Wolf Totem: A Novel (7 page)

The old man frowned. “You two hunt wolves too often. You get more kills than anyone on the pasture.”

Batu defended himself: “The grazing land for our herd of horses is the closest to the border with Outer Mongolia, and that’s where most of the wolves are. If we don’t hunt them, they’ll cross the border in even greater numbers. Most of the foals that year did not survive.”

“Why are both of you here? Did you leave the herd in the care of Zhang Jiyuan?”

“The wolves come at night,” Batu said, “so we relieve him then. He’s never taken gazelles during the day, so we came instead. We can work faster.”

The winter sun lay low in the sky, appearing to settle close to the land. The blue sky turned white, as did the dry grass; the surface of the snow began to melt, forming a glittery mirror. Humans, dogs, and carts had a spectral quality. The men put on their sunglasses, while the women and children covered their eyes with their flapped sleeves. A few of the cowherds, who suffered from sun-blindness, shut their eyes, but not in time to stanch the flow of tears. The big dogs, on the other hand, were either watching wide-eyed at bounding hares or sniffing the side of the road, where foxes had recently left tracks in the snow.

As they neared the site of the encirclement, the dogs discovered something new on the slope and raced over, leaving frenzied barks in their wakes. Those that were still hungry tore into gazelle carcasses the wolves had left behind. But Bilgee’s Bar and a few of the team’s better hunting dogs, their hackles raised, ran over to where the wolves had left droppings in the snow, searching the area to determine how many wolves there had been, how powerful a force, and which alpha male they had followed. “Bar recognizes the scent of most of the Olonbulag wolves,” Bilgee said, “and they recognize his. The way the fur on his neck is standing up is a sure sign that it was a large pack.”

As the riders entered the hunting ground, they sized the scene up by keeping their eyes to the ground. All that remained of most gazelles on the slope were heads and a scattering of bones. Bilgee pointed to the tracks in the snow and said, “Some of them came back last night.” Then he pointed to tufts of grayish-yellow wolf fur and said, “A couple of wolf packs had a fight here. It was probably a pack from the other side of the border that followed the scent of the gazelle herd. The shortage of food there makes them more ferocious than ever.”

The horse team finally made it up to the ridge, where they reacted as if they’d discovered a cornucopia, whooping it up like mad. They waved their hats to the carts behind them. Gasmai jumped down off her wagon and grabbed the bridle of the lead ox to get it to trot. So did the other women. They gathered speed, since the oxen were fast and the carts light.

When Lamjav saw the sight below, his eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Yow!” he exclaimed. “It took an amazing pack of wolves to herd in that many gazelles. Last year it took more than twenty of us herders to pen thirty, and we nearly ran our horses into the ground doing it.”

Bilgee reined in his horse and took out his telescope to pan the snow-drift and the surrounding mountains. Everyone else reined in their horses too and looked around, waiting to hear what he had to say.

Chen viewed the slope through his telescope. Countless gazelles were buried in the snowdrift, which could also have been the burial site of ancient warriors. The center of the drift was relatively smooth, like a mountain lake sealed by snow and ice. A dozen or so gazelle carcasses dotted the sloping area around the lake, but the shocking sight was seven or eight yellow dots on the lake, some still moving. Chen realized it was a cluster of gazelles that had been driven into the lake but had not been swallowed up by the snow. The surrounding area was pitted with hollows, some large, some small, off into the distance, the only visible traces of gazelles that had drowned in an ocean of snow. Unlike lakes of water, snow lakes indicate where the drowning victims have fallen in.

Bilgee said to Batu, “You and some of the others start shoveling snow to let the carts come up closer.” Then he led Chen Zhen and Lamjav up to the edge of the lake. “Make sure you check for gazelle and wolf tracks before you take a step, and avoid spots with no grass.”

They rode their horses carefully down the slope. The snow kept getting deeper, the grass less visible. They moved down a little more. The surface was peppered with holes about the thickness of a chopstick tip. A dry yellow stalk of grass stood rigidly in the middle of each hole. Bilgee said, “Tengger gave those air holes to the wolves. Without them, how could they detect the smell of their dead victims in snow this deep?”

