by Shen Shixi
Flame blocked his way to Sweetie, her hair standing on end, her tail horizontal, her back teeth clamped together – the typical stance of a mother protecting her pups. There was fearless determination in her eyes. She would protect this little thing through hell or high water. Once she was back by Flame’s side, Sweetie’s courage returned, and with the natural bravery of a wolf she charged out from behind Flame, howling and ready to fight, claws at the ready.
Although male and female jackals have a different build, the differences are not as pronounced as in some animals, such as lions and lionesses, wild boars and sows. A male jackal is a little more robust than a female jackal but not by much, and physical strength is not always the deciding factor in a battle.
Jackals are intelligent animals, they can take stock of a situation, weigh up the advantages and disadvantages. Blacktail knew that if he was reckless enough to go for the pup now, go face to face with mother and pup, he would have little chance. The only wise choice would be to leave, to avoid a battle that would do him no good. This was a godless place, he thought. He had a better place of his own to go to. Giving a long, bitter cry, Blacktail shifted out of attack mode, turned around and walked off into the wilderness.
Flame understood that love can be fleeting, that it can brush past you. The jackal of her dreams had gone. She was so confused. She could not understand why she had been so stupid. It’s hard enough as it is to find a good jackal! So why did she rile him like that? Over a wolf pup! Why did she do this? It was irrational, wasn’t it?
Sweetie had had a huge shock. She snuggled up to Flame and sobbed her heart out. Flame checked to see that she wasn’t hurt. There were just a few scratches on her body and some hair was missing.
Blacktail did not hurry away. He was walking slowly, not straying far from the cave. Every so often he glanced back. He felt wronged and resentful. He let out a series of hurt cries and gave one plaintive look after another.
Flame knew that Blacktail was waiting for her to have a change of heart, to tell him to stay. She just had to kill Sweetie, or abandon her, and Blacktail would forget what had happened. If she had Blacktail as her mate, her life would no longer be lonely. And in the summertime she would produce a litter of little pups, pure jackals, her own flesh and blood. Perhaps she should try to save this opportunity? What was the point of hurting him if it hurt her too?
She watched him in the distance, longing to shout out an apology, and bring them back together again. But the sound stuck in her throat. There was a stronger, deeper, reluctant feeling in the way that would not let it out. She didn’t really understand it. She stood there, terrified. Reason and emotion were tearing her heart in two different directions.
Just when she was faltering, not knowing what to do, Blacktail walked off into the distance, down a dark mountain path through the wild grass. He grew smaller and smaller until he was just a blur. Eventually he turned a corner and disappeared, leaving behind a gaping melancholy, a heavy burden of feelings.
What was she doing? Why was she bidding farewell to a beautiful future? Because of a wolf pup?! Rage surged inside her. Angrily, she kicked Sweetie away from her. The little thing rolled like a ball, then rushed back to snuggle close again. Flame screwed up her nose and snarled, as though ready to bite, but the little thing just snuggled closer, as though it would rather die than run away. It would rather die in her embrace. Flame softened, and held her tight. Life! What a mess! Her mind was a mess too, all tangled up and pulling her in different directions.
Chapter 9
Time went by so quickly. In the blink of an eye it was early summer. Sweetie had grown so fast, she was almost as tall as an adult jackal now. As Flame watched her grow, it felt as though the full range of spices were spilling inside her. All the flavours were there: sour, sweet, bitter, spicy. With Flame’s milk, Sweetie had had a good start. Her coat was glossy and shiny. She was developing well. She was healthy and full of life with a natural self-pride. Flame took pleasure in her success as a mother. Except, that is, when she thought about it. At such times, she felt an antagonising guilt: it was her enemy’s job to raise the next generation of evil wolves, not hers. She was raising her enemy’s successor. And as Sweetie grew more robust, Flame’s sin grew more serious.
