Wolf Totem

4

Finally, the people were able to claim their well-deserved New Year’s provisions. The freezing air over the snow lake was becom-ing heavier, the snow on the surface harder. The old man said to the hunters, “Tengger is urging us to move quickly.” So the men ran to their spots, and the hunting ground once again steamed with exuberance. Bilgee led Chen Zhen to an average-sized depression in the snow, where they stopped. “Don’t look for the largest depressions,” he said, “because they usually contain seven or eight suffocated gazelles, and all that heat keeps them from freezing right away. As the heat builds up overnight, the animals get bloated, their legs turn rigid, and the skin over their abdomens turns purple. As much as half the meat on them is bad by the time they finally freeze. So what you get is a frozen gazelle with half its meat inedible. At the purchasing station, you’ll get less than half the price of a whole gazelle, money for the hide only, not a cent for the meat. But rotting meat is the wolves’ favorite, and the gazelles buried here will be on their mind all winter. So we’ll leave the choice wolf food for the wolves.”

The old man lay down on the felt and thrust his hooked pole into the depression, which was at least six feet deep. He probed and probed until he abruptly jerked the pole upward. “I’ve hooked one,” he said to Chen. “Help me pull it up.” They began raising the animal, dropping it back a little between pulls to let the displaced snow fill the gap beneath it. They stood on the felt, bending over to pull the pole up; before long, the snow-covered head of a dead gazelle broke the surface. The hook had caught the animal in the throat, which preserved the integrity of the hide. Chen bent over, grabbed the gazelle (which weighed fifty or sixty kilos) by the head, and pulled it onto the felt. It was completely frozen, its abdomen neither distended nor purple; it had died and frozen quickly. “A perfect specimen,” the old man said. “It’ll bring the highest price.”

“There are more down there,” he said, taking a deep breath. “You try to snag one. It’s like hooking a bucket at the bottom of a well. When you’ve found the right spot, pull with all your might. Don’t hook it where you’ll spoil the pelt and lower the price.” Chen agreed eagerly, took the pole, thrust it into the depression, and began to probe. He could feel two or more gazelles down there but kept moving the pole around to outline the shape of one of them. When he felt the throat, he jerked the pole upward until it felt well snagged. At long last, Chen had caught a “big fish” in a snow lake on the Mongolian grassland. It too weighed in at fifty or sixty kilos, a quarry that could outrun even the fastest horse. Filled with excitement, he shouted to Yang Ke, who was still on the lakeshore, “Look, I caught one, a great big one! It was quite a fight!”

“Come back here, would you?” Yang Ke replied, fit to be tied. “Come back and let me have a shot at it! And let Papa get some rest.”

Excited shouts rose on the lake and on the slope as large gazelles with plenty of meat and unbroken hides were brought to the surface and, one after the other, snow rafts sped to the shore. Some of the fastest workers were already out on their second voyage. The raft manned by Batu, Gasmai, and Lamjav was the most efficient. They snagged the largest gazelles unerringly and with amazing speed. When they pulled up medium or small-sized animals, or full-grown ones with distended or purple abdomens, those that would not bring in good prices, they tossed them back down into the empty depression. A rich harvest, normally only seen in the springtime, when baby lambs are born, spread across the barren, snowy plateau. Even predators sometimes turn into prey, Chen thought with grim satisfaction.

Chen and the old man sailed their raft, now weighted down with two large gazelles, back to shore, where Yang Ke and Bayar helped Bilgee step off. Chen pushed the two gazelles off the raft, and the four men dragged them over to their carts. There Chen discovered that the two carts were already piled high with large gazelles, and asked why that was. Yang Ke said, “Bayar and I bagged one of them. The rest are gifts from some of the other families. An Olonbulag custom, they said.” He laughed. “Hanging around Papa has brought dividends.”

Bilgee joined in the laughter. “You’re citizens of the grassland too,” he said. “So learn our customs and stick to them.” The old man, clearly tired, sat cross-legged alongside the cart to smoke his pipe. “You two go out,” he said, “but be careful. If you happen to fall in, spread your legs and stick out your arms immediately, and hold your breath. That way you won’t be in too deep. Whoever’s on the raft, stick in the pole, but be careful not to hook the person in the face. That will ruin your marriage prospects.” He choked on his laughter. Then he told Bayar to find some kindling for a cook fire.

