Wolf Totem: A Novel (13 page)

The herd was being decimated; blood stained the snow on the ground. The merciless grassland was once again a backdrop to ruthlessness, as it had been for thousands of years. Wolf packs had gobbled up countless fresh souls and, generation after generation, left their bloody imprint on the thin grassy slopes.

In the pale, murky light of their flashlights, the two herdsmen were witness to the slaughter. Although it seemed like an annual ritual, it was harder to accept this time, because these celebrated horses, representing the glory of the Olonbulag, were to be handed over to the military, and had, until now, managed to escape all the wolf massacres; they were the pride of the herdsmen who had desperately and anxiously brought them to maturity. Seeing the horses being butchered had Batu and Laasurung beyond tears. They were choked with anger and anxiety, but they knew they had to brave it out, suppress their emotions, remain calm, and do everything in their power to protect the horses that were still alive. Batu’s worries mounted. Years of experience told him that this was no ordinary wolf pack. It was led by astute animals who knew the Olonbulag well, and included male wolves crazed by hatred over having their food plundered, and even more by crazed females who had lost their litters. But the alpha wolf was anything but crazed. His scheme became clear by the way the pack had driven the horses south. The alpha wolf was intent on driving the herd to the lake at all costs. That was a common wolf strategy. Batu’s sense of dread grew. He’d seen wolves trap gazelles in mud, and he’d occasionally seen them drive cows and horses into muddy ground. From old-timers he’d heard of wolves trapping horses in pools, and he wondered if this was the night he was fated to have encountered one of those packs. Could they possibly swallow up an entire herd of horses? He forced himself to stop thinking those thoughts.

After signaling Laasurung with his flashlight to follow, Batu raced desperately from behind the herd all the way around to the east to block its passage; both men waved madly, struck madly, and harassed the wolves with their herding clubs and flashlights. Wolves are afraid of bright light; it hurts their eyes. By racing up and back, flashing the beams of their flashlights, the riders managed to hold the line east of the horses, whose terror seemed to lessen a bit. They quickly straightened out their stride and raced toward the east edge of the lake; this would be their last chance. The herd knew it had only to skirt the lake, then it could race with the wind all the way to the birthing basin, where there were many yurts and many people who could shout and shine blinding lights, and where their good friends—mean, snarling dogs who would fight the wolves until stopped by their masters—waited.

But wolves are demonic fighters with incredible patience in locating and waiting for opportunities. And when those opportunities arrive, they squeeze them until there is nothing left but pulp. Now that they had set the stage and found the opportunity, they had to make it theirs, do whatever it took to not let a single horse slip through the net.

Man, horse, and wolf ran in tandem. The wolf pack briefly called off the attack. Batu’s hands were sweating from clutching the stock of his rifle. Ten years of tending horses told him that the wolves were massing for a final surge; the opportunity to mount a successful attack would be lost otherwise, and this pack was in no mood to abandon its chance for revenge.

But before he could control his shaking enough to fire, terrified whinnies erupted from the herd and his own mount seemed to stumble. He rubbed his burning, teary eyes and shone his light in front, illuminating several large wolves loping ahead of his horse. Turning to look behind him, Batu saw that Laasurung was in the same predicament. Struggling to ease his horse’s fears at the very moment the wolves began to attack, he flashed a signal for Laasurung to catch up, but Laasurung’s mount was too terrified to do anything but kick and buck. The wolves were taking turns pouncing on it, tearing flesh from its body. Eventually, the hem of Laasurung’s deel was ripped off, causing such panic he barely knew where he was. He threw away his herding club, which was too long to be of any use, and employed the thick handle of his flashlight as a weapon, battering the heads of the leaping wolves. The light went out, the handle was crushed, the heads of wolves were split open, but the alternating attack continued. Finally, one of the largest wolves took a bite out of the horse’s shoulder, driving the animal crazy with pain. Abandoning its rider’s flirtation with danger, the horse chomped down on the bit, lowered its head, and took off toward the southwest, fleeing for its life. Laasurung was powerless to hold it back, no matter how hard he pulled on the reins. Seeing they’d driven a troublesome combatant from the field of battle, the wolves broke off the chase, turned, and headed back to the herd.

