Wolf Totem: A Novel (60 page)

Chen stood up again, took the chain, and pointed the cub’s head in the direction of the yurt. Signaling the cooking smoke rising out of the yurt, he shouted, “Little Wolf, Little Wolf, time to eat. Drink some water.” He and Yang had figured out that that was the only way to get the cub to return after each walk. When he heard food and water, he drooled and, forgetting what had just happened, dragged Chen toward home.

The cub ran to his bowl, eagerly awaiting his food and water, so Chen looped the iron ring over the post and buttoned the cap, then gave the marmot’s neck and half a basin of clean water to the cub, who ignored the neck and instead buried his face in the basin of water and gulped it down. In order to ensure that he’d return willingly each time after the walk, they’d stopped giving him water all day before walking him. After running until he was famished and parched, he’d drag them back at the mere mention of water.

Chen went into the yurt to tend to his injury. The sight of the wounds so alarmed Gao Jianzhong that he made Chen promise to go get a shot. Not wanting to risk infection, Chen rode over to the students’ yurt in Section Three, where he asked the barefoot doctor, Little Peng, to give him a rabies shot, apply some salve, and bandage the wounds, while begging him not to tell anyone about the bite, for which he’d let Peng keep a book he’d borrowed and lend him two more, a biography of Napoleon and Balzac’s
Père Goriot
.

Peng agreed, though not without some grumbling. “The Brigade office clinic only gives me three or four vials of antirabies serum at a time,” he said. “I’ve already used up two on laborers who were bitten by herders’ dogs, so now I have to go back there on a hot day.”

Chen appeased the man, though he was barely aware of what he was saying; all he could think about now was how he was going to keep the cub. It had finally bitten him and, according to the laws of the grassland, even a dog was killed if it bit a sheep and was beaten to death on the spot if it bit a person. With a wolf cub that had bitten a human, there’d be no way out. Raising a wolf was already “violating the laws of nature,” and now its survival was threatened. Oblivious of his injury, Chen got back on the horse, slapping his own head on the way home, wishing he could dream up a way to save the cub.

Back at the yurt, he heard Yang and Gao arguing about how to deal with a cub that had begun biting people. “What an animal!” Gao shouted. “If he’ll go after Chen Zhen, who won’t he attack? We have to kill him. What if he bites someone else? In the fall, when we move to a new pasture, the sections will be so far apart I don’t know how anyone could manage to get a rabies shot. A wolf bite is worse than a dog bite. You can die from it.”

Yang Ke said softly, “I’m afraid the brigade won’t give us any more vaccine. It’s so precious they keep it for people who are bitten by a wolf or a dog on the job. What I’m thinking is, we set the cub free as soon as possible. Otherwise, they’ll send someone to kill him.”

“You’re talking about setting free a wolf that’s already bitten someone? How dense can you be? It won’t work, not now.”

Chen knew what he had to do. He clenched his teeth and said, “I’ve made up my mind. We won’t kill him and we won’t set him free. If we kill him, my wounds would all be for nothing and our efforts over these months would be wasted. And setting him free would be a death sentence. Even if he returned to the pack, the wolves would treat him as an outsider or a ‘traitor wolf.’ How would he survive then?”

“Then what do we do?” Yang said with a dark look.

“All we can do now is perform tooth surgery. We snip off the tips of his teeth, a wolf’s most lethal weapon. He’ll still be able to bite, but he won’t draw blood and there’ll be no need for rabies shots. We can cut the meat into small pieces to feed him.”

Yang shook his head. “It’s doable, but that’s a death sentence too. A wolf without fangs can’t survive out here.”

“It’s the only thing I can think of. In any case, I say we don’t stop just because I got bitten. Maybe the tips will grow back. For now they’re a threat to us.”

The following morning, Chen and Yang performed the surgery on the cub before taking their sheep out to graze. After giving him plenty of food to make him happy, Yang grabbed him by the back of his head and forced open his mouth with his thumbs. The cub was used to such antics, and didn’t mind them a bit. Facing the sun, they took a close look into the cub’s mouth. The fangs were slightly transparent and the root visible. They could see they wouldn’t damage the roots if they just clipped off the tips. He could keep his canines, which might be sharp again before long.

