Wolf Totem: A Novel

by Jiang Rong

  Chen crouched down beside the cub to listen to him howl and watch his movements. He saw how the young wolf raised his snout into the air before making a soft, drawn-out, even sound that Chen found so pleasant; it was like the sound a dolphin makes as it gently noses out of the water, sending ripples in all directions. It occurred to Chen that pointing the snout into the air was how wolves were able to communicate with their distant kin. Their long, mournful baying and their snout-in-the-air attitude were characteristics that had helped make it possible for them to survive on the grassland. The perfection of the wolves’ evolution was nothing less than Tengger’s masterpiece.

  Blood surged through Chen’s veins. Most likely, no herdsman deep in the Inner Mongolian grassland had ever before stroked the back of a living wolf and listened to it bay into the night. No one heard the round, gentle, pure sound of the cub’s howls more clearly than he; while they were typically wolf, there was no sorrowful quality to them. On the contrary, the cub was bursting with excitement, stirred to his soul that he was finally able to sing out like a wolf, each howl longer, higher, and more intense than the one before. He was like a novice singer getting rave reviews for a debut performance, glued to the stage as he soaked up the applause.

  Over several months, the cub had done many things to surprise Chen, but this amazed him. Since he hadn’t been able to imitate the barking of dogs, the young wolf had turned instinctively to the sounds a wolf makes, and mastered it at once. But how had the posture come to him? That was something he could not have seen, certainly not in the dark of night.

  Each howl the cub made was more natural, louder, and more resonant than the one before; and each one pierced Chen’s heart. A stolen gong will never ring out, they say, but this stolen and human-nurtured wolf rang out with no help from the thief, in triumphant self-assertion. Then Chen realized that the cub was howling to be found: he was calling for the wild to which he belonged. Chen broke out in a cold sweat, feeling suddenly hemmed in between man and wolf.

  Then the cub loosed a howl that dwarfed all those before it.

  At first, there had been no response to the young wolf’s calls, not by humans, by dogs, or by distant wolves, since all had been caught unprepared. The wolves, however, were the first to react. After the cub’s third and fourth immature attempts, the wolves in the surrounding mountains stopped in midhowl and fell silent.

  Chen surmised that the wolves out there—pack leaders, old warriors, alpha wolves, or females—had never before heard a wolf howl emerge from a camp of humans, and he tried to imagine their unbelieving shock. The pack had to be completely mystified, and Chen imagined that they were staring at each other, momentarily silenced by what they heard. He knew that, sooner or later, the wolves would realize this was one of their own and that a prairie fire of hope would be kindled in the hearts of the mothers whose young had been taken from them; they would want their offspring back. Thanks to the cub’s sudden self-revelation, Chen’s worst fears were about to become reality.

  The dogs were next to react to the wolfish howls. A round of ferocious barking erupted, filling the night with a canine din of unmatched savagery, turning the grassland virtually upside down. Prepared for a deadly battle, they alerted their human masters that the wolf pack had launched a surprise attack and warned them to pick up their rifles and engage the enemy.

  The last to react were the people. Most women on the night watch had fallen asleep from fatigue and hadn’t heard the cub’s baying; it was the extraordinary ferocity of the dogs’ barking that woke them. But now that they were awake, their shrill cries cut through the night, their flashlights penetrated the darkness. A wolf attack just before the mosquito onslaught was the last thing any of them had imagined.

  The waves of ferocious barking unnerved Chen Zhen. It was an uproar he had caused, and he wondered how he was going to face the wrath of the brigade members when the sun rose in the morning. He worried that a group of herdsmen would arrive and fling his cub to Tengger, especially since the cub showed no interest in bringing an end to the noisemaking; he howled as if celebrating a rite of passage, stopping only long enough to wet his throat with a bit of water. The darkness was beginning to lose ground to early-morning sunlight; women not on watch were getting up to milk the cows. Starting to panic, Chen wrapped one arm around the young wolf and held his snout closed with his left hand to get him to stop howling. But it was not in the cub’s nature to be bullied, and he fought with all his might to loosen Chen’s grip. By then he was a fully half-grown animal, and much stronger than Chen could have believed. He easily broke free from the arm around him, and Chen knew he had to hold on to the snout or he would surely be bitten.

