Wolf Totem

22

Once again, Chen Zhen was assigned the night shift for tend-ing the sheep. With Erlang along to keep guard, he was free to stay in the yurt to read and to write in his journal. He moved his squat table up next to the door, then set two books on edge between the lamp and his sleeping comrades so as not to waken them. The grassland was perfectly still; no wolves were baying that night, and none of the three watchdogs was barking, though they were awake and alert. He left the yurt only once, to take a turn around the flock with his flashlight, and the sight of Erlang lying awake and alert on the northwestern edge put him at ease. He rubbed the big dog’s head to express his appreciation. Back in the yurt, he read some more to keep from dozing off. Finally, in the early-morning hours, he fell asleep. When he woke the next morning, he went out to feed the wolf cub.

After coming to the new grazing land, the cub awoke every day at the crack of dawn and crouched down, as if ready to pounce on unsuspecting prey, staring at the door of the yurt and glaring at his food bowl. To him, the bowl was his prey, and, like an adult wolf, he waited patiently for the right moment to attack it. The moment it came close enough, he pounced, and the meat he ate from it was the flesh of his prey, not something supplied by humans. That was how the young wolf preserved his wolfish independence. Chen helped by feigning fear of the cub and backing off; still, he was seldom able to mask his delight.

Before the summer rains come, the Mongolian plateau is visited by dry hot air for a time, but the heat this year seemed worse than usual. As far as Chen was concerned, the Mongolian sun not only rose earlier than it did in China proper but seemed lower in the sky. It was as hot at ten in the morning as it was at noon down south; the sun baked the grass around their yurt until each blade was nothing but a hollow green needle. The mosquito scourge hadn’t yet begun, but maggot-born big-headed flies swarmed across the land and launched assaults on men and their livestock. They focused on the eyes or the nose, on chapped corners of mouths, or on bloody strips of raw lamb hanging inside yurts. Men, dogs, and wolves waved arms and swished tails in an unending and futile attempt to bear up under the assault. Yellow was expert at lightning-quick grabs of flies in his mouth, which he chewed up and spat out, and it never took long for the floor around him to be littered with the bodies of flies, like the empty husks of melon seeds.

The temperature continued its inexorable rise above the steaming ground, so hot that the basin was like a gargantuan iron cook pot and the grass took on the appearance of dry tea leaves. The dogs lay sprawled in the narrow crescent-shaped shadow north of the yurt, mouths open and tongues lolling as they panted to cool down, their bellies rising and falling rapidly. Chen noticed that Erlang wasn’t among them, so he called his name. He didn’t come, and Chen wondered where he’d gotten off to. Maybe to the river, where it was cooler. Erlang was a reliable watchdog when Chen had the night shift, and members of the brigade no longer called him a wild dog. But come sunrise, when the dog was off duty, Chen’s control over him ended, and he wandered away. Yellow and Yir, on the other hand, stayed close to home during the day, still watchful, still loyal.

The weather was particularly hard on the cub, since its chain was too hot to touch and there were no shady spots where he could get out of the sun for a while. He just sweltered. The grass in his pen had succumbed to his trampling; the ground was now more like desert than grassland, or like a platter on a lit stove, filled with hot water and sand. The cub himself was like a chestnut that had been roasted until it was burned to a crisp and about to pop. The pathetic creature was a captive in an overheated prison.

The instant the gate swung open, the cub rose up on his hind legs, nearly choking on the chain collar. He kicked the air with his front paws, and anyone watching would have known that what he wanted was neither shade nor water but food. Food is the core of a wolf’s existence, and Chen could see that his appetite was not affected by the extreme heat. He kept kicking the air as a sign for Chen to put his food bowl down in the pen. Once he had his “prey” in his grasp, he snarled and drove Chen out of the pen.

