Wolf Totem

11

The three students mounted up and followed Dorji as he headed west through the reedy land, then turned south, skirting alkali dunes, intentionally choosing land too hard to leave hoofprints as they sped home. They were unavoidably nervous, feeling not in the least victorious, and overcome by guilt and trepidation.

Chen felt better when he thought about the wolf running off with one of his lambs. As a shepherd, he’d avenged a slaughtered member of his flock. Removing a litter of cubs, difficult as it might be, was easier than killing the same number of adult wolves. But the question remained: Why, if the Mongols had stumbled on this lethal means of keeping down the wolf population, did the wolf scourge persist? Chen decided to ask Dorji.

“The wolves are too clever,” Dorji replied. “They choose the perfect time to bear their litters. Everyone says that dogs and wolves were the same family back in antiquity, while in fact wolves have always been stealthier than dogs. Dogs have their litters about half a month after Lunar New Year’s. Wolves, on the other hand, have theirs at the very beginning of spring, when the snow has melted and sheep are having their young. That’s the busiest time of the year for us, the most exhausting and the most urgent. Once the lambs have been born and the people can relax a bit, the cubs have grown out of their dens. The only time wolves live in dens is when the females bear their litters. The cubs open their eyes at about a month, and a month or so after that, they’re out romping with their mother. There’s another advantage to having their cubs in early spring. The mothers can hunt newborn lambs to feed their offspring and teach them how to hunt. Tender lamb is a wonderful diet for the cubs.”

As Yang yawned over and over, Chen suddenly felt so tired he could barely stay on his mount. The prospect of sleep sounded good. But he couldn’t get the wolves out of his mind. He asked Dorji, “How come the herdsmen out here aren’t enthusiastic about looking for wolf cubs?”

“The local herdsmen are Lamaists,” Dorji replied. “In the past, nearly every family had to send one member out to become a lama. Lamaists believe in doing good deeds, so they forbid random killing. Killing lots of wolf cubs, they believe, will shorten their own lives. Since I’m not a Lamaist, I’m not afraid of shortening my life. Manchurian Mongols don’t feed their dead to the wolves, and I wouldn’t shed a tear if every last wolf was killed. Once we learned how to plant crops, we began following the Han custom of burying our dead in the ground.”

Chen felt as if an ill wind were following him, stirring up a deep-seated fear in his soul. After having had no contact with wolves in the city, he now was the master of seven cubs whose mother was unimaginably fierce and cunning. Who could say that the litter in his bag had not been sired by the leader of the pack? Or the finest of the breed? If not for his obsession, the tiny creatures would surely not have fallen into human hands; they would have grown to adulthood and become intrepid fighters. But his arrival changed their fate, and he would forever be linked to all the wolves on the grassland, their eternal enemy. Wolf families on the Olonbulag, led by the implacable mother wolf, would come to him in the dark of night to demand retribution, forever nipping at the edges of his soul. He suddenly sensed that he may have committed a terrible sin.

By afternoon they were back in the yurt; Chen hung his bag on the wall, and the four men sat around the stove drinking hot tea, eating roasted meat, and discussing what to do with the seven cubs.

“What’s there to talk about?” Dorji said. “After we’re finished here, watch me. It won’t take two minutes.”

Chen was now facing the dilemma he had anticipated-the raising of a wolf cub. From the moment the thought had first occurred to him, he knew there would be resistance from the herdsmen, party officials, and fellow students. Raising a wolf cub was something only someone with an ulterior motive would consider. It not only flew in the face of politics, faith, religion, and ethnic relations but also adversely affected production, safety, and their state of mind. During the early years of the Cultural Revolution, the Beijing Zoo attendants had kept an orphaned tiger cub and a canine surrogate mother in the same cage, and that had turned into a serious political incident, viewed as extolling the virtues of the reactionary theory of class harmony, for which the attendants were subjected to strident criticism. Wouldn’t raising a wolf around flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, and packs of dogs be a public disavowal of separating friend and foe? Would he be seen as advocating the idea of considering one’s enemy a friend? Since wolves were the enemies of herdsmen, as well as their revered divinities, their totem (especially in the minds of the elders), their bridge to heaven, and as such, creatures to whom homage was paid, how could they be raised as pets, like domestic dogs? From the perspectives of religion, production, and safety, one need only consider the saying “Raising a tiger invites peril; raising a wolf brings disaster.” For Chen, the greatest concern was whether Bilgee would still consider him as a second son if he decided to raise the wolf cub.