  The cub resisted furiously, his blazing, awl-like eyes all the proof Chen needed to know that he had now become the enemy. With Chen still holding his snout, the cub struck out with his claws, ripping Chen’s deel and gouging the back of his right hand. Shocked by the pain, Chen screamed, “Yang Ke! Yang Ke!” The yurt door flew open and Yang ran outside, barefoot; a moment later, the two men succeeded in pinning the cub to the ground, where he panted and puffed as he dug furrows in the sandy ground with his claws.

  With Chen’s hand bleeding noticeably, the men counted—one-two-three—before letting go and quickly backing out of the pen. With plenty of fight left in him, the cub charged his retreating captors but was held back by the chain. Yang ran into the yurt to get some antiseptic powder and a bandage from the first-aid kit to treat Chen’s wound.

  All this activity awoke Gao Jianzhong, who stumbled out of the yurt, cursing. “You treat this damned wolf like royalty, day in and day out, and it bites you anyway. If you won’t do away with him, let me have him!”

  “No,” Chen said anxiously, “don’t do anything. It’s not his fault. I clamped his mouth shut. That set him off, and for good reason.”

  It was getting light by then, but the cub’s passion hadn’t cooled. Jumping and leaping, he panted noisily until finally crouching at the edge of the pen and looking up into the northwestern sky to howl yet again. Strangely, however, in the wake of the exhausting struggle he had just experienced, he couldn’t howl—the newly mastered sound was forgotten. He tried and he tried, but all that emerged was a series of doglike barks that set Erlang’s tail wagging happily and eliciting whoops of joy from the three men looking on. Angered and embarrassed by his failure and the reaction to it, the cub snarled at Erlang, his adoptive father.

  “The cub now knows how to howl,” Chen said unhappily, “like an adult wolf. Everyone in the brigade must have heard him, and that means trouble for us. What do we do?”

  Gao Jianzhong was unmoved. “I say kill it. If we don’t, the pack will take up positions around our flock night after night, howling nonstop, which will get all the dogs barking, and no one will get any sleep. And if they take any of our sheep, you’ll have more trouble than you can handle.”

  “We can’t kill him,” Yang said. “Let’s just quietly set him free and say he escaped.”

  “We can’t kill him,” Chen echoed, grinding his teeth, “and we can’t let him go! We’ll hold on, take it one day at a time. If we’re going to set him free, it can’t be now. There are dogs in every camp, and they’ll pounce on the cub almost as soon as we let him go. For now, you tend the sheep when the sun’s out, and I’ll take the night shift. That way I can keep my eye on him during the day.”

  “I guess that’s all we can do,” Yang said. “If an order to kill him comes down from brigade headquarters, we’ll turn him loose someplace where there aren’t any dogs.”

  “You’re a couple of dreamers,” Gao said with a derisive snort. “You just wait. The herdsmen will be here before you know it. The damned thing kept me awake all night, and I’ve got a splitting headache. I tell you, I’m ready to kill it.”

  The sound of horse hooves arrived before they’d finished their morning tea. With a deep sense of foreboding, Chen Zhen and Yang Ke ran to the door, where they saw Uljii and Bilgee circling the yurt on their
horses, looking for the cub. The second time around, they spotted the chain leading into a hole in the ground. They dismounted for a closer look. “No wonder we couldn’t find him,” Bilgee said, “he’s hiding down here.”

  Chen and Yang ran up to grab the reins and tie the horses to the axle of an oxcart. They stood without speaking, like men awaiting sentencing.

  Uljii and Bilgee crouched just outside the pen and gazed into the hole where the cub was lying, unhappy that strangers had come to disturb his rest. He snarled as he poked his head out and glared at the crouching men.

  “He’s grown since the last time I saw him,” Bilgee commented. “He’s bigger than young wolves I’ve seen in the wild.” He turned to Chen Zhen. “You’ve spoiled him,” he said. “Even digging a hole so he can cool off. I was thinking that by leaving him out in the heat every day, you’d have made it easy for us: we wouldn’t have to kill him, the sun would do that.”

