Wolf Totem: A Novel (74 page)

At that instant, Chen Zhen believed he saw his very own wolf totem.

Early in the second spring after the wolves disappeared from the Olonbulag, the Inner Mongolian Production and Construction Corps sent down an order to reduce the number of dogs so that they could save the precious sheep and cows to supply the agricultural units in need of meat. The first unfortunate victims were the puppies. Nearly all the newborn puppies were tossed and sent to Tengger, and sad wails from the bitches could be heard everywhere on the grassland. Sometimes the mother dogs were seen digging up puppies their owners had buried behind their backs; they would often run around in circles holding the puppies in their mouths. The women wailed; the men shed silent tears. The big dogs were getting thinner by the day.

About six months later, someone in a corps truck shot and killed Erlang after he’d left the yurt and was wrapped in his own thoughts out in the grass. The killer took his body. Outraged, Chen and the other three students ran to the corps headquarters, but no culprit was found. The newly arrived Chinese, united behind the issue of eating dogs, hid the killer as if shielding a hero who was being pursued by an alien race.

Four years later, one early morning during a white-hair blizzard, an old man and a middle-aged man rode alongside an oxcart heading to the border highway; on the cart lay Bilgee’s body. Two of the three sky-burial grounds had already been abandoned, as some of the herdsmen had adopted the Han custom of underground burial. The old man insisted on being sent to a place where wolves might still roam, so two of his cousins took his body to the no-man’s-land north of the border highway.

The younger cousin said, “The wolves up north howled all night, and didn’t stop till daybreak.”

Chen Zhen, Yang Ke, and Zhang Jiyuan believed that Bilgee had suffered more than most but that he was also the luckiest, the last Mongol to have a sky burial and return to Tengger.

Not long after that, Chen, Yang, and Gao were assigned to company headquarters, where Yang became a grammar school teacher, Gao was sent to drive tractors, and Chen worked as a storehouse guard. Zhang Jiyuan was the only one left, kept on as a horse herder.

They left Yir and her puppies with Batu, while the loyal Yellow followed Chen. But every time Gasmai came with her oxcart and dogs, Yellow had a great time with his family and followed the carts back to the herding team. No one could stop him, and he would return to Chen only after spending a few days back home. He’d return no matter how far the herding section moved, even from a hundred
li
away; but he always looked unhappy on his arrival. Chen was worried that something might happen to Yellow on the way, but his worries vanished when the dog showed up again. He wouldn’t deprive Yellow of the pleasure and freedom of being with his grassland family. A year later, however, Yellow was “lost.” The grassland people knew that their dogs would never get lost or be eaten by wolves, since there were no more wolves; even if there had been, a wolf pack would never kill a lone dog. Yellow could only have been killed by people, people who did not belong to the grassland.

Chen and Yang were back in a place inhabited mostly by Chinese, living a settled life. Most of the people around them were professional soldiers and their families from all parts of China, as well as soldiers from the Student Army Corps from Tianjing and Tangshan. But emotionally, they knew they could never live a purely Han-style life. After work and study sessions, they often climbed a small hill nearby, where they could gaze into the distance at Tengger in the northwest, searching for traces of the cub and Bilgee in the blindingly bright, towering clouds.

In 1975, the Inner Mongolian Production and Construction Corps was formally disbanded, but the Majuzi River area, with its lush grass and abundant water, had already been turned into a desert by farming. Most of the workers—along with their concepts and lifestyle, as well as their houses, machines, vehicles, and tractors—remained. The Olonbulag regressed by the year, and a sheep killed by a wolf would be a topic of discussion for days, whereas more and more horses were stepping in mouse holes, injuring themselves and their riders.

A few years later, before Chen Zhen returned to Beijing to take the graduate school entrance exam, he borrowed a horse to say good-bye to Batu and his family. Then he made a special trip to visit the ancient den where the cub had been born. The den was still dark, deep, and solid, but spiderwebs covered the entrance and a pair of slender green grasshoppers were struggling to free themselves. Chen pushed the grass aside to look in and detected an earthy smell, not the pungent, acrid odor of wolves. Tall grass grew on the land outside the cave where the seven cubs had played and sunned themselves. Chen sat by the cave for a long time, but there was no wolf cub, no hunting dogs, not even a puppy with him.

