Wolf Totem: A Novel (49 page)

After coming to the new grazing land, the cub awoke every day at the crack of dawn and crouched down, as if ready to pounce on unsuspecting prey, staring at the door of the yurt and glaring at his food bowl. To him, the bowl was his prey, and, like an adult wolf, he waited patiently for the right moment to attack it. The moment it came close enough, he pounced, and the meat he ate from it was the flesh of his prey, not something supplied by humans. That was how the young wolf preserved his wolfish independence. Chen helped by feigning fear of the cub and backing off; still, he was seldom able to mask his delight.

Before the summer rains come, the Mongolian plateau is visited by dry hot air for a time, but the heat this year seemed worse than usual. As far as Chen was concerned, the Mongolian sun not only rose earlier than it did in China proper but seemed lower in the sky. It was as hot at ten in the morning as it was at noon down south; the sun baked the grass around their yurt until each blade was nothing but a hollow green needle. The mosquito scourge hadn’t yet begun, but maggot-born big-headed flies swarmed across the land and launched assaults on men and their livestock. They focused on the eyes or the nose, on chapped corners of mouths, or on bloody strips of raw lamb hanging inside yurts. Men, dogs, and wolves waved arms and swished tails in an unending and futile attempt to bear up under the assault. Yellow was expert at lightning-quick grabs of flies in his mouth, which he chewed up and spat out, and it never took long for the floor around him to be littered with the bodies of flies, like the empty husks of melon seeds.

The temperature continued its inexorable rise above the steaming ground, so hot that the basin was like a gargantuan iron cook pot and the grass took on the appearance of dry tea leaves. The dogs lay sprawled in the narrow crescent-shaped shadow north of the yurt, mouths open and tongues lolling as they panted to cool down, their bellies rising and falling rapidly. Chen noticed that Erlang wasn’t among them, so he called his name. He didn’t come, and Chen wondered where he’d gotten off to. Maybe to the river, where it was cooler. Erlang was a reliable watchdog when Chen had the night shift, and members of the brigade no longer called him a wild dog. But come sunrise, when the dog was off duty, Chen’s control over him ended, and he wandered away. Yellow and Yir, on the other hand, stayed close to home during the day, still watchful, still loyal.

The weather was particularly hard on the cub, since its chain was too hot to touch and there were no shady spots where he could get out of the sun for a while. He just sweltered. The grass in his pen had succumbed to his trampling; the ground was now more like desert than grassland, or like a platter on a lit stove, filled with hot water and sand. The cub himself was like a chestnut that had been roasted until it was burned to a crisp and about to pop. The pathetic creature was a captive in an overheated prison.

The instant the gate swung open, the cub rose up on his hind legs, nearly choking on the chain collar. He kicked the air with his front paws, and anyone watching would have known that what he wanted was neither shade nor water but food. Food is the core of a wolf’s existence, and Chen could see that his appetite was not affected by the extreme heat. He kept kicking the air as a sign for Chen to put his food bowl down in the pen. Once he had his “prey” in his grasp, he snarled and drove Chen out of the pen.

Chen was growing anxious; the herdsmen had told him that, once the summer months arrived, their customary fare was milk products, seldom supplemented by meat. Tea in the morning and dinner in the evening, but without the handfuls of meat he’d gotten used to. There were noodles, millet, fried rice, and a variety of milk dishes: sour curds, yogurt, butter, and whey. The herdsmen preferred to eat fresh dairy products in the summer, something the Beijing students did not enjoy. To begin with, they weren’t used to substituting dairy products for meat, but, more important, none of them liked the idea of getting up at three or four in the morning to milk cows for four or five hours, followed by churning until the milk curdled. Even less inviting was waiting till the cows came back at five or six in the evening, then milking them for three or four hours, followed by all the cooking, pressing, chopping, and drying that was required. They’d rather eat boiled and steamed millet, vegetarian noodles, buns, or dumplings than curds. So while the local herdsmen ate their curds in the summer, the students picked wild vegetables—onions, garlic, leeks, daylilies, ash greens, and dandelions, plus something the northeastern Mongols called
halagai,
a wild plant whose thin, broad, lip-numbing leaves had a spicy taste. The change of diet during the summer months profoundly affected Chen and his cub.

