Wolf Totem

24

Summer nights on the Mongolian grassland can be as cold as late autumn. Hordes of fearsome mosquitoes will soon be on the offensive, leaving but a few peaceful days.

The sheep, newly sheared, lay huddled together as they chewed their cud; a low grinding sound hovered above the flock. Erlang and Yellow looked up from time to time, sniffing the air alertly as they made their rounds with Yir and the three puppies. Chen Zhen, carrying a flashlight and dragging a piece of felt about the size of a blanket, walked over to where the dogs were patrolling, picked a good spot, and spread the felt on the ground. He sat cross-legged, a tattered, thin coat over his shoulders, not daring to lie down. After coming to the new grazing land, a good night’s sleep had become a rarity, the long days given over to tending the sheep, shearing wool, and caring for the wolf cub, while the short nights were a time for reading, writing in his journal, and of course keeping watch. All he had to do was lie down to almost immediately fall asleep so deeply that not even a barking dog could rouse him. He wanted to catch up on his sleep before the mosquito onslaught, but he knew the grassland wolves would take advantage of his slackness.

Having attacked a sick cow at the work site, the wolves showed that their appetites had shifted to domestic livestock. The young gazelles could already run, the marmots were jittery, and field mice could not sate the appetite of the hungry wolves; only livestock could do that, and since the herds were not completely settled in the new grazing land, Bilgee called a series of meetings to caution the herdsmen and students to be like the wolves themselves, sleeping with their eyes shut but their ears alert to all sounds. The Olonbulag was poised for another man-wolf war.

Chen cleaned the cub’s area every day, covering the ground with a layer of fresh sand after removing the waste not only for hygienic reasons but also to conceal the cub’s presence and location. He had been reliving the days since finding the cub in the temporary den, fearing the wolf pack would initiate a murderous attack to reclaim it. He had taken every precaution to prevent the cub from leaving its scent on the way to the new grazing land so that even if the mother ran down the cub’s scent in the former camp, she would have no way of knowing where the cub had been moved to.

It did not seem to Chen as if the smell of wolves was in the air. The three half-grown puppies ran up to him. He petted each one. Yellow and Yir followed the pups over to get their share of attention. Erlang alone, loyal as ever, kept watch on the flock. He, more than other dogs, understood wolves and was always as alert as any wolf could be.

The night winds grew colder, drawing the sheep closer and closer to keep warm, shrinking the space they occupied by at least a fourth. The three pups crawled under Chen’s tattered deel as they settled down in the dark, intensely cold night.

After a couple of turns around the flock with his flashlight, he had barely sat down on his felt mat when, from somewhere not far off, he heard the mournful baying of a wolf-Ow… ow… ow… -trailing off slowly, with only the briefest of pauses between each pure, resonant trill, a sound mellow yet sharp-edged, simultaneously seeping into and boring through the consciousness. Before the sound had died out, low echoes rebounded from the mountains on three sides-north, south, and east-and swirled in the valleys and in the basin, as well as along the lakeshore, where they merged with the rustling of reeds in the gentle breezes to create a chorus of wolf, reed, and wind. The melody turned cold, carrying Chen Zhen’s thoughts off to the Siberian wilderness.

It had been a long time since he’d listened to the call of a wolf late on a calm and clear night, and it made him shudder. He drew his deel even more tightly around him, but that could not keep out the fearful chill of the howls, which penetrated his deel and his skin, then moved down his spine to his tailbone. He reached out and pulled Yellow to him, wrapping his deel around the dog, and that brought him a bit of warmth.

This was just the overture, somber and drawn out. Next came the high-pitched bays of several powerful male wolves, which set all the dogs in the brigade camps barking. The dogs around Chen, big and small, ran to the northwest perimeter around the flock and raised a din of ferocious barking. Erlang rushed noisily toward the howls but stopped and headed back, fearing an attack from the rear. Taking up his place before the flock, he continued barking. Flashlights shone at all the brigade camps that snaked past the foothills on the edge of the basin; the hundred or more dogs belonging to the brigade barked for half an hour before gradually quieting down.

The night was, if anything, darker still, and colder. The wolf leader began baying again; the answering calls of more wolves, like three walls of sound bearing down on the camps, were so loud that they drowned out the dogs, whose barks had a flustered, surging quality. All the night-watch women flicked on their flashlights and frantically swept the area where the sound was coming from as they cried out: Ah-he… wu-he… yi-he…, wave after wave of shrill cries pressing down on the wolf pack.

Taking a cue from their human masters, the dogs set up a ferocious storm of noise: a mixture of barks, howls, roars, provocations, intimidations, and jeers produced a cacophonous drumbeat. Chen added his uncontrolled shouts to the mix, but his weak shouts were immediately swallowed up by the night.

