Like a trio of racehorses, their mounts galloped off toward the mountains, sending grass and dirt flying behind them, the fresh green grass staining their hooves. Luckily, there would be no other horses in that area for several months. Chen, who was bringing up the rear, was beginning to understand the true implications of the saying “Horse herds are the grassland’s enemy.”
The horses reached a hillside, where they were greeted by the high-pitched yelps of marmots, burrowing animals found all over the grassland. Nearly half the hills on the Olonbulag were home to Mongolian marmots. Every autumn Chen saw marmots the old man had shot and was treated to their fatty, delicious meat. Like bears, they hibernate during the winter and survive on stored-up fat. The distinctive meat has a layer of fat, like pork, and, since it has no gamey taste, it is among the Mongols’ favorite foods; they prefer it over beef and lamb. A grown marmot provides enough meat for a meal for a whole family.
Chen was amazed by the array of marmots in front of him: no fewer than sixty or seventy of the animals, big and small, stood on the slopes and peaks of a string of hills, looking like tree stumps after the loggers have left. Large brown males in front of large isolated burrows, the slightly smaller females with fur as yellow as wolf coats in front of burrow clusters. Babies, sometimes as many as seven or eight of them, their heads like little rabbits, stood around their mothers. The arrival of humans did not send them scurrying into their burrows; instead, they rose up on their hind legs, front legs in front of their chests, like little fists, and barked, each bark accompanied by an upward jerk of their bottlebrush tails, as if to warn the intruders away.
“People call this place Marmot Hill,” Bilgee said. “It’s crawling with them. Up north there’s another spot with even more than here. This place was once the salvation of the grassland’s poorest residents. In the fall, when the marmots were big and plump, they’d come here to catch them, eating the meat and selling the pelts and oil for money or for lamb. You Chinese are crazy about marmot overcoats, so each fall, the fur traders from Zhangjiakou come here to pick mushrooms and buy marmot skins, which are three times as expensive as lambskin. These little animals have saved more people than you know, including Genghis Khan’s family when they were living in hard times.”
“Marmots are tasty because of the fat,” Uljii said. “Other burrowing animals, such as ground squirrels and field voles, store up food for the winter months. But marmots get through the winter thanks to their fat.”
“After making it through the winter,” Bilgee said, “they have lost nearly all their fat, but there’s plenty of meat on their bones. See how big they are? Well, thanks to the abundance of grass this year, they’ll fatten up in no time.”
“No wonder the wolves haven’t been harassing us lately,” Chen said. “They like a change of diet too. But how do they catch them, since marmots never stray far from their deep burrows?”
“They’re expert marmot hunters,” Bilgee said with a laugh. “The big ones dig into the burrow entrance, sending the occupants scurrying out escape holes, where other wolves are waiting to kill and eat them. Sometimes smaller wolves actually dig their way deep into the burrow to catch and drag them out. Desert foxes also burrow in to get at them. When I come out to shoot marmots, I trap six or seven foxes every year, and once I trapped a small wolf. We learned to let our children crawl into wolf dens to get at the cubs from the wolves and the desert foxes. If their burrows are too shallow, the marmots will freeze, so they dig very deep—ten, maybe twenty feet. Can you tell me why wolf dens are so deep, since wolves don’t hibernate in the winter?” the old man asked Chen.
Chen shook his head.
“Because they often take over marmot burrows. A wolf will clear out one of these burrows and have her cubs inside.”
“That’s amazing,” Chen remarked. “Killing and eating a family of marmots isn’t enough for them. They have to take over their home as well.”
Uljii smiled with admiration. “That’s how they keep the marmots in check. They perform a great service, since the rodents are no good at all for the grassland. See what they’ve done to this hillside, burrows everywhere. They produce litters of six or seven every year. If their burrows stay small, there isn’t enough room for them all, so they dig bigger ones, destroying the grazing land for miles around. The four destructive pests of the grassland are field mice, wild rabbits, marmots, and gazelles, in that order. Marmots are relatively slow animals, and ought to be easy to catch. So why do we need to trap them? Because their burrows are interconnected. At the first sign of danger, they disappear in the web of tunnels. They forage voraciously, and in the fall they feed on seeds. One of those plump little bodies requires several acres of grass and seeds each year. There’s nothing worse for horses than a marmot colony. Every year we lose several horses that break their legs when they step in one of these burrows and throw their riders.