Chen was not motivated by a desire to blaspheme the Mongols’ divinity, nor did he wish to defile their religious beliefs. Quite the opposite: He felt an increasing sense of urgency to raise a cub owing to his deep-seated respect for the Mongol people’s totem and his obsessive interest in the profound mysteries surrounding wolves, the way they came and went like shadows. But to avoid creating enmity with the herdsmen, especially with the old man, it was important to come up with reasons they could accept, however reluctantly.

Even before finding the litter, after racking his brain for days, Chen had finally found an argument he thought they might find reasonable: raising a wolf would be a scientific experiment to create a new breed of wolf hound. Wolfhounds enjoyed an excellent reputation on the grassland. Guards at the frontier station had five or six of the large, ferocious, and speedy animals. When they hunted wolves or foxes, they were fast, ruthless, and successful nine times out of ten. Commander Zhao of the frontier station had once gone out with two soldiers and a pair of wolfhounds to inspect the work of the militias in livestock regions. Along the way, his dogs had caught four large foxes. The commander had moved from place to place on his inspection tour, skinning foxes along the way, to the amazement of all the hunters who saw him. Not surprisingly, the herdsmen all wanted one of those wolfhounds; unfortunately, they were a rare breed at the time, and were considered army materiel. The herdsmen had no chance of ever getting a wolfhound cub, even if they were on good terms with the military. What were wolfhounds but the spawn of a male wolf and a female dog? Chen reasoned. So all he had to do was raise a male wolf to maturity and mate it with a bitch to produce a wolfhound, which he would donate to the herdsmen. Since Mongolian wolves were considered the finest in the world, if his experiment was a success, he might well produce a breed superior to German and Soviet army dogs, and might even be responsible for developing a new form of livestock farming.

Chen set down his tea and said to Dorji, “You can dispose of six of the cubs, but leave the most robust male for me. I want to raise it.”

Speechless at first, Dorji stared at Chen for a good ten seconds. “You want to raise a wolf?” he said finally.

“That’s right. When it reaches maturity, I’ll breed it with dogs, and we’ll wind up with cubs like the wolfhounds at the frontier station. When they start coming, every Mongol family will want one.”

Dorji’s eyes lit up, like a hunting dog spotting its prey. He nearly gasped. “What a great idea! It might just work. If we all had wolfhounds, catching foxes and wolves would be like child’s play. Selling wolfhound pups might even make us rich someday.”

“What if the brigade won’t let me do it?”

“Say you’re raising a wolf to fight wolves,” Dorji said. “To safeguard collective property. Anyone who opposes you will be out of luck when the pups start coming.”

“You’re not thinking of raising one too, are you?” Yang Ke asked with a laugh.

“If you’re going to do it,” Dorji said, “then I will too.”

Chen smacked his fist into his hand. “Great!” he said. “With two yurts involved, we’ll double our chances of success.” He paused. “But there’s no guarantee that a male wolf will mate with a bitch.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Dorji said. “That I can take care of. Three years ago, I managed to get a terrific bitch, which I wanted to mate with my fastest, meanest male dog. But we had ten dogs altogether, eight males, good and bad, and if the bitch had decided to mate with one of the bad ones, what a waste that would’ve been. So here’s what I did. When she was in heat, I found a well that had been dug halfway, about the size of a yurt and twice the depth of a man’s height. I put her and one of my good male dogs inside, added a dead sheep, and made sure they were fed and watered for twenty days. When I took them out, the bitch was pregnant. She had a litter of fine cubs just before Lunar New Year’s, eight in all. I killed the four females and kept the four males. Among all our dogs, more than a dozen, they’re the biggest, the fastest, and the most powerful. Every year they get credit for more than half the wolves and foxes we take. If we do that here, we’ll get our wolfhound pups. But don’t forget, you need to raise your wolf cub with a female pup.”

