Wolf Totem

3

Fine weather greeted them the following morning. Kitchen smoke rose from the yurts like slim white birches, the tips of their high-Fest branches boring into the heavens, into Tengger. The cows and sheep were ruminating leisurely; the sun had driven off the cold night air, and frost on the animals’ hides was just then turning to dew, to eventually rise from their bodies as mist.

Chen Zhen asked his neighbor Gombu to tend his sheep that day. As a onetime herd owner, Gombu was kept under surveillance, and his right to tend sheep had been taken from him; but the four Beijing students asked him to watch their animals whenever they could, for which Gasmai would let him earn the appropriate work points. Chen and one of the other herders, Yang Ke, yoked up a light cart and headed to Bilgee’s yurt.

Yang, a classmate who lived in Chen Zhen’s yurt, was the son of a famous professor at one of Beijing’s most prestigious universities. They had as many books at home as a small library. In high school, Chen and he had often traded books. They’d exchange views when they finished, and were best friends. In Beijing, Yang had been a shy, mild-mannered boy who blushed whenever he met a stranger. No one could have predicted that after two years of eating lamb and beefsteaks and cheese, after baking in the strong rays of the Mongolian sun season after season, he would be transformed into a brawny son of the grassland, with a face as sunburned as the native herdsmen and none of the bookish manners he’d brought with him.

Yang was more excited than Chen, and as he whipped the back of the ox he said, “I didn’t sleep at all last night. The next time Bilgee takes you hunting, be sure to let me go along, even if I have to lie there for two whole days. This is the first time I’ve heard of wolves performing good deeds for people, and I won’t believe it until I personally drag one of the gazelle carcasses out of the snow. Can we really take a cartload of them back with us?”

“Would I lie to you?” Chen smiled. “Papa said that no matter how hard it is to dig them out, we’re guaranteed a cartful, which we can swap for other things, like New Year’s items and some large pieces of felt for our yurt.”

Yang was so pleased he whipped the back of the ox until it glared angrily. “It looks like your two-year fascination with wolves is beginning to pay off,” he said. “I’ll have to start studying their hunting techniques myself. Who knows, it might come in handy in a real fight one day… What you said could be a pattern. Living on the grassland over the long haul as a nomad, it makes no difference which ethnic group you belong to, since sooner or later you’ll start worshipping wolves and treating them as mentors. That’s what happened with the Huns, the Wusun, the Turks, the Mongols, and other nationalities. Or so it says in books. But the Chinese are an exception. I guarantee you, we Chinese could live out here for generations without worshipping a wolf totem.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Chen said as he reined in his horse. “Take me, for instance. The wolves have won me over in a little more than two years.”

“But the vast majority of Chinese are peasants,” Yang countered, “or were born to peasants. The Han have a peasant mentality that’s impossible to break down, and if they were transported out here, I’d be surprised if they didn’t skin every last wolf on the grassland. We’re a farming race, and a fear and hatred of wolves is in our bones. How could we venerate a wolf totem? We Han worship the Dragon King, the one in charge of our agrarian lifeline-our dragon totem, the one we pay homage to, the one to whom we meekly submit. How can you expect people like that to learn from wolves, to protect them, to worship and yet kill them, like the Mongols? Only a people’s totem can truly rouse their ethnic spirit and character, whether it’s a dragon or a wolf. The differences between farming and nomadic peoples are simply too great. In the past, when we were immersed in the vast Han Chinese ocean, we had no sense of those differences, but coming out here has made the inherent weaknesses of our farming background obvious. Sure, my father is a renowned professor, but his grandfather and my mother’s grandmother were peasants.”

“In ancient times,” Chen said, picking up the thread, “the impact of Mongols on the world was far greater than that of the Han, who outnumbered them a hundred to one. Even now, people in the West call us members of a Mongol race, and we accept that. But back when the Qin and Han dynasties unified China, the word Mongol didn’t exist. I tell you, I feel sorry for the Han Chinese. We built the Great Wall and crowed about what an achievement it was, considering ourselves to be the center of the world, the central kingdom. But in the eyes of early Western people, China was only a ‘silk country,’ a ‘ceramic country,’ a ‘tea country.’ The Russians even thought that the little Khitan tribe was China, and to this day, they still call China, Khidai.”

