Wolf Totem: A Novel

by Jiang Rong

  The other big dogs learned from the tactic, it seemed, since they began butting the wolves and sending them flying. Erlang and Bar, the assassins, went on a murderous rampage, opening a hole in the wolves’ defenses and letting the hunters in. Lasso poles rained down on the pack, disrupting their formation and driving many of them into the nooses or the teeth of waiting dogs.

  Seeing that the battle was lost, the pack split up and, relying on the might and courage of each individual wolf, ran to break through the encirclement in all directions, throwing the battle plan into confusion; it was their last chance to escape with their lives. But each wolf was immediately surrounded by several dogs and a hunter or two; escape was impossible. With a chorus of shouts, the outer ring of hunters— men and women, young and old—charged with their lasso poles.

  In the inner circle, Lamjav, who invariably compared himself to a wolf, saw a pair of dogs grappling with a wolf; he rode over, bent down in the saddle, and held his lasso pole low enough to let the wolf pass over it, then jerked it up and caught the animal’s hind legs in the noose. Before the wolf could turn and attack the pole, Lamjav spun around and dragged it away like a gunnysack. Scraping its front claws on the ground in a desperate attempt to get away, it left furrows in the snow as Lamjav called for the dogs.

  Lassoing a wolf on the grassland is hard, killing one even harder. Wolves’ necks are so short and thick that they can easily slip a noose. It is like roping a log, and pulling it tight often makes it slip off. Experienced hunters therefore prefer to snag a wolf around the hips, the thinnest part of its body; if successful, this hold is escape-proof. But then comes the tricky business of killing the wolf. Dragging one by the neck usually ends in strangulation, but when the noose is down around its hips, and if only one hunter is involved, the difficulties mount, for when the hunter climbs down off his horse, the wolf will charge back toward the pole, often snapping it in two, and then either attack the hunter or run off. Only the most courageous and skillful hunter will not wait for the wolf to get to its feet, but will drag it up close and kill it with his herding club or a knife. Most do not dare take on a wolf single-handed, and will sacrifice the pelt, forced to drag the animal over to another hunter or to the dogs.

  Lamjav dragged his wolf to a spot where the snow was deeper and searched for an assassin dog. Several dogs surrounded the wolf, filling the air with their barks and nipping here and there before falling back, unwilling to go in for the kill. Seeing that Erlang had just brought down one wolf by its throat, Lamjav dragged his wolf toward Erlang and shouted, “Kill! Kill!”

  Erlang abandoned the mortally wounded wolf, turned, and went after the one snagged by Lamjav, held its head and chest down with his front paws, and sank his teeth into his throat. Even with its carotid arteries severed, the wolf tried to fight Erlang off with its claws; it failed.

  Lamjav jumped down out of the saddle and shouted to other hunters, “Drag them over here. They’re no match for this dog!”

  Nearby, Bar was killing a wolf caught in a noose. Several hunters who had trapped wolves with their lasso poles dragged their victims over to Erlang and Bar to dispatch.

  But they were not the only dogs involved in the frenzy of killing. Several huskies were also showing their mettle. Renowned wolf killers owned by Dorji, each was a trained assassin, and there were eight of them, perfectly suited to work in concert with the others: the fast ones ran down the wolves; the slow ones butted them to the ground and held them down for their more ferocious comrades, who went for the throats. They fought as a unit, never alone. That is how they were working now: a team of eight dogs killing one wolf after another, quickly, efficiently, already three and counting.

  The hunters too were working in groups of three or four. As soon as one bagged a wolf, the others jumped down, grabbed it by the tail and hind legs, and crushed its head with their clubs. Wild shouts erupted in the northwest, where five or six hunters were chasing a pair of large wolves.