Chen was growing anxious; the herdsmen had told him that, once the summer months arrived, their customary fare was milk products, seldom supplemented by meat. Tea in the morning and dinner in the evening, but without the handfuls of meat he’d gotten used to. There were noodles, millet, fried rice, and a variety of milk dishes: sour curds, yogurt, butter, and whey. The herdsmen preferred to eat fresh dairy products in the summer, something the Beijing students did not enjoy. To begin with, they weren’t used to substituting dairy products for meat, but, more important, none of them liked the idea of getting up at three or four in the morning to milk cows for four or five hours, followed by churning until the milk curdled. Even less inviting was waiting till the cows came back at five or six in the evening, then milking them for three or four hours, followed by all the cooking, pressing, chopping, and drying that was required. They’d rather eat boiled and steamed millet, vegetarian noodles, buns, or dumplings than curds. So while the local herdsmen ate their curds in the summer, the students picked wild vegetables-onions, garlic, leeks, daylilies, ash greens, and dandelions, plus something the northeastern Mongols called halagai, a wild plant whose thin, broad, lip-numbing leaves had a spicy taste. The change of diet during the summer months profoundly affected Chen and his cub.

Few sheep were slaughtered in the summer, since there was no way to keep the meat from spoiling. Thanks to the heat and the flies, it turned maggoty in less than two days, so the locals cut it into strips and coated it with flour to keep the flies from laying eggs in it. The strips were hung in the coolest corner of a yurt to dry. A few were then added to noodles to give them a meaty taste. Sometimes, when the sky was overcast for several days, the meat would turn moldy and go bad. So summer was the season when the sheep fattened up. It was important for them to add muscle in the summer and fat in the fall. If they didn’t, the meat was thin, with little grease and no taste; the herdsmen wouldn’t eat it. Summertime was also when the sheep were sheared; their skins are worth little and can only be made into thin jackets worn in the spring or the fall. Slaughtering a sheep in the summer is wasteful, Bilgee once told Chen.

Government policy those days, when cooking oil was scarce and meat was rationed, dictated that the Olonbulag herdsmen were to treat every sheep among their vast flocks as precious and not kill and eat them in large numbers. People, even the meat-loving students, could survive the meat ban. But for the wolf cub, it was a different matter altogether.

One morning, Chen filled the cub’s bowl with half a strip of spoiled meat to take the edge off his hunger. Then he carried the empty bowl back to the yurt to figure out what to do next. As he ate his breakfast of pickled leeks and soupy lamb noodles, he picked out the few pieces of dried lamb and put them into the cub’s bowl. Unlike the dogs, the cub would not eat porridge or rice if it had no meaty flavor; if he was given a bowl of food with no meat or bones, he’d anxiously and angrily gnaw on his chain.

So after finishing his breakfast, Chen dumped the remainder into the wolf’s bowl and stirred it to bring bits of meat from the bottom to the top, where the cub could see it. He sniffed the mixture; he could barely smell meat, so he decided to pour in some of the sheep oil from the lamp. The congealed oil in the ceramic jug was turning soft and starting to go bad in the heat; but since wolves prefer rotting meat, the cub was sure to appreciate the sheep oil.

Chen scooped out a big ladleful of oil and added it to the bowl. It stirred up into a nice oily mixture. This time he was satisfied with the smell; the cub was in for a tasty meal. He added some more millet but could not give up more of his oil.

The dogs, forced to go without meat all summer and hungry most of the time, were waiting for him when he opened the door. So he fed them first, pausing until they’d licked their bowls clean before going out to the shaded area behind the yurt with the cub’s food. “Little Wolf, Little Wolf,” he called out as he always did. “Time to eat.” By the time Chen reached the pen, the cub’s eyes were red with anticipation; he was jumping around so excitedly he nearly choked himself. Chen laid down the bowl and stepped back to watch him eat. The cub appeared to be satisfied.