Chen Zhen and Yang Ke whooped in delight.

There was movement in the canvas bag. The cubs were probably uncomfortable and hungry, so it was time for them to stop playing dead and start struggling to find a way out of the bag. They were seven noble lives, the sort that Chen Zhen valued and admired, and five were about to be killed. His heart was heavy, and a picture of the sculpted wall at the main gate of the Beijing Zoo flew into his mind. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, he was thinking, if I could send them there, members of the purest possible wolf breed, from the heart of the Mongolian grassland? At that moment he sensed how rapacious and vain humans can be. There would have been nothing wrong with picking the biggest and strongest of the seven cubs. So why had they brought the entire litter home? He should never have taken Dorji and Gao Jianzhong along. But would he have only brought one cub back with him if they hadn’t been there? Probably not. Bringing back the whole litter represented conquest, courage, reward, and glory; it won him the respect of others. Compared to that, those seven lives were like grains of sand.

Chen’s heart ached, for he had developed a fondness for wolf cubs almost from the beginning. They’d been on his mind for more than two years, until he was nearly spellbound, and now he wished he could keep them all. But that was out of the question. Seven cubs-how much food would it take to raise them to adulthood? Then an idea came to him. Why not get on his horse and return the remaining five cubs to their den? But other than Yang Ke, no one would have gone with him, and he certainly wouldn’t go on his own, a four-hour trip there and back, more than he or his horse had the stamina for. At that moment the mother wolf must have been wailing grievously alongside her ruined den, howling madly, so going back would be suicidal.

Chen took the bag off the hook and walked slowly out of the yurt. “Wait a few days before you take care of them, all right? I’d like to study them awhile.”

“What do you plan to feed them?” Dorji asked. “Cold as it is, they’ll all die if they go a day without being fed.”

“I’ll feed them cow’s milk,” Chen said.

“No you won’t,” Gao Jianzhong said, obviously displeased. “I tend those cows, and their milk is meant for humans. Wolves eat cows, so feeding them cow’s milk would be an affront to the heavens, and the herdsmen wouldn’t let me tend the cows anymore.”

Yang Ke stepped in to smooth things over. “Go ahead and let Dorji take care of them now. Gasmai is worried about not meeting her quota. If we give her five cub pelts, she’ll be able to squeak by, and we can raise one on the sly. Otherwise, the whole brigade will come over to see the litter of live cubs and you won’t be able to hold one back. So let Dorji dispose of them. I couldn’t do it, and I know you couldn’t. We’re lucky to have him here to do it for us.”

Chen’s eyes stung as he sighed and said, “I guess we have no choice.”

He went inside and dragged out the box in which they stored dried dung for the stove. After dumping out the dung, he emptied the contents of the canvas bag into the box. The cubs immediately scrambled this way and that, but when they reached a corner they stopped and played dead, anything to escape a cruel end. They were trembling, the rigid black wolf hairs oscillating as if electrified.

Dorji moved them around with his fingers, and looked up at Chen. “Four males and three females,” he said. “You can have this one, the biggest and brawniest. This other one’s mine.” Then he picked up the rest, put them back into the bag, and carried it over to an open space in front of the yurt, where he picked out one, turned it upside down, and announced, “This one’s a female. Let her be the first to go to Tengger.”