  “Papa,” Chen replied cautiously, “I didn’t dig that hole, he did. He was dying out in the sun, and after a while he hit on the idea of digging the hole.”

  With a look of astonishment, the old man stared at the cub. “He knew how to do that without a mother teaching him?” he said. “Maybe Tengger doesn’t want this one to die, after all.”

  “Wolves have agile brains,” Uljii said. “They’re smarter than dogs, and in some ways smarter than humans.”

  Chen Zhen’s heart was racing. “I . . . ,” he said breathlessly. “I was puzzled too over how a wolf this young could figure that out. His eyes hadn’t even opened when I took him out of that hole. He’d never so much as seen his mother.”

  “Wolves have amazing native intelligence,” Bilgee said. “Their mothers might not be around, but there’s always Tengger to teach them. You must have watched how he bayed last night. Wolves are the only grassland animals that howl up into the sky; you’ll never see a cow, a sheep, a horse, a dog, a fox, a gazelle, or a marmot do anything like that. Do you know why? I’ve told you that wolves are Tengger’s pride and joy. Well, when they’re in trouble, they look up and howl so that Tengger will come to their aid. They get most of their abilities directly from Tengger. They know how to ‘ask for instructions in the morning and submit a report in the evening.’ When people run into trouble out here, they look up into the sky and ask for Tengger’s help, just like the wolves. We’re the only two species that pay homage to Tengger.”

  The old man’s gaze softened as he looked at the cub. “In fact,” he continued, “we learned that from the wolves. Before we Mongols came to the grassland, the wolves were already raising their voices to Tengger. It’s a hard life out here, especially for them. Old-timers often shed tears of sadness when they hear wolves bay at night.”

  Chen knew that what Bilgee said was the truth, for he had observed that only wolves and humans revered Tengger, with their howls or with their prayers. Life on this beautiful yet barren spot of land was burdensome for humans and for wolves, and in frustration they unburdened themselves by their daily cries to Tengger. From a scientific perspective, it was true that wolves bayed at the moon so that their voices could be heard far and wide. But Chen preferred Bilgee’s explanation. Without spiritual support, life would be unendurable. Chen felt tears filling his eyes.

  The old man turned to him. “You don’t have to hide that hand from me. The cub clawed you, I bet. I heard everything last night. You thought I came to kill him, didn’t you? Well, you should know that some horse and sheep herders came to see me early this morning to demand that the brigade have the wolf killed. Uljii and I talked it over, and we’ve decided you can keep him for now, but only if you’re more careful. I tell you, I’ve never seen a Chinese so smitten by wolves.”

  Chen was momentarily speechless. “Are you really going to let me keep him?” he finally managed to say. “Why? I don’t want to be someone who brings harm to the brigade, and I’d hate to add to your troubles. I was thinking about making a leather muzzle to keep him from baying.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Uljii said. “All the mother wolves out there know we’ve got a cub, and I predict they’ll be here tonight. But Bilgee and I organized the camps so they’d be close together. Given our numbers—people, dogs, and rifles—the wolves won’t actually attack. What worries me is that when we decamp to move to the autumn grazing land, you’ll be in grave danger.”

  “By then,” Chen said to reassure him, “our puppies will be fully grown, so we’ll have five dogs, including Erlang, our wolf killer. We’ll go out to check more often, and we can always light off firecrackers. The wolves won’t bother us.”

  “We’ll see,” Bilgee said.

  Still worried, Chen said, “Papa, what did you say to all those people demanding to have the cub killed?”

  “The wolves have gone after our horses lately, and we’ve suffered considerable losses. If the cub can bring the wolf pack over here to us, horses will be saved, to the great relief of the herders,” Bilgee said.

  “So raising that wolf cub has had at least one positive effect,” Uljii said. “But don’t let it sink its teeth in you. That would be a disaster. A few nights ago, a migrant laborer tried to steal some dried dung from a herdsman’s house and was bitten by one of the family’s dogs. He damn near died.”