“It looks like your fascination with wolves was worth it,” Yang said. “It’s contagious. Now when I read history, I keep looking to the barbarian tribes of the four corners and am tempted to look for their connections to wolves.”

“Look at you,” Chen said. “You’re damned near a Mongol yourself. All you need is an infusion of wolf blood. Hybrids are always superior creatures.”

“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you urged me to come to the grassland. Do you know what it was you said that touched that special spot in me? You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? This is it: you said, ‘The grassland contains the most extensive primitivism and freedom anywhere.’ ”

Chen loosened his horse’s bit and said, “I think you’re putting words in my mouth.”

They laughed happily. Snow flew from the wheels of the cart as it sped along.

Humans, dogs, and carts formed a scene on the snow like a Gypsy carnival. Every member of Gasmai’s group-four hots (two adjacent yurts comprised a hot), altogether eight yurts-sent men and carts. The eight carts were loaded with felt, ropes, hoes, kindling, and wooden-handled hooks. Everyone was wearing grimy old clothing for the dirty, tiring work ahead-so grimy it shone, so old it was black, and dotted with sheepskin patches. But the people and the dogs were as cheerful as the tribes that had followed the ancient Mongol hordes in sweeping up battlefields to claim the spoils of war. A large felt-wrapped flask of liquor was passed from the head of the procession all the way to the rear, and from the hands of women to the mouths of men. Music filled the air: Mongol folk songs, songs of praise, war chants, drinking songs, and love songs-the dam had broken. The forty or fifty furry Mongol dogs were acting like children, giddily showing off on this rare and happy occasion, running around the carts, rolling in the dirt, play-fighting, and flirting.

Chen Zhen and two horse herders, Batu and Lamjav, plus five or six cowherds and shepherds, clustered around Bilgee, like bodyguards for a tribal chief. Lamjav, a man with a broad face, straight nose, and Turkish eyes, said to Bilgee, “I could be the best marksman anywhere and I still wouldn’t be your equal. Without firing a shot, you’ve made it possible for every family in the team to enjoy a bountiful New Year’s holiday. Even with an apprentice like our Han friend Chen Zhen, you haven’t forgotten your old Mongol apprentices. I’d never have predicted that the wolves would launch their attack out here yesterday.”

The old man glared at him. “In the future, when you have a successful hunt, don’t you forget the old folks and the Beijing students in the team. I’ve never seen you deliver meat to anybody. You only gave Chen Zhen a gazelle leg because he visited your yurt. Is that how we treat our guests? When we were young, the first gazelle or snow otter of the year always went to the old folks and to guests. Young people today have forgotten customs handed down from the great khans. Let me ask you, how many wolves do you have to kill to catch up with Buhe, the great hunter of the Bayan Gobi Commune? You want to see your name in the newspaper, hear it on the radio, win a prize, don’t you? If you hunt the wolves to extinction, where do you think your soul will go after you die? Don’t tell me you want to be like the Han, buried in a hole in the ground, where you can feed the worms and other insects! If you do, your soul will never make it to Tengger.”

“Batu is your son,” Lamjav said as he touched the back flap of his fox-fur cap. “You may not believe me, but you ought to believe him. Ask him if I have any interest in becoming a great hunter. A journalist from the Mongol League came to the horse unit to see me the other day. Batu was there; you can ask him if I didn’t cut the number in half.”

“Is that true?” the old man turned and asked his son.

“Yes,” Batu replied, “but the man didn’t believe him. He asked people at the purchasing station how many wolf pelts Lamjav had sold them. You know that after they check the quality of the pelts to determine the price, they give the seller twenty bullets. And they keep records. After the journalist returned to the league, he said over the air that Lamjav had nearly caught up with Buhe, which so frightened Lamjav that he asked others to sell his pelts for him.”

The old man frowned. “You two hunt wolves too often. You get more kills than anyone on the pasture.”

Batu defended himself: “The grazing land for our herd of horses is the closest to the border with Outer Mongolia, and that’s where most of the wolves are. If we don’t hunt them, they’ll cross the border in even greater numbers. Most of the foals that year did not survive.”

“Why are both of you here? Did you leave the herd in the care of Zhang Jiyuan?”