  The two animals, driven dizzyingly from one hunter to the next, had nowhere to go. After being knocked to the ground several times, one of them could no longer run. So Laasurung threw down his lasso pole, took his feet out of the stirrups, and jumped up until he was crouching on the saddle, from where he leaped onto the wolf’s back. Before it could react, he was sitting astride it. Grabbing it by the ears, he thudded its head to the ground; blood seeped from its mouth and nose. Other hunters rode up and threw themselves onto the wolf, until it could barely breathe. Finally, Laasurung drew his knife and killed the beast. The other wolf was harassed by three young horse herders who took turns kicking it, until one of them ended the game by killing it.

  Chen Zhen, Yang Ke, and the other students let their lasso poles droop to the ground. Their role in the hunt had been as observers. What disappointed them most was that the only one of their number who had been sent into battle, the horse herder Zhang Jiyuan, had failed to lasso a wolf.

  Seeing that all was well in hand, Bilgee rode up to Chen and Yang. “You students did a fine job,” he said. “You held your positions. With you here, I was able to send more hunters into the battle with their lasso poles.” Noting the disappointment on their faces, he laughed and said, “That dog of yours made a heroic contribution. I counted for you: by himself he killed two wolves, and he helped hunters kill two more. So each of you has a pelt coming. Custom dictates that the other two go to the men who lassoed the wolves.” He turned and led them down the slope.

  The hunt was over. Except for half a dozen especially fast or skillful or just plain lucky members of the pack who had used speed or cunning or a shattered pole to break out of the encirclement, all the wolves had been killed.

  The hunters in the outer ring came charging downhill, shouting the whole way, to get a close look at the spoils of the battle. Bilgee had already told people to drag two carcasses to where Chen and Yang were standing, then rolled up his sleeves and helped skin them. Gasmai had people bring over the two wolves Bar had killed and two others that Sanjai’s dogs had killed. Sanjai and Gombu came to help her skin them.

  Chen had learned from Bilgee how to skin a wolf; now it was his turn to teach Yang. He began by cutting the skin away from the jaw-bone, then tugged it back over the head. After having Yang anchor the teeth with a leather strip, he pulled the skin back to the neck. From there he kept pulling backward, cutting skin from flesh, like removing a set of leotards, and ending by cutting away the legs and the tail. At this point, the pelt was turned inside out, so the two men reversed it, as if it were a length of intestine, to expose a perfect pelt.

  “Good job,” Bilgee complimented them. “Not much grease. When you get home, fill it up with dry grass and hang it on a tall pole. That way, the people of the Olonbulag will acknowledge you as true hunters.”

  Erlang and Yellow sat on their haunches beside their masters looking on; Erlang licked the blood from his injured chest and front legs the whole time. He appeared to be enjoying it. Yellow, who was uninjured, licked the injuries on the top of Erlang’s head, like a pampered pet. Still, many of the hunters were praising him, telling how he had wrestled several wolves to the ground and taken bites out of their rear legs. If not for Yellow, Lamjav would have been unable to get his noose on the wolves.

  That made Yang happy. “Lamjav is like me, after all,” he said, to even a score, “standing brave behind his dog.”

  Chen took some hard candies out of his pocket and gave them to the canine generals, three for Erlang, two for Yellow. He’d had a premonition that Erlang and Yellow would make him proud that day. The dogs laid the candy on the ground and peeled the paper away with their teeth, then picked each piece up with their tongues and, heads held high, crunched them loudly. All the other dogs could only look on and slobber, or lick the paper on the ground. The students’ arrival had taught the dogs that there were more good things to eat in the world than they were used to, and eating candy in front of all those dogs brought Erlang and Yellow canine glory.

  Grinning, Gasmai
walked over and said to Chen, “I guess you’ve forgotten your old dog since moving out of our place.” She reached into his pocket, retrieved some candy, and gave it to Bar. Chen hurriedly took out all the remaining candy and handed it to Gasmai. She smiled, peeled the paper from one piece, and popped it into her mouth.

