Wolf Totem: A Novel (47 page)

Chen’s sheep had barely climbed to the top of the ridge after drinking their fill when another flock of thirsty animals ran noisily to the lake’s edge, raising another cloud of dust.

Laborers had set up four or five tents on a gentle slope a few hundred feet from the lake, where dozens of men were hard at work digging trenches. Under Bao Shungui’s direction, they were building a dipping pool for sheep, a wool storage shed, and a provisional headquarters building. Chen saw some of the laborers and members of their family dig trenches and plow plots of land for vegetable gardens. Another group of laborers had dug a stone quarry on a distant hill and were loading bright yellow rocks and flagstone onto large wagons, which were driven back to the work sites. Chen hated to see scars opened on the virgin land, so he turned back to his sheep and herded them off to the northwest.

The flock crossed a mountain ridge into a grassy basin. Bilgee had asked that the livestock not graze exclusively in the basin; since the summer days were so long, he said, the animals should be taken as far away as possible. That way there would be no need to move again as summer turned to fall. He planned to have the animals make several large sweeps of the basin and its outlying areas to keep the grass from growing out of control and patting down the loose soil as a means of mosquito control. Chen’s flock, forming a crescent, moved slowly toward mountains to the west.

In the glare of sunlight, the thousand or so sheep and their lambs sparkled like a field of white chrysanthemums, in stark contrast to their green surroundings. The lambs, whose coats were getting fluffy, alternately suckled and grazed the field. Their round tails were filling out and were nearly as big as those of their still-nursing mothers. Chen felt his eyes fill with the golden luster of yellow daylilies, which had just bloomed on the mountainside. Tens of thousands of bushes, two feet tall, offered up large, trumpet-shaped yellow flowers, with long, thin new buds dotting the branches below, ready to open soon.

Chen got up, mounted his horse, and rode over to an even denser field to pick the flowers, which had been introduced into the Beijing students’ diets: lilies and lamb dumplings, lilies and mountain onion salad, lilies and shredded lamb soup, and more. After going without vegetables all winter, they took to the wild greens and flowers like sheep to grazing land. The local herdsmen were amazed, since wildflowers were not something they ate. Before Chen left the yurt in the morning, Zhang Jiyuan had emptied out a pair of schoolbags, denying him the pleasure of reading while he tended the flock, so he and Yang could bring back a load of wildflowers before they withered and died. He blanched them in boiled water and dried them for the coming winter. In a few days they had already filled a sack half full of dried flowers.

The sheep grazed on the field behind Chen as he quickly filled a bag with flowers. While he continued to pick, he spotted some wolf droppings by his foot. He bent down and picked up a piece to examine it closely. It was gray, about the length of a banana, and already dry, though he could tell that it was still relatively fresh. He had just sat down to study it when it dawned on him that this must have been a resting spot for a wolf only a few days before. What was it doing there? He checked but found no bones or animal fur, so it wasn’t where it had eaten a kill. Small clusters of sheep often passed through the area, with its tall flowers and dense grass, so maybe this was the wolf’s hiding place, an ideal spot for an ambush. Suddenly quite nervous, he stood up and looked around, happy to spot some shepherds surveying the surroundings while they rested. Since his flock was several hundred feet behind him, he relaxed and sat down again.

Chen was familiar with wolf droppings, but this was his first opportunity to study them up close. He broke off a piece; inside he found gazelle fur and sheep’s wool, but not a shard of bone. There were a couple of field-mouse teeth and a few calcified chunks of wool. He crumbled the piece in his hand, but that was all it contained. The meat, skin, bones, and tendons of the sheep and mice the wolf had eaten had been completely digested, leaving behind only the fur and teeth. When he looked even closer, he saw that only the coarsest hair had passed through the wolf’s body. No dog had as effective a digestive system as that, he knew, since you can normally find undigested items like bone and kernels of corn in their droppings.

The efficiency with which wolves, the grassland’s sanitation workers, disposed of everything—cows, sheep, horses, marmots and gazelles, wild rabbits and field mice, even humans—was astonishing. As the animals passed through the wolf’s mouth, stomach, and intestines, the nutrients were removed, leaving behind only bits of hair and teeth, not even enough to feed germs. The grassland remained clean down through the ages thanks largely to its wolves.