Batu, now alone, was surrounded. Acting out of desperation, he transformed himself from a herdsman into a Mongol warrior. He and the wolves were in a fight to the death, and for the first time in a long time, he prepared to use the wolf-fighting skills and devious tactics that had come down to him through the centuries. His club was as long as a cavalry sword, a weapon given to him by Bilgee, the kind that his ancestors had used to fight and kill wolves. The tip of the sturdy club, which was as thick as a shovel handle, had rows of iron coils, the spaces between stained with the dried blood of generations of wolves. Several of the large wolves took turns pouncing on his horse from both sides, which gave him the necessary angle to use his club, his best chance that night to kill wolves. Everything depended on his nerve and his aim.

He was ready. Taking a deep breath, he turned his light to the right and raised the club over his head. Seeing an opening, he twirled his arm and brought the club down as hard as he could on the hardest yet most vulnerable spot on a wolf’s head—its fangs. The airborne wolf, claws bared, had all four of its fangs smashed by the force, a mortal blow.

The wolf fell to the snowy ground, where it licked mouthfuls of blood and raised its head to the skies to howl, the sound of grief more chilling than a death cry. On the grassland a wolf’s fangs have always sustained its life. Without them, the wolf is lost. No longer can it hunt its favorite prey, large domestic animals; no longer can it defend itself against hunting dogs or rival wolves; no longer can it rip and tear, feast on chunks of meat and mouthfuls of blood; no longer can it adequately replenish its energy on the unforgiving grassland.

Caught up in the stink of death, as one horse after another was killed, Batu was bent on killing wolves and giving the pack a taste of a grasslander’s ferocity. Before the other wolves could regroup, he saw another opening and swung hard. But though his aim was off, he managed to strike the animal on its snout, ripping the flesh from the bone. The animal fell to the snowy ground, where it curled up into a writhing ball of fur. With two large members of the pack howling in pain, the other wolves seemed temporarily cowed into submission by Batu’s skills and might. Abruptly shaken from their fury, they stopped leaping and pouncing; yet they remained in the space between Batu and his herd.

Now that he had beaten off the attack, Batu looked over at the herd, sensing that time was running out for them but at the same time aware that the wolves behind them had suffered a setback. They set up a quivering buzz like wind whistling past electric wires, a sound filled with deathly terror and agitation.

Under the command of its leader, the pack launched yet another offensive, employing the cruelest, bloodiest, most inconceivably suicidal methods in the arsenal of Mongolian wolves. One after the other, especially females that had lost their cubs, they leaped onto horses, sinking their fangs into the tender spot below the shoulder, then hung there heavily, willing to sacrifice their own bodies. This tactic was dangerous to both horse and wolf. As the horse ran, the lower half of the wolf’s body became wedged between its rear legs, where, as the panicky victim tried to throw its tormenter off, its powerful hooves could shatter the attacker’s bones and tear her hide, even disembowel her. Only the largest and strongest wolves could hang on with no leverage, eventually ripping the horse’s abdomen with their fangs and then dropping to the ground in safety. If the horse failed to kick the wolf from its body, the predator’s weight would slow it down, until it was set upon by the pack and killed. If it managed to kick the wolf, the added force could well accelerate the mortal injury to its abdomen.

The horses attacked in this way, as well as the suicidal attackers, all shuddered as if in tragic despair.

Most of the wolves who brought down horses at the cost of their own lives were female. They were lighter than the males, making it more difficult for them to rip open the horses’ abdomens simply by hanging on, so they had to rely on the might of the horse itself. They offered up their lives, obsessed with vengeance, staring death calmly in the face, devoted to the cause, merging blood and milk. They faced the danger of fatal wounds to belly, chest, organs, and teats with a willingness to die alongside the horses they killed.

Horses whose bellies had been ripped open by wolves had just filled their stomachs with the first grass shoots of the year, mixed with some that remained from the previous autumn, and their abdomens were taut and low-slung; when the thin hide covers were torn away by wolf fangs, the stomachs and supple intestines spilled out onto the snow.

