Wolf Totem

1

As Chen Zhen looked through the telescope from his hiding place in the snow cave, he saw the steely gaze of a Mongolian grassland wolf. The fine hairs on his body rose up like porcupine quills, virtually pulling his shirt away from his skin. Old Man Bilgee was there beside him. This time Chen did not feel as if his soul had been driven out of his body, but sweat oozed from his pores. He had been on the grassland two years but still had not lost his fear of Mongolian wolves, especially in packs. Now he was face to face with a large pack deep in the mountains, far from camp, his misty breath quivering in the air. Neither he nor Bilgee was armed-no rifles, no knives, no lasso poles, not even something as simple as a pair of metal stirrups. All they had were two herding clubs, and if the wolves picked up their scent, their sky burial would come early.

Chen exhaled nervously as he turned to look at the old man, who was watching the wolf encirclement through the other telescope. “You’re going to need more courage than that,” Bilgee said softly. “You’re like a sheep. A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones. That’s the only explanation for why you people have never won a fight out here.” Getting no response, he leaned over and whispered, “Get a grip on yourself. If they spot any movement from us, we’ll be in real trouble.” Chen nodded and scooped up a handful of snow, which he squeezed into a ball of ice.

The herd of Mongolian gazelles was grazing on a nearby slope, unaware of the wolf pack, which was tightening the noose, drawing closer to the men’s snow cave. Not daring to move, Chen felt frozen in place, like an ice sculpture. This was Chen’s second encounter with a wolf pack since coming to the grassland. A palpitating fear from his first encounter coursed through his veins.

Two years earlier, in late November, he had arrived in the border-region pasture as a production team member from Beijing; snow covered the land as far as the eye could see. The Olonbulag is located southwest of the Great Xing’an mountain range, directly north of Beijing; it shares a border with Outer Mongolia. Historically, it was the southern passage between Manchuria and the Mongolian steppes, and, as such, the site of battles between a host of peoples and nomadic tribes, as well as a territory in which the potential struggles for dominance by nomads and farmers was ever present.

Yurts had not yet been assigned to the Beijing students, the so-called educated youth, so Chen had been sent to live with Old Man Bilgee and his family, and given duties as a shepherd. One day slightly more than a month after his arrival, he and the old man were sent to headquarters, some eighty li, to fetch study materials and purchase daily necessities. Just before they were to head back, the old man was summoned to a meeting of the revolutionary committee. Since headquarters had said the study materials had to be delivered without delay, Chen was told to return alone.

As he was about to leave, the old man swapped horses with him, lending him his big, dark mount, a fast horse that knew the way. Bilgee warned Chen not to take a shortcut, but to follow the wagon road back; since there were yurts every twenty or thirty li, he ought to be able to make the trip without incident.

As soon as he was in the saddle and on his way, Chen sensed the power of his Mongol horse and felt the urge to gallop at full speed. When they reached a ridge from which he could see the peak of Chaganuul Mountain, where the brigade was quartered, he forgot the old man’s warning and left the road-which curved around the mountain, adding twenty li to the trip-to take a shortcut that led straight to camp.

The temperature began to fall, and when he was about halfway home, the sun shivered from the deepening cold before retreating to the horizon and slipping from view. Frigid air from the snowy ground rose up, turning Chen’s leather duster hard and brittle. The hide of his mount was covered with a layer of sweat-frost. Their pace slowed as the snow deepened and little hillocks rose in their path. They were deep in the wilds, far from all signs of habitation. The horse trotted on, straight and smooth, so Chen relaxed the pressure on the bit to let the horse determine the pace and direction, as well as how hard it wanted to work. For no obvious reason, Chen suddenly tensed; he shuddered, becoming fearful that the horse might lose its way, fearful that the weather would turn ugly, fearful of being caught in a snowstorm, and fearful of freezing to death on the glacial grassland. The only thing he forgot to fear was the wolves.

