Wolf Totem: A Novel (73 page)

It had been over a month since Chen had last heard the howls of free Olonbulag wolves, and the tremulous, feeble, anxious howls transmitted a message that had been worrying him. He wondered if Bilgee was crying at that moment, for hearing the howls of desperation was worse than hearing nothing at all. Most of the strongest, most ferocious, and smartest males had already been eliminated by the hunters. After snow blanketed the grassland, the army vehicles were of no use, so the hunters exchanged them for fast horses and continued to hunt wolves, who seemed to have lost the power to find their way out and create a new territory for themselves.

This was Chen’s greatest fear. The return of the long-absent wolf howls rekindled hope, longing, resistance, and a fighting spirit in the cub. Like an imprisoned grassland prince, he heard his aging father’s call, a call for help, and he grew anxious, agitated, and violent, so much so that he wanted to respond with a howl as loud as a cannon shot.

But his injured throat would not allow him to answer his father and his own kind. Crazed by anxiety, he grew reckless, jumping and running, jerking the chain and the wooden post, oblivious to the possibility of mortal injury. Chen felt the frozen ground move; given the clanging and clamoring from the pen, he could imagine the wolf cub running, crashing, coughing up blood.

Frightened, he jerked away his felt blanket and quickly put on his fur-lined pants and deel before running out of the yurt. Blood was visible in the beam of his flashlight. The cub was bleeding openly, but he kept running and crashing, his tongue lolling involuntarily from the pressure of the tightening collar. The chain was stretched taut, like a bow at the breaking point. Bloody icicles hung from his chest, while beads of blood splattered the ground.

Chen ran up, without regard for anything, in an attempt to hold the cub by his neck, but the cub took a large patch of sheepskin from Chen’s sleeve the moment he reached out. Yang Ke ran over anxiously, but even with two of them they couldn’t get close. The madness that had been building up inside the cub turned him into a demon with eyes reddened from killing, or a cruel, enraged, suicidal wolf. They hurriedly dragged over a large thick, filthy felt used to cover the cow dung, and lunged at the cub to press him to the ground.

Seemingly engaged in a bloody life-and-death struggle, the cub went completely wild; he gnawed at the ground, bit the felt and anything else he came into contact with, and continued shaking his head to free himself from the chain. Chen felt as if he himself were losing his mind, but he forced himself to calm down and call out in a tender voice, “Little Wolf, Little Wolf.” Finally, the cub exhausted his energy and slowly gave in. Chen and Yang sat wearily on the ground, gasping for breath as if they’d been engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a wild wolf.

In the light of dawn, they pulled the felt away to see the consequence of the cub’s crazed struggle for freedom and longing for his father’s love: The infected tooth was now protruding from his mouth; the root had broken when he tore at the felt. He was bleeding, his wounds possibly made worse by the dirty felt. His throat was still bleeding as well, worse now than when they’d first moved here. The old wound had clearly been reopened.

His eyes bloodshot, the cub kept swallowing the blood, but it was everywhere: on their deels, on the felt, inside the pen, a worse sight than when a foal was killed. The blood quickly turned to ice. Chen’s knees buckled from the fright and he stammered in a shaky voice, “It’s all over. He’ll die for sure.”

“He’s probably lost half his blood,” Yang Ke said. “He’ll bleed to death if we don’t do something fast.”

They didn’t know how to stop the bleeding. Eventually, Chen got on his horse to go ask for Bilgee’s help.

The old man, shocked by the sight of blood on Chen, went back with him. “Do you have anything to stem the bleeding?” the old man asked.

Chen brought out four bottles of Yunnan White Powder. Bilgee entered the yurt, where he found a cooked sheep lung, which he soaked and softened in warm water from a vacuum bottle. He cut off the hard windpipes and separated the two halves before smearing powder on the surface of the softened lungs. He took it out to the pen for Chen to feed the cub, who caught and swallowed one of the halves as soon as Chen pushed the food basin in. He nearly choked, for the lung had swelled up after soaking up the blood in his esophagus. The soft organ remained in the throat for a while, like blood-stemming cotton, before slowly going down. The expanded lung put pressure on the blood vessels while helping to medicate the esophagus, slowly reducing the bleeding after the cub had swallowed both lung halves.