Bursting with excitement, Chen and Yang walked over to the felt raft, and as they neared the deep snow by the shore, Chen spotted a hole that looked like a tunnel to the depths of the snow lake. Yang Ke said with a laugh, “I didn’t want to say anything a moment ago, because Papa was there beside us, but this hole in the snow, Bayar and I dug it, it’s where we found that big gazelle. I tell you, that Bayar may be small, but he’s got guts. When he saw you out there, he opened his fur coat and, because he weighs so little, crawled out on the snow without falling in. He found a depression before he’d gone more than five or six yards, so he crawled back and we dug a tunnel in the snow. We didn’t have to dig far to reach the gazelle, so he went down and tied a rope around one of its legs. When he came back, I pulled the animal out of the snow. He was fearless, but the whole time he was down there I was worried the snow might cave in and bury him.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Chen said. “Anyone who isn’t afraid to grab hold of a wolf with his bare hands isn’t going to be scared by a hole in the snow. Now you know what a Mongol kid is capable of doing. Just think what he’ll be like when he grows up!”

“When I told him not to go down into the snow,” Yang said, “he said that when he was seven, he crawled into a wolf’s den and stole a litter of cubs, so a snow cave is nothing! You’ve talked about wanting a wolf cub, haven’t you? Well, take Bayar along and get one.”

“Not me,” Chen replied. “These Mongols, all I can do is stand back and admire them.”

As the two students rode their Mongolian snow raft, Yang’s face was joyfully wrinkled. “I can’t believe how great it is to hunt on the grassland. Shepherding is so boring. As soon as wolves entered the picture, our lives got a lot more interesting and a lot more exciting.”

“This is a vast, sparsely populated territory,” Chen said. “Sometimes there isn’t a yurt within miles. Without the wolves and the hunt, life out here would be stultifying. I’ve gotten hooked on reading lately and it appears that these people have revered the wolf totem for thousands of years.”

Having eaten braised venison with their tea that morning, they had an abundance of energy, so, with clouds of white steam bursting from their mouths, their arms and legs churning like dragon-boat racers, they skimmed the snowy surface, the two halves of their felt raft rapidly changing positions. Eventually, Yang also managed to hook a gazelle and was so excited he nearly tipped the raft over, causing Chen to break out in a cold sweat as he rushed to calm his friend down. With a smack of his hand against the frozen animal, Yang shouted, “I thought I was dreaming when I saw people hook these things and bring them up, but now I know I wasn’t. This is terrific! And all thanks to you, wolves. Wolves! Wolves!”

Yang refused to turn the hooking pole over to Chen, who was too concerned with their safety to wrangle over it, and content to be his friend’s muscle. All in all, Yang hooked three gazelles and got so addicted to what he was doing that he didn’t want to head back to shore. With a wicked smile, he said, “Let’s drag some more out and take them back all at once. More efficient that way.” Without a second thought, he laid the frozen carcasses flat on top of the hardened snow.

Back on the shore, Bilgee had finished a pipeful of tobacco and was telling people to clear a wide space, where women from each family piled up broken boards, wooden axles, and the like as kindling. Then old felt was spread around and piled high with insulated bottles of milk tea and liquor, wooden utensils, and salt cellars. Sanjai and one of the boys slaughtered a pair of half-dead gazelles, both with broken legs. People on the Olonbulag only eat meat from freshly slaughtered animals, so these would serve as the hunters’ noonday meal. The dogs, who had stuffed themselves with kills left behind by the wolves, gazed on the two skinned, gutted, steaming gazelles with indifference. Bilgee and the women and children speared chunks of fresh, still-twitching meat onto metal and wooden skewers, added salt, and held them over the blazing bonfire. Then they sat back to eat the meat and drink tea; its seductive fragrance, along with that of the liquor and the meat, spread across the lake and drew the hunters back to eat and rest.

By midday, all the rafts had made two or three trips to shore to unload their quarry, and each family’s cart was piled high with six or seven frozen gazelles. It was time for the men to turn the work over to the well-fed women and children, who climbed aboard the felt rafts and went out onto the snow lake to bring up more animals.