Every day at mealtime he called out to the cub, hoping that would spark a bit of gratitude. He often found himself thinking that when the day came that he married and started a family, he’d probably not be as fond of his own children as he was of the young wolf. Since he had taken it upon himself to raise the cub, his mind was often tormented by mythlike dreams and fantasies. He’d read a Soviet story in elementary school about a hunter who rescued an injured wolf and returned it to the forest after nursing it back to health. One day later, the hunter opened the door of his shack and found seven dead rabbits in the snow, and several sets of wolf tracks… It was the first story he’d read about friendships forged between wolves and humans, and the first to show a different side of wolves from all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen. The books were mostly of the “Little Red Riding Hood” variety or of wolves eating little lambs, or cruel and scary stories of wolves eating the hearts and livers of small children. The Soviet story was one he had never forgotten. He often dreamed that he was the hunter tramping through the forest to enjoy life with his wolf friends, wrestling and riding them across the snow…

Finally, the cub had licked the bowl clean. He had grown to three feet in length, and now that he had finished eating, he looked bigger and more intimidating than ever. He was already half again as big as the puppies he’d grown up with. After leaving the bowl outside the gate, Chen walked back and sat down to spend some time with the cub. He held him in his arms awhile, then turned him over and laid him on his lap so he could rub his belly. When dogs and wolves fight, the adversary’s belly is a prime target. If one of them can get its fangs or claws into the other’s belly, the wounded animal is doomed. That is why neither dogs nor wolves will expose their bellies to anyone they do not trust absolutely, animal or human. Though Dorji’s little wolf died because it had bitten Dorji’s son, Chen offered up his fingers for his cub to lick and nibble on while he was holding it. He was confident the cub would not bite him, and gnawing on one of Chen’s fingers was much the same as biting one of its littermates, always stopping short of breaking the skin. Since the cub was willing to lie on his back and let Chen rub his belly, why shouldn’t he put his fingers in the cub’s mouth? They trusted each other.

It was nearly noon, and the sun had wilted the hollow green needles. Time for the cub to suffer again. His mouth hung slack and he panted nonstop, drops of liquid falling to the ground from his lolling tongue. Chen had opened the felt covering the yurt all the way to the top. Mongol yurts are open to the air on eight sides, like a pavilion or an oversized birdcage. That way he could keep an eye on the cub from inside the yurt, where he’d gone to read.

Unable to think of anything that might help the cub cool off a bit, Chen settled for observing the young animal to determine his level of tolerance for heat. The breezes entering his yurt were getting hotter; cows out in the basin had stopped grazing and were lying in the mud of the riverbank, while most of the sheep were sleeping in a mountain pass to catch the relatively cool winds. Three-sided white tents were going up on the mountaintop, as shepherds fended off the unbearable heat by sticking their lasso poles into marmot holes, then draping their thin white deels over them and anchoring the edges with rocks. These makeshift tents kept them out of the harsh sunlight. Chen had tried that, and had found it effective in keeping cool. Two occupants shared the tents, one sleeping while the other kept watch over the flock.

But as he baked in the merciless heat, the cub suffered whether he lay down or remained standing. Waves of heat rose from the sandy ground, scalding his paws and making it impossible to keep all four paws on the ground at one time. He kept looking around for his puppy playmates, and when he saw one of them lying in the shade under a wagon, he strained at his chain in exasperation. Chen ran out of the yurt, convinced that if he didn’t do something soon, the cub would be roasted like a chestnut. If the animal suffered heatstroke, the pasture vet would not lift a finger to save him.

So Chen scooped out a panful of water from the water wagon and laid it out for the cub, then watched as he thrust his head in and didn’t stop drinking until there was none left. He then ran up and hid from the sun in Chen’s shadow. Like a little orphan child, he stepped on Chen’s feet to keep him from leaving. So Chen stood there until he felt the back of his neck prickle, and he knew that his skin would begin to crack if he didn’t move. After walking out of the pen, he dumped half a bucketful of water onto the sandy ground, sending clouds of steam into the air. The cub, seeing that the ground temperature had fallen at that spot, ran over and lay down to rest. But the ground soon heated up, and the torment returned. Chen was out of options. He couldn’t keep watering the ground, and even if he could, what would happen when it was time to go out and tend the flock?

Back inside the yurt, Chen didn’t feel like reading; he could not shake the fear that the cub would get sick, or lose too much weight, maybe even die in the cruel summer heat. By chaining him, he realized, he was preserving the safety of people and their livestock, but not the life of the cub. If there were only an enclosure in which the cub could run free, he could at least find shelter at the base of a wall.

All Chen could do was keep an eye on his wolf and try to figure out something; nothing came to mind.