Chen Zhen smiled and nodded. The holes and grass stalks were safety signs. A few paces farther down the slope they disappeared, but there were still gazelle and wolf tracks. The powerful Mongol horses’ hooves broke through three inches of crusty snow and settled into deep drifts as they moved closer to the snow lake, heading toward the nearest dead gazelles.

Finally, the horses could go no farther. The men dismounted, broke through the crusty surface, and sank into deep snow. They struggled to stomp out a platform on which they could turn around. A half-eaten gazelle lay at an angle in the crushed snow beside Chen Zhen’s foot. All around it was frozen grass from the gazelle’s stomach. The remains of thirty or forty gazelles that had been caught and eaten lay in the immediate area. That was as far as the wolves had gone.

Chen Zhen gazed out at the most tragic scene he’d ever encountered. Eight or nine little gazelles stood trembling on the lake a hundred yards or so from him, surrounded by holes in the snow, where other gazelles were now buried. These surviving animals were too frightened to move, but the tiny spot of hard snow on which they stood could crumble at any moment. There were others whose thin legs were buried in the snow but whose bodies remained supported by a crusty layer. They were still alive but immobilized. These fleet-footed free spirits of the grassland were hungry and cold, unable to move, suffering one last torment from Death itself.

But the most heartbreaking sight was a series of gazelle heads poking up out of the snow, their bodies completely submerged. They might have been standing on a little hillock or perhaps on the corpses of their companions. By using his telescope, Chen thought he could see the animals’ mouths move, as if crying for help, although no sound emerged.

The crusty surface sparkled like ice, beautiful yet treacherous and cruel, another gift from Tengger to the wolves and humans, a deadly hidden weapon safeguarding the grassland. The crusty layer is a product of winter blizzards and the sun. The winds that sweep across the land are like winnowing machines, removing the powdery snow and leaving a dense carpet of pellets that make up the snowy landscape. In the windless mornings, all the way up to midday, under intense rays of sunlight, the snow begins to melt, but cold afternoon winds freeze it again. After several blizzards have blown across the landscape, a three-inch crust, a mixture of ice and snow that is harder than snow alone but more brittle than ice, remains; smooth and slippery, it is uneven in its depth. At its thickest, it can support a man, but there are few places that can withstand the sharp hooves of the Mongolian gazelles.

The scene made Chen tremble with dread. Wolves had dragged all the gazelles they could out of the snow, creating long troughs crisscrossing the edges of the deep snow as they hauled their victims away. The far ends of the troughs were the abattoirs and picnic areas. Only the innards and the choicest flesh were eaten; the rest was left as waste. The wolves had obviously heard the approach of the people and dogs, and had left in a hurry, for the snow pellets were still shifting on the surface, and spots where the wolves had defecated had not completely frozen over.

Mongolian wolves are brilliant fighters on a snowy field, fully cognizant of the limits of battle. They will ignore gazelles out in the deeper snow, those lying on top and those sunken beneath the surface. There wasn’t a single track from a probe outside the safe zone. The animals dragged out of the snow could have fed several large wolf packs; the ignored frozen carcasses were the wolf pack’s guaranteed fresh food, for they would keep till the spring thaw, when the wolves would return for more tasty meals. This enormous snowdrift and snow lake was a wolf pack’s natural cold storage. Old Bilgee said, “There’s ice and snow storage for wolves all over Olonbulag. This is just the biggest one. The wolves often store their kills in places like this to keep from starving the following year. The meat of these frozen gazelles is life-saving food for wolves that grow lean in the spring and have a lot more stored-up fat than the live, and very thin, gazelles.” The old man pointed to one of the holes and said with a laugh, “Wolves out here really know how to live. We’re no match. As winter sets in each year, herdsmen slaughter their cows and sheep before they start losing their autumn fat and then they store the meat, which will take them through the winter. They learned that from wolves.”