Freshly roasted gazelle is a delicacy of the Mongolian grassland, especially after a hunt, when the meat is roasted and eaten on the spot. Historically, it was a favorite of the khans and royalty, and an essential component of gatherings of ordinary hunters. As newly acknowledged hunters, Chen Zhen and Yang Ke were invited to participate in the feast. The thrill of the hunt, along with sheer exhaustion, had given Chen such an appetite that he felt he appreciated the event more than any Mongol khan ever could; it was an outdoor feast for humans following an outdoor feast by a pack of wild wolves. Chen and Yang, who at that moment felt as free and powerful as any Mongol, impulsively grabbed flasks from the hands of fellow hunters who were drinking and eating and singing with fervor and passion, and gulped down great mouthfuls of liquor.

With a burst of laughter, Bilgee said, “I’d be afraid to go see your parents in Beijing a year from now, since by then I’ll have turned you into Mongol savages.”

“We Han could use a heavy dose of Mongol spirit,” Yang Ke said, the smell of liquor strong on his breath.

At the top of his lungs, Chen Zhen shouted “Papa” three times, raised the flask in his hand above his head, and toasted the “Venerable Tribal Leader.” The old man took three drinks from his flask and responded, “Minihu, minihu, minisaihu” (My child, my child, my good child).

Batu, giddily drunk, slapped Chen on the back and said, “You… you are only half a Mongol, wh… when you, you marry a Mongol girl… a woman, father a… a Mongol brat, then you’ll be a true Mongol. You, you’re on the weak side, no good, not good, not good enough. Mongol women under… under the bedcovers, make you work, worse than wolf… wolves. Mongol men, most of us, are scared of them, like sheep.”

“At night,” Sanjai piped in, “men are sheep, women are wolves. Especially Gasmai.”

The hunters all roared with laughter.

Lamjav was in such high spirits that he flipped Yang Ke heavily onto a snowdrift. “When… when you can do that to me,” he stammered, “that’s when you… the day you’re a Mongol.” Yang grabbed hold of Lamjav and tried to wrestle him to the ground, only to be flipped head over heels three more times. Lamjav laughed. “You… you Han Chinese are grass-eaters, like sheep. We Mongols are meat-eaters, like wolves.”

As he brushed the snow from his clothes, Yang said, “Just you wait. Next year I’m going to buy a full-grown ox and eat every bite of it myself. I plan to keep growing till I’m a head taller than you, and then you’ll be like a sheep.”

“Yes!” the other hunters shouted approvingly. “Good comeback!”

Grassland Mongols are known more for their capacity for liquor than for their appetite for meat. After a few rounds, all seven or eight flasks were empty. Seeing that there was no more liquor, Yang boldly proclaimed to Lamjav, “You can outwrestle me, but let’s see who can outdrink who.”

“Playing the fox, are you?” Lamjav retorted. “Well, out here, wolves are cleverer than foxes. Wait here. I’ve got more liquor.” He ran over to where his horse was standing and took a bottle of clear liquor out of his felt saddlebag, that and two cups. Waving the bottle in front of Yang, he said, “I was saving this for… for guests, but now I’m going to use it to punish you.”

“Punish!” the hunters shouted. “Punish him! Give him what he deserves!”

With an embarrassed smile, Yang Ke said, “It looks like this fox is no match for a wolf. I’ll take my punishment.”

"Listen…listen closely,” Lamjav said. “To follow our custom, you… you must drink as many cups as I say. I misspoke myself once and was outdrunk by a journalist who knew both Mongol and Han customs. This time I’m going to make sure you taste defeat.” He poured a cup and, in halfway decent Chinese, intoned, “Meadowlarks fly in pairs, two cups from a single wing.”

Yang Ke blanched. “Four wings times two cups, ah! That’s eight cups! How about one cup from each wing?”

“If you don’t play by the rules,” Lamjav replied, “I’ll make it three, I mean… three cups from a single wing.”

The crowd of hunters, Chen Zhen included, shouted in unison, “Drink! You must drink!”

Seeing no way out, Yang belted down eight cups, one after the other. The old man laughed. “Trying to trick a friend out here gets you into trouble every time,” he said.

Chen and Yang took skewers of cooked meat from the old man and, with bloody grease dripping down their chins, ate with gusto.

