Wolf Totem: A Novel (23 page)

But there was no sign of him. Chen reached inside his coat and took out a little sheepskin bag. It was a waterproof, oil-resistant food pouch Gasmai had given him. Under his coat it had stayed warm and hadn’t soiled his clothes. He took out some flat bread, some fatty meat, and two chunks of curds. He handed half the food to Yang, and as they ate, they tried to devise a new plan.

Tearing off a piece of the flat bread and putting it in his mouth, Yang said, “This den is full of tricks and dodges, a real maze. They always keep their cubs in places we’d never think of. We went to a lot of trouble finding this one, and I’m not ready to quit, not yet. Since we didn’t smoke them out, let’s see how we do with water. If we brought up nine or ten water wagons, we could drown every last one of those little bastards.”

“In this sandy soil?” Chen replied with a sneer. “You could bring an entire reservoir up here, and it’d all seep into the ground.”

“Got it!” Yang exclaimed after a moment. “The adult wolf is gone, so why not send Yellow in there and have him bring the cubs out in his mouth, one at a time?”

This time Chen had to laugh. “That dog has already developed human traits and lost half its wolfishness. He’s got such a keen sense of smell he can sniff out any wolf that’s nearby. If a dog could bring cubs out like you say, then all we’d ever have to do is wait for the mother to leave the den and send in the dogs. That, of course, would spell the end of the wolves on the grassland. What kind of morons do you take the herdsmen for?”

“We could try,” Yang said defiantly. “What would it cost us?” He called Yellow over to the entrance, where the smell of gunpowder was nearly gone. He pointed to the tunnel and called out, “Go get ’em!” Yellow knew exactly what Yang wanted, and backed off in fear. Yang straddled the dog and closed his knees around his middle, grabbing his front legs and dragging him back to the entrance. Yellow tucked his tail between his legs and whined as he struggled to break free, casting a pleading look at Chen Zhen, begging him to rescind the command.

“See what I mean?” Chen said. “You’re wasting your time. Progress is hard; regression is harder. Dogs have regressed far from their wolfish origins. These days dogs are weak, or lazy, or stupid. Just like people.”

Yang let Yellow go and said, “Too bad Erlang’s not here. He’d go in.”

“Of course, but he’d kill every cub he found. I want a live one.”

“I know what you mean. That dog wants to kill every wolf he sees.”

After finishing the meat he’d been given, Yellow walked off to check things out. He sniffed around and lifted his leg to leave his mark on the ground, drifting farther and farther away. Erlang, meanwhile, had still not returned, and Chen and Yang sat by the entrance waiting and watching, not knowing what else to do. No signs of life in the tunnel, yet the cubs couldn’t all have died. At least one or two would have survived the smoke, and they should be trying to get out. But another half hour passed, and none emerged. Either they were dead, the two men surmised, or there hadn’t been any in there to begin with.

While they were getting ready to head back to camp, they suddenly heard Yellow barking—now loud, now soft—somewhere behind the hill to the north, sounding like a hunting dog that had found its prey. They jumped onto their horses and rode as fast as they could up to the top of the hill; they couldn’t see Yellow but could still hear him, so they followed the sound until the rocky ground made it too hard for their horses to run and they were forced to rein them in. Crisscrossing gullies stretched out in front on the weedy, rock-strewn ground. The snowy surface was covered by the tracks of animals—rabbits, foxes, corsacs, and wolves—all of which had passed by the spot at one time or another. A profusion of waist-high cogon grass, brambles, and other underbrush filled the spaces between splintered rocks, all dried-out and withered, presenting a scene of desolation to match an abandoned Chinese graveyard. The riders kept a tight grip on the reins as the horses slipped and stumbled on the dangerously uneven ground. No cow, sheep, or horse ever grazed there; neither Chen nor Yang had ever been there.

Yellow’s barks were getting closer, but there was still no sight of him. “With all the tracks around here,” Chen said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s caught a fox. Let’s speed up a little. At least the trip won’t be a total waste.”

Finally, after skirting the brambles, they reached the bottom of a ravine, where, as soon as they turned the corner, they spotted Yellow and were stunned by what they saw. Yellow, his tail sticking up in the air, was haranguing the entrance to an even larger, and much darker, den. The ravine was gloomy, the presence of wolves palpable. As a cold wind blew past, Chen felt his skin crawl. He wondered if they had stumbled into a wolf-pack ambush, with lupine eyes burning holes in him from their hiding places, and his hair stood on end.