Chen let the cub sniff and play with the clippers for a while so as not to fear them. Then Yang forced open his mouth, and Chen quickly and carefully snipped off the tips of the fangs, about a quarter length of each tooth. Thinking that clipping off the cub’s canines would be as hard as pulling a tiger’s teeth, they’d been prepared to tie the cub up and battle him over the forced surgery. The whole process took less than a minute, with no injury to anyone. The cub licked at the broken surfaces, seemingly unaware of what he had lost. They set him down gently. They wanted to give him something good to eat but decided not to for fear of hurting him.

Now they breathed a sigh of relief, no longer having to worry that the cub might bite someone. But for several days they were saddened by what they’d done. “Trimming a wolf’s fangs is crueler than castrating a man,” Yang Ke commented.

Chen had to ask himself, “Have we moved too far from our original purpose in raising a cub?”

They also felt bad about the books lent to Little Peng. Among the hundred or so students in the brigade, only they had brought along cases of classics condemned as “feudal, capitalist, and revisionist.” After the first two stormy years, tedium and boredom had spurred the students to begin devouring the banned books in secret. Once a book was lent out, there was little hope of ever getting it back. But Chen had had no choice. Bao Shungui would certainly have killed the cub when the leaders heard about what had happened. As it turned out, the classics did their job; for a long time no one in the brigade learned that Chen Zhen had been bitten by his wolf cub.

28

East-central Inner Mongolia probably has more mosquitoes than anywhere in the world. They find welcoming habitation in the many rivers and lakes, the tall, dense grass, and the dens of hibernating marmots; they live on an endless supply of blood, cold and hot: the blood of humans, cattle, and sheep, plus that of field mice, hares, snakes, marmots, and Mongolian gazelles. Swarms of them, crazed from feasting on wolf blood, had recently all but destroyed the nerves of a sixteen-year-old student, who was sent back to Beijing.

That summer was a particularly bad year for mosquitoes.

One afternoon, Chen Zhen sat inside the protection of his mosquito net reading. He got up, put on a beekeeper’s mask, picked up a fly whisk made of horsehair, and walked out of the tightly sealed yurt to see how the wolf cub was doing. It was the time of day when the fiercest mosquito attacks occurred. Chen walked into a clamor more terrifying than an air-raid siren.

The big yellow Olonbulag mosquitoes lack the intelligence of wolves, and attack with greater disregard for their own survival. They will go after any creature as soon as they smell out its existence and have no concern over how many of them will die from a lethal tail swish by horse or cow; in fact, the crushed bodies of their splattered comrades are likely to send them into a blood lust.

The window of Chen’s protective mask was virtually closed by the swarming mosquitoes. He was terrified to see that they not only swarmed in great numbers but appeared larger than normal. Their wings never stopped moving, so fast that only their bodies, the size of tiny shrimp, were visible to the naked eye, and he suddenly felt like a man who had sunk into a lake and was looking up at vast schools of plankton.

Chen’s fettered white horse had no interest in grazing as it stood in the middle of a fertilizer trough. Filled with sheep dung, and devoid of even a blade of grass, it offered some respite from the mosquitoes. Some, but not enough, since the insects had blanketed the horse’s hide like a layer of rice husks. The horse spotted Chen approaching, preceded by the fanlike motions of a whisk, and inched toward him. Chen quickly removed the fetters and led the horse over to the oxcart, where there were fewer mosquitoes, then replaced the fetters. The horse’s head never stopped bobbing, the tail angrily fanning the air around its belly, rear legs, and flanks, while its mouth was its only weapon against attacks from the front. Tens of thousands of the insects parted the hair on the horse’s hide and buried their sucking needles in its flesh. When their bellies were full, they looked like little wolfberries, red and shiny. The horse swished its tail with all its might, producing bloodred splotches where it landed, until its tail was wet with blood, the hairs sticking together like a rug. Its tail produced a blood-soaked killing field; the once white animal now looked like a horse that had run a gauntlet of bloodthirsty wolves.

Chen used his whisk to help drive mosquitoes away from his horse’s back and front legs. The animal displayed its gratitude by bowing its head. But more mosquitoes gathered around them, wave after wave, and Chen’s horse could not free itself from them.