“Actually,” Uljii continued, “the burrows cause even more trouble that that. During the winter, they’re home to mosquitoes. The mosquitoes of Eastern Mongolia are world renowned. Mosquitoes in the Manchurian forests can eat a man alive. Ours can eat a cow. You’d think that out here, where the temperature plunges to thirty or forty below in the winter, cold enough to turn a sick cow into an ice sculpture, that it ought to freeze the mosquitoes. How do they make it through the winters? Marmot burrows. When winter closes in, they follow the marmots into the deep burrows, which are sealed up to keep the snow and ice out and the warmth in. The marmots sleep, going without food and water. But the mosquitoes have plenty of food and water, all from their hosts, making for a comfortable winter. Then when spring arrives, and the marmots leave their burrows, the mosquitoes follow them out and, given all the little lakes on the grassland, fly off to breed the next generation on the water. Come summertime, the grassland is mosquito heaven. See what I mean? Wolves are the prime marmot killers out here. We have a saying that goes, ‘When marmots leave their burrows, the wolves go up the mountain.’ Once the marmots are out in the open, the livestock can rest easy for a spell.”
Chen had been severely bitten for two summers, and the sound of mosquitoes was enough to make his hair stand on end. His skin felt as if it were being cracked and split; the Chinese students feared mosquitoes more than they did wolves. Eventually, he got his family to send mosquito netting from Beijing, and he began sleeping through the night. The herdsmen thought the netting was a wonderful thing, and it quickly became an essential part of the Mongol yurts. They called the nets “mosquito houses.”
“I’ve never seen in any book a word about the relationship between mosquitoes and marmots, or how the burrows are the mosquitoes’ bandit hideouts, or how wolves are their mortal enemies,” a skeptical Chen said to Uljii.
“The grassland is a complex place,” Uljii said. “Everything is linked, and the wolves are the major link, tied to all the others. If that link is removed, livestock raising will disappear out here. You can’t count all the benefits the wolves bring, far greater than the damage they cause.”
With a laugh, Bilgee said, “But don’t think that the marmots don’t benefit us at all. Their fur, their meat, and their oil are extremely valuable. Marmot skins are an important source of income for the herdsmen. The government trades them for automobiles and artillery. The wolves are smart, they don’t kill off all the marmots, so there’ll always be a supply for the next year. That’s true for the herdsmen as well. We take only the adults, not the young animals.”
As the horses sped through the mountains, the fearless marmots kept up the chorus of barks. Hawks attacked out of the sky, but failed most of the time. The farther northwest the men traveled, the fewer people they saw, and the fewer signs of habitation, until finally there weren’t even horse droppings anywhere.
When the three riders reached the top of a steep slope, spread out before them were hills so green they seemed unreal. As they crossed the hill, they saw yellow mixed in with the green, the color of last year’s grass, but the green on the mo
untains ahead was like a dyed stage curtain, or a fairyland in an animated movie. Uljii pointed with his whip. “If you’d come here last fall, you’d have seen only black mountains. It looks like they’ve been dressed in green felt, doesn’t it?” The horses picked up speed when they spotted the green mountains. Uljii led the way across gently rising land.
After crossing a pair of ridges, the party reached a green slope. It was covered with barley; not a single blade of yellow grass in sight, nor a trace of any unpleasant scent. The fragrance grew stronger, and Bilgee sensed that something was different. He looked down. The dogs also picked up a scent and checked out the area, nose to the ground. The old man bent down to get a closer look at the tall grass around the horses’ hooves. When he looked up, he said, “What do you smell?” Chen breathed in deeply, and could smell the fragrance of the tender new grass. It was like sitting on a horse-drawn mower in the fall, when the smell of cut grass floods the nose. “No one was out here cutting this, were they?” he asked. “Who could it be?”