The wolf walked around and around, his brain apparently doing the same. The cub seemed to realize that the grassy ground outside the pen was cooler than the sandy ground inside. He turned and stepped on the grass with his hind legs; finding that it was, in fact, cooler, he lay down on the grass, leaving only his head and neck on the scalding sand inside the pen. With the chain pulled taut, he could finally stretch out and get some rest, part of his body no longer baked by the sun. Chen was so happy he could have kissed the young wolf; this manifestation of the cub’s intelligence gave him a thread of hope. Now he knew what to do. As the temperature continued to climb, he’d make a new pen for the wolf, this time with grass, and each time the cub trampled it down and exposed the sand, he’d move him again. A wolf’s power to survive was greater than that of humans. Even without a mother’s guidance, a young wolf solves the problems it faces, in a pack or alone. With a sigh, Chen lay back against his bedroll and began to read.

A flurry of hoofbeats resounded on the road some sixty or seventy feet outside the yurt; assuming it was horse herders galloping by, Chen wasn’t particularly curious. So he was caught by surprise when two horses left the road and headed for his yurt, then veered off toward the wolf pen, where the startled cub stood up on his hind legs and straightened out the chain. The rider in front looped his lasso pole noose over the cub’s neck and jerked it back, lifting him off the ground. The force of the man’s movement left no doubt that he wanted the wolf dead, expecting the pull of the chain to decapitate him. The cub had no sooner fallen back to the ground than the second man used his lasso pole as a whip, hitting him with such force that he rolled over. Meanwhile, the first man halted his horse, grabbed his herding club, and was about to dismount and kill the cub with his club when Chen let out a shriek, picked up his rolling pin, and ran out like a madman. Seeing the defiant look in Chen’s eyes, the two men spun their horses around and rode off in a cloud of dust. Chen heard one of them shout, “Wolves killed our fine horses, and you think you can raise one of them! Well, sooner or later, I’m going to kill that wolf!”

Yellow and Yir ran after the men, barking ferociously, and both were struck by lasso poles as the men headed off to where the horse herds were grazing.

Chen could not see who the attackers were, but he assumed that one of them might have been the shepherd whom Bilgee had rebuked and the other a member of the horse herders’ Unit Four. They clearly had come with murderous intentions, and Chen was witness to the fearful blitzkrieg tactics of Mongol horsemen.

He ran over to where the wolf lay, his tail between his legs, nearly frightened to death. His legs were so wobbly he couldn’t stand, and when he spotted Chen, he tumbled into his arms like a chick running for the mother hen after escaping the clutches of a cat. Chen, who was also trembling, held him tight, man and wolf a chorus of shaking. He anxiously felt the cub’s neck and was relieved to see that it was still intact, though some of the fur had been pulled off by the hemp noose and a bloody gouge circled his neck. The cub’s heart was racing. Chen did what he could to calm the young wolf down; it took some time, but eventually they both stopped quaking. Chen then went back to the yurt, where he took down another strip of dried lamb. That had a soothing effect on the cub. Picking him up again, Chen held him in his lap and pressed his face up against the cub’s face while he rubbed his chest until his heartbeat was back to normal. But the cub’s fears lingered, and he wouldn’t take his eyes off Chen. Suddenly he licked Chen on the chin; it was the second time the wolf had done so but the first time that the gesture was an expression of gratitude. As Chen saw it, the story of a rescued wolf showing its gratitude with the gift of seven rabbits had not necessarily stemmed from someone’s imagination.

The thing Chen had feared the most had finally occurred, rekindling his concern. His decision to raise a wolf had offended most of the herdsmen, and the coolness of their attitude toward him was palpable. Even Bilgee had nearly stopped coming to visit. In the eyes of the herdsmen, it seemed, there was little difference between him and Bao Shungui and his laborers, all outsiders who had no respect for grassland customs. The wolf is their spiritual totem, but a physical enemy. Raising one like a pet is something a herdsman could not condone; it was a blasphemy in the spiritual sense and consorting with the enemy in the physical realm. He had broken one of the grassland’s prohibitions, violated a cultural taboo-of that there was no doubt. He was no longer sure if he could continue to protect the cub or even if he ought to keep raising it. Sincere in his desire to record and investigate the secrets and value of the “wolf totem” as the “soul of the grassland,” he saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; he needed to be unyielding, to grit his teeth and carry on. So he went looking for Erlang. When that dog was watching over things, no one but herdsmen in Chen’s unit would dare to come near without being invited. Erlang was capable of driving away an unfamiliar rider by nipping at the man’s horse and sending it off in a panic. The two attackers must have seen that Erlang was not around before making their move.