Jackal and wolf are both canines, and have certain things in common. At about six months a young jackal will start to go hunting with an adult jackal. It’s not that there’s a strict timetable, it’s just that they are ready at that time. The young jackal builds up its stamina and physique, becomes familiar with its surroundings and learns the lay of the land. It observes the adult’s hunting techniques and gains experience of living in the forest. It’s much the same for young wolves. So, when Sweetie was about six months old, and it was time for her to learn her hunting techniques and survival skills, every morning when Flame went out to catch food, she would pester her, hoping to go along too. Flame was reluctant at first. If she taught Sweetie these things, it would be like training a competitor, and it would put pressure on herself and other jackals. But if she didn’t take her hunting then Sweetie would miss the most important stage of learning, and the little thing would be a low-achiever with inadequate survival skills. She couldn’t bear that either.
Well, it does get a bit lonely when you’re out looking for food on your own, and if the little thing came with me, at least I’d have some company! thought Flame.
That afternoon, Flame took Sweetie to a ditch in the bamboo valley, to hunt for porcupines. Porcupines are also known as quill pigs because they are covered with spiky quills that will prick your paws or your mouth if you’re not careful. A slight prick will cause a painful inflammation. A more serious one will mean you can’t run, or swallow, and eventually you will die of hunger. So, although porcupines are quite slow and are easy to find, and their flesh is delicate and sweet, carnivores seldom try to catch them. Just like humans risk death when they eat pufferfish, carnivores face a similar risk when they want to eat porcupine. Just consider the name, ‘pork with spines’. Nature often pits one animal against another. Just like a sword and a spear; you can’t have one without the other. Only a jackal knows how to deal with a porcupine in its spiky uniform. When a jackal finds a porcupine, it roars fiercely in its ears. The terrified porcupine rolls itself up into a ball, with all its quills sticking out. Then the clever jackal bites a branch off a nearby tree, and holds it near the porcupine so the leaves catch on its quills. It drags the porcupine ball to the edge of cliff, and lets it roll. When it lands at the bottom, the quills snap, the porcupine cries out in pain, and the jackal runs down to enjoy the rare delicacy.
Flame came to a slope covered with dense shrub growth. She sniffed about and picked up the unique scent of a porcupine mixed in with the perfumes of the wild flowers, the smell of earth, and the droppings of all kinds of wild animals. She looked around. There on the deep green moss at the bottom of the saddle-shaped rock was a sharp scratch mark, and the scent of porcupine. The smell wasn’t strong but it was fresh, a porcupine had been here not long ago. What’s more, Flame could smell that this was a large one with a big head and fat body. If she could catch it, it would provide two days’ food for herself and Sweetie. Flame knew that porcupines are creatures of habit, and that when they go out hunting, they always follow the same route back. So Flame sat behind the rock and waited for it to appear.
Sweetie was at that age of wanting to be active. She was playful by nature, and of course didn’t want to be hiding quietly behind a rock. After a while she grew impatient, rolled her eyes this way and that, and ran off to paw and yap at the butterflies in the tall grass. Young pups love to play. Their games allow them to be active and use up their energy. They also prepare them for their future life.
The porcupine was taking its time. The most important thing when trying to catch a porcupine is patience. Sometimes it can take four or five hours, and you have to wait until the sun is beginning to set over the mountains before the porcupine comes trundling along.
/> It was calm and peaceful in the wilderness, there was just the gentle sound of Sweetie chasing after butterflies in the grass. Suddenly, Flame heard a hissing in the grass behind her. Flame’s hearing was very sharp, and this was not the sound of Sweetie playing, or the shuffle of the porcupine’s feet. It was a sinister sound. She caught the smell of a cold-blooded animal. Flame’s heart skipped a beat. She leapt to her feet, ran to the grass in front of her and took a good look around. It was bad news. There, in the grass, was a cobra, at least two metres long, with those distinctive dark brown bands, half coiled on the ground, half rising up, its neck flared in a broad hood. A cobra’s eyes instil terror into all living creatures, and this was no exception. Its blood-red tongue flicked in and out and it was hissing.