Few sheep were slaughtered in the summer, since there was no way to keep the meat from spoiling. Thanks to the heat and the flies, it turned maggoty in less than two days, so the locals cut it into strips and coated it with flour to keep the flies from laying eggs in it. The strips were hung in the coolest corner of a yurt to dry. A few were then added to noodles to give them a meaty taste. Sometimes, when the sky was overcast for several days, the meat would turn moldy and go bad. So summer was the season when the sheep fattened up. It was important for them to add muscle in the summer and fat in the fall. If they didn’t, the meat was thin, with little grease and no taste; the herdsmen wouldn’t eat it. Summertime was also when the sheep were sheared; their skins are worth little and can only be made into thin jackets worn in the spring or the fall. Slaughtering a sheep in the summer is wasteful, Bilgee once told Chen.

Government policy those days, when cooking oil was scarce and meat was rationed, dictated that the Olonbulag herdsmen were to treat every sheep among their vast flocks as precious and not kill and eat them in large numbers. People, even the meat-loving students, could survive the meat ban. But for the wolf cub, it was a different matter altogether.

One morning, Chen filled the cub’s bowl with half a strip of spoiled meat to take the edge off his hunger. Then he carried the empty bowl back to the yurt to figure out what to do next. As he ate his breakfast of pickled leeks and soupy lamb noodles, he picked out the few pieces of dried lamb and put them into the cub’s bowl. Unlike the dogs, the cub would not eat porridge or rice if it had no meaty flavor; if he was given a bowl of food with no meat or bones, he’d anxiously and angrily gnaw on his chain.

So after finishing his breakfast, Chen dumped the remainder into the wolf’s bowl and stirred it to bring bits of meat from the bottom to the top, where the cub could see it. He sniffed the mixture; he could barely smell meat, so he decided to pour in some of the sheep oil from the lamp. The congealed oil in the ceramic jug was turning soft and starting to go bad in the heat; but since wolves prefer rotting meat, the cub was sure to appreciate the sheep oil.

Chen scooped out a big ladleful of oil and added it to the bowl. It stirred up into a nice oily mixture. This time he was satisfied with the smell; the cub was in for a tasty meal. He added some more millet but could not give up more of his oil.

The dogs, forced to go without meat all summer and hungry most of the time, were waiting for him when he opened the door. So he fed them first, pausing until they’d licked their bowls clean before going out to the shaded area behind the yurt with the cub’s food. “Little Wolf, Little Wolf,” he called out as he always did. “Time to eat.” By the time Chen reached the pen, the cub’s eyes were red with anticipation; he was jumping around so excitedly he nearly choked himself. Chen laid down the bowl and stepped back to watch him eat. The cub appeared to be satisfied.

Every day at mealtime he called out to the cub, hoping that would spark a bit of gratitude. He often found himself thinking that when the day came that he married and started a family, he’d probably not be as fond of his own children as he was of the young wolf. Since he had taken it upon himself to raise the cub, his mind was often tormented by mythlike dreams and fantasies. He’d read a Soviet story in elementary school about a hunter who rescued an injured wolf and returned it to the forest after nursing it back to health. One day later, the hunter opened the door of his shack and found seven dead rabbits in the snow, and several sets of wolf tracks . . . It was the first story he’d read about friendships forged between wolves and humans, and the first to show a different side of wolves from all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen. The books were mostly of the “Little Red Riding Hood” variety or of wolves eating little lambs, or cruel and scary stories of wolves eating the hearts and livers of small children. The Soviet story was one he had never forgotten. He often dreamed that he was the hunter tramping through the forest to enjoy life with his wolf friends, wrestling and riding them across the snow...