The sun still had not reached the peak of its daily onslaught, but it seemed that all the heat of the basin had gathered in the wolf pen. The cub’s torso was no longer being baked unbearably, but his head and neck remained atop the sand; the injuries from the foiled attack made it impossible for him to lie down for any length of time, so he was forced to walk around inside the pen until, after several revolutions, he lay back down on the grass.

No longer in the mood to read, Chen busied himself with household chores. He picked some leeks, broke open several duck eggs, rolled out some dough, added filling, and then fried flat bread, all of which kept him occupied for half an hour. When he looked out at the pen, he was shocked to see the cub digging a hole in the sand, his tail and hindquarters sticking up in the air. Sand flew up from the ground like a fireworks display. Chen wiped his hands and ran outside, where he crouched down to see what the cub was doing.

The cub was digging frenetically on the southern edge of the pen, and by the time Chen arrived, half of his body was in the ground. Sand kept coming up through his legs, dispersed by a briskly wagging tail. He backed out of the hole, covered with dirt, and when he spotted Chen, there was a wild, intense look in his eyes, as if he’d been digging for buried treasure.

What was he up to? He wasn’t trying to uproot the post, was he? No, that couldn’t be it; the hole wasn’t lined up with the post, which was, after all, buried too deeply for the cub to dig under. No, he was digging with his back to the post and toward, not away from, the direction of the sun’s movement. Then it hit him! Chen knew exactly what the wolf was doing.

The cub went back to work, digging out more and more dirt, his mouth hanging open as he dug and dug for a while, then moved out the dirt. Lights flashed in his eyes, bright as the sun, and he had no time to take note of Chen, who watched as long as he could before calling out, “Slow down, Little Wolf, you might break off your claws.” The cub looked over at Chen and squinted to form a smile, seemingly pleased with himself and what he was doing.

The sand dug out of the hole was moist and much cooler than the surface sand. It takes a resourceful wolf, Chen was thinking, to dig its way to safety, away from the sun, the heat, the people, and a variety of dangers. This has to be what the cub is thinking: a hole will be cool and dark, and as for direction, the opening faces north, the tunnel faces south, so the sunlight cannot bake its way into the hole. As the cub dug deeper, Chen noted, most of his body was protected against the lethal sun’s rays.

The deeper he dug, the weaker the light; beginning to taste the pleasures of darkness, he was nearing his target depth. Wolves love darkness, for it contains coolness, safety, and contentment. From now on, he would no longer be vulnerable to intimidation and attacks from the much larger cows, horses, and humans. His digging grew more frantic and brought him such pleasure he couldn’t close his mouth. Another twenty minutes passed, until nothing showed above the surface except the tip of his bushy tail; he had all but buried himself in the cool earth.

Amazed once again at the cub’s extraordinary talent for survival and his native intelligence, Chen was reminded of the ditty “A dragon sires a dragon, a phoenix breeds a phoenix, but a rat’s baby knows how to dig a hole.” But a rat knows how to dig a hole because it has observed adult rats at work. This wolf was taken from his mother before his eyes were fully open; he had never seen an adult wolf dig a hole. Surely none of the dogs would have taught him this skill, since they’re not by nature hole diggers. So who taught him? In particular, how had he learned the precision of location and direction? If he’d dug farther from the post, the chain would have kept him from digging as deeply as he needed. No, the hole was midway between the post and the edge of the pen, which allowed him to take half of the chain into the hole with him. Where had he learned that? It was not the sort of skill an adult wolf would have prepared him for, yet he’d worked it out perfectly.

