Wolf Totem: A Novel (20 page)

“Not really. It’ll be gone by the time we get to where we’re going. Just remember, don’t let your coat or leather pants touch the frozen horsemeat and you’ll be okay.”

“Fighting wolves is tiring business,” Chen said. “The dogs kept exchanging howls with the wolves last night, angry howls, and I didn’t sleep a wink.”

“At home you Chinese get a good night’s sleep every night. But this is a battlefield, and we Mongols are warriors who are born to fight. People who need peace and quiet to sleep make poor soldiers. You must learn how to fall asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow and wake up the minute you hear a dog bark. Wolves sleep with their ears pricked, and at the first sign of danger, they’re up and away. You have to be like that too if you’re going to fight them. Me, I’m an old wolf.” He laughed. “I eat, I fight, I sleep, and I know how to cat-nap. Olonbulag wolves hate everything about me, and when I die they’ll chew me up, bones and all. I’ll get to Tengger faster than anybody. Ha ha...”

Chen yawned and said, “Students out here are beginning to suffer from nervous breakdowns. One girl’s already been sent back to Beijing. At this rate it won’t take many years before the wolves have sent at least half of us back down south. I’m not going to feed the wolves when I die. I want to be cremated.”

The old man was still laughing. “You Han are wasteful, and a whole lot of trouble. A man dies and requires a coffin, wasting wood that could be used to make a wagon.”

“I won’t need a coffin,” Chen said. “Just toss me onto a fire.”

“But a fire requires wood too,” the old man said. “Wasteful, really wasteful. We Mongols are frugal revolutionaries. Lay us out on a cart when we die, head south, and where the body bounces out is where the wolves get their next meal.”

“Are you saying that besides letting the wolves eat the body so that the soul can go to Tengger, it’s also to save trees? There are no trees out here.”

“Even more than saving trees, it’s important to turn meat-eaters into eaten meat.”

“Meat-eaters into eaten meat?” That was a new phrase for Chen, and thoughts of sleep vanished. “What exactly does that mean?”

“We grasslanders eat meat all our lives, for which we kill many creatures. After we die, we donate our meat back to the grassland. To us, it only seems fair, and it’s good for our souls when we go up to Tengger.”

“You’re right,” Chen said. “It is fair. If the wolves fail to drive me back to Beijing one day, I might just say okay to letting them eat me when I die. With a whole pack sharing one body, it has to be a quick meal, probably faster than cremation.”

This pleased the old man, but a worried look soon darkened his face. “In the past not many Chinese ever came to the Olonbulag. The seven or eight hundred inhabitants of the one hundred and thirty or forty yurts were all Mongols. Then came the Cultural Revolution, and a hundred of you students arrived from Beijing. You’ve been followed by soldiers and big wagons, with drivers, and now they’re putting up buildings. They hate wolves, except for the pelts, which they love, and sooner or later their guns will put an end to them. Then you won’t be able to feed the wolves even if you want to.”

“Don’t worry,” Chen said spiritedly. “When the big war comes one of these days, the atomic bomb will get us all, people and wolves, and no one will be feeding anyone.”

The old man made a circle in the air with his hand. "Atom...atomic bomb, what’s that?”

Chen Zhen did what he could, including gestures, to explain, but it was no use: the old man couldn’t comprehend it.

They’d nearly reached the northern edge of the frozen lake, where the horses had died. Bilgee reined in his horse and told Bayar to stop the cart and wait there. With two of the traps and a small spade, along with the bag of dried horse dung, he and Chen rode over to where the dead horses had lain. Stopping from time to time, he checked out the area. The dead horses, of course, had all been touched, and it was possible to see under the light blanket of snow where animals had sunk their teeth, that and the paw prints in the snow. “Have the wolves been back?” Chen asked.

The old man examined a few of the carcasses. “Not the big pack,” he replied. “Uljii was right when he said it was probably up north past the public road. They are masters at waiting patiently.”

“Then what about these tracks?” Chen said as he pointed to the ground.

“Mostly fox, plus the tracks of one female wolf. There must be several females up here who are staying with their cubs, all operating independently. He thought for a moment, then added, “I was hoping to catch the alpha males and some of the larger males in the pack, but with all these foxes around, that won’t be easy.”

“Have we wasted our time?”