“Papa,” Chen said, “this is the first time I’ve eaten wolf food, and it’s the best thing I’ve eaten in my life, the best meat I’ve ever tasted. Now I know why so many emperors and their sons were avid hunters. Taizong of the Tang, China’s greatest emperor, loved to hunt. His son, his heir, used to come to the grassland with his Turkish bodyguards to ride and hunt. He even set up a grassland-style tent in the palace courtyard, where, like you, he slaughtered sheep and ate, slicing the meat off the bones with his own knife. For him, life on the grassland was better than being emperor. All he wanted was to hunt with his Turkish bodyguards under his own Turkish wolf flag, to live like a Turk on the grassland. Eventually, he lost his claim to the throne and his father picked his brother as heir. Life out here can even win over an emperor.”

The old man listened wide-eyed. “You never told me that,” he said. “It’s a good story. It would be wonderful if all you Han could appreciate the grassland like that prince did, but it would have been better if he hadn’t lost the throne. The Qing emperors often came out here to hunt and to find Mongol girls to marry. And they didn’t allow their Han subjects to open the grassland to raising crops. Back then, there was no fighting between the Mongols and the Chinese; we were at peace.”

Bilgee loved listening to Chen’s historical tales, and repaid the debt with tales of Mongolia. “Anyone who doesn’t eat wolves’ food is not a true grassland Mongol. There would probably be no Mongols without it. In days past, when Mongols were driven to the brink of destruction, they survived by eating wolves’ food. One of Genghis Khan’s ancestors, who was driven deep into the mountains, was on the verge of starvation, like a common savage. He was reduced to following the path of wolves; whenever they had a kill, he would wait until they’d eaten their fill and moved on, then he’d eat what they left. He lived like that, alone in the mountains, for years, until his brother found him and took him home. Wolves are the Mongols’ benefactors, sometimes their saviors. Without them there would have been no Genghis Khan, and no Mongols. Wolf food is delicious. See what the wolves have given us for our New Year’s celebration… though it doesn’t come that easily most of the time. That’s something you’ll learn someday.”

The two gazelles were picked clean and the bonfire began to sputter. Bilgee had the people smother the fire with snow.

The cloud cover thickened, and blowing snow began to reach them from the mountaintops, creating a gauzy veil. The brawniest hunters boarded their snow rafts again and headed out to the snow lake. It was essential to fill the carts before the blowing snow filled in the depressions. Each gazelle hooked and brought up meant six or seven bricks of Sichuan tea or a dozen or so cartons of Haihe cigarettes from Tianjin, or fifteen or sixteen bottles of Mongolian clear liquor. Under Bilgee’s command, all the rafts were maneuvered by the hunters from the deepest section of the lake to shallower spots, where it was easier to hook the frozen gazelles. The old man also divided the people into teams, the most adept users of the poles concentrating on hooking animals, and those better at manipulating the rafts focusing on transporting the animals back. As the rafts neared the shore, ropes were put to use, with several men standing at the edge of the lake flinging them like mooring lines to the carcass-laden rafts, where hunters tied one end to the raft and flung the other end back so that the men there could pull them back to shore. The process was repeated over and over.

By the time all human shadows on the snow lake had been swallowed up by mountain shadows, the carts were piled high, but there were a few men who wanted to hunt into the night by lamplight, piling the surplus gazelles on the lakeshore, with armed guards, to be picked up the following morning. Bilgee stopped them. “Tengger has given us a good day,” he chastised them. “Tengger is fair. Since wolves have eaten our sheep and horses, these are the reparations. Now Tengger has started the winds blowing, telling us to leave the remaining gazelles for the wolves. Which of you is willing to disobey Tengger? Which of you is willing to stay behind in this snowdrift? If the wolves came out with a blizzard tonight, I wonder who among you would still be around tomorrow morning.”

His comments were met with silence. He gave the command to head back. The exhausted but happy people pushed the heavy, overloaded carts to help the drivers navigate the hills and ridges, then mounted their horses or climbed aboard the carts and headed back to camp.