When Bar and the other dogs spotted live gazelles, their hunting instincts kicked in and they ran toward them. But when they reached the spot where the wolves’ paw prints ended, they stopped. Denied the kill, they stretched out their necks and barked madly in the direction of the gazelles. Some of the targets were so frightened that they broke for the snow lake. But before they’d gotten far, the crust gave way and they sank into the quicksand-like snow, struggling briefly before disappearing from sight. The snow above them shifted like sand in an hourglass, until it formed a funnel. One of the animals broke through the crust, thrusting out its front legs and supporting the front half of its body while the rear half sank into the snow. Half a life was saved—for the moment.

The team dug a path to allow the carts down off the ridge, and when the lead cart reached a point where it could go no farther, a line of carts stretched out behind it. The men got out and shoveled away the snow around them so that they could unload the carts.

The men walked up to Bilgee. “All of you, see how the snow off to the west has frozen solid?” he said. “There aren’t many holes there, but there are a lot of gazelle droppings and tracks, and that means that many got away.”

The sheepherder Sanjai said with a laugh, “I can see that wolves miscalculate sometimes too. If the alpha male had sent four or five wolves over here to close off this route, those gazelles wouldn’t have gotten away so easily.”

“If you were the alpha male,” Bilgee snorted, “you’d starve to death. If you kill off all the gazelles at one time, what will you eat the following year? Wolves aren’t greedy like humans. They know how to figure things out, big things!”

“There are too many gazelles this year,” Sanjai said. “You could kill a thousand more and still have plenty left. I want to get my hands on enough money to build a new yurt and get married.”

The old man glared at him. “When your sons and grandsons get married and the gazelles are gone, then what? You young people are getting more like those outsiders all the time.”

Seeing that the women had unloaded the carts and dug paths to the deep snow by clearing out troughs the wolves had made when dragging the gazelle carcasses through the snow, and that they’d also built up a snowbank, Bilgee looked skyward and chanted something. Chen Zhen guessed that he was asking Tengger for permission to go out in the snow and bring up the dead gazelles.

The old man closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again and said, “There are plenty of frozen gazelles at the bottom of the snow, so don’t get greedy. When you’re out there, first free the surviving animals, all of them, before coming back to dig out the frozen ones. Tengger didn’t want those animals to die, so we must save them.” He lowered his head and said to Chen Zhen and Yang Ke, “When Genghis Khan finished an encirclement hunt, he let a small number of animals go. The Mongols have fought like that for centuries, and the reason we can have these hunts year after year is that, like the wolves, we don’t kill off all the prey.”

Bilgee assigned gazelle collection sectors to each family, then let them go off and work on their own. Everyone followed hunting custom by leaving the nearest and most plentiful holes for the students and for Bilgee, who led Chen and Yang over to his cart, where they unloaded two large rolls of felt, each about two yards wide and four yards long. They appeared to have been sprayed with water beforehand, for they were frozen stiff. Chen and Yang each dragged one along the cleared path, while Bilgee carried a long birch club, tipped with a metal hook. Batu and Gasmai also carried large rolls of felt to the deep snow; little Bayar walked behind his parents with a hook over his shoulder.

After they reached the edge of the deep snow, Bilgee had Chen and Yang spread one of the rolls of felt over the crusty snow, then asked Yang, the heavier of the two, to see if it could sustain his weight. It was like a gigantic skateboard. Yang stepped onto the felt, drawing crunching sounds from the snow under it, but no signs of danger. He jumped up and down. The felt sank beneath his feet slightly but not perilously. The old man quickly made him stop. “Don’t do that when we’re out on the deep snow. If you break through the felt, you’ll become a frozen gazelle yourself, and that’s no joke. Now then, Chen Zhen is lighter than you, so I’ll go dig out a couple of gazelles with him. After that, you two can go out on your own.”

Yang jumped off and helped the old man onto the felt. Chen followed. The felt easily withstood the weight of the two men and looked as if it would hold up under the added weight of a couple of gazelles. Once they were steady, they dragged up the second roll of felt and laid it out in front of the one they were standing on. They squared the two pieces and then stepped onto the second piece. After laying down the hooked pole, they repeated the process, moving the first piece out in front of the second. This they did over and over, as if piloting a pair of felt boats, gliding toward a living gazelle.