Wolf Totem: A Novel (11 page)

He had known of Tibetan sky burials, but not until arriving on the grassland had he discovered that it was also a Mongol practice, with wolves replacing eagles as the burial agents. Since all herdsmen of the Olonbulag would one day wind up in the bellies of wolves via the sky burial, they had, for millennia, been at peace with the idea of death.

Chen’s sense of dread was overcome by his curiosity. After learning the precise locations of the burial sites from the proprietor of wagons who delivered production materials, he secretly went out twice to observe burials. Each time, unfortunately, the sites were covered by snow and he missed what he’d hoped to see. But then one day, as winter was about to give way to spring, he spotted the tracks of horses and cart ruts in the snow leading in the direction of one of the burial sites. He followed the tracks until he came upon the corpse of an old man who had died a natural death and had, it seemed, been there a short time. The snow was disturbed by fresh animal and human tracks in addition to the wheel ruts; not even the powdery snow had been blown away. The old man lay there looking peaceful and innocent, supine, his body blanketed by a thin layer of powder, a look of devotion on his smooth, seemingly veiled face.

The anxiety and the dread Chen had experienced on the way over were gradually supplanted by a sense of the sacred. The dead man exhibited no sign of someone meeting death, but of someone attending a feast in Tengger, a second baptism, a rebirth. At that moment, Chen shared the reverence in which the grassland Mongol people held the wolf totem. At the end of a life, the body was served up as an unadorned sacrificial offering, providing a clean and absolute liberation; now Chen understood the deep reverence of the Mongols for Tengger, the wolves, and the souls they entrusted to them. He had no heart to loiter at that sacred place, fearful of agitating the soul of the deceased and of desecrating the sacred beliefs of the grassland people; so, with a respectful bow to the old man, he led his horse away from the burial site.

Three days later, the family of the deceased had nothing to worry about, which greatly relieved Chen Zhen. The family, following local custom, had gone to verify the burial and must have seen the traces of an outsider among the tracks of men and horses; but none came to Chen Zhen with accusations. That would not have been so had the soul not gone up to Tengger. Chen, realizing that his curiosity and interests had begun to clash with his hosts’ totems and taboos, took care to concentrate on tending his sheep and working hard, even as he sought to move closer to the mysterious people about whom he was so curious and whom he so deeply respected.

Spring came strangely early that year, more than a month earlier than usual. Warm winds turned the Olonbulag a golden yellow. Autumn grass, pressed down by the snow for an entire winter, burst onto the surface, and on some of the slopes that faced the sun a smattering of green buds appeared. Dry winds and warm days came hard on the heels of these changes, and when the teams went to their birthing meadows, the people were kept busy with wildfire prevention and antidrought measures to safeguard newborn animals.

Gao Jianzhong was too late. Laborers and members of the floating population who had streamed into the city to work in transportation and construction teams had, earlier in the year, viewed with envy the lively scene that occurred when Gasmai’s team had brought cartloads of gazelles to the purchasing station. They had crowded around the hunters, trying to learn the whereabouts of the hunt. After being told that all the frozen gazelles had been retrieved, they had approached Bayar with candy from the Northeast, but he had directed them to an empty mountain valley. Finally, these men, mostly Mongol outsiders from Manchurian farms, had found the grassland Mongols’ weakness—liquor. They had gotten the shepherd Sanjai drunk and learned the location of the gazelles. Moving quickly, they had beat the wolf pack and Gao Jianzhong by arriving just as the gazelles were breaking through the surface of the snow. They had pitched a camp nearby and, within a single day, retrieved every last animal, big and small, good and bad. They had then loaded them onto carts and transported them overnight to the purchasing station at the Bayan Gobi Commune.

Over the next several nights, the horse herders heard the plaintive, angry howls of hungry wolves echo up and down the valley. They grew tense, keeping close watch over their horses, never letting them stray from their sight. The lovers they’d left behind in yurts, knowing that there would be a high price to pay for the wolves’ hunger, beat their livestock out of anger and sang sad songs, bitter melodies of frustration.