Kneeling on one knee, he windmilled his right arm and flung the plump little cub as high into the air as possible, the way herdsmen disposed of excess baby dogs in the spring: What goes up to heaven is its soul; what falls to the ground are its mortal remains. Chen and Yang had seen this ancient ritual many times in the past, and they’d heard it was how herdsmen disposed of wolf cubs. But this was the first time they’d witnessed it performed on stolen cubs, and their faces were drained of color, like the dirty snow alongside the yurt.

The female cub, apparently unwilling to go to Tengger so early, had played dead in order to stay alive. Now that she was up in the air and knew where she was headed, she spread her tiny legs and performed a strange dance, as if wanting to grab hold of her mother or dig her claws into her father’s neck. She opened her mouth as she reached the apex of her arc and began to fall.

The cub hit the hard snow-swept ground in front of the barracks with a thud, like a melon, and stopped moving. Trickles of pink blood seeped out through her mouth, her nose, and her eyes, a milky color mixed in. Chen’s heart slipped back into his chest from his throat, the pain moving beyond consciousness. The three dogs ran toward the corpse but were stopped by a shout from Dorji, who kept them from reaching the dead animal and destroying its valuable pelt. To his astonishment, Chen saw that Erlang had rushed over, not to join his companions, but to stop them from getting their teeth into the dead cub. With his commanding presence, he was not an animal to tear into a carcass; maybe he too had developed a fondness for the wolf cubs.

Dorji took a second cub out of the bag. This one, it seemed, could smell the milky blood of its sister, and as soon as she lay in Dorji’s palm, she stopped playing dead and fought to free herself, scratching the back of his hand with her tiny claws. He was about to fling her skyward when he stopped and said to Chen, “Here, you can kill this one, see what you’re made of. No grassland shepherd can go through life without killing wolves.”

Chen took a step backward. “No, you go ahead.”

“You Han Chinese have no guts,” Dorji said with a laugh. “You hate wolves, but you can’t even bring yourself to kill a cub. How do you expect to fight a war? No wonder you put all that time and energy into building a wall all the way across your northern border. Watch me…” His words still hung in the air as the second cub flew skyward, and before she hit the ground, the third one was on its way up. The killing excited Dorji, who murmured, “Up to Tengger you go; there you’ll enjoy a happy life!”

Five pitiful little cubs had flown through the air; five bloody corpses now lay on the ground. Chen scooped them into a dustpan and stared up into the sky, hoping that Tengger had accepted their souls.

Dorji seemed exhilarated by what he’d done. He bent down and wiped his hands on the toes of his boots and said, “You don’t get many chances to kill five wolves in one day. They’re better at this than we are. Given the chance, a wolf will kill a hundred, even two hundred sheep at a time. I only killed five, big deal! It’s getting late. I have to go round up my cattle.” He walked over to pick up his wolf cub.

“Don’t go yet,” Chen said. “Help us skin these.”

“No problem,” Dorji said. “It’ll only take a minute.”

Standing guard over the dead cubs, Erlang snarled at Dorji and tensed. Chen wrapped his arms around the dog’s neck to give Dorji a chance to skin the cubs, which he did as if he were skinning a lamb. They were so small he didn’t need to skin the legs. After the five cubs were skinned, he spread their pelts over the rounded top of the yurt and pulled them taut. “These are fine pelts,” he said. “If you had forty of them, you could make a wonderful coat-light, warm, good-looking. You couldn’t buy one for any amount of money.”

Dorji cleaned his hands with snow and walked over to the wagon to get a spade. “You guys are useless,” he said. “I have to do everything. Dogs won’t eat a wolf, so we have to bury these right away, and deep, to keep the mother from picking up their scent. That would be the end of your flocks and herds.” They picked a spot west of the yurt and dug a four-foot hole. After tossing in the five skinned cubs, they filled in the hole and tamped down the surface. Then they spread medicinal stomach powder over the grave to cover the smell of the corpses below.

“Should we make some sort of den for our cub?” Yang Ke asked Dorji.