In the thirtieth summer after the Beijing students had been sent down to the Olonbulag, Chen Zhen and Yang Ke left the capital in a blue Jeep Cherokee on their way to the grassland.

Upon graduating from the Academy of Social Sciences, Chen had joined a national affairs institute at a university where he conducted research on system reform. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in law, Yang went on to get a master’s degree and was given a license to practice law. By this time he was the founder of a highly regarded Beijing law firm.

The two old friends, now in their fifties, had never stopped thinking about the grassland but had been afraid to return. At the thirty-year mark, an important anniversary in the life of a Chinese, they decided to go back to see their friends, to the Great Ujimchin Steppe they’d been afraid to visit, and the old wolf cave at the foot of Black Rock Mountain.

The sky was still a clear blue when the Jeep entered Inner Mongolia, but anyone who had spent a long time there knew that Tengger was not the same. The sky was dry and cloudless; the Tengger of the grassland was now the Tengger of the desert. Under the dry hot sky, no dense green grass was visible; large patches of hard sandy soil filled the spaces between sparse, dry yellow grassland, as if giant sheets of sandpaper had been spread out across the ground.

On a highway, half covered with dry sand, caravans of trucks equipped with iron cages to transport sheep and cows rumbled toward them, trailing thick columns of yellow dust as they made their way to China proper. They hardly saw a yurt or a herd of horses or cows along the way; every once in a while they spotted a flock of sheep, but they were small and thin, with dirty, tangled black wool. Even the “processed” sheep looked better than those. The two friends nearly gave up on the trip, not wanting the moist, lush grassland in their hearts to be replaced by dry dust.

Yang pulled over and stopped, and, as he brushed the dust off of his body, said to Chen, “I’ve been so busy over the past decade I haven’t had time to come back. Now that the people in my firm can work independently, I’ve finally found some time, but to be honest, I’m scared about seeing the grassland. Zhang Jiyuan came for a visit this past spring and told me about the desertification. So I’ve had plenty of time to prepare myself emotionally. But I’m afraid it will be worse than I imagined.”

Chen patted the steering wheel. “Why don’t I take over? It’s barely been twenty years since Papa died, and we’re already seeing the bad end he predicted. We really should pay our respects to him, and, besides, Little Wolf’s cave will be filled up by sand if we wait a few more years. That cave is the only remaining relic left by wolves that dominated the grassland for thousands of years.”

“I miss Uljii too,” Chen added. “I’d really like to see him again so I could ask about the wolves and the grassland. But unfortunately he felt so bad about the grassland that he left after retirement and now lives in the city with his daughter, where he’s recovering from some illness. Since China doesn’t have a competitive, scientific, and democratic system for selecting top talent, honest and frank people are denied a chance to rise up. Uljii, a rare expert on wolves and grassland, was buried under the yellow sand of our current system, which is far worse than the yellow sand of the grassland, because the system was the true origin of the dust storm there.”

The Jeep continued in the dry, dusty wind for over five hundred miles, and by the time they were close to the Olonbulag their arms were tanned and prickly from the sun. They entered the Olonbulag the next day, and finally saw connected patches of sparse pastureland, since this was, after all, a border area corner of the Great Ujimchin Steppe. But they could not bear to look down at their feet, for just beneath the grass, sand and surface, rocks met their eyes. Sometimes there were long, thin gray mushrooms that looked like bean sprouts. In the past, decomposing fertilizer from livestock droppings would be at the base of the dense grass.

Chan and Yang were worried. They knew that farther on there was a thousand-year-old river, with water that came up to the horses’ knees or even their bellies. Big trucks had been the only vehicles that could cross it, and Jeeps like theirs had to speed up if they had any chance of crossing. During the rainy season, the flood river would cause the suspension of mail delivery and create shortages of food and other necessities for two weeks, even a month. As Chen and Yang talked about how they were going to cross the river, they reached the near riverbank. One look ended the discussion. The fast-flowing water of the old days had receded until the rocky riverbed was exposed; nothing but wet sand and a few wormlike streams crisscrossed the dry rocks. The Jeep crossed the river easily, but their hearts grew heavier.