Chen’s hair stood on end. A three-month-old wolf cub had solved a problem that threatened his survival without having been taught how by anyone. Chen got down on his hands and knees to watch more closely, feeling not so much that he was raising a pet as facilitating the growth of a young teacher who commanded his respect and admiration. He was convinced that there would be more lessons from the wolf in the days to come.

The cub’s tail was wagging excitedly. The deeper he dug, the cooler and happier he was, almost as if he could smell the mud of the dark place where he’d been born. Chen believed that the cub was not just digging a hole to be cool and safe but also trying to excavate pleasant memories of his earliest days and find his mother and his brothers and sisters. He tried to imagine the wolf’s expression as he dug. It was probably a complex mixture of excitement, hope, luck, and a bit of sorrow…

Chen’s eyes grew moist as he experienced powerful qualms of conscience. His feelings for the young wolf were growing stronger by the day, yet he could not deny that he was the one who had destroyed the cub’s free and happy family. If not for him, all those young wolves would now be off fighting wars with their father and mother. While it was only a guess, Chen had a feeling that the current king of the wolves had sired this splendid cub. Maybe, under the tutelage of the wolf pack, with its vast battlefield experience, the cub would one day be the leader of that pack. Lamentably, his and their brilliant future had been forfeited by a Han Chinese from a faraway place.

The wolf had dug as far as the chain would allow, and Chen was not interested in making the chain any longer. The ground around the hole was loose sand with a thin layer of grassy roots, and in the off chance that a horse or cow stepped too close to the hole, the cub could easily be buried alive. The cub’s enthusiasm for digging was brought to a sudden stop; he howled his displeasure and backed out of the hole to tug on the chain. The collar rubbed painfully against his injured neck, drawing a gasp. But he kept at it until he had exhausted his strength; he then sprawled on the excavated earth and panted. After a brief rest, he stuck his head down into the hole, and Chen wondered what he might be up to now.

As soon as the wolf cub had caught his breath, he scampered down into the hole, and in no time, more dirt came flying out, which Chen found almost stupefying. He bent down and looked into the hole, which the cub was now making wider, another sign of his intelligence.

Once construction on the cool, protective hole was completed, the wolf lay comfortably inside and ignored Chen’s calls to come out. When Chen looked inside, the cub’s eyes, open wide, a bloodcurdling green, gave him the appearance of a wolf in the wild. Obviously, he was enjoying the dark, the coolness, and the smell of earth, as if he’d returned to his first home alongside his mother and his littermates. He was at peace, having finally left the surface, where he was in a constant state of anxiety, surrounded by humans and their livestock; he had taken shelter in his own den and reentered his natural realm. Finally, he could sleep in safety to dream the dreams of wolves. Chen smoothed out the earth around the opening. With his cub in a safe place, he was once again confident of the young wolf’s ability to survive.

Gao Jianzhong and Yang Ke returned at sunset, and when they spotted the wolf hole in front of their yurt, they were amazed. “After a day out there tending sheep,” Yang said, “we were baked dry and dying of thirst, and I figured the wolf cub wouldn’t make it through the summer. He’s smarter than I thought.”

“We’re going to have to be more careful around him,” Gao said, “be on our guard. We need to check out the chain, the post, and his collar every day. Who knows, he could make big trouble for us at a critical juncture. The herdsmen and the other students are just waiting to have the last laugh.”

All three men saved a portion of their oily duck-egg-filled fried flat bread for the cub, and the moment Yang announced mealtime, the cub scrambled to the surface, picked up the food, and took it back down with him. It was a space that belonged to him and only him, off-limits to everyone else.

Erlang, out on his own all day, returned home, his belly taut, his mouth coated with grease. Obviously, he’d hunted down something out there. Yellow, Yir, and all the puppies, half crazed from not having tasted meat in a long time, ran up to Erlang to lick at the grease on his snout.

The cub came out of his cave as soon as he heard that Erlang was back. When the dog walked up to him, he too licked his greasy snout. Then Erlang noticed the hole in the ground and, apparently surprised and pleased, made several turns around it. With what sounded like a laugh, he squatted down at the opening and stuck his nose inside to sniff around. The cub leaped onto his surrogate father’s back, where he jumped and rolled and somersaulted happily, the wound on his neck completely forgotten as his wild vitality burst forth.