“No, dig a hole for it.” So Chen and Yang dug a hole a dozen or so paces southwest of the yurt. It was a foot or so deep and a couple of feet across. They covered the bottom with well-worn sheepskins, leaving a spot of muddy ground uncovered, and put the little male cub inside.

It came to life the moment it touched the muddy ground, surveying its surroundings with its nose and its eyes, as if it thought it might be back home. It calmed down slowly and curled up on a sheepskin in the corner, still sniffing and looking around, as if trying to find its brothers and sisters. Chen was about to put the second cub in the hole to keep the first one company, when Dorji scooped it up and held it close; he jumped onto his horse and galloped off. Gao Jianzhong cast a cold look down at the cub in the hole, then climbed onto his horse and rode off to round up his cattle.

Chen Zhen and Yang Ke, weighed down with anxieties, crouched beside their new wolf den and stared at the cub. "I don’t know if we’re going to be able to do this,” Chen said. "There are troubles ahead.”

“With him on our hands,” Yang said, “the good can’t get out the door; the bad goes on forever. You just wait. The whole country’s singing ‘We won’t stop fighting until all the jackals are dead,’ and here we are, raising a wolf, treating an enemy like a friend.”

“Out here,” Chen said, “heaven is high and the emperor is far away. Who will know what we’re doing? What worries me is that Bilgee won’t let us do it.”

“The cows are back,” Yang said. “I’ll go get some milk. This guy must be starving.”

Chen waved him off. “Dog’s milk is better,” he said. “We’ll give him Yir’s milk. If a tiger cub can live off dog’s milk, a wolf cub is a sure bet.” Chen picked the cub up out of the hole and held it in both hands. Its belly had caved in with hunger and its paws were cold, like little icy stones. It was trembling. Chen quickly held it close, under his coat, to warm it up.

As dusk was falling, the time for Yir to return to her pups, Chen and Yang went over to the dog pen, dug a hole, and lined it with a thick layer of old sheepskins. A stiff, untanned horsehide curtain kept the den warm for Yir and her three puppies. After Yang fed her a soupy mixture of meat and millet, Yir ran back to the den, muzzled aside the horsehide curtain, and lay down gently against the wall. Her pups found her nipples and sucked greedily.

Chen approached Yir warily, crouched down, and rubbed her head to block the view down below. Happy as always when someone rubbed her head, Yir licked Chen’s hand while Yang pushed one of the pups away and squeezed some milk into his palm. When he saw there was enough, Chen took the wolf cub out from under his coat and Yang smeared milk on its head, back, and paws, the way herdsmen tricked ewes into feeding orphaned lambs. But dogs are smarter than sheep, their sense of smell keener. If Yir’s pups had died or been taken from her, she might have accepted the wolf cub. But with three of her own, that would not happen. As soon as she detected the presence of the wolf in her den, she tried to raise her head to make sure she could see her own pups. Using force and guile, Chen and Yang kept her down.

When the cold, hungry little wolf was laid down next to one of Yir’s teats and could smell the milk, he stopped playing dead and, as if detecting the scent of blood, opened his mouth and bared his fangs, instinctively displaying an attitude of “If there’s milk, she’s my mother.” Born a month later than the dog pups, the cub had a tinier head and was smaller overall. But he was already stronger than the little dogs, and his skill at latching on to the closest teat was superior to theirs. There were two rows of teats, some larger than others, so the supply of milk varied. Chen and Yang watched with amazement as the little wolf seemed less interested in drinking than in finding the largest teat, in pursuit of which he nudged the puppies out of the way. An intruder, a thug, a brigand had been introduced into a peaceful den. His wild nature was revealed as he sent the puppies reeling on his search for the largest teat. He sampled one, spit it out, and tried the next, over and over until he settled on the largest, fullest nipple right in the middle, and began sucking greedily. As he drank, he spread his paws over neighboring teats, as if eating out of a bowl and guarding the pot, hoarding the best for himself. The three docile puppies were kept away.