On the new grazing land, the proximity of the yurts had the effect of concentrating and invigorating the herdsmen’s vocal and light-beam counterattack, producing a warlike tension.

The wolves’ cries were quickly overwhelmed. The close concentration of yurts, devised by Uljii and Bilgee, had worked as a strategy. The unified camp would hold, making an attack from the wolves unlikely.

Suddenly, Chen heard the sound of a rattling chain and ran immediately to the young wolf, who was jumping up and down outside the hole, snarling and baring his claws, wildly excited by the sound-and-light war between humans, wolves, and dogs.

Darkness is kind to wolves: they are liveliest at night and at their most warlike. It is a time of plunder, of gorging themselves on flesh and blood, of dividing up the spoils of a kill. But a metal chain kept the young wolf imprisoned, turning him into a crazed animal. As he struggled in vain against the chain, roaring his anger over being denied the fight he sought, he curled into a ball, then burst out and raced to the path he had worn in the pen. He leaped into the air, snapping at imaginary targets as he ran, stopping abruptly before the next charge and rolling on the ground. Then he closed his mouth, ground his teeth, and shook his head, just as if he had taken down a large animal and was waiting for it to die from his death grip.

Moments later, the cub was standing on the northern edge of the pen, staring straight ahead, his ears pricked straight up, and not moving a muscle, poised to launch another charge. His fighting instincts had been stimulated by the prebattle tension and palpable sense of fear in the air, and he seemed incapable of distinguishing between friend and foe, so long as he could enter the fray on any side. It seemed as if killing a puppy or killing another cub would have made him equally happy.

The cub rushed up to Chen Zhen as soon as he saw him coming, but he then backed up so Chen would come into the pen. Chen took one step into the pen and was about to crouch down when the cub attacked like a hungry tiger, wrapping his legs around Chen’s knee and opening his mouth, ready to bite. Chen was prepared for the attack; he jammed his flashlight up against the cub’s nose and turned it on. The blinding light stopped the attack.

The cub cocked his head and listened enviously to the warlike howls of the big dogs, then lowered his head thoughtfully, as if just discovering that he could not bark like they could. He opened his mouth, determined to learn from them. Chen was surprised; he crouched down to see what the cub would do next. The young wolf opened his mouth and managed, with considerable difficulty, a strange guttural sound; but it sounded nothing like a dog’s bark, and that made him furious. So he tried again: he took a breath and held it, then constricted his belly over and over, copying the movements of the dogs; but the raspy sound that emerged belonged to neither dog nor wolf, tormenting the cub, who spun in circles of exasperation.

As he watched the cub’s bizarre movements, Chen nearly laughed out loud. The cub could not yet make wolf sounds, so he’d tried to imitate the barking of a dog, but that was simply too hard. Most dogs are able to imitate the sounds of wolves, but wolves have never tried to bark like dogs, possibly finding that demeaning. But at that moment, a young wolf maturing among dogs wanted only to sound like them. The poor thing was having an identity crisis.

Yet even as the cub fretted over his inability to bark like a dog, he refused to stop trying. Chen walked up, bent down until his mouth was next to the cub’s ear, and barked. The cub, appearing to understand that his “master” was trying to teach him something, briefly had the embarrassed look of a slow student but quickly followed that with the defiant glare of a shamed classroom bully. Erlang came running over, stood beside the cub, and began to bark, slowly, like a patient teacher. A moment later, Chen heard the cub cry out in the cadence of a dog’s bark, but without the sound a dog makes-orf orf. The cub was so excited he leaped into the air and began licking Erlang’s mouth. From then on, the cub made the same un-doglike sound. It made Chen laugh.

The strange sound brought the three puppies running, while the other dogs made deriding sounds as if mocking the cub. Every time he went orf orf, Chen answered with an arf arf, and before long the camp was awash in a battle of strange, unharmonious sounds: orf orf- arf arf. The cub may well have been aware that the man and the dogs were making fun of him, but that only increased the intensity of the orf orf-arf arf. The puppies were so happily caught up in the atmosphere that they were rolling on the ground. Before long, all the brigade dogs stopped barking, and with no models to follow, the cub turned mute.

The people’s voices had stilled when the wolf cries came from the surrounding mountains, and the flashlights had been turned off; by then even the dogs were just going through the motions. When the wolves responded by howling even louder, Chen Zhen was convinced that they were plotting something. Maybe the pack had discovered how tight the man-and-dog line of defense was, and had settled on a strategy of wearing the enemy down; once the herdsmen and their dogs were worn out from the battle of sounds, they would launch a sneak attack. The state of paralysis could last several nights. Grassland wolves had perfected tactics for wearing down an enemy.