Just before they reached a ravine, the horse stopped, pointing toward a spot down the ravine. It tossed its head and snorted, its pace no longer steady. Chen Zhen, who had never before ridden alone deep into the snowy grassland, had no inkling of the danger ahead. But the agitated horse, its nostrils flaring, its eyes wide, turned to head away from what lay in front of them. Its intuition was lost on Chen, who pulled the reins taut to turn the animal’s head and keep it moving forward at a trot. Its gait grew increasingly jerky, an erratic combination of walking, trotting, and jolting, as if the animal might bolt at any moment. Chen pulled back hard on the reins.

As if frustrated that its warning signals were not being heeded, the horse turned and nipped at its rider’s felt boot, and at that moment Chen recognized the danger facing them by the fear in the horse’s eyes. But it was too late, for the horse had carried him into the flared opening of a gloomy ravine on trembling legs.

Chen turned to look down the ravine and was so terrified he nearly fell off the horse. There on a snow-covered slope not less than fifty yards away was a pack of golden-hued, murderous-looking Mongolian wolves, all watching him straight on or out of the corners of their eyes, their gazes boring into him like needles. The closest wolves were the biggest, easily the size of leopards and at least twice the size of the wolves he’d seen in the Beijing Zoo, half again as tall and as long, nose to tail. All dozen or so of the larger wolves had been sitting on the snowy ground, but they immediately stood up, their tails stretched out straight, like swords about to be unsheathed, or arrows on a taut bowstring. They were poised to pounce. The alpha male, surrounded by the others, was a gray wolf whose nearly white neck, chest, and abdomen shone like white gold. The pack consisted of thirty or forty animals.

Afterward, when Chen and Bilgee were rehashing the circumstances of the encounter, the old man wiped his sweaty brow with his finger and said, “They must have been holding a council. The alpha male was likely passing out assignments for an attack on a herd of horses on the other side of the hill. You’d have realized your luck had you known that when their coats shine, they aren’t hungry.”

In fact, Chen’s mind was wiped clean the moment he spotted them, and the last thing he recalled was a muted but terrifying sound rising up to the top of his head, not unlike the thin whistle you get by blowing on the edge of a coin. It must have been the ping his soul made as it tore through his crown on its way out. He felt that his life had stopped for a minute or more.

Long afterward, whenever he recalled his encounter with the wolf pack, he silently thanked Papa Bilgee and his dark horse. The only reason he hadn’t fallen off was that the animal had lived its entire life in wolf territory, a battle-tested horse perfectly suited to the hunt. At the critical moment, as their lives hung in the balance, the horse grew extraordinarily calm. Acting as if it didn’t even see the pack or that it had any intention of interrupting their council, it continued on at a leisurely, just-passing-through pace. With all the courage it possessed, and in full control of its hooves, it neither struggled to keep moving nor broke into a panicky gallop, but carried its rider at a steady pace that allowed Chen to sit up straight.

Maybe it was the horse’s extraordinary courage that summoned back Chen’s departed soul, but when that spirit, which had hovered in the frigid air for a moment, returned to his body, he felt reborn and was extraordinarily tranquil.

He forced himself to sit firmly in the saddle. Taking his cue from the horse, he pretended not to have seen the pack, though nervously keeping them in sight. He knew all about the speed of wolves on the Mongolian grassland. It would take but seconds to close the gap. And he knew how important it was not to show fear. That was the only way to avoid an attack by these grassland killers.

He sensed that the alpha male was gazing at the hill behind them; all the other members of the pack turned their pointed ears in the same direction, like radar locking on to a target. They silently awaited orders as the unarmed man and his horse pranced boldly past them; the alpha male and his followers were not sure what to make of this.

The sunset slowly faded away as man and horse drew ever nearer. The next couple of dozen steps comprised the longest journey of Chen Zhen’s life. A few steps into that journey, he sensed that one of the wolves had run up to the snow-covered slope behind him, and he knew intuitively that it was a scout sent by the alpha male to see if other troops lay in wait. Chen felt his soul straining to leave again.

The horse’s gait faltered slightly; Chen’s legs and the horse’s flanks were trembling. The horse turned its ears to the rear, nervously monitoring the scout wolf’s movements. Chen imagined himself passing through an enormous wolf’s maw, with rows of razor-sharp teeth above and below; once he was in the middle, the mouth would snap shut. The horse began to gather its strength in its rear legs, preparing for a mortal engagement. But the burden on its back put it at a terrible disadvantage.