Soon after, a formal notice arrived from headquarters reinstating the once annual tradition of stealing wolf cubs. The rewards were to be higher than in previous years, thanks to the personal intervention of Bao Shungui, the military representative. Word had it that the wolf-cub pelts would bring in a better price than ever. Those pelts, soft and shiny, rare and expensive, were used for women’s leather jackets, and were cherished items of the wives of northern officials; they also provided hard currency for lower-ranking officials willing to do business out the back door.

Bilgee was silent, smoking one pipeful after another. Chen overheard him mutter, “The wolves will soon have their revenge.”

5

Dense dark clouds raced over from the northern horizon, tumbling and roiling their way through the blue sky, ferocious as dense smoke or a black fire. In a matter of seconds, clouds swallowed up many miles of mountain ranges, like a colossal black hand pressing down on the pastureland. Off to the west, the orange-colored sun was not yet consumed, as a northern wind carrying powdery snow swept quickly across the vast Olonbulag. Swirling flakes sparkled in the slanting rays of sunlight like hungry locusts.

A Mongol proverb: Wolves follow the wind. For decades, the Olonbulag pack, which had fought guerrilla wars on both sides of the border, took advantage of the rare early spring to come south, leap across fire breaks, and force its way past guarded public roads to return to the grassland. The wolves had suffered the bitter cold and, since there was little grass, scant prey, which had left them desperately hungry. But the cache of frozen gazelles in their home territory had been pillaged, while beyond their territory famine raged, making it impossible to catch the light-footed gazelles. Great numbers of starving wolves had formed a pack on the frontier, eyes burning red as they entered the territory; their appetites were gargantuan, their killing methods ruthless, their behavior unmindful of consequences. Alpha males, filled with murderous thoughts of revenge, and ready to die for food, led the pack ever nearer, at a time when the people were so caught up in raids on wolf dens that they were oblivious to the scourge bearing down on them.

During the latter half of the 1960s, if rain was predicted, a drought occurred; if a clear, bright day was on tap, the sun never made an appearance. “Those weather reports are a joke,” Director Uljii commented. Except for Bilgee and some of the other old-timers, who worried that the pasture leadership had taken too many people away from their jobs to raid wolf dens, no one had anticipated the early spring or the wolf scourge. The men at the frontier station, who had always shown concern for the herders and the livestock production, failed to warn of what was on its way. In the past, when they discovered tracks of a wolf pack during their rounds, they notified headquarters and the herdsmen. Low hills occupied the frontier grazing land, offering neither cover nor barriers, and arctic currents produced blizzards known locally as white-hair winds. Wolves, unmatched at climatological warfare, often launched lightning strikes during blizzard conditions.

A new herd of horses had recently been guided to a patch of fine grazing land on the Olonbulag, seventy or eighty of the finest horses among the dozens of herds belonging to a certain regiment of the Mongolian mounted militia. They had been sent there to await the results of a medical examination. If none of the horses was found to be suffering from glanders, they could be on the road. Given the tensions of war preparedness, the herdsmen were saddled with great responsibility. The military representative and revolutionary committee had specifically selected four dependable, vigilant, and courageous herdsmen, who were also excellent horsemen, divided them into two teams, and assigned them the task of watching over the horses twenty-four hours a day. The two teams were led by Batu, who was a company commander in the Second Militia Group. In order to keep the horses from running back to their own herds, he ordered all the other herds moved to a distance of several miles. The breezes were light, the spring air warm, the water clear, the grass lush; the year’s first buds had appeared, setting the scene for a contented herd of warhorses that happily stayed together. The four herdsmen took their task seriously, and all was well for several days.