Chen Zhen felt the sweat on his body chilling. He could not stop shivering. Everywhere-on the lake and off, on the ridges and the paths through the snow-the humans had left their imprint: bonfire ashes, cigarette butts, and liquor bottles, plus tire ruts all the way back to camp. Chen kneed his horse to ride up to Bilgee. “Papa, this time the wolves lost. Will they seek revenge? You’re always saying they have long memories. They remember their food and their fights-how about their enemies?”

“We dug out a lot of gazelles, but left more than half the number for the wolves. Next spring the wolves will feast on frozen gazelle and won’t stick around to trouble us. Besides, they did us a favor, so we should leave them something. Don’t worry, the wolf leader knows what to do.”

A blizzard swept the area that night, and the students’ yurt sweltered. Chen Zhen put away his copy of The Secret History of the Mongols and said to Yang Ke, "The man Bilgee mentioned, the one who picked over the food left by the wolves was Budoncher, Genghis Khan’s great-great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather. Genghis Khan’s family was part of the Borjigin tribe, whose historical founder was Budoncher. Subsequent generations would witness monumental changes.”

“That must mean that if there’d been no wolves, those great war counselors and leaders, there’d have been no Genghis Khan, no golden tribe, and of course no wise and brave Mongol fighting horsemen,” Yang said. “Wolves have certainly played a prominent role in the history of the Mongol people.”

“Why stop there? They’ve played a prominent role in the lives of the Chinese, in the lives of all the world’s people. The arrival of Genghis Khan and his Mongol horsemen on the scene led to a rewriting of the history of China, from the Jin and Southern Song on. So too the histories of Central Asia, Persia, Russia, and India. Gunpowder, invented in China, was introduced to the West by Mongol hordes as they cut their murderous swath through Europe and Asia, bringing down the castle of feudalism in the West and sweeping away all obstacles to the emerging system of capitalism. Gunpowder then made its way back to the East, where it blew open the door to China and, ultimately, ended the reign of the Mongol horsemen and turned the whole world upside down. But the historical impact of wolves has been written off by historians. If Tengger had recorded events, wolves on the Mongolian grasslands would have had their place in the annals of history.”

Gao Jianzhong, the cowherd, could not contain his excitement over the arrival of the largesse. “What are you two doing, dredging up the ancient past? Our first priority ought to be to dig all the gazelles out of the snowbank and get rich.”

Chen Zhen said, “Heaven keeps its eye out for the wolves, and we should be grateful for this cartload of gazelles. The blizzard will blow for three days at least, adding a couple of feet or more to the snowbank and filling in the depressions. Looking for gazelles in that would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.”

Gao walked out of the yurt and looked up at the sky. “It’s really going to blow for three days,” he said when he was back inside. “I should have been there today. Damned if I wouldn’t have planted poles in the largest depressions.” He sighed. “I guess I’ll have to wait till spring. But then I’ll go out, fill up a cart, and personally take it to the purchasing station at the Bayan Gobi Commune. If you two say nothing, no one else need know.”

The livestock made it through the latter half of winter without incident. The Olon wolf pack followed the gazelles far away, where it dispersed. The great blizzard did not come.

Over the lonely winter, when Chen Zhen was neither tending the sheep nor on night watch, he made his rounds of the grassland, searching out tales of wolves, spending most of his time on the legend of the “flying wolves.” Known throughout the Olonbulag, it had recent origins and, as it turned out, was set in the area of Chen’s production brigade. He was determined to get to the bottom of the legend and satisfy his curiosity as to how wolves were able to “fly” on the Olonbulag.

Soon after their arrival, the students had been told by herdsmen that Tengger had sent the wolves down to Earth, which meant they could fly. Over the centuries, when a herdsman died, his body was taken into the wilds and laid out in open view for the wolves to dispose of. The “sky burial” was completed once the wolves had eaten every morsel of human remains. It was called a sky burial owing to the belief that the wolves could fly to Tengger, taking the human soul back with them, just like the magic eagles of Tibet. But when the students labeled this as superstition, one of the “four olds” attacked during the Cultural Revolution, the herdsmen insisted that wolves could fly. As recently as the third year of the Cultural Revolution, they said, a pack of wolves flew into Second Brigade Cherendorji’s stone enclosure, where they ate a dozen sheep and killed more than two hundred. After satisfying their appetite, they flew away. The stone wall was six or seven feet high, too high for a person to climb over, so how did the wolves get in there if they didn’t fly?