The wildflowers swayed in a breeze. Chen crumbled the last of the wolf dung, which was carried off by the wind, settling to the ground to become one with the grassland, leaving no waste at all. With wolf dung it was truly a case of ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

Chen was by then deep in thought. Over the centuries, the herdsmen and hunters of the grassland returned to Tengger with no burial and no markers, and definitely no mausoleums. Men and wolves were born on the grassland, lived there, fought there, and died there. They left the grassland exactly as they found it.

Every month, or at least once every season, a grasslander was given a sky burial to send his soul to Tengger. Chen lifted his hands to the blue sky and said a silent wish that all those souls were at peace.

Summer days are dreadfully long on the Mongolian grassland. The sky is light from three in the morning till nine at night. The sheep are not taken out until eight or nine o’clock, after the sun has burned off the frost. At night they are not returned to their pens until after dark, since the period between sunset and darkness is when they eat the most ravenously and fatten up. Tending sheep in the summer takes nearly twice the time as it does in the winter. Summer is the shepherds’ least favorite season of the year. After breakfast, they go hungry until nine o’clock at night; all day long they bake under the sun, fight off the urge to sleep, go thirsty and hungry, and are bored stiff. At the height of summer, the mosquitoes turn the grassland into a torture chamber. Compared to the draining days of summer, the long cold winters are happy times.

Before being exposed to the hordes of mosquitoes, Chen had believed that hunger and thirst took the greatest toll on people. Herdsmen, on the other hand, tolerated hunger and thirst well, even though most of them were bothered by stomach ailments. During their first summer, the students took dry food along when they let the sheep out to graze, but eventually they followed the local custom of going without a midday meal.

While Chen was standing there in the tall grass, Dorji rode up and asked how he’d like some roast marmot. Chen salivated over the prospect. "They’re all over the place,” Dorji said. "That mountain ridge to the west is pockmarked with marmot holes. Let’s survey the place today, then lay out a dozen traps tomorrow. We’ll catch some by noon, and we can have roast marmot for lunch. That’ll take care of our hunger and keep us from napping in the middle of the day.” Dorji looked out at the two flocks of sheep, his and Chen’s, and saw that none of the animals were up and grazing. So the two men rode over to the mountain ridge, where they hid behind some limestone boulders, in sight of the sheep behind them and the marmot holes in front. They took out their telescopes. The ridge was still, the dozens of marmot holes seemingly empty; sunlight glistened on the bits of mineral ore in the limestone.

Before long, they heard the chirps and squeaks of marmots, exploratory noises made by animals before emerging from their holes. If they detected no responses, they’d pop up in large numbers. There were no responses, so out they came, dozens of them, big and small, filling the air with chirps. From every hole, it seemed, a female emerged to survey the area, and when they saw there were no predators nearby, they chirped a slow, rhythmic all-clear signal, following which hordes of young animals shot out of the holes and began eating clumps of grass as far as thirty or forty feet from the safety of their holes. With vultures circling high above in the deep blue sky, the females kept a careful watch. If their winged natural enemies descended, the marmot mothers chirped a frantic warning, which sent the young animals scurrying back to the safety of their holes, where they waited for the danger to pass.

When Chen moved slightly, Dorji laid his hand on his back to have him stay still. “Look at that hole over there,” he whispered. “There’s a wolf. He’s looking forward to a meal of marmot, just like us.” Chen immediately grew alert and turned his head to look. A large male marmot was standing in front of its hole, front legs folded in front of its chest as it scanned the area, obviously reluctant to leave the hole to graze on the grass. Male and female marmots live separately. The females live in one hole with their offspring; the males live alone in another. A large clump of tall grass lay not far below this particular male’s hole, and as it swayed in gentle breezes, the tops of brown rocks peeked through. The shifting shadows made it difficult to discern anything farther below.

“I don’t see a wolf,” Chen said. “Nothing but a few rocks.”

“There’s a wolf hidden beside one of those rocks, and I’ll bet it’s been there for a long time.”

Straining to look closer, Chen thought he could make out the partial figure of a wolf. “You’ve got better eyes than me,” he said. “I didn’t spot it.”