Suddenly, Chen Zhen, like the shepherd he was supposed to be, appealed to Tengger, Mongol heaven, in a moment of peril: Wise and powerful heaven, Tengger, reach out and give me your hand. Next he summoned Papa Bilgee under his breath. In the Mongol language, Bilgee means “Wise One.” If only the old man would find a way to transmit his knowledge of the grassland directly into his brain. No echoes anywhere disturbed the stillness of the Olonbulag. Gripped by despair, Chen raised his eyes, wanting the last thing he saw to be the ice blue beauty of the heavens.

Then something Papa had said dropped from the sky and struck his eardrum like a thunderclap: Wolves are afraid of rifles, lasso poles, and anything made of metal. He had no rifle and no lasso pole, but did he have anything made of metal? His foot felt warm. Yes! There under his feet were two large metal stirrups. His legs twitched excitedly.

Papa Bilgee had lent him his horse, but the saddle was Chen’s. No wonder the old man had picked out the largest stirrups he could find for him at the beginning; it was as if he knew that someday they would come to Chen’s rescue. Back then, when he was learning to ride, the old man had said that not only did small stirrups make staying in the saddle difficult, but if the horse bucked you off, your foot could get caught and you could be dragged along, which could lead to serious injury or death. These stirrups, with their large openings and rounded bottoms, were twice the size of the more common small-mouthed, flat-bottomed ones, and double the weight.

The pack was waiting for the scout’s report; horse and rider were now directly opposite them. Chen quickly removed his feet from the stirrups, reached down, and pulled them up by their leather straps. Holding one in each hand, and calling upon all his strength, he spun the horse around, roared in the direction of the wolf pack, raised the heavy stirrups chest-high, and banged them together.

Clang clang…

A crisp, ear-splitting clang, like a hammer on an anvil, tore through the silent air of the grassland and straight into the ears and the seats of courage of every wolf in the pack, like a sword. Nonnatural metallic noises frighten wolves more than any thunderstorm; they produce a sound that has a greater and more devastating impact on them than the snap of a hunter’s trap.

The wolves trembled when the first clangs from Chen’s stirrups resonated in the air. The next burst sent them turning away; led by the alpha wolf, they fled into the mountains like a yellow storm, their ears pinned against their heads and their necks pulled into their shoulders. Even the scout abandoned its mission and followed the other members of the pack in flight.

Chen Zhen could hardly believe his eyes as he watched the wolves frightened off by a pair of metal stirrups. As his courage made its belated return, he banged the stirrups together wildly, then windmilled his arms like a shepherd and shouted, “Hurry! Hurry! There are wolves everywhere!”

For all he knew, the wolves understood Mongol and knew the meaning of human gestures; perhaps they’d been frightened into dispersal by what they’d assumed was a trap laid by hunters.

But they dispersed in orderly fashion, maintaining the ancient organizational unity and group formation characteristic of grassland wolves: The most ferocious members serve as a vanguard, with the alpha male out in front, the pack’s larger wolves behind it. There is never any of the confusion commonly seen among fleeing birds and other wild animals. Chen was overwhelmed by the sight.

In a moment, the pack had vanished without a trace, and all that remained in the ravine were a white mist and swirling flakes of snow.

By then night had fallen. Before Chen could step fully into the stirrups again, his horse took off like a shot, racing toward the nearest camp. Frigid air seeped into Chen’s collar and sleeves; the cold sweat on his body had turned to ice.

Having escaped from the wolf’s maw, he became an immediate convert to the devotion paid to Tengger, just like his Mongol hosts. He also developed a complex attitude of fear, reverence, and infatuation toward the Mongolian wolf. It had touched his soul. How could it possess such a powerful attraction?

Chen did not catch sight of another wolf pack over the next two years. During the day he tended his sheep, occasionally spotting a lone wolf, maybe two, off in the distance. Even when he was far from camp, he never saw more than four or five at one time. Often, however, he came across the remains of sheep or cattle or horses that had been killed by wolves, individually or in packs. There might be one or two dead sheep, two or three cows, and maybe three or four horses; but sometimes carcasses would be strewn over a wide area. When he was out making calls on people, he regularly saw wolf pelts hanging on tall poles, like flags waving in the wind.