Finally, the cub had licked the bowl clean. He had grown to three feet in length, and now that he had finished eating, he looked bigger and more intimidating than ever. He was already half again as big as the puppies he’d grown up with. After leaving the bowl outside the gate, Chen walked back and sat down to spend some time with the cub. He held him in his arms awhile, then turned him over and laid him on his lap so he could rub his belly. When dogs and wolves fight, the adversary’s belly is a prime target. If one of them can get its fangs or claws into the other’s belly, the wounded animal is doomed. That is why neither dogs nor wolves will expose their bellies to anyone they do not trust absolutely, animal or human. Though Dorji’s little wolf died because it had bitten Dorji’s son, Chen offered up his fingers for his cub to lick and nibble on while he was holding it. He was confident the cub would not bite him, and gnawing on one of Chen’s fingers was much the same as biting one of its littermates, always stopping short of breaking the skin. Since the cub was willing to lie on his back and let Chen rub his belly, why shouldn’t he put his fingers in the cub’s mouth? They trusted each other.

It was nearly noon, and the sun had wilted the hollow green needles. Time for the cub to suffer again. His mouth hung slack and he panted nonstop, drops of liquid falling to the ground from his lolling tongue. Chen had opened the felt covering the yurt all the way to the top. Mongol yurts are open to the air on eight sides, like a pavilion or an oversized birdcage. That way he could keep an eye on the cub from inside the yurt, where he’d gone to read.

Unable to think of anything that might help the cub cool off a bit, Chen settled for observing the young animal to determine his level of tolerance for heat. The breezes entering his yurt were getting hotter; cows out in the basin had stopped grazing and were lying in the mud of the riverbank, while most of the sheep were sleeping in a mountain pass to catch the relatively cool winds. Three-sided white tents were going up on the mountaintop, as shepherds fended off the unbearable heat by sticking their lasso poles into marmot holes, then draping their thin white deels over them and anchoring the edges with rocks. These makeshift tents kept them out of the harsh sunlight. Chen had tried that, and had found it effective in keeping cool. Two occupants shared the tents, one sleeping while the other kept watch over the flock.

But as he baked in the merciless heat, the cub suffered whether he lay down or remained standing. Waves of heat rose from the sandy ground, scalding his paws and making it impossible to keep all four paws on the ground at one time. He kept looking around for his puppy playmates, and when he saw one of them lying in the shade under a wagon, he strained at his chain in exasperation. Chen ran out of the yurt, convinced that if he didn’t do something soon, the cub would be roasted like a chestnut. If the animal suffered heatstroke, the pasture vet would not lift a finger to save him.

So Chen scooped out a panful of water from the water wagon and laid it out for the cub, then watched as he thrust his head in and didn’t stop drinking until there was none left. He then ran up and hid from the sun in Chen’s shadow. Like a little orphan child, he stepped on Chen’s feet to keep him from leaving. So Chen stood there until he felt the back of his neck prickle, and he knew that his skin would begin to crack if he didn’t move. After walking out of the pen, he dumped half a bucketful of water onto the sandy ground, sending clouds of steam into the air. The cub, seeing that the ground temperature had fallen at that spot, ran over and lay down to rest. But the ground soon heated up, and the torment returned. Chen was out of options. He couldn’t keep watering the ground, and even if he could, what would happen when it was time to go out and tend the flock?

Back inside the yurt, Chen didn’t feel like reading; he could not shake the fear that the cub would get sick, or lose too much weight, maybe even die in the cruel summer heat. By chaining him, he realized, he was preserving the safety of people and their livestock, but not the life of the cub. If there were only an enclosure in which the cub could run free, he could at least find shelter at the base of a wall.

All Chen could do was keep an eye on his wolf and try to figure out something; nothing came to mind.

The wolf walked around and around, his brain apparently doing the same. The cub seemed to realize that the grassy ground outside the pen was cooler than the sandy ground inside. He turned and stepped on the grass with his hind legs; finding that it was, in fact, cooler, he lay down on the grass, leaving only his head and neck on the scalding sand inside the pen. With the chain pulled taut, he could finally stretch out and get some rest, part of his body no longer baked by the sun. Chen was so happy he could have kissed the young wolf; this manifestation of the cub’s intelligence gave him a thread of hope. Now he knew what to do. As the temperature continued to climb, he’d make a new pen for the wolf, this time with grass, and each time the cub trampled it down and exposed the sand, he’d move him again. A wolf’s power to survive was greater than that of humans. Even without a mother’s guidance, a young wolf solves the problems it faces, in a pack or alone. With a sigh, Chen lay back against his bedroll and began to read.