Director Uljii had taken all the leaders over to see, including even the head of the police station, Harbar. After taking pictures and measurements, they agreed that the wall was too high for the wolves to jump over, and noted that there were no breaches through which they could have gotten in. Several days of investigation turned up no explanation for how the wolves had gotten in and out. But the herdsmen knew.

The tale had stuck in Chen’s mind for a long time; now, as his fascination with wolves grew, it resurfaced. So he saddled up and rode out to see the wall with his own eyes. After examining it carefully, he was no closer to an explanation than anyone else, so he went to talk to the old-timer Cherendorji.

“I still don’t know which of my idiot sons offended Tengger,” the old man said, “but my family is cursed even today.”

The old man’s son, who had attended middle school, said, “The affair can be blamed on stupid pasture regulations. There were no such walls on the Olonbulag before, but headquarters decided to build stone enclosures in the birthing meadow, both to protect the sheep and to cut back on expenses by reducing the work points given out for night watches. The wolves can’t climb the walls, they said, so there’ll be no need for night watchmen, and everyone can sleep easy at night. So we closed the gate and stayed inside our yurt. That night I heard the dogs bark and I knew something was wrong, as if a pack of wolves was in the vicinity. But since headquarters had said there was no need to go on watch, we didn’t even go out to check. Unfortunately, when we opened the gate in the morning, we were struck dumb by the sight of all those dead and dying sheep. There was blood all over the ground, as thick as two fingers in places, and more on the stone wall. The marks of four fangs stood out on the necks of the dead animals, whose blood had even flowed outside the wall. There were also several piles of wolf dung… Later on, headquarters changed the regulations, requiring people who lived near one of the enclosures to recommence night watches, for which work points would be given. More and more stone and rammed-earth enclosures have been built on the birthing meadows in recent years and, since there are night watchmen again, there have been no more stories of wolves flying into an enclosure and eating our sheep.”

But that wasn’t enough for Chen Zhen, who went around asking other herders. All of them-men and women, young and old-told him that wolves could fly. They also said that when a wolf dies, its soul flies up to Tengger.

Eventually, Police Chief Harbar was released from confinement in the banner interrogation unit and sent back to assume his position again. Taking a pack of Beijing cigarettes with him, Chen went to call on the chief to get an explanation as to how the wolves had “flown” in and out of the enclosure.

Chief Harbar, a graduate of the Inner Mongolian Police Academy and fluent in Chinese, said, “The case is closed. Unfortunately, the scientific explanation has no standing on the grassland, and most of the herders don’t believe it. All but a few educated and experienced hunters, who accepted the results of the investigation, were convinced that the wolves could fly. If we respect the beliefs and customs of the local population” he laughed-“then the wolves flew into the enclosure. There’s a bit of truth to that, since wolves do sail through the air a long ways.

“The herders were in a state of anxiety that day,” he went on, “believing that Tengger was angry enough to send down a scourge. They left their herds up on the mountain and rushed back to see what was happening. Women and old men went down on their knees to Tengger. Children were so frightened they didn’t cry even when grown-ups slapped them. Worried that the commotion would adversely affect production, Director Uljii gave me two days to solve the case. I called the cadres together to safeguard the site, but it had already been corrupted. All the clues on the ground outside the enclosure had been trampled on by people and sheep, and I had to examine every inch of the stone wall with a magnifying glass. Finally, on the outside of the northeast corner of the wall, I found two faint, bloody wolf-paw prints. That solved the case. Can you guess how the wolves got in?”

Chen shook his head.

“I determined,” Chief Harbar said, “that one large wolf had leaned its front paws against the wall, rear legs on the ground, and made its body available as a springboard. The other wolves ran full speed, jumped on its back and shoulders, and sailed into the enclosure. From inside, wouldn’t it look like they flew in?”

Amazed by what he was hearing, Chen said, “Those Olonbulag wolves are incredibly smart. Almost as soon as the stone enclosures went up on the grassland, they figured out how to deal with them. It’s like they’re bewitched… The herders aren’t that far off when they say that the wolves can fly. And when they fell out of the sky in the midst of the sheep, the flock must have been scared half to death. The rest was easy. After a killing frenzy, they ate their fill, all but the poor wolf springboard on the other side of the wall. It got nothing. It must have been a special animal, devoted to the pack, obviously an alpha male.”