  A layer of heat had settled over the hunting ground; steam rose from the wolf carcasses, the horses’ bodies, the dogs’ mouths, and the people’s foreheads as they separated into family units and skinned the dead animals. Tradition was followed in dividing up the spoils of battle. There were no arguments. The herdsmen always knew which dog or hunter had killed which wolf. A few words might pass between two men who had both gotten their nooses around a single animal, but Bilgee settled the matter with a single comment: Sell the pelt, buy a crock of liquor, and split it. Hunters and herdsmen who had killed no wolves watched enthusiastically as the others skinned their kills, even offering positive comments on the pelts and the people’s dogs. With good dogs, the pelts were flawless; with bad dogs, the pelts were chewed up. Those who wound up with the most pelts loudly invited everyone to their yurt for a drinking celebration. On the grassland, everyone benefited from an encirclement hunt.

  People rested on the now quiet site of the hunt.

  Women had the most unpleasant work—patching up the injured dogs. Men used dogs during a hunt, but women relied on them for watching the livestock at night. And it was they who raised them, almost as if they were their children. When dogs were hurt, or when they died, it was the women who grieved. A few of the dogs lay dead on the ground. Where they lay was where their souls had flown up to Tengger; what had sent them on their way was their mortal enemy— the wolf. “The dogs should thank the wolves,” Bilgee said, “for without them, the herdsmen would have no need to keep so much meat on hand, and their pups would be off to Tengger soon after they came into the world.”

  The dead dogs lay undisturbed, for no grassland Mongol would give a second thought to the lush, beautiful coats. Dogs were their comrades-in-arms, their best friends, their brothers. Grasslanders survived in two enterprises: hunting and tending livestock. For both, dogs were indispensable. As production instruments and livestock guards, they were more important to them than oxen were to farmers on the Central Plains. And their relationship to the humans was closer; they helped to dispel the loneliness of the wildwood.

  The Mongolian grassland—vast, underpopulated, and dangerous— was a place where dogs kept people safe. Gasmai told Chen and Yang that she could not forget how Bar had saved her one autumn when she was out dumping stove ashes and hadn’t noticed a still-smoldering piece of dried sheep dung. A strong wind ignited a fire that quickly spread to the dry grass in front of her yurt. She was alone that day with old Eeji and her child, doing needlework, unaware of what was happening outside. Suddenly she heard Bar barking violently and ramming the door. She ran outside, where a fire was threatening haystacks belonging to other production brigades; they were tall, densely packed, and oily, and if they caught fire, there would be no saving them. Animals that were not killed or injured in the fire would starve without that year’s hay, and she would be punished. Bar’s warning had given her time that was more valuable than life itself. She ran out with a large piece of wet felt straight into the flames, wrapped herself in it, and rolled on the ground, managing to crush the fire before it reached the hay. She often said that without Bar she’d have been lost.

  “Our men are such big drinkers,” she said to Chen and Yang, “that sometimes they fall off their horses and freeze to death. Those who don’t die can thank their dogs, who run home, grab their mistresses’ clothing with their teeth, and lead the women to their husbands, where they dig them out of the snow and bring them home. Every yurt has someone whose life has been saved by the family dog.”

  And so eating dog meat, skinning a dog, or sleeping under a dog skin were considered acts of unforgivable betrayal. This was one of the reasons why herdsmen had come to hate inhabitants of farming regions and Han Chinese.

  Bilgee said that in olden days, Han armies would come to the grassland and start killing and eating dogs, infuriating the herdsmen and inciting armed resistance. Even now, shepherds’ dogs were often stolen by outsiders, who killed and ate them. Their coats were secretly sent to the Northeast and to China proper. The pelts of Mongolian dogs—large, with lush fur—were favorites for making hats and bedcovers. The old man commented angrily, “But you’ll never find that mentioned in books written by Chinese!”

  Bilgee and his family often asked Chen: “If you Chinese hate dogs, curse them, even kill them, why do you eat them?”

  Embarrassed by the question, Chen had to think long and hard to give them a satisfactory explanation.