The old man got off his horse and poked at the grass with his herding club, looking for something. Before long, he found something green and yellow. He pinched it, then smelled it. “This is gazelle dung,” he said. “They passed through here not long ago.”
Uljii and Chen also got down off their horses and examined the gazelle dung the old man was holding. Gazelle dung is wet in the summer, tightly packed, not pellets. Uljii and Chen were surprised by the find. They walked a few steps and spotted patches of grass that looked as if they had been attacked with scythes, but unevenly.
“I thought I saw gazelles out by the birthing pens this spring. So this is where they came to graze. They cut through the grass more savagely than mowers.”
Uljii loaded his rifle and flicked off the safety. “Every spring they migrate to the birthing pens, where they compete for grazing land with ewes that have just given birth. But not this year, and that’s because this is better grass. They think like me.”
Bilgee’s eyes turned into slits as he laughed. “They’re experts at finding good grazing land,” he said to Uljii. “It’d be a shame if they chose the best land and we and our livestock stayed away. You were certainly right this time.”
“Not so fast,” Uljii counseled. “Wait till you see the source of water.”
“But the lambs are still too young,” Chen said. “They can’t walk all the way out here. It’ll be at least another month before they’ll be able to walk long distances, and by then this grass will all be in the bellies of gazelles.”
“Don’t worry,” Bilgee said. “Wolves are smarter than people. Sooner or later they’ll be here too. The birthing season for gazelles hasn’t ended yet, and neither the adults nor the young can run fast. This is the time of the year when the wolves can feast on gazelle. It won’t take many days for them to drive the entire herd out of here.”
“No wonder the survival rate among newborn sheep was so high this year,” Uljii said. “With the growth of this grass, the gazelles and the wolves all came out here. There was no fighting over grazing land.”
Hearing that there might be wolves around, Chen anxiously urged the two men to get back onto their horses. As they crossed another ridge, Uljii reminded them to be alert, since just beyond the next ridge lay a vast grazing land, and that, he guessed, was where they’d find both gazelles and wolves.
They dismounted when they reached the top of the ridge; bending low and stepping quietly, they led the horses with one hand and held the dogs with the other as they made their way to a spot among several large boulders. The two big dogs could smell a hunt and crawled along, sticking close to their masters. Just before they reached the rocks, the men wrapped their reins around their horses’ front legs. Then they sprawled on the ground behind the boulders to survey the area through telescopes.
At last Chen laid eyes on virgin grassland, possibly the last of its kind in all of China, and breathtakingly beautiful. Spread out before him was a dark green basin, dozens of square miles, with layers of mountain peaks to the east, all the way north to the Great Xing’an range. Mountains of many colors—dark and light green, brown, deep red, purple—rose in waves as far as one could see, to merge with an ocean of pink clouds. The basin was surrounded by gentle sloping hills on three sides. The basin itself looked like a green carpet manicured by Tengger; patterns of blue, white, yellow, and pink mountain flowers formed a seamless patchwork of color.
A stream flowed down from a mountain valley to the southeast, twisting and turning as soon as it entered the basin, each horseshoe twist like a silver band, the many bands lengthening and curving until the stream drained into a blue lake in the center of the basin. Puffy white clouds floated atop the clear water.
That centerpiece was a swan lake, which Chen Zhen never dreamed of seeing. Through the lens of his telescope he saw a dozen white swans floating gracefully on water ringed by dense green reeds. The swans were surrounded by hundreds, perhaps thousands of wild geese, wild ducks, and other nameless waterbirds. Five or six large swans flew up into the air, accompanied by a flurry of waterbirds. They circled the lake and the stream, crying out like a welcoming orchestra. The lake was quiet, white feathers dancing on its surface, an otherworldly haven of peace.
A natural outlet opened to the northwest, diverting the lake’s water to thousands of acres of marshland.