The final maniacal assault by the wolves crushed the herd’s resistance. The grassland was transformed into an abattoir. Horse after horse, gutted by its own hooves, lay writhing in the snow, wracked by spasms. In seconds, chests in which hot blood had flowed only moments before were now filled with ice. Surging horse blood stained the swirling snow.

The wolves’ suicidal war of vengeance paralyzed Batu with fear; cold sweat froze on his body. He knew that all was lost. His only wish now was to salvage a few of the horses. After pulling back hard on the bit to slow his horse momentarily, he abruptly dug his heels into its sides, released his hold on the bit, and flew past the line of wolves between him and the remnants of the herd, heading for the horse leader. The herd had already been scattered by the wolf attack, an army in full flight, running with the wind, so panic-stricken the horses had forgotten that the lake lay straight ahead to the south.

A downhill slope that led to the lake increased their speed, and the blizzard, with its mounting force, pushed them even faster, until their hooves barely touched the ground, their momentum like an avalanche crashing down a mountainside and into a morass. The thin layer of ice shattered under their hooves, and the viscous mud flew; the bog was about to claim the remaining horses, whinnying forlornly and struggling to keep moving, their fear and loathing of the wolf pack at its peak. Now hopelessly mired in the bog, they hesitated briefly before mustering the strength to plow into the deepest part, choosing self-inflicted death and burial in the bog over letting the wolves feed on their flesh and prevail in their quest for vengeance. These horses, castrated by humans, their virility lost to a knife, would end their lives with one final act of resistance: they would respond to the wolves’ attack by committing suicide en masse. At this moment they represented the most intrepid life force on the ancient grassland.

But the cruel grassland scorns the weak, refusing to bestow on them even the slightest measure of pity. As night fell, the plummeting temperature turned the muddy surface into a thin layer of brown ice. The edges of the lake were frozen solid, but the ice over the boggy center was not thick enough to withstand the weight of the horses; their hooves cracked the ice as they moved into deeper water and into thicker mud, made stickier than usual by the swirling snow and bitter cold air. They were trapped, though they kept struggling, each torturous step bringing more snow and cold air into the spaces that opened up between hoof and mud. Their struggles turned the bog into a frozen morass. Finally, inevitably, their strength ran out and they could no longer move. Denied the quick death they had sought, the herd voiced their desperate agony; their breaths created a mist of steam, and their hides were coated in hoarfrost. Every member knew that salvation was impossible, that nothing and no one could prevent the coming butchery.

Batu carefully reined in his horse at the edge of the lake, yet the moment the big black’s hooves touched the water, it snorted fearfully, lowered its head, and nervously eyed the muddy scene ahead, not daring to approach any closer. Batu shone his light on the surface of the lake and saw the hazy outlines of trapped horses where the flying snow of the blizzard weakened here and there. The heads of a few swayed weakly, a plea for help to the man responsible for their survival. He dug the heels of his boots into the sides of his horse to get it to move closer. But before it had gone more than five or six steps, its hooves broke through the ice and sank into mud, an alarm that sent it back to solid ground. This time Batu hit his mount on the flank with his herding club, but it refused to move. He thought of getting down, crawling out onto the ice, and standing guard over his horses with his rifle. But he knew that once he was off his horse and in the midst of the wolf pack, he would lose the commanding position from which he could use his club and the iron shoes of his horse as weapons; as soon as the wolves no longer feared him, man and horse would be torn apart. Besides, he only had ten bullets, and even with perfect marksmanship, killing a wolf with each shot would leave many standing. Icy tears covered his cheeks as he looked to the east, turning his head to the sky. Tengger, Tengger, eternal Tengger, give me the wisdom and power to save this herd! To which Tengger responded by puffing out its cheeks and blowing harder, dissolving the sound of Batu’s voice in the roar of the white-hair blizzard.

Batu wiped the tears from his cheeks with the sleeve of his deel, looped the herding club around his wrist again, armed his rifle, and cradled it and his flashlight in his left hand to await the arrival of the wolves. A single thought ran through his mind: Kill as many as possible.