Wolf Totem: A Novel (9 page)

Chen and the old man sailed their raft, now weighted down with two large gazelles, back to shore, where Yang Ke and Bayar helped Bilgee step off. Chen pushed the two gazelles off the raft, and the four men dragged them over to their carts. There Chen discovered that the two carts were already piled high with large gazelles, and asked why that was. Yang Ke said, “Bayar and I bagged one of them. The rest are gifts from some of the other families. An Olonbulag custom, they said.” He laughed. “Hanging around Papa has brought dividends.”

Bilgee joined in the laughter. “You’re citizens of the grassland too,” he said. “So learn our customs and stick to them.” The old man, clearly tired, sat cross-legged alongside the cart to smoke his pipe. “You two go out,” he said, “but be careful. If you happen to fall in, spread your legs and stick out your arms immediately, and hold your breath. That way you won’t be in too deep. Whoever’s on the raft, stick in the pole, but be careful not to hook the person in the face. That will ruin your marriage prospects.” He choked on his laughter. Then he told Bayar to find some kindling for a cook fire.

Bursting with excitement, Chen and Yang walked over to the felt raft, and as they neared the deep snow by the shore, Chen spotted a hole that looked like a tunnel to the depths of the snow lake. Yang Ke said with a laugh, “I didn’t want to say anything a moment ago, because Papa was there beside us, but this hole in the snow, Bayar and I dug it, it’s where we found that big gazelle. I tell you, that Bayar may be small, but he’s got guts. When he saw you out there, he opened his fur coat and, because he weighs so little, crawled out on the snow without falling in. He found a depression before he’d gone more than five or six yards, so he crawled back and we dug a tunnel in the snow. We didn’t have to dig far to reach the gazelle, so he went down and tied a rope around one of its legs. When he came back, I pulled the animal out of the snow. He was fearless, but the whole time he was down there I was worried the snow might cave in and bury him.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Chen said. “Anyone who isn’t afraid to grab hold of a wolf with his bare hands isn’t going to be scared by a hole in the snow. Now you know what a Mongol kid is capable of doing. Just think what he’ll be like when he grows up!”

“When I told him not to go down into the snow,” Yang said, “he said that when he was seven, he crawled into a wolf’s den and stole a litter of cubs, so a snow cave is nothing! You’ve talked about wanting a wolf cub, haven’t you? Well, take Bayar along and get one.”

“Not me,” Chen replied. “These Mongols, all I can do is stand back and admire them.”

As the two students rode their Mongolian snow raft, Yang’s face was joyfully wrinkled. “I can’t believe how great it is to hunt on the grassland. Shepherding is so boring. As soon as wolves entered the picture, our lives got a lot more interesting and a lot more exciting.”

“This is a vast, sparsely populated territory,” Chen said. “Sometimes there isn’t a yurt within miles. Without the wolves and the hunt, life out here would be stultifying. I’ve gotten hooked on reading lately and it appears that these people have revered the wolf totem for thousands of years.”

Having eaten braised venison with their tea that morning, they had an abundance of energy, so, with clouds of white steam bursting from their mouths, their arms and legs churning like dragon-boat racers, they skimmed the snowy surface, the two halves of their felt raft rapidly changing positions. Eventually, Yang also managed to hook a gazelle and was so excited he nearly tipped the raft over, causing Chen to break out in a cold sweat as he rushed to calm his friend down. With a smack of his hand against the frozen animal, Yang shouted, “I thought I was dreaming when I saw people hook these things and bring them up, but now I know I wasn’t. This is terrific! And all thanks to you, wolves. Wolves! Wolves!”

Yang refused to turn the hooking pole over to Chen, who was too concerned with their safety to wrangle over it, and content to be his friend’s muscle. All in all, Yang hooked three gazelles and got so addicted to what he was doing that he didn’t want to head back to shore. With a wicked smile, he said, “Let’s drag some more out and take them back all at once. More efficient that way.” Without a second thought, he laid the frozen carcasses flat on top of the hardened snow.