Just out of her reach, Sweetie was in pursuit of a magnificent yellow swallowtail, absorbed in her energetic play, and oblivious to everything else. She had no idea that death was creeping up on her. The cobra’s hood swayed from side to side, mirroring Sweetie’s movements. Its lower body was tensing slowly, preparing to attack.
Flame had encountered the horrors of a cobra before. It had been early summer, like now, and she’d come across a pack of wild asses on the grasslands. For jackals, wild ass is a rare mountain delicacy. So she followed them for a while, her mouth watering in anticipation. Unfortunately, there were no old or weak ones in the pack. They were all strong, young asses who could run like the wind. It would be a waste of energy trying. She could only watch as they ran further and further and further into the distance.
She had just decided to give up the chase, when a male ass with a pale grey mane suddenly leapt high in the air, screaming, then did a crazy kind of wild ass dance in the air, his hooves going up-down, up-down, as though treading on hot coals. The other asses fled, leaving him leaping and spinning. Flame ran closer. He was still jumping about, the sweat dripping off him, the whites of his eyes showing, his lips pulled one over the other, his long face twisted in agony. At first, Flame thought he must have some dreadful affliction, or be having an epileptic fit, or have gone insane. And then she discovered in the trampled grass beside him a nest of snake’s eggs smashed to smithereens, and, close by, a determined cobra entrenched in the grass. Two minutes later, the grey-maned ass crashed to the ground, limbs twitching, foaming at the mouth, out of his senses. Flame looked closer and saw two puncture marks on his front leg, two tiny wounds oozing deep purple-black blood.
The wild asses had fled because they’d chanced upon a cobra who had laid her eggs in the grass. For the cobra it was like being caught in the pelting rain, with hundreds of hooves thundering down around her. She hadn’t known what to do. The grey-maned ass was unlucky. He had unknowingly stepped right on the eggs. The cobra had been livid, springing up like a tornado, and biting him viciously on the leg.
Well, Nature is full of surprises, and this time Flame had been lucky. She’d ripped a piece of flesh from the dying ass’s body, and had just swallowed it down when she sensed something was not right. It felt as though she had been dragged into a whirlpool in the Nu River. The world had spun around her. She had seen stars before her eyes. Thinking quickly, she had chewed on some bitter mugwort, to make her throw up the ass-meat she had swallowed, and prevent the poison from spreading further. Cobra venom is particularly virulent, and even feeding on an animal that has been bitten by a cobra will produce the symptoms of poisoning.
Now, with the cobra just moments from Sweetie, Flame wanted to cry out a warning, but it was too late. The lower half was not yet in a full cobra twist. If Flame roared now, and Sweetie jumped to the side, she’d be out of danger. Flame’s mouth was half-open, and the warning roar was already gaining momentum in her throat, when she suddenly had an idea. It might be wiser to keep completely quiet.
Sweetie was growing up day by day, and before long she would be a full-size wolf. Wolves are as smart as jackals. At the moment the little thing thought of Flame as her mother, but when she was grown up and understood these things better, the day was bound to come when she would discover that Flame was just a jackal that had taken her in, and then how would things turn out? Jackals and wolves can’t live together long-term and Sweetie was bound to come to her senses one day. Perhaps then she’d think of Flame as food and kill her? Perhaps, if she had a kind heart, she would remember Flame’s kindness in bringing her up, and would let her slip through the net? In any case, Flame was not brave enough to spend every day by the side of an adult she-wolf.
The sensible thing would be to kill the little thing and eat her up before she had the strength to fight back. But she’d tried several times already, and always at the last moment some thread of kindness had bound her feet, and she hadn’t been able to do it. She wanted to do it, but she couldn’t. At the same time she worried that she was asking for trouble if she let her stay. Neither way was easy. But, if she let the cobra kill Sweetie, perhaps this impossible situation might resolve itself. She didn’t want to harm Sweetie intentionally, but this could be an unexpected accident, an unfortunate turn of events. Such things happen every day in the wilderness. There’s nothing unusual about them. She just had to pretend she hadn’t seen anything and walk away. It’s not easy to spot a venomous snake coiled in the grass. If you were looking for an explanation, you could blame it on fate, on Sweetie’s bad luck. You could say that the stars predicted she’d die in a disaster, that she was destined to meet an evil spirit, and it happened to be the cobra.