The old man shook his head and said, “It’s useless. He’s bled too much, and he’s injured his throat, a mortal wound. Even if you could stop the bleeding this time, could you stop it the next time he heard wolf howls? This is terrible for the cub. I told you not to, but you insisted on raising him. Seeing him like this is worse than having a knife in my throat. It’s no life for a wolf; not even dogs have it this bad. It’s worse than the ancient Mongolian slaves. Mongolian wolves would rather die than live like this.”

Chen pleaded with the old man. “Papa, I want to raise him to old age. Please, is there any way to save him? Please, teach me all your cures.”

The old man glared at him. “You still want to raise him? You need to kill him now, while he still looks like a wolf and has a true wolf spirit. That way he’ll die as if in battle, like a wild wolf. Don’t let him die an ignoble death, like a sick dog! Let his soul complete its cycle.”

Chen couldn’t stop his hands from shaking. He never imagined that one day he would have to kill the cub with his own hands, a cub he’d raised in the face of incredible hardships. Holding back his tears, he made one last attempt to plead with the old man: “Papa, please. How could I bring myself to kill him? I have to save him, even if there’s only a tiny shred of hope.”

The old man’s face darkened. He began to cough out of anger. He spat out a gob of phlegm and shouted, “You Chinese will never understand the Mongolian wolves.”

Incensed, he climbed onto his horse and, with a vicious whip on the animal’s flank, rode off in the direction of his yurt without looking back.

Chen’s heart felt the blow of that whip.

The two friends, Chen and Yang, stood on the snowy ground like wooden posts, completely lost.

Yang looked down. “This is the first time Papa ever got that angry with us. The cub really isn’t a cub anymore. He’s a grown wolf, and he’d fight us for his freedom. They really are the ‘freedom or death’ species. Look at him; he’s not going to live. I think we should follow Papa’s advice and give the cub the dignity he deserves.”

Tears had by then formed a string of icy beads on Chen’s face. He sighed and said, “It’s not that I don’t understand what Papa said. But how can I bring myself to do it? If I have a son someday, I don’t think I’ll dote on him the way I did the cub. Just give me some time to think.”

The cub, having lost most of his blood, got to his feet shakily and walked to the side of the pen, where he pawed at the snow piled on the edge. He opened his mouth and Chen quickly grabbed him. “He must be trying to numb the pain with the snow,” he said to Yang. “Should I let him do it?”

“I think he’s thirsty. How could he not be after losing so much blood? I say let him do whatever he wants; let him be the master of his own fate from now on.”

Chen let go and the cub gulped down mouthfuls of snow. Weakened and assaulted by the cold and pain, he shook violently, like an ancient grassland slave stripped of his fur deel as punishment. Finally, no longer able to stand, he fell to the ground, where he struggled to curl up, covering his face with his tail.

The cub convulsed violently each time he sucked in a lungful of cold air, and the convulsions stopped only when he breathed out. That went on for a long time, sending tremors through Chen’s heart. He had never seen the cub in such a frail, helpless state. He went and got a thick felt blanket, and when he placed it over the cub, he seemed to feel that the animal’s soul was leaving his body little by little, as if he were no longer the cub he had raised.

At noon, Chen cooked a pot of porridge with diced sheep rump. After cooling it with some snow, he took it over to the cub. Although still displaying his usual ferocious appetite and greedy look, the cub could no longer eat like a real wolf. Instead, he took many breaks to cough and to bleed. Obviously, the wound in his throat still had not healed. A pot of meat porridge that the cub would normally finish in one meal lasted two days for three meals.

Over those two days, Chen and Yang took turns watching the cub, their hearts in their throats. But he was eating less and less, and could barely swallow anything except his own blood from the previous meal. Chen Zhen got on his horse with three bottles of grassland liquor to get help from the brigade’s veterinarian. The vet took a look at the blood on the ground, and said, “Don’t bother. Lucky it’s a wolf; if it were a dog, it’d be long dead.”

Not leaving a single pill, the vet leaped back onto his horse to visit another yurt.

On the third morning, Chen walked out of the yurt and saw that the cub had pushed the felt aside and lay on his back, stretching his neck to take in short, rapid breaths. He and Yang ran over to check on him and were thrown into a panic. His neck had swollen so much it was almost bursting through the collar, which was why he tilted his head back to breathe. Chen quickly loosened the collar by two holes; the cub kept gulping in air, while struggling to his feet. They forced open his mouth, only to see that the throat was swollen, as if from a tumor, and the skin had turned cankerous.