Shortly after crossing the river they felt as if they’d entered a battlefield; cement posts and wire fences were all over the once vast and lush Olonbulag, and the Jeep had to travel down passages created by chain-link fences. Chen studied the fences, which enclosed areas of several hundred acres each. The grass inside the enclosure was much taller than that outside, but the overall appearance was still of a sparse pastureland, for sandy soil was visible under the grass.

Yang Ke said, “Those are what they call grass
kulun
. After receiving a parcel of pastureland and some livestock, herdsmen build fences around them for lamb birthing and don’t live here during the other three seasons.”

“How could so little grass be enough?” Chen asked.

Yang replied, “I’ve heard that the herdsmen have been reducing the number of livestock, some cutting the total in half.”

They passed a few more of the grass
kulun
areas, where they saw three or four redbrick houses with tiled roofs and birthing pens. But obviously, no one lived there at the moment, for no smoke rose from the chimneys, nor were there any dogs or calves by the front doors. The people might have herded their livestock deep into the mountains, where the animals were free to roam.

As he looked at the chain-link fences, Chen said emotionally, “In the past, who would dare build a fence on a grassland famous for its Ujimchin warhorses? At night, a horse could get tangled up in it and, in the worst cases, die struggling. But the horses whose hooves once shook the world have been driven off the Mongolian grassland. I’ve heard that sheepherders now use motorcycles, a sign of prosperity they show on television. Actually, that was because the grassland could no longer feed the horses, which disappeared after the wolves. The cows and sheep will soon follow, I’m sure. Horseback races have turned into motorcycle races, and may one day evolve into a race of ecological refugees. We’ve witnessed the ‘impressive victory’ of an agrarian society over a nomadic herding society. Current government policy has developed to the stage of ‘one country, two systems,’ but deeply rooted in the Han consciousness is still ‘many areas, one system.’ It doesn’t matter if it’s farmland or pastureland, forest or river, city or countryside; all they want to do is mix them all up to create a ‘unified’ flavor. With the ‘impressive victory’ has come a tremendous amount of subsidies, but the grassland could not return even if the subsidies continued for the next century.”

They rode along a dirt path leading to the site of their previous company headquarters, eager to see the herdsmen or, for that matter, anyone. But they crossed the familiar mountain ridge, only to see the old site replaced by a dying yellow sandy grassland overrun by mice whose tracks snaked across the ground amid piles of dry sand. The row of brick and rammed-earth houses was gone. As Chen drove around the once bustling company headquarters, he didn’t have to worry about running into any walls, but he got stuck several times in collapsed mouse dens. It had only been two decades, but the remains of the past were completely covered by yellow sand, as if wiped off the face of the earth.

Chen sighed. “Mice are kings on a wolfless grassland. They dig deep holes and store up large quantities of food, giving them hegemony over the grassland. We like to say that everyone shouts ‘Kill it!’ when a mouse crosses the street, but deep down we worship the mouse and place it at the head of our zodiac.”

Yang took the wheel and sped off to a nearby hill. They looked to the north, where they spotted some cows and a few houses with chimney smoke, but still no yurts. Yang headed toward the nearest chimney smoke.

They had been driving for a dozen
li
when a column of yellow dust rose up on a dirt path in the distance. Chen hoped it would be a herder on a fast horse, but when it drew close enough, they saw it was a shiny Yamaha motorcycle. The rider was a Mongol teenager wearing a jacket-like shirt and a baseball cap. The motorcycle screeched to a stop by the Jeep. Chen was shocked to see a small-caliber rifle slung over the youth’s shoulder and a medium-sized hawk tied to the seat, dripping blood. Chen was reminded of the startled and fearful look in Bilgee’s eyes when he first saw one of those weapons, and was surprised to see a young Mongol boy in possession of one, not to mention that he was riding an advanced, imported two-wheel vehicle.