that would have been fine. But I stepped on it, covering it with snow, and figured that would do it. The wolves smelled it out.”

  “That’s incredible!” Chen said admiringly.

  “Wolves are intelligent, they’re looked after by the gods, and they get help from all sorts of demons. That makes them a formidable enemy.”

  Chen was about to ask about the gods and demons when the old man rose up on his knees to take a trap out of the pot. After Chen helped him fish it out, they laid it on a greasy gunnysack and put another one into the pot. The traps were so big and so heavy that he could only cook one at a time. “I had everyone in the family clean traps yesterday,” he said. “I’ve already cooked them once; this is the second time. And this won’t be the end of it. Pretty soon I’m going to brush on intestinal oil from a horse with hairs from its mane, then repeat the process. That’s when they’ll be ready to use. I’ll wear gloves and add dry horse dung when I set the traps. Fighting the wolves is like waging war. If you’re not careful, you’re lost. You need to be more meticulous than a woman, even more meticulous than Gasmai,” he added with a chuckle.

  Gasmai looked up and pointed to a bowl on the rack. “I know how much you like my butter tea,” she said. “My hands are dirty, so help yourself.” Chen, who did not like stir-fried millet, was especially fond of Gasmai’s curds. He put four or five pieces in a bowl, took down a warm teapot, and poured a bowl of butter tea. “Papa was going to take Batu with him to lay traps, but Batu can’t go outside with his face like that, so Papa’s taking his favorite Han Chinese with him.”

  Chen laughed. “Whenever wolves are involved, Papa can’t help thinking about me. Right, Papa?”

  “Young fellow,” Bilgee said, “I think the wolves have got you in their clutches. I’m an old man, so I’m passing what knowledge I have on to you. Learn it well, and you’ll get your wolves one day. But don’t forget what I told you, that wolves are sent by Tengger to safeguard the grassland. Without them, the grassland would vanish. And without wolves, we Mongols will never be able to enter heaven.”

  “Papa, since wolves are the divine protectors of the grassland,” Chen asked, “why kill them? I understand you agreed to the hunt at the headquarters meeting.”

  “If there are too many of them, they lose their divine power and turn evil. It’s all right for people to kill evil creatures. If they killed all the cows and sheep, we could not go on living, and the grassland would be lost. We Mongols were also sent by Tengger to protect the grassland. Without it, there’d be no Mongols, and without Mongols, there’d be no grassland.”

  “Are you saying that wolves and the Mongols protect the grassland together?” Chen asked, moved by what the old man said.

  A guarded look came into the old man’s eyes. “That’s right,” he said, “but I’m afraid it’s something you... you Chinese cannot understand.”

  “Papa, you know I’m opposed to Han chauvinism and that I oppose the policy of sending people here to open up farmland.”

  The old man’s furrowed brow smoothed out and, as he rubbed the wolf trap with horse’s mane, he said, “Protecting the grassland is hard on us. If we don’t kill wolves, there’ll be fewer of us. But if we kill too many of them, there’ll be even fewer.”

  An almost mystical truth seemed hidden in the old man’s words, one not easily grasped. Chen swallowed the rest of his questions, feeling a sense of uncertainty.

  Once the traps were ready, the old man turned to Chen. “Come with me to set these,” he said. “Watch closely how I do it.” Bilgee put on a pair of canvas gloves and handed a second pair to Chen. Then he picked up one of the traps and took it outside where a light wagon was waiting. The bed was covered with a tatter
ed piece of felt that had been soaked in the intestinal grease of a horse. Chen and Bayar followed with more traps; as soon as they were outside, the grease froze into a thin, oily coat, making the metal invisible. Once they were all loaded, the old man went to the side of the yurt and returned with a sack of dried horse dung, which he also loaded onto the wagon. Now that everything was ready, the three of them saddled up. But before they started, Gasmai ran out and shouted, “Chenchen, be careful with those. They can easily break your arm.” He assumed she was actually saying that for the benefit of her son.