“The wolves come at night,” Batu said, “so we relieve him then. He’s never taken gazelles during the day, so we came instead. We can work faster.”

The winter sun lay low in the sky, appearing to settle close to the land. The blue sky turned white, as did the dry grass; the surface of the snow began to melt, forming a glittery mirror. Humans, dogs, and carts had a spectral quality. The men put on their sunglasses, while the women and children covered their eyes with their flapped sleeves. A few of the cowherds, who suffered from sun-blindness, shut their eyes, but not in time to stanch the flow of tears. The big dogs, on the other hand, were either watching wide-eyed at bounding hares or sniffing the side of the road, where foxes had recently left tracks in the snow.

As they neared the site of the encirclement, the dogs discovered something new on the slope and raced over, leaving frenzied barks in their wakes. Those that were still hungry tore into gazelle carcasses the wolves had left behind. But Bilgee’s Bar and a few of the team’s better hunting dogs, their hackles raised, ran over to where the wolves had left droppings in the snow, searching the area to determine how many wolves there had been, how powerful a force, and which alpha male they had followed. “Bar recognizes the scent of most of the Olonbulag wolves,” Bilgee said, “and they recognize his. The way the fur on his neck is standing up is a sure sign that it was a large pack.”

As the riders entered the hunting ground, they sized the scene up by keeping their eyes to the ground. All that remained of most gazelles on the slope were heads and a scattering of bones. Bilgee pointed to the tracks in the snow and said, “Some of them came back last night.” Then he pointed to tufts of grayish-yellow wolf fur and said, “A couple of wolf packs had a fight here. It was probably a pack from the other side of the border that followed the scent of the gazelle herd. The shortage of food there makes them more ferocious than ever.”

The horse team finally made it up to the ridge, where they reacted as if they’d discovered a cornucopia, whooping it up like mad. They waved their hats to the carts behind them. Gasmai jumped down off her wagon and grabbed the bridle of the lead ox to get it to trot. So did the other women. They gathered speed, since the oxen were fast and the carts light.

When Lamjav saw the sight below, his eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Yow!” he exclaimed. “It took an amazing pack of wolves to herd in that many gazelles. Last year it took more than twenty of us herders to pen thirty, and we nearly ran our horses into the ground doing it.”

Bilgee reined in his horse and took out his telescope to pan the snow-drift and the surrounding mountains. Everyone else reined in their horses too and looked around, waiting to hear what he had to say.

Chen viewed the slope through his telescope. Countless gazelles were buried in the snowdrift, which could also have been the burial site of ancient warriors. The center of the drift was relatively smooth, like a mountain lake sealed by snow and ice. A dozen or so gazelle carcasses dotted the sloping area around the lake, but the shocking sight was seven or eight yellow dots on the lake, some still moving. Chen realized it was a cluster of gazelles that had been driven into the lake but had not been swallowed up by the snow. The surrounding area was pitted with hollows, some large, some small, off into the distance, the only visible traces of gazelles that had drowned in an ocean of snow. Unlike lakes of water, snow lakes indicate where the drowning victims have fallen in.

Bilgee said to Batu, “You and some of the others start shoveling snow to let the carts come up closer.” Then he led Chen Zhen and Lamjav up to the edge of the lake. “Make sure you check for gazelle and wolf tracks before you take a step, and avoid spots with no grass.”

They rode their horses carefully down the slope. The snow kept getting deeper, the grass less visible. They moved down a little more. The surface was peppered with holes about the thickness of a chopstick tip. A dry yellow stalk of grass stood rigidly in the middle of each hole. Bilgee said, “Tengger gave those air holes to the wolves. Without them, how could they detect the smell of their dead victims in snow this deep?”

Chen Zhen smiled and nodded. The holes and grass stalks were safety signs. A few paces farther down the slope they disappeared, but there were still gazelle and wolf tracks. The powerful Mongol horses’ hooves broke through three inches of crusty snow and settled into deep drifts as they moved closer to the snow lake, heading toward the nearest dead gazelles.

Finally, the horses could go no farther. The men dismounted, broke through the crusty surface, and sank into deep snow. They struggled to stomp out a platform on which they could turn around. A half-eaten gazelle lay at an angle in the crushed snow beside Chen Zhen’s foot. All around it was frozen grass from the gazelle’s stomach. The remains of thirty or forty gazelles that had been caught and eaten lay in the immediate area. That was as far as the wolves had gone.