Flame didn’t need to feel condemned by her conscience, or have feelings of guilt. In a few more seconds, the cobra would have twisted up its lower half, ready to strike. Quick as a flash it would fling itself at Sweetie’s neck, and that would be the end of it. Flame’s biggest problem would be solved. It was an ideal solution. It would happen so fast that the little thing wouldn’t know what was happening, she wouldn’t feel scared.
The cobra’s venom works so fast, that the pain would be over in no time. Her whole body would go numb, paralysed, then she’d suffocate and die. This would be so much better than trying to do the job herself. Although Sweetie was only six months old, she was already the same size as Flame, and no matter how she tried to sneak up in attack, there was no way she would have time to deliver a single bite deep enough to make her lose consciousness. That would not only prolong the little thing’s physical pain, it would also cause enormous mental suffering. Flame would do her best to keep the little one’s suffering to a minimum. Ideally, Sweetie should leave this world without knowing anything had happened. That was what Flame wanted.
For some reason – and Flame didn’t really understand this – her mind was swaying back and forth, like the cobra’s neck. It was as though her body was not listening to her brain. She suddenly felt an uncontrollable urge to charge over and sink her teeth into the flat hood of the cobra, as if it were her irreconcilable enemy. She warned herself that jackals have no immunity against snake venom, that the cobra is one of the most venomous snakes, and that one bite from a cobra would end her life. It just didn’t make sense to risk her life for a wolf pup, to risk going to the yellow springs of the underworld.
As she hid behind the grass, she kept her eyes firmly on the cobra just a foot and a half in front of her. She saw the cobra’s body was now twisted and ready to strike, and that its hooded neck was fully flared.
Sweetie had caught the yellow swallowtail, and was clutching her prize to her chest. If Flame roared a warning right now, it would be too late to save her. It would harm her. Most snakes are short-sighted, and rely on heat to track down their prey. They have a heat sensor on their foreheads, which tells them where to attack. If the target is quiet and does not move, then the snake’s heat sensor does not respond and the snake will not know where to attack. But as soon as the target moves, the heat sensor will pick up the signal, the snake will know the location of the target, and will strike. Right now, Sweetie was lying on the ground pawing at the yellow swallowtail. She was fairly still. The cobra was not moving either. If Flame was to
roar now, Sweetie would hear the warning and come running to her, and in that moment the cobra would fly up and land its poisonous fangs in the little thing’s body.
If Flame wanted to save Sweetie from danger, she had to act before the snake struck, to pounce on it from behind, and sink her teeth into the snake’s neck. Although she had a lot of experience of living in the wild, and had hunted and killed snakes before, they were all small non-venomous ones. She had never caught a live poisonous one before, not to mention a seriously venomous cobra. It was as dangerous as pulling a tiger’s tooth. There was no guarantee of success. Her instinct was to attack, but her mind was at sixes and sevens.
Somehow or other, Sweetie sensed there was something swaying in front of her. She tossed her head up, then stopped, her eyes wide open, her chin dropping. It was the first time she had seen a cobra. But lots of animals seem to have a built-in terror of poisonous snakes with their soft shiny skin and their brightly coloured bodies, in particular the cobra with that eye pattern on the back of its neck. One look at that eye, and your scalp is tingling, you know without being told that it’s time to run away. If Sweetie lay on the ground and did not move, she could prevent the catastrophe from happening. But that was impossible. The little thing was so young, she had no experience of evading a poisonous snake’s attack. And if she was startled, she was bound to run off. For a few moments Sweetie was frozen to the spot. The she looked round deciding which way to run, arched her back, and summoned all her strength to her legs. As soon as she was ready, she would roar and run as fast as her legs would carry her.