  One evening he said to the family as they sat around the fire, “There are no nomads among the Han, and few hunters. Just about every wild animal that can be killed and eaten has been. So we Han don’t know the value of dogs. With our dense population, it’s hard for Chinese to be lonely, so we don’t need dogs to keep us company. We have dozens of curses based on dogs: ‘rapacious as a wolf and savage as a dog’; ‘A dog in a sedan chair does not appreciate kindness’; ‘You can’t get ivory from a dog’s mouth’; ‘Only busybody dogs catch rats’; ‘Throw a meaty bun at a dog, and it won’t come back’ . . . And some have entered politics.

  Everyone in the country is shouting slogans like ‘Smash in Liu Shaoqi’s dog head’ and ‘Down with Liu the dog.’

  “Why do we hate and curse dogs? Mainly because dogs don’t follow Chinese rules. You know all about our ancient sage Confucius, right? Well, even emperors throughout our dynastic history have bowed down before him. He established a series of rules to live by, and over the centuries we’ve followed those rules. Every literate person had his own ‘quotations,’ like today’s little red book of quotations by Chairman Mao, and anyone who didn’t follow the rules was considered a barbarian; death awaited the worst cases. The biggest problem with dogs is that they don’t follow the Confucian rules of behavior. They bark at strangers, violating our rules of hospitality; they are incestuous; and they eat human feces. But the main reason we hate dogs, why we kill and eat them, is that we’re a farming people, not nomads, and we seek to impose our habits and customs on other people.”

  Bilgee and Batu heard Chen out in silence, and did not appear to be offended. “Young man,” Bilgee said after a while, “it would be a good thing if more people, Han and Mongol, were as reasonable about such things as you.”

  Gasmai sighed and remarked indignantly, “The worst thing that ever happened to dogs was being introduced into Chinese society. What they do best they can’t do there, and their shortcomings are all you see. If I were a dog, I’d stay as far away from there as possible. I’d much prefer to stay here, even if a wolf got to me.”

  “Not until I came here,” Chen said, “did I realize that dogs and humans are so much alike, that dogs are truly man’s best friend. It’s only the impoverished, backward farming peoples who will eat anything, including dogs. One day, maybe, when all Chinese are well off, when there’s enough food for everyone, they’ll make friends with their dogs and stop hating and eating them. I’ve grown to love dogs. A day without dogs is a wasted day for me. If someone were to kill the dogs at our yurt, Yang Ke and I would beat the hell out of him.” Chen’s emotions got the better of him, to his own amazement. Having grown up with the concept that a gentleman argues but does not fight, he now found himself articulating feelings more wolfish than human.

  “When you return to Beijing one day,” Gasmai said, “will you raise dogs?”

  “I’ll love dogs for the rest of my life,” Chen replied with a smile. “Love them as much as you do. Just so you’ll know, I haven’t eaten all the fine hard candies my family sent me from Beijing. I haven’t even given many to you or Bayar. I’ve saved them for my dogs.”

  Batu slapped Chen on the back. “You’re at least half Mongol now.”

  More than six months had pa
ssed since that conversation about dogs, but Chen would never forget the promises he’d made that day.

  Quiet had settled over the site of the hunt. The exhausted and injured dogs were grieving over the loss of their comrades, sniffing their bodies nervously, fearfully, and circling them over and over, a rite of farewell perhaps. A young boy lay prone on the ground, his arms wrapped tightly around the body of his dog. Adults tried to get him to leave, but he wailed mournfully, his tears falling on the lifeless body of his beloved dog. His wails hung in the air for a very long time, and all Chen Zhen could see was a blur.

  13

  After Bao Shungui and Uljii led a party of pasture officials to view the spoils at the site of the hunt, they rode up to Bilgee. Bao dismounted and said excitedly to the old man, "A marvelous victory! Truly wonderful! And we have you to thank for that. A signal accomplishment, as my report to my superiors will state.”

  He reached out to shake hands with Bilgee, who responded by spreading out his bloody fingers. “Too dirty,” he said.