The two friends could not believe their eyes. “Wolves are scary,” Yang remarked. “This little bastard’s eyes aren’t even open and he’s already a tyrant. Now we see what it means to be the pick of the litter. I’ll bet he’d have acted the same around his brothers and sisters.”

Chen, mesmerized by the sight, was deep in thought. “We’ll have to study him closely,” he said finally. “There’s a lot we can learn from this. Our dog pen is a microcosm of world history. I’m reminded of something Lu Xun once wrote. He said that Westerners are brutish, while we Chinese are domesticated.”

Chen pointed to the cub. “There’s your brute.” Then he pointed to the pups. “And there’s your domestication. For the most part, Westerners are descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons. They burst out of the primeval forest like wild animals after a couple of thousand years of Greek and Roman civilization, and sacked ancient Rome. They eat steak, cheese, and butter with knives and forks, which is how they’ve retained more primitive wildness than the traditional farming races. Over the past hundred years, domesticated China has been bullied by the brutish West. It’s not surprising that for thousands of years the Chinese colossus has been spectacularly pummeled by tiny nomadic peoples.”

Chen rubbed the cub’s head and continued. “Temperament not only determines the fate of a man but also determines the fate of an entire race. Farming people are domesticated, and faintheartedness has sealed their fate. The world’s four great civilizations were agrarian nations, and three of them died out. The fourth, China, escaped that fate only because two of the greatest rivers-the Yellow and the Yangtze-run through her territory. She also boasts the world’s largest population, making it hard for other nations to nibble away at her or absorb her, but maybe also because of the contributions of the nomadic peoples of the grassland… I haven’t satisfactorily thought out this relationship, but the more time I spend on the grassland-and it’s already been two years-the more complex I think it is.”

Yang nodded. “I think raising this wolf will be good for more than just studying wolves. We can also study human nature, wolf nature, and domestication. It’s a condition you can’t find in the city or in farming areas, other than people perhaps and their pets.”

“But if you don’t study them in tandem with wolf nature, you’ll never come up with anything worthwhile.”

“You’re right,” Yang agreed happily. “Our first day has already produced rewards.”

The commotion in the dog pen, and the whining protestation of the bullied pups increased Yir’s suspicions and vigilance. She fought to break free of Chen’s grip and see what was happening down there. Worried she might spot the cub and kill it, he held her head down and softly called her name, rubbing and stroking her to keep her calm until the cub’s belly was full. She managed to turn her head enough to see that there was an extra puppy in her den, and sniffed out the wolf. Maybe because the wolf had some of her milk on its body, she hesitated briefly, then nudged it away with her nose and struggled to get to her feet and step out of the den, where the light was better, to see what was going on.

But Chen pushed her down again; it was important for her to learn what he needed, and he was counting on her to accept this new reality, to obey, not resist. She began to whimper, appearing to comprehend that her master had brought a wolf cub back from the mountains and put it into her den with the idea of having her nurture one of her mortal enemies. Several times she tried to stand and pull her nipple out of the wolf’s mouth, but Chen kept pushing her back down. She was angry, agitated, uncomfortable, and disgusted, but she didn’t dare disobey her master and was forced to lie down indignantly and not move.

Calm gradually returned to the den. Yir was the first bitch Yang and Chen had raised, and they had lavished attention on her during her pregnancy, when the litter was born, and throughout the nursing period, with good food, good drink, and whatever else she needed. She had plenty of milk; in fact, after several of her litter had been taken away, she had more than she needed. The additional mouth, the wolf cub, had no effect on her supply, and even though her own three puppies had been pushed over to thinner teats, they slowly ate their fill, then crawled up onto their mother’s back and neck, where they began playfully nipping at one another’s tails and ears. The wolf cub was still suckling.