  As soon as Bar and some of the other big dogs spotted the traps, their hunting instincts kicked in, and they were about to run after them when Batu grabbed Bar by the neck and Gasmai wrapped her arms around one of the other dogs. Bilgee told them to stay. Then the three men and four horses trotted off toward the lake ahead of the loaded cart.

  Clouds were pressing down on the mountaintops; a light snow was falling, velvety and dry. The old man leaned back to let the snow land on his face, where it quickly melted. Taking off a glove, he caught a bit more snow and rubbed it all over his face. “I’ve been so busy these past few days,” he said, “I forgot to wash my face. Snow does a decent job, and it feels good. My face gets smoky when I sit by the stove for a long time. The snow gets rid of the smell and makes the job easier.”

  Chen washed his face with snow too, and then sniffed his sleeve. He detected the faint odor of sheep dung. “Will this smoky odor make a difference?” he asked.

  “Not really. It’ll be gone by the time we get to where we’re going. Just remember, don’t let your coat or leather pants touch the frozen horsemeat and you’ll be okay.”

  “Fighting wolves is tiring business,” Chen said. “The dogs kept exchanging howls with the wolves last night, angry howls, and I didn’t sleep a wink.”

  “At home you Chinese get a good night’s sleep every night. But this is a battlefield, and we Mongols are warriors who are born to fight. People who need peace and quiet to sleep make poor soldiers. You must learn how to fall asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow and wake up the minute you hear a dog bark. Wolves sleep with their ears pricked, and at the first sign of danger, they’re up and away. You have to be like that too if you’re going to fight them. Me, I’m an old wolf.” He laughed. “I eat, I fight, I sleep, and I know how to cat-nap. Olonbulag wolves hate everything about me, and when I die they’ll chew me up, bones and all. I’ll get to Tengger faster than anybody. Ha ha...”

  Chen yawned and said, “Students out here are beginning to suffer from nervous breakdowns. One girl’s already been sent back to Beijing. At this rate it won’t take many years before the wolves have sent at least half of us back down south. I’m not going to feed the wolves when I die. I want to be cremated.”

  The old man was still laughing. “You Han are wasteful, and a whole lot of trouble. A man dies and requires a coffin, wasting wood that could be used to make a wagon.”

  “I won’t need a coffin,” Chen said. “Just toss me onto a fire.”

  “But a fire requires wood too,” the old man said. “Wasteful, really wasteful. We Mongols are frugal revolutionaries. Lay us out on a cart when we die, head south, and where the body bounces out is where the wolves get their next meal.”

  “Are you saying that besides letting the wolves eat the body so that the soul can go to Tengger, it’s also to save trees? There are no trees out here.”

  “Even more than saving trees, it’s important to turn meat-eaters into eaten meat.”

  “Meat-eaters into eaten meat?” That was a new phrase for Chen, and thoughts of sleep vanished. “What exactly does that mean?”

  “We grasslanders eat meat all our lives, for which we kill many creatures. After we die, we donate our meat back to the grassland. To us, it only seems fair, and it’s good for our souls when we go up to Tengger.”

  “You’re right,” Chen said. “It is fair. If the wolves fail to drive me back to Beijing one day, I might just say okay to letting them eat me when I die. With a whole pack sharing one body, it has to be a quick meal, probably faster than cremation.”

  This pleased the old man, but a worried look soon darkened his face. “In the past not many Chinese ever came to the Olonbulag. The seven or eight hundred inhabitants of the one hundred and thirty or forty yurts were all Mongols. Then came the Cultural Revolution, and a hundred of you students arrived from Beijing. You’ve been followed by soldiers and big wagons, with drivers, and now they’re putting up buildings. They hate wolves, except for the pelts, which they love, and sooner or later their guns will put an end to them. Then you won’t be able to feed the wolves even if you want to.”

  “Don’t worry,” Chen said spiritedly. “When the big war comes one of these days, the atomic bomb will get us all, people and wolves, and no one will be feeding anyone.”

  The old man made a circle in the air with his hand. "Atom...atomic bomb, what’s that?”

  Chen Zhen did what he could, including gestures, to explain, but it was no use: the old man couldn’t comprehend it.