Suddenly the gentle breezes were replaced by sweeping gale-force winds. Lake water poured onto the grassland, and livestock began breaking out of their pens. Yurts set up along wind tunnels were blown upside down, turned into huge bowls that tumbled briefly before falling to pieces. Carts heading into the wind lost their felt canopies, which flew off into the sky. The blowing snow was so dense that anyone riding a horse could see neither the head nor the tail of his mount. The snow stung like buckshot, whistling through the air as it tore millions of white scars across the sky. Old Man Bilgee said that in ancient times there had been a shaman who exclaimed, “Blizzard, blizzard, the madness of a white goblin with unkempt hair!” The shaman’s words had survived into modern times. Everywhere between heaven and earth on the grassland, the mere mention of a blizzard struck fear into man and beast. People screamed, horses neighed, dogs barked, and sheep bleated—a cacophony that came together in a single sound: the crazed howls of the monstrous white-hair blizzard.

People preparing to continue their nightly foraging for wolf dens were stranded in the mountains, with no way in or out. Hunters heading home lost their way. Laborers, the old and the sick, women, and children who stayed behind to tend livestock were kept busy chasing down and penning up stray animals. On the grassland, the ability to hold on to savings accumulated over years of labor was often tested in the space of a single day or night.

The primary target of an organized attack by the wolf pack that had crossed the border was the thriving herd of warhorses. Bilgee, who assumed that the horses had already been sent off as ordered, secretly rejoiced when the blizzard rose up. He later learned that the herd’s departure had been delayed by one day, pending the medical report, and that the person who was to deliver the report had chosen instead to follow the military representative up the mountain to look for wolf cubs. A larger number had been found that year than usual, more than a hundred from at least a dozen dens, and grieving mothers whose cubs had been taken joined the pack, turning it especially frenzied and cruel.

Bilgee said, “Tengger has presented the wolf leader with this opportunity. There’s no doubt that the white wolf king, so familiar with the Olonbulag, has chosen this path to vengeance.”

At the first sound of wind, Batu had burst out of the small yurt for the temporary herders. After several night watches in a row, this was supposed to be his day of rest. He was exhausted, as was his horse, but he could not sleep and hadn’t closed his eyes all day. Having grown up around horses, he had suffered through many blizzards and had often been victimized by wolves. But now a number of uneventful days had put him on edge, and his nerves were as taut as the string of a Mongolian lute. The slightest breeze, the mere swaying of grass made his ears buzz. All the seasoned herders had committed to memory a grassland maxim, written in blood: On the Mongolian grassland, peace does not follow peace, but danger always follows danger.

The moment he stepped out of the yurt, he could smell the coming blizzard, and when he saw the direction of the wind, his broad ruddy face turned a grayish purple and his amber eyes glowed with fear. He rushed back into the yurt and nudged his sleeping comrade, Laasurung. Then, in rapid order, he picked up his flashlight, loaded his rifle, looped his herding club over his wrist, put on his fur deel, doused the fire in the stove, and picked up fur jackets for the two men watching the horses. He and his comrade, rifles slung over their backs and carrying long flashlights, mounted up and galloped north to where the herd was grazing.

As soon as the sun set behind the mountains, the grassland was cloaked in darkness. The two riders had no sooner reached the bottom of a slope than they were met head-on by the blizzard, like a tidal wave or an avalanche. It swallowed them up. The men choked on the wind until their faces turned purple; the pounding snow pellets forced them to shut their eyes. The horses too succumbed to fear, throwing their heads up in a desperate attempt to turn and flee from the wind. The men had started out shoulder to shoulder, but Batu, who could not see his hand in front of his face, shouted frantically; there was no response from Laasurung. Wind and snow consumed everything in a raging howl. Batu reined in his horse, wiped the frost from his forehead, and tried to calm himself. Then he tucked the flashlight under his arm and turned it on. Usually, it would light up the area like a searchlight, sending out a beam that could illuminate a horse at a hundred yards or more. Now he could see no more than a few yards ahead; dense horizontal strands of white hair filled his sight. Suddenly, a snowman and snow-horse entered the beam and, at the same time, sent a weak light his way. The two men made circles in the air with their flashlights as they strained to control their panic-stricken mounts. Finally, they were side-by-side again.

Batu grabbed Laasurung, raised one of his earflaps, and shouted into his ear. “Stay here, don’t move. This is where we need to stop the herd. Then we’ll drive it east. We have to avoid the small lake at Jiazi Mountain at all costs. All is lost if we don’t.”