Now Bilgee lay flat in the snow cave, not moving a muscle, his eyes glued to the gazelles grazing on the slope and the wolf pack that was inching nearer. "Stay calm,” he whispered to Chen. "The first thing you need to learn as a hunter is patience.”

Having Bilgee beside him was comforting. Chen rubbed his eyes to clear away the mist and blinked calmly at Bilgee, then raised his telescope again to watch the gazelles and the wolves. The pack still had not given itself away.

Since his earlier encounter with the wolves, he had come to understand that the inhabitants of the grassland, the nomads, were never far from being surrounded by wolves. Nearly every night he spotted ghostly wolf outlines, especially during the frigid winter; two or three, perhaps five or six, and as many as a dozen pairs of glittering green lights moving around the perimeter of the grazing land, as far as a hundred li or more distant. One night he and Bilgee’s daughter-in-law Gasmai, aided by flashlights, counted twenty-five of them.

Like guerrilla fighters, nomads strive for simplicity. During the winter, sheep pens are semicircles formed by wagons and mobile fencing, with large felt rugs that serve as a windbreak but cannot keep out the wolves. The wide southern openings are guarded by packs of dogs and women on watch shifts. From time to time, wolves break into the pens and fight the dogs. Bodies often thud into yurt walls, waking the people sleeping on the other side; twice that had happened to Chen Zhen, and all that had kept a wolf from landing in bed beside him was that wall. Frequently nomads are separated from wolves by no more than a couple of felt rugs.

At night, when the wolves came out to hunt, Chen would sleep lightly. He had told Gasmai to call him if a wolf ever broke into the pen when she was on guard duty, assuring her that he would help drive the animal away, fight it head-on if necessary. Bilgee would stroke his goatee, smile, and say he’d never seen a Chinese so fixated on wolves. He seemed pleased with the unusual degree of interest displayed by the student from Beijing.

Late one snowy night during his first winter, Chen, flashlight in hand, witnessed at close quarters a battle between a wolf, a dog, and a woman.

“Chenchen! Chenchen!”

Chen was awakened by Gasmai’s frantic cries and the wild barking of dogs. After pulling on his felt boots and buttoning up his Mongol robe, his deel, he ran out of the yurt on shaky legs, flashlight and herding club in hand. The beam of light sliced through the snow to reveal Gasmai holding on to the tail of a wolf, trying to pull it away from the densely packed sheep. The wolf tried desperately to turn its fangs on her. Meanwhile, the stupid, fat sheep, petrified by the wolf and nearly frozen by the wind, huddled together and kept backing up against the windbreak, packed so tightly the snowflakes between their bodies turned to steam. The front half of the wolf was immobilized; it could only paw at the ground and snap at the sheep in front of it, all the while engaged in a tug-of-war with Gasmai. Chen staggered over to help but didn’t know what to do. Gasmai’s two dogs were hemmed in by the huddled sheep. Unable to get to the big wolf, they were reduced to wild, impotent barking. At the same time, Bilgee’s five or six hunting dogs, together with their neighbors’ dogs, were fighting other wolves east of the pen. The barks, the howls, and the agonizing cries of dogs shook heaven and earth. Chen wanted to help Gasmai, but his legs were so rubbery he could barely move. His desire to touch a living wolf had vanished, replaced by paralyzing fear.

Gasmai cried out anxiously, “Stay where you are! Don’t come near us! The wolf will bite you. Get the sheep to move! Let the dogs in!”

Gasmai was tugging so hard on the wolf’s tail she was nearly falling backward, her forehead bathed in sweat. Her grip on the tail caused the wolf so much pain that it had to suck cold air through its bloody mouth. Desperate to turn and claw its tormentor and seeing it was futile to press forward, the wolf abruptly backed up, spun around, and came at Gasmai, fangs bared. With a loud ripping noise, the lower half of her fur deel was torn off. A panther-like glare flashed in her Mongol eyes, and she refused to let go of the tail. She jumped backward, straightening the animal out once more, and began dragging it over to the dogs.