  Bilgee and Uljii mounted up and rode off toward where the horses were grazing, which must have meant there had been more trouble with the herd. As Chen gazed at the dust in their wake, he couldn’t have said if he felt relieved or even more nervous.

  25

  Chen Zhen took out the last two pieces of meat, added some sheep fat, and made a pot of thick, meaty porridge for the cub, whose appetite was growing so fast that a full pot was no longer enough for him. With a sigh, Chen went back inside the yurt to get some sleep so that he’d be well rested for the dangerous night battle. Sometime after one in the afternoon, he was awakened by shouts; he ran outside.

  Zhang Jiyuan had ridden up on a big horse that was carrying something on its back. Blood covered the front half of the horse, who was acting skittish and afraid, reluctant to get close to the oxcarts. Dogs rushed up and surrounded the horse and rider, wagging their tails. Rubbing his sleepy eyes, Chen was startled to find an injured foal lying across Zhang’s saddle. He rushed up to grab the bridle to calm the big horse. In obvious pain, the foal struggled to raise its head as blood continued to drip from the wounds on its neck and chest, staining the saddle and the big horse, whose eyes bulged with fear; it snorted and pawed the ground. Seated bareback behind the saddle, Zhang had a hard time dismounting, afraid that the bloody foal would fall off and frighten the big horse. Chen held one of the foal’s front legs while Zhang, after removing his foot from the stirrup with difficulty, dismounted and nearly fell to the ground.

  Standing on either side of the horse, they picked up the foal and gently laid it on the ground. The big horse turned and sadly looked down at the foal. No longer able to raise its head, the foal could only look at them with its lovely big eyes. Crying out in pain, it pushed against the ground with its front hooves, but it was no use.

  “Can we save it?” Chen asked.

  Zhang said, “Batu checked the wound and said it was beyond help. We haven’t had meat in a long time. Let’s kill it. Laasurung sent another injured foal over to Bilgee.”

  Chen’s heart skipped a beat. He got a basin of water so that Zhang could wash up. “Has there been another attack on the herd? How bad was it?”

  Zhang replied glumly, “Don’t ask. Wolves killed and ate two horses last night and injured another. Laasurung fared even worse; the wolves got five or six of his. I don’t know about the other herds, but I’m sure they didn’t do well either. The brigade leaders all went down to check on them.”

  Chen said, “I know the wolf pack surrounded the camp and howled all night long. But if they were here, how did they end up attacking the horses?”

  “That was their plan: an all-out attack from four sides, hitting the east to divert attention from the west, c
overing for each other, feigning an attack on one side while mounting a major assault on the other; they advanced when they could, and when they couldn’t, they tied us up so that we couldn’t cover both the head and the tail, or both east and west. Their strategy was more lethal than combining forces to launch assault waves.” He finished washing his hands and added, “Let’s kill the foal quickly. We won’t be able to let out any blood once it dies, and blood-clogged meat doesn’t taste good.”

  “They’re right when they say that horse herders are more like wolves than anyone. You look like a real herder now, and you sound like one, with some of the cruel savagery of an ancient grassland warrior.” Handing his brass-handled Mongolian knife to Zhang, he said, “You do it. I can’t bring myself to kill such a beautiful foal.”

  “Wolves killed this foal,” Zhang said, “not humans. This has nothing to do with human nature. I’ll do it. But that’s all I’ll do. You have to do the rest—skin it, gut it, and cut up the meat. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  Taking the knife, Zhang put his feet on one side of the foal’s chest while holding down its head. Following grassland tradition, he let the foal’s eyes face Tengger as he plunged the knife into its neck and severed an artery. There wasn’t enough blood to spew, barely enough to drip slowly. As if looking at a butchered sheep, Zhang watched the foal struggle and finally die.

  “I killed one the other day,” Zhang said, “but it wasn’t as big and meaty as this one. We horse herders had two meals of horsemeat buns. Foal meat is tender and fragrant, but the herders eat it in the summer only when that’s all there is. After thousands of years, foal has become a grassland delicacy.” After washing his hands again, Zhang sat down on the shaft of a water wagon to watch Chen skin the horse.