Chen Zhen gazed out at the most tragic scene he’d ever encountered. Eight or nine little gazelles stood trembling on the lake a hundred yards or so from him, surrounded by holes in the snow, where other gazelles were now buried. These surviving animals were too frightened to move, but the tiny spot of hard snow on which they stood could crumble at any moment. There were others whose thin legs were buried in the snow but whose bodies remained supported by a crusty layer. They were still alive but immobilized. These fleet-footed free spirits of the grassland were hungry and cold, unable to move, suffering one last torment from Death itself.

But the most heartbreaking sight was a series of gazelle heads poking up out of the snow, their bodies completely submerged. They might have been standing on a little hillock or perhaps on the corpses of their companions. By using his telescope, Chen thought he could see the animals’ mouths move, as if crying for help, although no sound emerged.

The crusty surface sparkled like ice, beautiful yet treacherous and cruel, another gift from Tengger to the wolves and humans, a deadly hidden weapon safeguarding the grassland. The crusty layer is a product of winter blizzards and the sun. The winds that sweep across the land are like winnowing machines, removing the powdery snow and leaving a dense carpet of pellets that make up the snowy landscape. In the windless mornings, all the way up to midday, under intense rays of sunlight, the snow begins to melt, but cold afternoon winds freeze it again. After several blizzards have blown across the landscape, a three-inch crust, a mixture of ice and snow that is harder than snow alone but more brittle than ice, remains; smooth and slippery, it is uneven in its depth. At its thickest, it can support a man, but there are few places that can withstand the sharp hooves of the Mongolian gazelles.

The scene made Chen tremble with dread. Wolves had dragged all the gazelles they could out of the snow, creating long troughs crisscrossing the edges of the deep snow as they hauled their victims away. The far ends of the troughs were the abattoirs and picnic areas. Only the innards and the choicest flesh were eaten; the rest was left as waste. The wolves had obviously heard the approach of the people and dogs, and had left in a hurry, for the snow pellets were still shifting on the surface, and spots where the wolves had defecated had not completely frozen over.

Mongolian wolves are brilliant fighters on a snowy field, fully cognizant of the limits of battle. They will ignore gazelles out in the deeper snow, those lying on top and those sunken beneath the surface. There wasn’t a single track from a probe outside the safe zone. The animals dragged out of the snow could have fed several large wolf packs; the ignored frozen carcasses were the wolf pack’s guaranteed fresh food, for they would keep till the spring thaw, when the wolves would return for more tasty meals. This enormous snowdrift and snow lake was a wolf pack’s natural cold storage. Old Bilgee said, “There’s ice and snow storage for wolves all over Olonbulag. This is just the biggest one. The wolves often store their kills in places like this to keep from starving the following year. The meat of these frozen gazelles is life-saving food for wolves that grow lean in the spring and have a lot more stored-up fat than the live, and very thin, gazelles.” The old man pointed to one of the holes and said with a laugh, “Wolves out here really know how to live. We’re no match. As winter sets in each year, herdsmen slaughter their cows and sheep before they start losing their autumn fat and then they store the meat, which will take them through the winter. They learned that from wolves.”

When Bar and the other dogs spotted live gazelles, their hunting instincts kicked in and they ran toward them. But when they reached the spot where the wolves’ paw prints ended, they stopped. Denied the kill, they stretched out their necks and barked madly in the direction of the gazelles. Some of the targets were so frightened that they broke for the snow lake. But before they’d gotten far, the crust gave way and they sank into the quicksand-like snow, struggling briefly before disappearing from sight. The snow above them shifted like sand in an hourglass, until it formed a funnel. One of the animals broke through the crust, thrusting out its front legs and supporting the front half of its body while the rear half sank into the snow. Half a life was saved-for the moment.

The team dug a path to allow the carts down off the ridge, and when the lead cart reached a point where it could go no farther, a line of carts stretched out behind it. The men got out and shoveled away the snow around them so that they could unload the carts.

The men walked up to Bilgee. “All of you, see how the snow off to the west has frozen solid?” he said. “There aren’t many holes there, but there are a lot of gazelle droppings and tracks, and that means that many got away.”