The men dismounted, fettered their horses, and ran to the entrance, weapons in hand. The opening, which faced south, was at least three feet high and a couple of feet wide. Chen had never seen one bigger, not even one of the wartime tunnels he’d seen as a high school farm laborer in Hebei Province. It was so well hidden in a tiny gully, and so protected by needle grass above and rocky ground below, that it was visible only close-up. Delighted to see them, Yellow jumped and ran around Chen, as if wanting to be rewarded for his discovery. “I think we’ve found what we were looking for,” Chen said. “The way Yellow’s strutting around, he might actually have seen some cubs here.”

“I think you’re right. This looks like a real wolf’s den, gloomy as hell.”

“And there’s a strong wolf smell,” Chen said. “They’re in there, I know it!”

Chen bent down to examine the berm in front of the opening, typical of dens, built by moving rocks during the digging process; the bigger the hole, the bigger the berm. This one was the size of two school desks placed side by side. There was no snow on it, but plenty of wolf prints and bone fragments. Chen’s heart was thumping; this was what he’d been looking for. He called Yellow over and had him stand guard. Then he and Yang knelt down to examine the berm. By then Yellow had stepped all over the animal tracks, but the men could distinguish the prints of two or three adult wolves and five or six young ones. The cubs’ prints were like plum blossoms, small, delicate, quite lovely. They were so well defined that the cubs might have been playing there only moments before, running inside only when they heard the barking dog; the berm itself looked as if the mother wolf had built it as a sort of play-ground. There were shards of lambs’ bones and bits of hide here and there, with traces of nibbling on the tender bones by the cubs. Little piles of cub droppings were visible alongside the berm, thin as chopsticks and oily black, like little honeyed Chinese medicine pills.

Chen slapped himself on the knee. “The cub I’ve been looking for is in there,” he said. “That mother wolf made suckers out of us.”

Yang also realized what she’d done, and he pounded the berm. “You’re right. This is where she’d been running to, and when she spotted us on the mountain, she made a detour and tricked us into searching an empty tunnel, then made us believe it was the real thing, drawing the dog into a fight, like any mother protecting her young. You damned wolf, you got us that time.”

Chen thought back and said, “I had my suspicions when she changed directions, but she quickly made a believer out of me. That’s a wolf that knows how to adapt. If you hadn’t tossed those three firecrackers in there, she’d have gone around and around with us till nightfall, and we’d have been the ones who got screwed.”

“We’re lucky we had good dogs with us. If not for them, we’d have had to slink back to camp empty-handed.”

“We’re not in much better shape now,” Chen said. “This wolf has kept us busy most of the day and got us to waste three bombs. This den goes down into the belly of the hill, deeper than the first one, with more twists and turns.”

“We haven’t got much time,” Yang said as he stared at the opening, “and we don’t have any more bombs. I think we’re done for the day. Maybe we should check the area to see if there are any more openings, and seal up any we find. Then tomorrow we ask some herdsmen what we should do now, especially Papa, whose ideas are always the best.”

Chen Zhen, not happy with how things had turned out, said, “There’s one thing we can try. This is a big opening, probably the size of that Hebei tunnel, which we were able to crawl into. Why can’t we do the same here? After all, Erlang’s out dealing with the mother wolf, and there shouldn’t be another adult wolf in there. If you tie your sash around my foot and lower me in, who knows, we might find our cubs. And even if we don’t, I can get an idea of how the den is laid out.”

Yang Ke shook his head. “That’s suicide. What if there
is
another wolf in there? I’ve been tricked by wolves enough for one day. How confident are you that this is her den? What if it belongs to another wolf?”

The desire Chen had suppressed for more than two years suddenly burst to the surface and drowned out his fears. Clenching his teeth, he said, “If a Mongol boy has the guts to crawl into a wolf’s den, and we don’t, what does that make us? I’m going in, and that’s that. I just need you to give me a hand. I’ll take my flashlight and spade with me, in case there’s an adult down there.”