Chief Harbar laughed heartily. “Wrong,” he said. “The way I see it, that wolf flew in and ate just as much as the others. You should know that these wolves have a strong collective spirit; they stick together. It’s not in their nature to abandon one of their own. A wolf on the inside acted as a springboard for another one, which had eaten its fill, to leap back across the wall. Then it acted as a springboard for the hungry wolf to fly into the enclosure and eat its fill. Those two bloody paw prints were left by the second wolf. How else would they have been bloody? The first wolf hadn’t made a kill when it was the springboard, so its paws were clean, no blood. Right? Think about it. They played a neat trick on the people. The pack was inside the enclosure, where it killed at will. The people built the wall to keep the wolves out, but wound up keeping the sheepdogs out instead. I guarantee you that Cherendorji’s dogs’ anger pushed their noses out of joint. They weren’t smart enough to follow the wolves’ example; nor would they if they could have, because once they flew inside, they’d have been no match for the smarter wolves.”

“They’re smarter than me too,” Chen said. “But one problem remains. How did the last member of the pack get out safely? Where was its springboard? ”

The question delighted Chief Harbar. “People really are stupider than wolves,” he said. “That’s what puzzled everybody back then too. That is, until Director Uljii went into the enclosure, sloshing through all the blood. He discovered a pile of six or seven sheep carcasses up against the northeast wall, and everyone assumed that the last wolf was one of the smartest and most powerful pack leaders. All by itself, it had made a springboard out of a pile of sheep carcasses and flown out of the enclosure. There were those who didn’t think one wolf could have managed it alone, and that several of them had done the piling, then jumped out. When it was all over, Director Uljii summoned the team leaders to the site and described to them how the wolves had leaped into the enclosure, and back out. That brought a sense of calm to the pasture. Cherendorji was not punished, but Director Uljii made a self-criticism, acknowledging that he’d underestimated the wolves, that he’d taken them too lightly.”

Chen Zhen’s hair stood on end. Although he accepted the chief’s conclusion, from that day on fantastic images of flying wolves frequently visited his dreams, and he often woke up drenched in cold sweat. No longer did he treat grassland legends simply as entertainment.

Several days passed, and Chen decided to get a close look at the brigade’s two open-air sky-burial sites. One was on the northern slope of Mount Chagantolgai, the other on the northeastern slope of Black Rock Mountain. At first glance the two burial sites looked pretty much like other hillside grazing land. But up close, there were distinct differences. Both were far from the ancient nomadic trails, in a bleak location north of the grasslands’ sacred mountains, close to wolf territory and to Tengger, thereby shortening the distance that souls had to travel to reach heaven. In addition, the ground was rocky and uneven, bumpy enough for the carts.

For centuries on the Olonbulag, when a herder died, people stripped him naked and tied his body up in a roll of felt, although sometimes they left the corpse clothed so they could forego the felt. Then they loaded the corpse onto a cart on which a long board had been laid across the shafts and made secure. In the predawn hours, two senior male members of the family, each holding one end of the board, drove the cart to the sky-burial site, where they whipped their horses into a gallop. Inevitably, the deceased bounced out of the cart, and that was the spot where the soul would return to Tengger. The two relatives dismounted and, if the corpse was naked, unrolled the felt and lay the deceased out on the grass, facing the sky, exactly the way he (or she) came into the world, naked and innocent. At that moment, the deceased belonged to the wolves, and to the gods. Whether or not the soul of the deceased would enter Tengger depended on the virtues, or their lack, of the life lived. Generally speaking, that would be known within three days. If, by then, nothing but bones was left of the corpse, the soul of the deceased had entered Tengger. But if the deceased remained more or less whole, the family was thrown into a panic. There were, however, many wolves on the Olonbulag, and Chen had never heard of a single person whose soul had not entered Tengger.

He had known of Tibetan sky burials, but not until arriving on the grassland had he discovered that it was also a Mongol practice, with wolves replacing eagles as the burial agents. Since all herdsmen of the Olonbulag would one day wind up in the bellies of wolves via the sky burial, they had, for millennia, been at peace with the idea of death.