The sheepherder Sanjai said with a laugh, “I can see that wolves miscalculate sometimes too. If the alpha male had sent four or five wolves over here to close off this route, those gazelles wouldn’t have gotten away so easily.”

“If you were the alpha male,” Bilgee snorted, “you’d starve to death. If you kill off all the gazelles at one time, what will you eat the following year? Wolves aren’t greedy like humans. They know how to figure things out, big things!”

“There are too many gazelles this year,” Sanjai said. “You could kill a thousand more and still have plenty left. I want to get my hands on enough money to build a new yurt and get married.”

The old man glared at him. “When your sons and grandsons get married and the gazelles are gone, then what? You young people are getting more like those outsiders all the time.”

Seeing that the women had unloaded the carts and dug paths to the deep snow by clearing out troughs the wolves had made when dragging the gazelle carcasses through the snow, and that they’d also built up a snowbank, Bilgee looked skyward and chanted something. Chen Zhen guessed that he was asking Tengger for permission to go out in the snow and bring up the dead gazelles.

The old man closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again and said, “There are plenty of frozen gazelles at the bottom of the snow, so don’t get greedy. When you’re out there, first free the surviving animals, all of them, before coming back to dig out the frozen ones. Tengger didn’t want those animals to die, so we must save them.” He lowered his head and said to Chen Zhen and Yang Ke, “When Genghis Khan finished an encirclement hunt, he let a small number of animals go. The Mongols have fought like that for centuries, and the reason we can have these hunts year after year is that, like the wolves, we don’t kill off all the prey.”

Bilgee assigned gazelle collection sectors to each family, then let them go off and work on their own. Everyone followed hunting custom by leaving the nearest and most plentiful holes for the students and for Bilgee, who led Chen and Yang over to his cart, where they unloaded two large rolls of felt, each about two yards wide and four yards long. They appeared to have been sprayed with water beforehand, for they were frozen stiff. Chen and Yang each dragged one along the cleared path, while Bilgee carried a long birch club, tipped with a metal hook. Batu and Gasmai also carried large rolls of felt to the deep snow; little Bayar walked behind his parents with a hook over his shoulder.

After they reached the edge of the deep snow, Bilgee had Chen and Yang spread one of the rolls of felt over the crusty snow, then asked Yang, the heavier of the two, to see if it could sustain his weight. It was like a gigantic skateboard. Yang stepped onto the felt, drawing crunching sounds from the snow under it, but no signs of danger. He jumped up and down. The felt sank beneath his feet slightly but not perilously. The old man quickly made him stop. “Don’t do that when we’re out on the deep snow. If you break through the felt, you’ll become a frozen gazelle yourself, and that’s no joke. Now then, Chen Zhen is lighter than you, so I’ll go dig out a couple of gazelles with him. After that, you two can go out on your own.”

Yang jumped off and helped the old man onto the felt. Chen followed. The felt easily withstood the weight of the two men and looked as if it would hold up under the added weight of a couple of gazelles. Once they were steady, they dragged up the second roll of felt and laid it out in front of the one they were standing on. They squared the two pieces and then stepped onto the second piece. After laying down the hooked pole, they repeated the process, moving the first piece out in front of the second. This they did over and over, as if piloting a pair of felt boats, gliding toward a living gazelle.

At last, Chen Zhen was aboard one of those marvelous creations, which grassland inhabitants had devised to transport themselves across the snow and avoid calamitous blizzards. Countless Mongol herdsmen had ridden these boats over the millennia, escaping the snowy abyss and rescuing vast numbers of sheep and dogs. It had also allowed them to drag out victims of hunts by wolves and humans and to claim spoils of war abandoned on snow lakes. Rather than keeping this Mongol secret from an outsider, Bilgee was teaching the Beijing student how to use it. Chen Zhen thus had the good fortune to be the first Han Chinese to actually navigate one of those ancient, primitive boats.