At sunset, the hot air dissipated and cool breezes blew. Yang Ke put on a jacket and went out to see to his flock. Chen went along to help drive them home. It was not a good idea to make the sheep move too fast after they’d eaten their fill; for the men, herding the flock into a circle at camp, where there were no fences, was like a casual stroll. During the summer, the sheep spent the nights in the vicinity of the yurts, not in pens, which made the summertime night watch especially hard and dangerous. Vigilance was essential, now more than ever, for a pack of wolves might detect the presence of the cub in camp and take that opportunity to wreak vengeance.

The cub’s day began late at night. He’d run around in his pen, rattling the chain, frequently stopping to admire the fruits of his labor. Chen and Yang sat at the edge of the pen quietly enjoying the spectacle of the cub running around, his emerald eyes shining through the darkness.

Chen filled Yang in on that day’s activities. “We’ve got to get our hands on some meat,” he said. “The cub won’t grow big and strong without it. Erlang hasn’t been hanging around recently, which makes for a dangerous situation.”

Yang said, “I had a meal of roasted marmot up in the mountains today, thanks to Dorji. If he manages to trap a lot of them, we can ask for one for the cub. The problem is, the shepherds and their flocks have raised hell out there, scaring the marmots and keeping them out of the traps.”

Weighed down with anxieties, Chen said, “I’m worried that the wolf pack will come at night and create a bloodbath with our sheep. You can’t find a more vicious female anywhere than a mother wolf. And the craving for revenge after the loss of her offspring has probably driven this one nearly insane. If she brought the pack for a nighttime raid on our flock and slaughtered a bunch of them, we’d be screwed.”

Yang Ke sighed. “The herdsmen all say that the females will come sooner or later. This year on the Olonbulag we raided dozens of dens, and all those females are looking for a chance to avenge the loss of their young. The herdsmen are united in their desire to kill this cub, and the students in all the other units are against keeping it. I almost got into a fight with one of them today. They say that if anything happens, it’ll make things hard for all the students. We’re getting hammered from all sides. What do you say we quietly let it go and say it broke the chain and ran off? That would solve our problems.” Yang picked up the young wolf and rubbed his head. “But I’d hate to give him up. I’m not this close to my own kid brother.”

Chen clenched his teeth and said, “We Chinese are afraid of the wolf in front and the tiger behind. Since we went into the den and got this cub, we can’t give up halfway. If we’re going to raise him, let’s do a good job of it.”

“It’s not the responsibility that bothers me,” Yang quickly replied. “It’s just that seeing him chained up all day like a prisoner is heartbreaking. Wolves demand freedom, but we keep him shackled the whole time. Doesn’t that bother you? Me, I’m totally in the wolf totem camp, and I can see why Papa doesn’t want you to raise the cub. He considers it blasphemy.”

Chen was conflicted but could not show it, so he got in Yang’s face and said, “Do you think I’ve never thought of setting him free? But not yet-there are still lots of things I need to know. If the cub is freed, that makes for one free wolf, but if one day there are no wolves on the grassland at all, what sort of freedom is that? You’d feel more remorse than anyone.”

Yang thought about that for a moment, and decided to compromise, though with a bit of hesitation. “Okay, we’ll keep at it, and I’ll find a way to get my hands on some firecrackers. Wolves are like men on horseback: they hate firecrackers; the sound freaks them out. If we hear Erlang tangle with a wolf, I’ll light off a string of crackers and you throw them into the middle of the pack.”

“If you want to know the truth,” Chen said, softening his tone, “you’ve got more wolf in you than I do. You’re not afraid of taking a chance. Do you really plan to marry a Mongol girl? I hear they’re tougher than wolves.”

Yang Ke waved him off. “Don’t tell anybody,” he pleaded. “If you do and some Mongol girl gets the wild idea to come after me like a wolf, I won’t be able to fight her off. First I have to get my own yurt.”