Chen fell to the ground, in total despair. The cub strained to push himself up and drag himself over to sit in front of Chen, his mouth hanging open, the tongue lolling to one side. Bloody saliva oozed from the corner of his mouth as he sat there looking at Chen, like watching an old wolf, as if he wanted to tell him something. He was breathing so hard he couldn’t make a single noise. Tears rained down Chen’s face; he held the cub by his neck and touched his head and nose against the cub’s for one last time. The cub’s strength vanished and his front legs began to tremble violently.

Chen jumped to his feet and ran to the side of the yurt, where he found a spade with a broken handle. He turned, holding the spade behind him, and ran toward the cub, who was still sitting there panting hard, but on the verge of toppling over again. Chen stepped behind him, raised the spade, and, with all the strength he possessed, brought it hard down on the cub’s head. The cub didn’t make a sound as he slumped to the ground, a true Mongolian grassland wolf till the very end.

At that instant, Chen felt that his own soul had been crushed out of him; he seemed to hear again the sound of his soul leaving through the top of his head, but this time it appeared to be for good. Like a ghostly white icicle, he stood frozen in the wolf pen.

Not knowing what had happened, all the dogs came over and sniffed at the dead wolf; they then ran off in fright, all but Erlang, who barked angrily at Chen Zhen and Yang Ke.

Yang said tearfully, “We have to follow Papa’s example and take care of the rest. I’ll remove the pelt. Why don’t you go inside and rest.”

“We raided the den and took the cub together,” Chen said woodenly, “so we have to take the pelt together.”

They struggled to control their shaky hands and carefully removed the pelt from the cub’s body. The fur was still dense and shiny, but the cub’s body had only a thin layer of fat left. Yang placed the pelt on top of the yurt while Chen found a clean gunnysack for the body and tied it behind his saddle. They rode up into the hills, where they found a rocky surface covered with hawk droppings. They brushed the snow away and gently laid the cub’s body down.

On that cold, solemn sky-burial ground, the peltless cub no longer looked like his old self. To Chen, he was like any other adult wolf that had been skinned after dying in battle. Facing the ghastly white carcass of their precious cub, Chen Zhen and Yang Ke didn’t shed a single tear.

On the Mongolian grassland, nearly every wolf arrived in a fuzzy coat and then left skinned, leaving their courage, strength, wisdom, and the pretty grassland behind for the humans. At this moment, the cub had been stripped of his battle garb and relieved of the chain; he could finally roam the vast grassland freely, just like members of the pack and all other grassland wolves that had died during the extermination. He would return to the pack and rejoin the ranks of grassland warriors, for Tengger would never reject his soul.

They looked up at the sky at the same time, where two hawks were already circling above their heads. They looked down and saw that the carcass was freezing, so they quickly got on their horses and rode down the hill. On flat ground, they looked back to see the hawks spiral near the rocky surface. The carcass hadn’t completely frozen, so the cub would be given a quick sky burial and taken to lofty Tengger by the hawks.

By the time Chen and Yang returned to the yurt, Gao Jianzhong had already found a long birch pole and placed it by the door. He stuffed the pelt with dry yellow grass, while Chen Zhen threaded a thin leather rope through the cub’s nostrils and tied one end to the tip of the pole. Together, the three of them raised the pole and planted it in the snowbank by their door.

A fierce northwestern wind sent the cub’s pelt soaring, combing through his battle garb and making him appear to be dressed formally for a banquet in heaven. Pale smoke rising from the yurt’s chimney wafted under the pelt, making it seem as if the cub were riding the clouds, roiling and dancing freely and happily in the misty smoke. At that moment, there was no chain around his neck and no narrow, confining prison under his feet.

Chen’s vacant gaze followed the impish, lifelike figure of the cub’s pelt as it danced in the wind; it was the undying outer shell the cub had left behind, but the beautiful and commanding figure seemed to still contain his free and unyielding spirit. Suddenly, the long, tubular body and bushy tail rolled a few times like a flying dragon, soaring in the swirling snow and drifting clouds. The wind howled and the white hair flew. The cub, like a golden flying dragon, rode the clouds and mist, traveling on snow and wind, soaring happily toward Tengger, to the star Sirius, to the free universe in space, to the place where all the souls of Mongolian wolves that had died in battles over the millennia congregated.