  They’d nearly reached the northern edge of the frozen lake, where the horses had died. Bilgee reined in his horse and told Bayar to stop the cart and wait there. With two of the traps and a small spade, along with the bag of dried horse dung, he and Chen rode over to where the dead horses had lain. Stopping from time to time, he checked out the area. The dead horses, of course, had all been touched, and it was possible to see under the light blanket of snow where animals had sunk their teeth, that and the paw prints in the snow. “Have the wolves been back?” Chen asked.

  The old man examined a few of the carcasses. “Not the big pack,” he replied. “Uljii was right when he said it was probably up north past the public road. They are masters at waiting patiently.”

  “Then what about these tracks?” Chen said as he pointed to the ground.

  “Mostly fox, plus the tracks of one female wolf. There must be several females up here who are staying with their cubs, all operating independently. He thought for a moment, then added, “I was hoping to catch the alpha males and some of the larger males in the pack, but with all these foxes around, that won’t be easy.”

  “Have we wasted our time?”

  “Not really. Our most important job is to trick the wolf pack, make them think that since we’re laying traps, we won’t bother to launch an encirclement attack against them. That way they’ll be back to finish off these horses. We’ll surprise them.”

  “Any chance we could get a wolf in one of these traps, Papa?”

  “You bet there is. Let’s set them for big animals, wolves not foxes.”

  The old man circled the area twice before choosing a spot next to one of the carcasses. Chen dismounted and started digging in the snow, while Bilgee crouched down and scraped out a circle about a foot and a half across and a couple of inches deep with his little spade. He then gouged out a depression in the middle. After putting on the gloves smeared with horse grease, he laid his trap on the ice and stepped down on both sides to set the springs, like a pair of oversized tweezers, pulling the sides, with their pointed teeth, down flat on the ground. Then he laid a cloth pad, shaped like an embroidery frame, over the depression, but beneath the metal base of the trap. Finally he hooked a metal rod onto the pad.

  With his heart in his throat, Chen watched the old man complete the dangerous, difficult job, setting a trap that could crush a man’s arm. Bilgee was breathing hard and drenched in sweat. He carefully wiped the sweat off with his sleeve, not wanting it to drip onto the dead horse. Now that Chen was on his first trap-laying trip with the old man, he was able to see how it worked. When a wolf stepped on the cloth pad, the weight would push down and release the metal rod from the hook. The springs would snap and close the serrated ends around the animal’s leg, breaking the bone and tearing the tendons. No wonder the wolves were afraid of the traps. If they hadn’t been frightened by the metallic sound of snapping traps, Chen would have died for sure durin
g his earlier encounter with the wolf pack.

  All that remained was to cover and disguise the trap. This too had to be done with extreme care. After catching his breath, Bilgee said, “You can’t cover this with snow, it’s too heavy, it’ll push the pad down. Also, if the sun comes out, the snow will melt, the metal parts will freeze, and the trap won’t snap shut. Hand me the horse dung.”

  Bilgee took the sack, grabbed a handful of dried dung, rolled it into little balls, and spread it on top of the cloth. The airy dung gradually filled in all the gaps, and the pad stayed suspended above the trap; also there was no fear of melting snow. The last thing the old man did was hook the chain connected to the trap to one of the horse bones and told Chen he could cover that with snow. After he’d instructed him on how to cover all the exposed parts, he sprinkled a little snow over the dung and smoothed out the surface with a sheepskin until it appeared undisturbed.

  A light snow continued to fall, quickly erasing all traces of activity. “How will the trap catch wolves but not foxes?” Chen asked. “I set the rod deeper than usual,” Bilgee replied. “A fox will be too light to spring the trap. But not a wolf.”

  The old man surveyed the area again and paced off a few steps. “You do it this time,” he said after choosing the second spot. “I’ll supervise.”

  “Why so close together?”

  “A wolf can be merciless with its own body. If one of its legs is caught in a trap, it’ll chew it off and escape on three legs. By setting two traps, if I get a leg in the first one, the pain will have the animal running around in circles, pulling on the chain, and its rear leg could trip the second trap, which I’m setting at the far reach of the chain. If a front and a back leg are caught, even if it chewed them both off, it couldn’t get away.”