From time to time, as the felt boat picked up speed, the crusty snow beneath them cracked and crunched, and Chen felt as if he were riding on a magic carpet, gliding across the snowy whiteness below, trembling with fear, excited by a sense of danger, floating like an immortal, and immensely grateful to the wolves and human inhabitants of the grassland for introducing him to an almost mythical sort of primitive life. Eight felt boats, sixteen flying carpets, converged on the snow lake as if chasing one another, raising clouds of powdery snow and sprays of ice. Dogs barked, people shouted, Tengger smiled. Suddenly a heavy cloud passed overhead, sending the temperature plummeting. Snow that had begun to melt was immediately transformed into brittle ice, which hardened the crusty surface and tripled the degree of safety in retrieving gazelles, with no need to change tactics. The men took off their sunglasses, opened their eyes wide, and looked up into the sky. “Tengger! ” they shouted joyfully. “Tengger!” Now the boats picked up speed, their pilots emboldened, and at that moment Chen actually sensed the existence of the Mongols’ eternal Tengger, which once more caressed his soul.

Then, without warning, shouts of joy from Yang Ke and Bayar erupted behind them. Chen turned to look. “We got one!” Yang and Bayar shouted together. “We got one!” Chen trained his telescope on them and saw that somehow, under Bayar’s direction, Yang had dug a large gazelle out of the snow. They were dragging it by its leg back to the cart, while others were running up with shovels over their shoulders.

The felt boat had traveled far from the safety of the shore and was getting closer to one of the gazelles, a pregnant female with a look of fear and hopelessness in her eyes, an almost prayerful look. Surrounded by holes in the snow, she was standing on a crusty spot no bigger than a small table, which could give way at any moment. “Slide the hook over slowly,” the old man said. “Don’t frighten her. We’re dealing with two lives here. Life on the grassland is hard for us all, and it’s sometimes important to spare lives.”

Chen nodded, lay down on his belly, and lightly moved the felt in front past the holes until it was up next to the female gazelle’s feet. The crust was holding. Maybe the animal had been rescued before, or maybe she recognized a slim chance of survival for the fetus she was carrying, but she leaped onto the felt and immediately fell to her knees, quaking all over. She seemed paralyzed with exhaustion, nearly frozen, and frightened out of her wits.

Chen breathed a sigh of relief as the two men stepped lightly onto the front sheet of felt and carefully dragged the rear sheet around the holes in the snow, pushing it to the west, where the snow was harder. After repeating the maneuver a dozen or so times, they reached a gentle slope where holes in the snow were replaced by gazelle droppings and tracks. “All right,” the old man said, “let her go. If she falls in now, it will be because Tengger wanted her to.”

Chen approached the gazelle slowly and looked into her eyes. He didn’t see a gazelle; he saw a docile deer about to become a mother. She possessed motherly beauty in her big, tender eyes. He rubbed the top of her head; she opened her eyes wide, now seeming to beg for mercy. Chen stroked the helpless, feeble creature kneeling at his feet, and felt his heart shudder. Why did he not strive to protect these warm, beautiful, peace-loving herbivores instead of gradually moving closer to the wolves, whose nature was to kill? Having grown up hearing tales that demonize wolves, he said without thinking, “These gazelles are such pitiful creatures. Wolves are evil, killing the innocent, oblivious to the value of a life. They deserve to be caught and skinned.”

Old Man Bilgee’s expression changed abruptly, and Chen nervously swallowed the rest of what he was about to say. He knew he’d offended the old man’s deities and the grassland inhabitants’ revered totem. But the words were out of his mouth, and there was nothing he could do about that now.

Glaring at Chen, the old man said angrily, “Does that mean that the grass doesn’t constitute a life? That the grassland isn’t a life? Out here, the grass and the grassland are the life, the big life. All else is little life that depends on the big life for survival. Even wolves and humans are little life. Creatures that eat grass are worse than creatures that eat meat. To you, the gazelle is to be pitied. So the grass isn’t to be pitied, is that it? The gazelles have four fast-moving legs, and most of the time wolves spit up blood from exhaustion trying to catch them. When the gazelles are thirsty, they run to the river to drink, and when they’re cold, they run to a warm spot on the mountain to soak up some sun. But the grass? Grass is the big life, yet it is the most fragile, the most miserable life. Its roots are shallow, the soil is thin, and though it lives on the ground, it cannot run away. Anyone can step on it, eat it, chew it, crush it. A urinating horse can burn a large spot in it. And if the grass grows in sand or in the cracks between rocks, it is even shorter, because it cannot grow flowers, which means it cannot spread its seeds. For us Mongols, there’s nothing more deserving of pity than the grass. If you want to talk about killing, then the gazelles kill more grass than any mowing machine could. When they graze the land, isn’t that killing? Isn’t that taking the big life of the grassland? When you kill off the big life of the grassland, all the little lives are doomed. The damage done by the gazelles far outstrips any done by the wolves. The yellow gazelles are the deadliest, for they can end the lives of the people here.” The old man’s wispy goatee quivered, worse than the gazelle at their feet.