“Not really. Our most important job is to trick the wolf pack, make them think that since we’re laying traps, we won’t bother to launch an encirclement attack against them. That way they’ll be back to finish off these horses. We’ll surprise them.”

“Any chance we could get a wolf in one of these traps, Papa?”

“You bet there is. Let’s set them for big animals, wolves not foxes.”

The old man circled the area twice before choosing a spot next to one of the carcasses. Chen dismounted and started digging in the snow, while Bilgee crouched down and scraped out a circle about a foot and a half across and a couple of inches deep with his little spade. He then gouged out a depression in the middle. After putting on the gloves smeared with horse grease, he laid his trap on the ice and stepped down on both sides to set the springs, like a pair of oversized tweezers, pulling the sides, with their pointed teeth, down flat on the ground. Then he laid a cloth pad, shaped like an embroidery frame, over the depression, but beneath the metal base of the trap. Finally he hooked a metal rod onto the pad.

With his heart in his throat, Chen watched the old man complete the dangerous, difficult job, setting a trap that could crush a man’s arm. Bilgee was breathing hard and drenched in sweat. He carefully wiped the sweat off with his sleeve, not wanting it to drip onto the dead horse. Now that Chen was on his first trap-laying trip with the old man, he was able to see how it worked. When a wolf stepped on the cloth pad, the weight would push down and release the metal rod from the hook. The springs would snap and close the serrated ends around the animal’s leg, breaking the bone and tearing the tendons. No wonder the wolves were afraid of the traps. If they hadn’t been frightened by the metallic sound of snapping traps, Chen would have died for sure during his earlier encounter with the wolf pack.

All that remained was to cover and disguise the trap. This too had to be done with extreme care. After catching his breath, Bilgee said, “You can’t cover this with snow, it’s too heavy, it’ll push the pad down. Also, if the sun comes out, the snow will melt, the metal parts will freeze, and the trap won’t snap shut. Hand me the horse dung.”

Bilgee took the sack, grabbed a handful of dried dung, rolled it into little balls, and spread it on top of the cloth. The airy dung gradually filled in all the gaps, and the pad stayed suspended above the trap; also there was no fear of melting snow. The last thing the old man did was hook the chain connected to the trap to one of the horse bones and told Chen he could cover that with snow. After he’d instructed him on how to cover all the exposed parts, he sprinkled a little snow over the dung and smoothed out the surface with a sheepskin until it appeared undisturbed.

A light snow continued to fall, quickly erasing all traces of activity. “How will the trap catch wolves but not foxes?” Chen asked. “I set the rod deeper than usual,” Bilgee replied. “A fox will be too light to spring the trap. But not a wolf.”

The old man surveyed the area again and paced off a few steps. “You do it this time,” he said after choosing the second spot. “I’ll supervise.”

“Why so close together?”

“A wolf can be merciless with its own body. If one of its legs is caught in a trap, it’ll chew it off and escape on three legs. By setting two traps, if I get a leg in the first one, the pain will have the animal running around in circles, pulling on the chain, and its rear leg could trip the second trap, which I’m setting at the far reach of the chain. If a front and a back leg are caught, even if it chewed them both off, it couldn’t get away.”

Chen felt his heart clutch and his hair stand on end as he tried to come to grips with the ruthlessness of the war between man and wolf. Both sides used cruelty to attack cruelty and cunning to thwart cunning. However much Chen hated the ferocity of the wolves, when he contemplated the sinister use of the cruel trap he was setting, his hands shook. The trap would be perfectly concealed alongside the irresistible temptation of a meaty horse carcass, where only the smell of horsemeat, horse grease, and horse dung hung in the air—no human or metal odors. In Chen’s mind, even the most cunning wolf would take the bait, suffer a broken leg, and wind up being skinned, its bloody, hide-less carcass thrown to the wild. He was reminded of all the Han armies, from the Zhou through the Qin, the Han, the Tang, the Song, and the Ming, that had been drawn deep into the grassland, thanks to beautifully executed traps, and annihilated. Mounted warriors in olden days had not relied on overwhelming numbers to sweep away advanced civilizations. The true defenders of the grassland had employed military prowess and wisdom learned from the wolves to protect their territory against the fire and steel, the hoes and plows lined up behind attacking Han armies. The old man spoke the truth, but Chen could not keep his hands from shaking.