“If you don’t know how wolves hunt marmots,” Dorji explained, “you’d never spot one like this. They have to stay downwind of their prey, hidden in a clump of grass below a marmot hole. Catching one of those things is hard, even for a wolf, so they concentrate on big males. See that big one standing there? Damn near as big as a newborn lamb. It’s enough for one wolf meal. If it’s a wolf you’re looking for, head for the nearest male marmot hole, then scan the tall grass downwind from it.”

“Well, I learned another trick today,” Chen declared happily. “But when will the marmot decide to go down and eat? I want to see how the wolf catches it. There are holes everywhere, and the minute the wolf shows itself, the marmots will scramble down the nearest one.”

Dorji said, “It takes a smart wolf to catch a marmot. They have a trick to keep marmots from getting into a hole. Let’s see how this one does.”

They looked downhill, where their sheep were still lying in the grass, so they decided to be patient and see what happened. “Too bad we didn’t bring a dog,” Dorji said. “If we had, we could wait till the wolf got this one, then turn the dog loose and follow it on horseback. The marmot would become a meal—but ours, not the wolf’s.”

“Why don’t we chase it anyway?” Chen said. “We might catch it.”

“No way,” Dorji said. “Just look. The wolf is on the mountain ridge, so it would be heading downhill, and we’d be riding uphill. And once the wolf made it over the ridge, you’d never see it again. Besides, with all those marmot holes, our horses can’t run fast.” Chen gave up on the idea.

“No, we’ll lay some traps tomorrow,” Dorji said. “I just brought you here today to look around. Wolves will only be catching marmots for another couple of weeks. Once the rains come and the mosquitoes emerge, they no longer go after them. Why? Because they’re afraid of the mosquitoes, who attack their noses, eyes, and ears, making them jump into the air and give themselves away, which sends the marmots scurrying back into their holes. That’s when the wolves give up on marmots and turn their attention to our sheep and horses. That’s bad news for us and our livestock.”

The big male watched the other marmots gorging themselves on the grass until it couldn’t stand it any longer and left the safety of its hole for the tempting grass several feet away. After a few tentative bites, it ran back to its hole and chirped loudly. “See how it won’t eat the grass around its hole? They save that as a sort of barrier. Things out here are never easy,” Dorji said. “One careless moment is all it takes to lose your life.”

Chen watched the wolf with growing anxiety. It didn’t seem to have a clear view of the marmot from its hiding place, and would have to rely on sound to determine the location and movements of its prey. It pressed itself down so flat that it had nearly burrowed into the ground.

After four or five lightning trips to the grass and back, the marmot relaxed, sensing there was no danger, and ran over to a spot where the grass was at its most lush. Five or six minutes passed; then, all of a sudden, the wolf stood up. What surprised Chen was that instead of rushing over to pounce on the marmot, the wolf pawed at some loose rocks, sending several of them rolling downhill, making noise as they built up speed and grew in number. Chen watched as the marmot, now twenty feet or more from its hole, looked up in fright, turned, and raced back toward safety. But the wolf streaked toward the marmot hole, reaching it at about the same time as its inhabitant. Before the marmot could scurry down the hole, the wolf had it by the scruff of its neck. It was quickly flung to the ground, where the wolf sank its teeth into its neck. Then the wolf picked it up and ran off, quickly crossing the ridge. The whole maneuver had taken less than thirty seconds.

All the other marmots had vanished. The two men sat up. Images of the wolf catching its prey replayed in Chen’s head. He was speechless. The wisdom of the wolf was unfathomable. An almost magical beast.

The sunlight had turned from white to yellow, and the sheep were once again grazing, having moved several hundred feet to the west. Chen and Dorji talked for a few minutes before deciding to return to their flocks, turn them around, and head back to camp. But just as they their flocks, turn them around, and head back to camp. But just as they were about to climb into the saddle, Chen noticed some stirring among his sheep. Quickly taking out his telescope, he trained it on the left edge of the flock, where he spotted a large wolf slipping out of the bed of flowers and pouncing on one of his sheep, pinning it to the ground. Chen’s face turned white from fright, and he was about to scream when Dorji stopped him. He swallowed the scream and watched as the wolf tore flesh from one of the live sheep’s rear legs. As one of the lower animals, sheep won’t make a sound when they see blood. This one struggled, pawing the ground with its front legs, but, unlike a goat, made no sound, no plea for help.