Chen looked on, and did not like what he was seeing. The cub’s belly was already more bloated than those of the puppies, so he reached down and touched it. It was taut as a drum and thin as paper. He worried that it might actually pop at that rate, so he pulled it back gently by the neck. But the cub refused to let go, stretching the nipple two inches and drawing yelps of pain from Yir. Yang anxiously reached down and pinched the sides of the cub’s mouth, finally breaking the connection. He breathed a cold sigh of relief. “Herdsmen say that wolves’ stomachs are made of rubber. I believe it.”

Chen was visibly pleased. “What an appetite!” he said. “He’s full of life; raising this one shouldn’t be hard. From now on, we’ll let him eat as much as he wants.”

Night had fallen, so Chen returned the cub to his den and put one of the female pups in with him so he’d feel comfortable around her even before the membranes fell from his eyes. He wanted them to become friends. They sniffed each other, Yir’s milk closing the distance between them; then they curled up together and slept. Chen spotted Erlang standing nearby, watching the cub and observing his master’s every move, wagging his tail, the sweep a little broader than before, as if to show his approval to his master for taking in a baby wolf. Just to be safe, Chen covered the little den with a wooden plank and held it down with a large rock.

Honest, sincere Gombu, so easy to get along with, had already penned the sheep, and when he heard that Chen and the others had stolen a litter of wolf cubs, he ran over with his flashlight to take a look. He spotted the five little pelts on top of the yurt and was shocked. “Here on the Olonbulag, no Han Chinese has ever taken a litter of wolves. Never. That’s the truth.”

As the three students sat around the metal stove eating lamb noodles, the sounds of barking dogs and running horses entered from the outside. A moment later, Zhang Jiyuan parted the felt curtain and opened the door. Squatting in the doorway, holding the reins of two horses, which were stamping their hooves, he said, “Headquarters says the big wolf pack has drifted back in smaller groups, and they’ve ordered all three production brigades to begin the encirclement hunt tomorrow. The northwest sector is our responsibility, with the help of some hunters from other brigades, and under the overall command of Bilgee. The brigade leaders want you to assemble at Bilgee’s yurt at one in the morning. Everyone but most of the old people and children, who will tend the cows and sheep, is expected to be part of the hunt. The horse herders will make sure everyone has a horse, and they’ll arrive at the ambush sites ahead of the rest of us. Get some sleep. I’m going now. Make sure, make absolutely sure, that you don’t oversleep.”

Zhang shut the door, jumped into the saddle, and rode off.

Gao Jianzhong put down his bowl, pulled a long face, and said, “We just got our little wolf, and now the big ones are here. These wolves are going to be the death of me.”

“A few more years out here on the grassland, and we might become wolves ourselves,” Yang Ke said.

They began making preparations for the hunt. Gao ran out to the pasture to bring their horses back to the hay enclosure, leaving them just outside while he ran in, picked up a pitchfork, and carried out three piles of hay. Yang fed the dogs some sheep bones and some lamb he took from a willow basket and checked the saddles, belly straps, and lasso poles. Then he helped Chen Zhen find a couple of leather dog collars. They had participated in small-scale hunts before and knew the importance of dog collars and leashes. Chen fastened one of the collars around Erlang’s neck and threaded a leash through the metal ring, then held both ends in his hand. He led the dog a few steps; then he pointed to the northern edge of the sheep pen, shouted “Go!” and released one end of the leash. Erlang ran over, turning the two lengths of rope into one, which came out of the ring. He ran into the dark night wearing only the collar, the long leash still in Chen Zhen’s hand. Handling dogs this way during a hunt meant the dogs were always under the hunter’s control, which kept them from going off on their own and throwing the hunt into confusion. At the same time, many dogs could be used without tangling them up in the leashes and slowing them down.

Yang Ke did the same to Yellow, threading the leash and practicing once. Both dogs obeyed commands, and the men’s actions were flawless, keeping the dogs from running off with the leashes.