Back on the shore, Bilgee had finished a pipeful of tobacco and was telling people to clear a wide space, where women from each family piled up broken boards, wooden axles, and the like as kindling. Then old felt was spread around and piled high with insulated bottles of milk tea and liquor, wooden utensils, and salt cellars. Sanjai and one of the boys slaughtered a pair of half-dead gazelles, both with broken legs. People on the Olonbulag only eat meat from freshly slaughtered animals, so these would serve as the hunters’ noonday meal. The dogs, who had stuffed themselves with kills left behind by the wolves, gazed on the two skinned, gutted, steaming gazelles with indifference. Bilgee and the women and children speared chunks of fresh, still-twitching meat onto metal and wooden skewers, added salt, and held them over the blazing bonfire. Then they sat back to eat the meat and drink tea; its seductive fragrance, along with that of the liquor and the meat, spread across the lake and drew the hunters back to eat and rest.

By midday, all the rafts had made two or three trips to shore to unload their quarry, and each family’s cart was piled high with six or seven frozen gazelles. It was time for the men to turn the work over to the well-fed women and children, who climbed aboard the felt rafts and went out onto the snow lake to bring up more animals.

Freshly roasted gazelle is a delicacy of the Mongolian grassland, especially after a hunt, when the meat is roasted and eaten on the spot. Historically, it was a favorite of the khans and royalty, and an essential component of gatherings of ordinary hunters. As newly acknowledged hunters, Chen Zhen and Yang Ke were invited to participate in the feast. The thrill of the hunt, along with sheer exhaustion, had given Chen such an appetite that he felt he appreciated the event more than any Mongol khan ever could; it was an outdoor feast for humans following an outdoor feast by a pack of wild wolves. Chen and Yang, who at that moment felt as free and powerful as any Mongol, impulsively grabbed flasks from the hands of fellow hunters who were drinking and eating and singing with fervor and passion, and gulped down great mouthfuls of liquor.

With a burst of laughter, Bilgee said, “I’d be afraid to go see your parents in Beijing a year from now, since by then I’ll have turned you into Mongol savages.”

“We Han could use a heavy dose of Mongol spirit,” Yang Ke said, the smell of liquor strong on his breath.

At the top of his lungs, Chen Zhen shouted “Papa” three times, raised the flask in his hand above his head, and toasted the “Venerable Tribal Leader.” The old man took three drinks from his flask and responded,
“Minihu, minihu, minisaihu”
(My child, my child, my good child).

Batu, giddily drunk, slapped Chen on the back and said, “You... you are only half a Mongol, wh . . . when you, you marry a Mongol girl . . . a woman, father a... a Mongol brat, then you’ll be a true Mongol. You, you’re on the weak side, no good, not good, not good enough. Mongol women under . . . under the bedcovers, make you work, worse than wolf . . . wolves. Mongol men, most of us, are scared of them, like sheep.”

“At night,” Sanjai piped in, “men are sheep, women are wolves. Especially Gasmai.”

The hunters all roared with laughter.

Lamjav was in such high spirits that he flipped Yang Ke heavily onto a snowdrift. “When . . . when you can do that to me,” he stammered, “that’s when you . . . the day you’re a Mongol.” Yang grabbed hold of Lamjav and tried to wrestle him to the ground, only to be flipped head over heels three more times. Lamjav laughed. “You... you Han Chinese are grass-eaters, like sheep. We Mongols are meat-eaters, like wolves.”

As he brushed the snow from his clothes, Yang said, “Just you wait. Next year I’m going to buy a full-grown ox and eat every bite of it myself. I plan to keep growing till I’m a head taller than you, and then you’ll be like a sheep.”

“Yes!” the other hunters shouted approvingly. “Good comeback!”

Grassland Mongols are known more for their capacity for liquor than for their appetite for meat. After a few rounds, all seven or eight flasks were empty. Seeing that there was no more liquor, Yang boldly proclaimed to Lamjav, “You can outwrestle me, but let’s see who can outdrink who.”

“Playing the fox, are you?” Lamjav retorted. “Well, out here, wolves are cleverer than foxes. Wait here. I’ve got more liquor.” He ran over to where his horse was standing and took a bottle of clear liquor out of his felt saddlebag, that and two cups. Waving the bottle in front of Yang, he said, “I was saving this for . . . for guests, but now I’m going to use it to punish you.”

“Punish!” the hunters shouted. “Punish him! Give him what he deserves!”

With an embarrassed smile, Yang Ke said, “It looks like this fox is no match for a wolf. I’ll take my punishment.”

"Listen...listen closely,” Lamjav said. “To follow our custom, you . . . you must drink as many cups as I say. I misspoke myself once and was outdrunk by a journalist who knew both Mongol and Han customs. This time I’m going to make sure you taste defeat.” He poured a cup and, in halfway decent Chinese, intoned, “Meadowlarks fly in pairs, two cups from a single wing.”