Thrown into a panic, Chen raised his flashlight and shone it on Gasmai and the wolf to help her see better and avoid getting bitten; then he brought his herding club down on the head of the sheep next to him. That threw the flock into chaos. Frightened of the wolf in the dark, they fought to huddle against the light shining in their midst; Chen had failed to get them moving. Even worse, he saw that Gasmai was losing the tug-of-war with the wolf, which was dragging her forward.

“Mother! Mother!” The fearful screams of a child tore through the air.

Gasmai’s nine-year-old son, Bayar, burst out of the yurt. The moment he saw what was happening, there was a change in his screams. He ran straight to his mother and, as if mounting a pommel horse, flew over the sheep and landed next to her, where he grabbed hold of the wolf’s tail.

“Grab its leg!” she shouted.

Bayar let go of the tail and grabbed one of the hind legs, pulling it backward and slowing the animal’s forward progress until the two of them managed to stop it altogether. Mother and son staunchly held their ground, making sure the large wolf in their grasp was unable to drive any sheep out through the felt-topped windbreak.

By then Bilgee had reached the flock, pushing the sheep out of the way as he called to his dog: “Bar! Bar!” In Mongol bar means “tiger”; Bilgee’s was the biggest, most ferocious wolfhound in the camp. It was not as long from nose to tail as one of the large wolves, but it was taller and broader in the chest, thanks to its partial Tibetan lineage. At the first call of its name, it withdrew from the battle outside and rushed to its master’s side, where it stopped, its mouth reeking of wolf blood. Bilgee took the flashlight from Chen Zhen and turned its light onto the wolf, which was still imbedded in the flock of sheep. Bar bounded over the backs of the sheep, stepping on heads along the way, rolling and scrambling as it charged the wolf.

“Drive the sheep toward the wolf,” Bilgee shouted. “We’ll pen it in so it can’t get away!” He took Chen Zhen’s hand, and the two of them herded the sheep toward the wolf and Gasmai.

Finally, Bar, his breath fouled, blood spurting from his nose, was standing beside Gasmai, but the wolf was still wedged in tightly among the sheep. Mongolian hunting dogs are trained not to bite wolves on the back or other spots on the torso, so as to preserve the pelt. Bar was going crazy trying to find a spot to sink his teeth into. Seeing Bar there beside her, Gasmai turned sideways, lifted one leg, and grabbed the wolf’s tail with both hands, laying it across her own leg. Then with a shout, she cracked the tail over her knee. With an agonizing howl, the wolf loosened its claws in the dirt, allowing mother and son to jerk it free of the sheep. The big animal, its body convulsing with pain, turned to look at its wounded tail, which gave Bar an opening to go for its throat. Letting the wolf claw at will, Bar pressed down with his front legs on the animal’s head and chest, and as he bit down, two streams of blood spurted from the wolf’s carotid arteries. It struggled madly for a minute or two before going limp, its long, bloody tongue slipping out through its teeth. Gasmai wiped the wolf’s blood from her face and panted. To Chen Zhen, her face, red from the bitter cold, looked as if rouge made of wolf’s blood had been smeared over it. She struck him as the picture of prehistoric woman-brave, strong, and beautiful.

The rank smell of blood rose into the air from the dead wolf, and the growls from dogs off to the east ceased abruptly as the other wolves fled, vanishing in the dark of night. Moments later, from the marshland in the northwest came the mournful bays of wolves venting their grief over the loss of one of their own.

“I’m worse than useless,” Chen said with a sigh, deeply ashamed. “Gutless as the sheep. A dog is worth more than me, not to mention a woman. Even a nine-year-old boy showed me up.”

With a smile, Gasmai shook her head. “No,” she said. “If you hadn’t come out to help, the wolves would have gotten our sheep.”

Bilgee smiled too. “This is the first time I’ve seen a Chinese student help get sheep moving and light the area up with his flashlight.”