This was likely the last spot in the northern grassland that still retained its primitive beauty. Chen Zhen was mesmerized by the sight. But even as he marveled, anxiety entered his heart. Once men and horses come, he was thinking, the primitive beauty of the place will quickly be lost, and no Chinese will lay his eyes on such natural, pristine beauty ever again.
Uljii and Bilgee kept their telescopes trained on spots below. The old man nudged Chen’s leg with the tip of his boot and directed his attention to the third bend in the stream, off to the right. There on the bank at one of the horseshoe bends he saw a pair of gazelles in the water, straining to climb onto dry land, their upper bodies safely aground, their rear legs apparently stuck in the mud. They lacked the strength to pull themselves out. Not far away, in the grass, lay the bodies of a dozen more, their abdomens torn open . . . Chen swung his telescope slowly toward the tall lakeshore grass. His heart lurched. Several large wolves were sprawled near their kills, fast asleep. The grass was too tall for him to get an accurate count.
Uljii and Bilgee continued scanning the area, stopping on a slope off to the southeast, where the dispersed members of the gazelle herd were grazing in small clusters, the newborns staying close to their mothers. Chen watched as one of the gazelles cleaned her newborn calf with her tongue, looking up anxiously every few seconds. The calf was struggling to get to its feet; once a gazelle calf is standing, it can run so fast not even a dog can catch it. The minutes during which it tries to stand will determine whether it lives or dies. Chen didn’t know what to do. At this distance, they had to make a decision: Go for the wolves or for the gazelles?
Bilgee said, “Look at those wolves, sleeping out in the open. They know there’s nothing anyone can do to them. We’re too far for our rifles to be of any use, and if we show ourselves, they and the gazelles will be gone before we know it.”
“But those stuck in the lake are ours,” Uljii pointed out. “Lunch.”
They mounted up and rode off toward the lake; the minute they, their horses, and their dogs were out in the open, the wolves fled toward the mountains, spread out, and headed south. They were immediately swallowed up by patches of reeds. The gazelles reacted the same way, and just as quickly, leaving behind the ones stuck in the mud and the mothers licking their calves.
The riders approached a bend in the stream that surrounded an acre of land. A dozen or more gazelles, adult and young, lay in the grass, their innards gone, their legs chewed down to the bone. One was stuck in the mud, unable to move an inch; the others were still making feeble attempts to pull themselves out, the wounds in their necks still bleeding.
B
y now Chen was familiar with the wolves’ tactics, but this was the first time he’d seen how they could use the bend in a stream to do the work. He rode around examining the tactics of the attack.
“See what geniuses they are?” Uljii said. “They hid in the grass the night before and waited until the gazelles came to drink. Then they quickly sealed off all avenues of escape, and trapped the gazelles with the help of the stream. As easy as that. The stream was their sack, and all they had to do was tighten the drawstring around the meat they needed.”
The dogs, smelling the wild meat all around, were in no hurry to eat, and they ignored the gazelles the wolves had eaten from. Bar charged a gazelle that was barely alive, and grabbed it by the throat. He glanced over at Bilgee; the old man nodded. “Go ahead, eat.” The dog lowered his head and bit down hard, and the gazelle was dead. He then ripped a chunk of meat off the animal’s thigh and began to eat. The sight of the bloody kill sent the hair on Erlang’s back straight up, like a wolf, and stirred his killer instinct. Seeing a live calf near a bend in the stream not far off, he jumped into the water and swam across. Bilgee stopped Chen from calling him back. “That dog has a wild streak. If you don’t let him kill wild animals,” he said, “he’ll turn on our sheep again.”
They rode up to the stream, where Bilgee took a leather rope from his saddle and tied it into a loop. Chen removed his boots, rolled up his pant legs, and waded into the water, where he looped the rope around the neck of a gazelle. Bilgee and Uljii dragged the animal up onto the bank, where they placed it on the ground and hogtied it. Then they dragged the second gazelle out of the bloody stream, laid it out on a clean patch of grass, and selected a site for their cookout. “We’ll eat one and take the other back with us,” Bilgee said. While Uljii was slaughtering one of the gazelles, Bilgee took Chen up into the mountains to the northwest to look for firewood.