Yang Ke blanched. “Four wings times two cups, ah! That’s eight cups! How about one cup from each wing?”

“If you don’t play by the rules,” Lamjav replied, “I’ll make it three, I mean... three cups from a single wing.”

The crowd of hunters, Chen Zhen included, shouted in unison, “Drink! You must drink!”

Seeing no way out, Yang belted down eight cups, one after the other. The old man laughed. “Trying to trick a friend out here gets you into trouble every time,” he said.

Chen and Yang took skewers of cooked meat from the old man and, with bloody grease dripping down their chins, ate with gusto.

“Papa,” Chen said, “this is the first time I’ve eaten wolf food, and it’s the best thing I’ve eaten in my life, the best meat I’ve ever tasted. Now I know why so many emperors and their sons were avid hunters. Taizong of the Tang, China’s greatest emperor, loved to hunt. His son, his heir, used to come to the grassland with his Turkish bodyguards to ride and hunt. He even set up a grassland-style tent in the palace courtyard, where, like you, he slaughtered sheep and ate, slicing the meat off the bones with his own knife. For him, life on the grassland was better than being emperor. All he wanted was to hunt with his Turkish bodyguards under his own Turkish wolf flag, to live like a Turk on the grassland. Eventually, he lost his claim to the throne and his father picked his brother as heir. Life out here can even win over an emperor.”

The old man listened wide-eyed. “You never told me that,” he said. “It’s a good story. It would be wonderful if all you Han could appreciate the grassland like that prince did, but it would have been better if he hadn’t lost the throne. The Qing emperors often came out here to hunt and to find Mongol girls to marry. And they didn’t allow their Han subjects to open the grassland to raising crops. Back then, there was no fighting between the Mongols and the Chinese; we were at peace.”

Bilgee loved listening to Chen’s historical tales, and repaid the debt with tales of Mongolia. “Anyone who doesn’t eat wolves’ food is not a true grassland Mongol. There would probably be no Mongols without it. In days past, when Mongols were driven to the brink of destruction, they survived by eating wolves’ food. One of Genghis Khan’s ancestors, who was driven deep into the mountains, was on the verge of starvation, like a common savage. He was reduced to following the path of wolves; whenever they had a kill, he would wait until they’d eaten their fill and moved on, then he’d eat what they left. He lived like that, alone in the mountains, for years, until his brother found him and took him home. Wolves are the Mongols’ benefactors, sometimes their saviors. Without them there would have been no Genghis Khan, and no Mongols. Wolf food is delicious. See what the wolves have given us for our New Year’s celebration... though it doesn’t come that easily most of the time. That’s something you’ll learn someday.”

The two gazelles were picked clean and the bonfire began to sputter. Bilgee had the people smother the fire with snow.

The cloud cover thickened, and blowing snow began to reach them from the mountaintops, creating a gauzy veil. The brawniest hunters boarded their snow rafts again and headed out to the snow lake. It was essential to fill the carts before the blowing snow filled in the depressions. Each gazelle hooked and brought up meant six or seven bricks of Sichuan tea or a dozen or so cartons of Haihe cigarettes from Tianjin, or fifteen or sixteen bottles of Mongolian clear liquor. Under Bilgee’s command, all the rafts were maneuvered by the hunters from the deepest section of the lake to shallower spots, where it was easier to hook the frozen gazelles. The old man also divided the people into teams, the most adept users of the poles concentrating on hooking animals, and those better at manipulating the rafts focusing on transporting the animals back. As the rafts neared the shore, ropes were put to use, with several men standing at the edge of the lake flinging them like mooring lines to the carcass-laden rafts, where hunters tied one end to the raft and flung the other end back so that the men there could pull them back to shore. The process was repeated over and over.

By the time all human shadows on the snow lake had been swallowed up by mountain shadows, the carts were piled high, but there were a few men who wanted to hunt into the night by lamplight, piling the surplus gazelles on the lakeshore, with armed guards, to be picked up the following morning. Bilgee stopped them. “Tengger has given us a good day,” he chastised them. “Tengger is fair. Since wolves have eaten our sheep and horses, these are the reparations. Now Tengger has started the winds blowing, telling us to leave the remaining gazelles for the wolves. Which of you is willing to disobey Tengger? Which of you is willing to stay behind in this snowdrift? If the wolves came out with a blizzard tonight, I wonder who among you would still be around tomorrow morning.”