Chen Zhen bent over and felt the still-warm body of the dead wolf. He hated himself for not having the courage to help Gasmai pull on the animal’s tail while it was alive, and for passing up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a Chinese student to know what it’s like to fight a wolf with his bare hands. The wolf was as intimidating dead as it had been alive. Chen rubbed Bar’s big head, then found the courage to squat down and, with his thumb and first finger, measure the dead wolf, from its nose to the tip of its tail. It was longer than he was tall. He sucked in a breath of frigid air.

Old Man Bilgee checked out the flock of sheep with the flashlight. The thick tails of three or four of them had been bitten off and eaten by the wolf, leaving a bloody mess that had already frozen. “Trading a few sheep tails for a wolf this big counts as a good deal,” Bilgee said as he and Chen dragged the carcass into the yurt to keep greedy neighboring dogs from venting their anger and ruining the hide.

The wolf’s paws were much bigger than a dog’s; measuring one against his palm, Chen saw that they were about the same size. No wonder wolves run so effortlessly through snow and across rocky hills.

“Tomorrow,” Bilgee said, “I’ll teach you how to skin a wolf.”

Gasmai carried a big pot of meat outside to reward Bar and the other dogs. As Chen Zhen followed her out, he rubbed Bar’s big head and stroked his back, which was the size of a small table. The dog wagged his tail gratefully. “Were you scared back there?” Chen asked.

“Sure,” Gasmai said with a little laugh. “Of course I was. I was scared the wolf would drive the sheep out of the pen. I’d lose all my work points. I’m the head of a production team, and you can imagine what a humiliation it would be if I lost my sheep.” She bent down to pat the big dog’s head and said, “Sain Bar” (Good Bar), over and over. Bar dropped the bone he was chewing and raised his head to nudge his mistress’s hand, then stuck his nose up her sleeve, happily wagging his tail and sending out little eddies of air. “Chenchen, I’ll give you a puppy after New Year’s,” Gasmai said. “There are all sorts of ways to raise a dog. Do a good job, and it’ll grow up to be like Bar.”

He thanked her repeatedly.

Back in the yurt, Chen admitted that he’d been scared to death. Old Man Bilgee laughed. “I could tell when I grabbed your hand. You were shaking like a leaf. Do you think you could hold a knife in a fight like that? If you plan to stay on the grassland, you’ll have to learn to be tougher than the wolves. One day I’ll take you out to hunt them. Back when Genghis Khan formed his army, he always picked the best wolf hunters.”

Chen nodded. “I believe that,” he said. “I really do. If Gasmai rode into battle, she’d be more fearful than the female general Hua Mulan.”

“You Chinese don’t have many Hua Mulans, but there are lots of Mongol women like Gasmai. At least one in every family.” The old man laughed again like an alpha wolf.

After that incident, Chen Zhen wanted to get as near to the wolves as possible so that he could study them. He sensed that only by gaining an understanding of the wolves would he be able to comprehend the Mongolian grassland and the people who lived there. He even entertained the idea of stealing a cub from its den and raising it one day.

Although Bilgee was the most renowned hunter on the Olonbulag, he seldom went out hunting, and when he did, it was for foxes, not wolves. People had gotten so caught up in the Cultural Revolution over the past couple of years that the traditional life of the grassland- a mixture of tending sheep and hunting wild animals-had been turned upside down, like a flock of sheep scattered in a blizzard. Then, in the winter of that year, herds of Mongolian gazelle migrated across the border into the Olonbulag, and the old man decided it was time to fulfill his promise to Chen to take him to see the wolves at close range so as to boost the young man’s courage and increase his knowledge.

Chen Zhen felt the old man nudge him with his elbow and saw him point to the snow-covered slope. Chen trained his telescope on the spot. The gazelles were still grazing nervously. He watched as one of the wolves left the pack and ran off to the mountain west of them. Chen’s heart sank. “I guess they aren’t going to attack,” he whispered. “Apparently, we’ve let ourselves freeze for nothing.”

“The pack won’t pass up an opportunity like this,” Bilgee said. “The leader must have felt there are too many gazelles, so he sent a runner to bring more troops. An opportunity like this comes maybe once every five or six years, and it seems they’ve got quite an appetite. They’re getting ready for a major battle. You’ll see that this was worth the wait. As I said, patience is the key to a good hunt.”