Chen’s thoughts were on the wolf cub, so he left the horse and ran over to the pen, where the hole was half filled with water, making it impossible for the cub to hide from the mosquitoes. His thin summer coat was little protection against the attacking needles, and the exposed skin on his nose, ears, eyelids, face, head, and belly were under such an assault that the poor animal was on the verge of madness. For grassland mosquitoes, wolf blood may be a tonic, which is why the cub was attracting a yellow cloud of flying attackers. Rolling around on the ground had no effect, and he was driven to running madly around his pen, unwilling to expose his tongue as he reached a stage of exhaustion; had he opened his mouth to breathe, he’d have sucked insects into his throat. After a moment, he stopped running, folded himself into a ball, with his hind legs under him and his front legs covering his nose. Chen was amazed to discover that the young wolf, a tyrant of the grassland, could be brought to such an ignominious state by mosquitoes. And yet the cub’s eyes were full of life, his gaze as penetratingly arrogant and unyielding as ever.

Bilgee had said to Chen, “Mosquito plagues are always followed by wolf plagues, because the killer insects leave starved, crazed wolves in their wake, for which humans and their livestock pay a price. The greatest terror on the grassland is linked plagues, especially mosquitoes and wolves.” A climate of fear had settled over the entire brigade.

The cub was obviously being worn out, but didn’t appear to have lost weight. The onslaught of mosquitoes continued day and night, yet he ran around the pen even more than usual. Faced with the fury of the mosquito plague, his obstinate nature held fast; his appetite did not diminish even a little. The young wolf actually fleshed out in the midst of the plague-filled season. Chen was like a doting father. As long as there was meat to eat and water to drink, the cub could withstand anything.

But now, with no warning, the cub began leaping around as if demented. A mosquito had managed to squirm under his belly and stick its needle into his little pecker. The excruciating pain left him no choice but to stop trying to evade the attacking mosquitoes and raise his rear leg to attend to his cherished appendage with its teeth; the moment he did that, hundreds of mosquitoes swarmed over his belly, causing such unbearable pain that he writhed in agony.

Leaving the cub to his afflictions, Chen grabbed his scythe, threw the willow basket over his back, and ran toward a culvert on the western hill where mugwort grew. The year before, when there were far fewer mosquitoes, he’d gone there with Gasmai to cut down mugwort. Soon after moving to the new grazing land, the rains came and Chen had gone out to determine where the mugwort grew most plentifully. Although the rains brought the mosquito plague, they also fed vast areas of mugwort, and as the plague of blood-sucking insects reached its peak, the medicinal odor of the plant filled the air. Chen looked up at Tengger and said, “This plant is what makes human survival on the grassland possible.”

There wasn’t a breath of wind down in the grassy culvert, and Chen’s denim shirt was soaked with sweat. Swarms of mosquitoes buried their needles halfway into the thick fabric, and Chen could not pull them out; the shirt was transformed into a pincushion of flying insects. He had no time to worry about that; he’d let them die there, impaled in his shirt. But then he felt a stabbing pain on his shoulder; he swatted the spot and drew back a bloody imprint.

Chen entered the patch of mugwort, where the number of mosquitoes dropped off dramatically. The plants, with gray-blue-white stalks, grew at least three feet high; the leaves had a succulent, downy surface. A bitter medicinal plant, mugwort went untouched by cows, sheep, and horses, which is why it grew in such profusion. As soon as he saw the tall plants, he slowed down, gripped his scythe tightly, and bent over cautiously into a battle stance. He and the other Beijing students had been warned by older shepherds that they should be especially careful around mugwort when they were out tending their flocks; since there were few mosquitoes, wolves often hid within these patches, rolling around and crushing the plant to coat their fur with the acrid smell, a natural mosquito repellent.

Not daring to venture too far into the patch without his dogs, Chen stopped and shouted twice. He detected no movement. He waited a few moments, then walked slowly in among the plants, where he felt surrounded by the miracle of salvation. He took aim at the densest patch he could see and began chopping like a madman, staining his scythe green and saturating the air with the strong medicinal odor. He breathed in deeply, as if to fill his innards with the smell.