Chen’s sense of dread was overcome by his curiosity. After learning the precise locations of the burial sites from the proprietor of wagons who delivered production materials, he secretly went out twice to observe burials. Each time, unfortunately, the sites were covered by snow and he missed what he’d hoped to see. But then one day, as winter was about to give way to spring, he spotted the tracks of horses and cart ruts in the snow leading in the direction of one of the burial sites. He followed the tracks until he came upon the corpse of an old man who had died a natural death and had, it seemed, been there a short time. The snow was disturbed by fresh animal and human tracks in addition to the wheel ruts; not even the powdery snow had been blown away. The old man lay there looking peaceful and innocent, supine, his body blanketed by a thin layer of powder, a look of devotion on his smooth, seemingly veiled face.

The anxiety and the dread Chen had experienced on the way over were gradually supplanted by a sense of the sacred. The dead man exhibited no sign of someone meeting death, but of someone attending a feast in Tengger, a second baptism, a rebirth. At that moment, Chen shared the reverence in which the grassland Mongol people held the wolf totem. At the end of a life, the body was served up as an unadorned sacrificial offering, providing a clean and absolute liberation; now Chen understood the deep reverence of the Mongols for Tengger, the wolves, and the souls they entrusted to them. He had no heart to loiter at that sacred place, fearful of agitating the soul of the deceased and of desecrating the sacred beliefs of the grassland people; so, with a respectful bow to the old man, he led his horse away from the burial site.

Three days later, the family of the deceased had nothing to worry about, which greatly relieved Chen Zhen. The family, following local custom, had gone to verify the burial and must have seen the traces of an outsider among the tracks of men and horses; but none came to Chen Zhen with accusations. That would not have been so had the soul not gone up to Tengger. Chen, realizing that his curiosity and interests had begun to clash with his hosts’ totems and taboos, took care to concentrate on tending his sheep and working hard, even as he sought to move closer to the mysterious people about whom he was so curious and whom he so deeply respected.

Spring came strangely early that year, more than a month earlier than usual. Warm winds turned the Olonbulag a golden yellow. Autumn grass, pressed down by the snow for an entire winter, burst onto the surface, and on some of the slopes that faced the sun a smattering of green buds appeared. Dry winds and warm days came hard on the heels of these changes, and when the teams went to their birthing meadows, the people were kept busy with wildfire prevention and antidrought measures to safeguard newborn animals.

Gao Jianzhong was too late. Laborers and members of the floating population who had streamed into the city to work in transportation and construction teams had, earlier in the year, viewed with envy the lively scene that occurred when Gasmai’s team had brought cartloads of gazelles to the purchasing station. They had crowded around the hunters, trying to learn the whereabouts of the hunt. After being told that all the frozen gazelles had been retrieved, they had approached Bayar with candy from the Northeast, but he had directed them to an empty mountain valley. Finally, these men, mostly Mongol outsiders from Manchurian farms, had found the grassland Mongols’ weakness-liquor. They had gotten the shepherd Sanjai drunk and learned the location of the gazelles. Moving quickly, they had beat the wolf pack and Gao Jianzhong by arriving just as the gazelles were breaking through the surface of the snow. They had pitched a camp nearby and, within a single day, retrieved every last animal, big and small, good and bad. They had then loaded them onto carts and transported them overnight to the purchasing station at the Bayan Gobi Commune.

Over the next several nights, the horse herders heard the plaintive, angry howls of hungry wolves echo up and down the valley. They grew tense, keeping close watch over their horses, never letting them stray from their sight. The lovers they’d left behind in yurts, knowing that there would be a high price to pay for the wolves’ hunger, beat their livestock out of anger and sang sad songs, bitter melodies of frustration.

Soon after, a formal notice arrived from headquarters reinstating the once annual tradition of stealing wolf cubs. The rewards were to be higher than in previous years, thanks to the personal intervention of Bao Shungui, the military representative. Word had it that the wolf-cub pelts would bring in a better price than ever. Those pelts, soft and shiny, rare and expensive, were used for women’s leather jackets, and were cherished items of the wives of northern officials; they also provided hard currency for lower-ranking officials willing to do business out the back door.

Bilgee was silent, smoking one pipeful after another. Chen overheard him mutter, “The wolves will soon have their revenge.”