“If you’re intent on going in, let me go first. I’m stronger, and you’re too skinny.”

“Being skinny gives me an advantage. If the tunnel narrows, you could get stuck. So no more arguments. The fat guy stays behind.”

After Chen took off his deel, Yang reluctantly handed him the flashlight, the spade, and his bag. He tied Chen’s Mongol sash, which was several feet long, around Chen’s foot, then tied his own sash to Chen’s. Just before he went in, Chen announced, “If I’m afraid to enter the wolf’s den, I don’t deserve a wolf cub!”

“If there’s an adult in there,” Yang reminded him, “don’t forget to shout and give a hard tug on the sash.” Chen turned on the light, got down on his hands and knees, and slid down the forty-degree slope into the passage. The smell of wolf was heavy in his nostrils, nearly suffocating him. Not daring to breathe deeply, he moved slowly past slippery walls with an occasional tuft of hair stuck to a protruding rock, on ground that was covered with tiny wolf tracks. I could be getting my hands on the cubs within a few feet, he was thinking happily, once he was completely inside the tunnel; Yang was feeding him the tether little by little, constantly asking if Chen wanted to come back out, to which he responded by telling Yang to keep going as he inched along on his forearms.

The first gradual turn in the passage came when he was five or six feet inside the den, where light from outside did not reach. Chen could now see only that much of the tunnel illuminated by his flashlight, and as he negotiated the turn, the tunnel gradually leveled out, though the walls abruptly narrowed and the ceiling lowered. He could move forward only by keeping his head down and holding his arms close into his body. As he crawled along, he studied the walls, which were slicker than the ones just inside the opening, and firmer, as if a spade had been used on them. Hardly any dirt fell when his shoulder brushed against the walls or when he scraped his spade against the ceiling, which eased his fears of a cave-in. He doubted that a single wolf could dig out such hard-packed dirt with her claws, certainly not this deep. All the sharp edges had been rubbed smooth, like cobblestones, so this must have served countless wolves—male, female, adult, and newborn—for a century or more. He had entered the world of wolves, and its smell was overpowering.

The farther in he crawled, the greater his sense of terror. On the floor beneath him, the tracks of adult wolves lay beneath those of cubs; would his spade be enough to allow him to survive if he encountered a mature animal? The tunnel was so narrow that it might be difficult for a wolf to use her fangs to full effect, but her claws would easily make up for that. She could probably rip him to shreds. Why hadn’t he considered that? He began to sweat. Hesitation. All he had to do was jerk his leg, and Yang Ke would drag him out of there. But thoughts of the eight or nine cubs, or more, waiting up ahead convinced him that he couldn’t stop now, so he clenched his teeth, relaxed the leg tethered to the outside, and continued crawling tenaciously. By now the walls were hugging him tightly, and he felt less like a hunter than a grave robber. The air thinned out, the smell of wolf got stronger, and the thought that he could die of suffocation came to him. Archaeological digs often turn up the remains of grave robbers trapped in just such narrow passages.

An opening loomed up ahead. Big enough for an adult wolf to squeeze through, but too small for him, it clearly was the wolf’s defense against her sole predator on the grassland. Chen knew she’d built it to protect her litter against water and smoke; it also succeeded in stopping him. But there was no surrender in him. He tried to breach a wall with his spade, but it didn’t take long to see how cleverly she’d chosen this site: the walls were constructed of large rocks with abundant gaps, making them sturdy yet dangerous. He was beginning to have trouble breathing, and his strength was ebbing. Even if he’d been able to keep hacking away, a cave-in was a possibility and he’d succumb to the wolf’s trap.

Chen breathed in a mouthful of air with more wolf smell than oxygen, and he knew he’d been defeated, that there would be no cub for him today. But he wasn’t ready to head back quite yet; he wanted to get a closer look at the construction of the opening, hoping to at least catch a glimpse of a cub or two. He put what little remained of his strength in the service of this last desire: sticking his head and right arm through the narrow opening, he shone his flashlight inside. What he saw was demoralizing: just beyond the opening, the passage continued on upward and out of sight. Up there somewhere was a drier, cozier spot for the wolf to raise her litter and protect them against flooding. She’d put a great deal of thought into creating a complex den for her offspring and, he was amazed to see, a roadblock for him.