Chen Zhen was deeply moved by the old man’s monologue; it beat on his heart like a war drum, persistent and painful. The inhabitants of the grassland were far ahead of any race of farmers not only in terms of battle strategies and strength of character but in their modes of thought as well. This ancient logic went to the core of why, over millennia, there has been constant and violent conflict between the carnivores and the herbivores. The old man had delivered his monologue as if he were standing on the Mongol plateau and looking down on the plains of Northern China: commanding, wolf fangs bared, forceful and resonant, pointed and convincing. Chen, who had been a skilled debater, could say nothing. Much of his worldview, based on the Han agrarian culture, crumbled in the face of the logic and the culture of the grassland. The nomadic inhabitants safeguarded the “big life”-the survival of the grassland and of nature were more precious than the survival of people. Tillers of the land, on the other hand, safeguarded “little lives”-the most precious of which were people, their survival the most important. But, as Bilgee had said, without the big life, the little lives were doomed. Chen repeated this over and over, and it pained him somewhat. But then he was reminded of the large-scale slaughter of tillers of the land by nomads throughout history, and the actions they took to return crop-lands to pastureland, and the doubts returned. He’d always considered these actions to be backward, regressive, and barbaric. But he was forced to reconsider his position after being scolded by the old man, who had employed the yardstick of big and little life. Both Easterners and Westerners all refer to the land as the mother of humanity. How then can anyone who does injury to Mother Earth be considered civilized?

Timidly, he asked, “Then why is it so important for you to free this gazelle?”

“Gazelles attract wolves,” the old man said. “Wolves hunt the gazelles, and that makes for fewer losses of cows, sheep, and horses. The gazelles also provide extra income for the herdsmen. In fact, many Mongols rely on what they earn from hunting gazelles to build their yurts, get married, and have children. Half of a Mongol is hunter. If we could not hunt, our lives would be like meat with no salt, tasteless. We Mongols go crazy if we can’t hunt, partly because that safeguards the big life of the grassland. We hunt animals that eat our grass many times more than we hunt animals that eat meat.” He sighed. “There are so many things you Chinese don’t understand. You read books, but what you find in them is false reasoning. Chinese write their books to advocate Chinese causes. The Mongols suffer because they can’t write books. If you could turn into a Mongol and write books for us, that would be wonderful.”

Chen nodded as he thought back to all the fairy tales he’d read as a child. The “gray wolves” were stupid creatures, greedy and cruel, while foxes were clever and likable. Not until coming to the grassland did he realize that in nature there is no wild animal that has evolved more highly or more perfectly than the gray wolf. Books, and especially fairy tales, he saw, often misled people.

The old man helped the gazelle to her feet and nudged her out onto the snow, in a spot where the tips of a few weeds poked through the surface. The hungry pregnant gazelle bent down and gobbled them up. Chen hurriedly pulled up the felt. The gazelle took a few wobbly steps, spotted the tracks of other gazelles, and ran off toward the ridge without looking back; she quickly vanished in the mountains.

Batu and Gasmai also brought up a live animal, a half-grown gazelle. Gasmai muttered, “Huolehei, huolehei” (Mercy, mercy), as she picked it up in her arms, set it down on the snowy ground, and sent it off running toward the ridge with a pat on its rump.

Chen gave Gasmai a thumbs-up. She laughed and said, “Its mother fell into a hole in the snow, and it just kept running around, not wanting to leave. We had a terrible time trying to catch it, until we managed to hold it down with our poles.”

The other snow boats drew near, and the surviving gazelles on the snow lake eventually formed a small cluster that went over the mountain ridge and disappeared. The old man said, “Those animals have learned something here. In the future, the wolves won’t be able to bring them down.”