Bilgee laughed spiritedly. “A little soft in the heart, I take it. Have you forgotten that the grassland is a battlefield, and that no one who’s afraid of blood can call himself a warrior? Doesn’t it bother you that those wolves wiped out an entire herd of horses? If we don’t use violent means, how will we ever beat them?”

Acknowledging the truth of the old man’s words, Chen breathed deeply and, despite his mixed feelings, scraped out a spot in the snow and ice. But as he was placing the trap in the indentation, his hands shook again; this time it was from fear over what could happen if he wasn’t careful with this, his first attempt. As the old man stood beside him giving instructions, he stuck his herding club into the trap’s gaping mouth; if it accidentally snapped shut, the club would keep Chen’s hand from getting caught. He felt a warm current throughout his body; with the old man standing by to help, he managed to stop his hands from shaking and laid his first trap without incident. As he was mopping his brow, he discovered that Bilgee was sweating more than he was.

“Young man,” Bilgee said after exhaling his relief, “you do the next one all by yourself. I think you’re ready.”

Chen nodded and walked back to the cart to get two more traps. Picking a spot by a second horse carcass, he carefully laid the third trap; then they each took two of the final four traps and set them separately, the old man telling Bayar to assist Chen.

The sky remained overcast as dusk settled in. After examining Chen’s work, the old man smiled and said, “You’ve concealed them well. If I were a wolf, you’d get me for sure. But it’s getting late. What do we do now?”

“Well, I’d say we use a broom to remove our footprints and count our tools to make sure we don’t leave anything behind.”

“You’ve learned a bit of cunning,” the old man said approvingly.

They began sweeping, from where they’d started all the way back to the wagon, inspecting their work as they went along. “How many wolves do you think we’ll catch with these traps?” Chen asked as he was putting away the tools.

“Don’t ask about numbers when you’re hunting. You won’t catch anything if you do. After the people do their job, they leave the rest to Tengger.”

They mounted up and, pulling the wagon behind them, rode off.

“Will we come back tomorrow morning to see how we’ve done?” Chen asked.

“We can’t go back, whether we get any or not. If we catch one, we need to give the pack plenty of time to see what’s happening. They’ll get suspicious when no one comes to claim their prey, and they’ll surround the dead horse site to figure out what to do next. The job we’ve been given isn’t to trap a few wolves, but to draw the pack out. No need for you to come here tomorrow. I’ll check things out from a distance.”

They made their way home in a good mood. Chen was thinking about a litter of wolf cubs and was planning to ask Bilgee how he should go about getting one, knowing it was a dangerous, difficult type of hunting that required exceptional skill, but was also one of the most important means of controlling the rampant growth of wolf packs. Wiping out one den of cubs meant one less wolf pack to worry about. But wolves call upon their highest powers of intellect and most ferocious skills in order to keep their young safe. Chen had heard tales of gripping adventure and lucky escapes regarding the theft of wolf cubs, and he was mentally prepared to take on the challenge. Two spring seasons had passed since the hundred or more students had come to the grassland, and none of them had single-handedly stolen a litter of cubs. Chen knew there was no guarantee that he’d be the first, yet he’d planned to accompany Bilgee as often as necessary to learn how it was done. But after the killing of the horse herd, the old man had no time for cubs, and all Chen could do was ask him to pass on his experience.

“Papa,” he said, “while I was tending sheep the other day, a female wolf took one of my lambs right under my eyes and carried it up to Black Rock Mountain. She must have a den up there, and I’m thinking of going back tomorrow. I was going to ask you to go with me...”

“I can’t tomorrow,” Bilgee said. “There’s too much to do around here. You say she went up to Black Rock Mountain?”

“Yes.”

The old man stroked his beard. “Did you follow her?”

“No. She was too fast for me. There was no time.”

“That’s good. If you had, she’d have led you on a wild-goose chase. They won’t return to their dens if they’re being chased.” The old man paused a moment. “She’s a clever wolf,” he said. “Last spring the production teams found three dens with cubs up there, so this year no one’s going back. I’m amazed that a wolf would go there to have her cubs. You can go tomorrow, but take others with you, and plenty of dogs. Make sure you take brave and experienced herdsmen. I don’t want you and Yang to try it alone; it’s far too dangerous.”