Chen lay back on the felt mat, his head pillowed by the dog Yellow. In China the baying of wolves enjoyed a fearsome reputation. It was a sound the inhabitants of China’s Central Plain equated with “wails of the Devil.” Chen had grown accustomed to hearing wolves over the years, though he’d never understood why the baying was so sad, so desolate-sounding, like a mournful lament, a long drawn-out torment. The sound did indeed call to mind the incessant wailing of widows at a grave site, and the first time he heard it, he wondered how the hearts of the savage, arrogant wolves could be so full of anguish. Was it an expression of the difficulty of life on the grassland? Were they complaining about their wretched fate at a place where death from starvation, the freezing elements, and mortal combat was so common? Chen had long felt that the wolves, so fierce and tenacious, were burdened with weak, fragile hearts.

But in the wake of two years of contact with them, especially over the past six months or so, he’d come to disavow that view. To him, the grassland wolves, with their hard bones, hard hearts, and survival skills, were tough as steel, consumed by a bloodlust, and unflinching even in the face of death. The agony over the loss of a female wolf’s young or the grave injury to a male wolf, even the loss of a leg, was only temporary and immediately led to thoughts of vengeance that grew more intense with each passing day. The several months he’d spent with the cub had convinced him of that. He had yet to discover a single moment of weakness in the young wolf; except for those times when he was overcome with exhaustion, his eyes were always aglow, his energy never flagged, he was full of life. Even after the time his neck had nearly been broken by the herdsman, he’d sprung back to life almost immediately.

As he continued listening to the wolves, Chen began to detect an arrogant, menacing quality to their baying, but he wondered why the threat to men and their livestock had to sound like mourning. What was the reason their baying adopted the sound of wailing? His reflections went deeper into the heart of the matter. The mighty wolf may have its moments of sadness, but at no time, at no place, and under the sway of no emotion does it cry. Crying is alien to a wolf’s character.

Clarity of mind settled in after Chen had been listening for much of the night. Dogs and wolves just sounded different. Dog barks are short and rapid; the baying of a wolf is a drawn-out sound. The effect of these diverse sounds on the listener is radically different. The baying of a wolf travels greater distances than the bark of a dog. The barks of dogs from the northernmost yurts in the brigade aren’t nearly as crisp as the baying of wolves in the same vicinity. Chen was also able to make out the baying of wolves in the mountains to the east, but no dog barks could ever travel that distance.

Perhaps that was the reason the wolves chose to wail-over thousands of years of evolution, they had discovered it was the sound that hung in the air longest and was able to travel the greatest distances. The grassland wolves are known for long-range raids, for splitting up to scout a situation and then joining for an attack. As pack animals, they range far and wide while hunting, and this highly advanced system of communication is how they make contact across great distances. In the most ruthless battles, results are all that count; how they sound is immaterial.

The baying thinned out gradually; but then, quite suddenly, a juvenile howl emerged from somewhere behind the yurt and the flock of sheep, momentarily paralyzing Chen. Had the wolves managed to of sheep, momentarily paralyzing Chen. Had the wolves managed to sneak up from behind? Erlang charged, barking ferociously, the other dogs right behind him. Chen scrambled to his feet, grabbed his herding club and flashlight, and ran after the dogs. When he reached the yurt, he saw Erlang and the other dogs growling as they stood around the cub’s pen in puzzled fashion.

With the aid of his flashlight, Chen spotted the cub, crouching next to the wooden post, his snout pointing into the sky as he howled. So that’s where the sound was coming from! It was the first time Chen had heard the cub actually bay like a wolf, something he thought the cub wouldn’t do until he was fully grown. But here he was, only four months old, and already sounding and acting like a mature wild animal. Chen was as thrilled as a father hearing his son say “Daddy” for the first time. He bent down and stroked the cub’s back; the cub turned and licked the back of his hand, then went back to baying.

The dogs were so bewildered they couldn’t tell if they should kill the cub or just get him to stop howling. The arrival of a mortal enemy in their midst had thrown the sheepherding dogs into total confusion. A dog belonging to their neighbor, Gombu, stopped barking; some of the other dogs ran up to see what was happening and offer their support. Erlang happily walked into the pen and licked the top of the cub’s head, and then sprawled alongside him and listened to him howl. Yellow and Yir glared hatefully at the cub-in those few minutes, the cub had given himself away to the dogs he’d lived with for months, exposing his true identity. He was a wolf, not a dog, a wolf no different from a wild wolf in a battle of howls and barks. But when Yellow and Yir saw their master smiling and stroking the cub’s head, they could only fume silently.

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.