Wolf Totem: A Novel

  Feeling a tingling in his scalp, Chen was reminded of the mysterious, frightening wolf circle by the pile of dead army horses in the early spring. Created by dozens of wolves running around a dense pile of horse carcasses, it had seemed like a sort of demonic writing or spirit painting. The elders believed that it was a letter of inquiry and thanks from the wolves to Tengger. That circle was nearly perfect, and so was the one made by the cub; and in the middle of both circles was prey.

  Was it that the cub had to first thank Tengger before enjoying the fresh food?

  The cub was still running in circles. He hadn’t had fresh meat all day and was ravenously hungry. Normally the sight of bloody meat turned a hungry wolf into a frenzied one. So why would the cub act against nature and instead perform something befitting a religious devotee, managing to control his hunger to carry out a set of complicated “religious rites”? Did a primitive religion exist among wolves, one that could control their behavior via a strong spiritual power, even for a cub who had been separated from the pack before he opened his eyes?

  Finally, the cub stopped. Crouching by the prairie dog and panting, he waited until his breathing became normal before licking his lips twice. A savage flame of greed and a hungry glare shone brightly in his eyes; he quickly changed from a primitive religious accolyte into a wild and hungry wolf. He pounced on his prey and bit into it, then tossed his head and tore off half the rodent’s skin and fur, exposing the bloody mass of flesh underneath. Shaking violently all over, he tore and he ate. After swallowing the meat and bones from one side of the prairie dog, he emptied out the entrails and wolfed down everything without clearing out the acrid grass in the stomach or the excrement in the intestines.

  As he ate, his manner grew increasingly wild and excited; he made happy, rhythmic snorts that sent shivers down Chen’s spine. He was getting increasingly wild and savage in the way he devoured the rodent, treating everything equally; the flesh, the bones, the skin, the fur, the bladder, and even the bitter gallbladder were all delicacies to him. In no time, there was nothing left but the head and the short tail. But that didn’t stop him; he held the head up with his paws and bit off half of it, including the teeth. Then he finished off the other half. He didn’t even spare the hairy yet bony tail; he bit it in two, and down it went. In the end there was only a bit of blood and some urine stains left on the sandy ground. But he still was not sated, for he stared awhile at Chen before finally confirming that the young man’s hands were empty; reluctantly, he walked part way toward Chen, then lay down on the ground looking disappointed.

  Chen now knew that the cub had a fondness for grassland rodents, for they awakened his instincts and his potential, which was perhaps why the Olonbulag had had no serious damage from rodents over thousands of years.

  Love and affection for the little wolf surged in Chen’s heart. He could enjoy a good drama nearly every day; it was always lively and profound, full of instructional significance, turning him into the cub’s most loyal fan.

  While the cub stared longingly at the puppies gnawing on bones, Chen went into the yurt to skin the marmot. He cut out the head and neck area that had been bitten through by the dogs, and put the pieces in a basin to serve as the cub’s dinner. He then chopped up the meat. It half filled the pot and would make a fine meal for three.

  In the evening the cub sat sedately in his sandy pan, facing west to watch anxiously as half of the setting sun slowly disappeared. As soon as the dying sun left only a few specks of light on the grassy hilltop, he as the dying sun left only a few specks of light on the grassy hilltop, he whipped around to face the yurt door and made a series of odd movements, like beating a drum or pouncing on food or executing somersaults and backflips. Then he clanged his chain to remind Chen or Yang that it was time for his walk.

  Chen ate some of the meat before the others returned so that he could take the cub for a walk, followed by Erlang and Yellow. This semifree time at dusk was the happiest moment of the cub’s day, even more eagerly anticipated than mealtime. But walking a wolf was not the same as walking a wolfhound. It was the most enjoyable yet the most exhausting and difficult labor of the day for Chen.

  With his ferocious appetite, the cub had grown much larger and a head longer than a dog of the same age and he weighed half again as much as a puppy. He had shed his fetal hair, which had been replaced by shiny gray-yellow fur. The row of dark mane on his back stood long and straight, nearly the same as on a big wild wolf. His once round head had flattened out, and white spots appeared amid the fur. His face had also elongated, with a moist tip on a nose that looked like a rubber bottle cap, hard and tough. Chen liked to pinch that nose, which made the cub sneeze; it was the cub’s least favorite sign of affection. His ears had grown hard and long, like pointed spoons. From a distance, he looked like a wild wolf.

  His eyes were the most fearsome and yet the most fascinating part of his face. They were round, but slanted upward and outward, and were more striking than the eyes painted on the face of a Beijing Opera performer. The inner corners of his eyes slanted downward to form a dark tear-duct line, giving them an especially eerie appearance.

  The cub’s eyebrows were a light gray-yellow mass of fur, not particularly effective in showing anger. For that, the eyes held the key. Most terrifying were the furrows that formed alongside his nose when he was angry.

  The cub’s eyes differed fundamentally from those of humans or other animals. The “whites” were more an amber yellow, which, Chen felt, had a penetrating power over human and animal psychology. The cub had small irises, dark and forbidding, like the tiny opening in the blowpipe used by the black man in one of Sherlock Holmes’s stories. When the cub was angry, Chen dared not look him in the eye.

  After the cub had gotten used to him, Chen could take advantage of his happy moments by grabbing his ears and holding his face. He’d been reading that face for more than a hundred days, and he knew it well. He often saw a fetching smile, but there were other times when what he saw scared him. The eyes alone could send chills down his spine, and he was scared witless when the cub exposed the four sharp fangs that were more lethal than those of a cobra. He frequently opened the cub’s mouth and rapped his fingers against the fangs. They were strong and tough, the tips sharper than an awl. The enamel was much harder than that on the teeth of humans. Tengger had favored the wolves by giving them such a powerful yet handsome face, with all its terrifying weapons.

  Over a period of weeks, the cub’s strength had increased much faster than his body weight. Chen was no longer walking the wolf; he himself was being dragged along. The moment he left the pen, the cub pulled Chen toward the grassy slope like an ox pulling a cart. Chen and Yang would run to help the cub build up strength in his legs and hone his skill at running. The cub would use all his might to drag them along when they were too tired to run any longer, sometimes for an hour or more.

  Chen Zhen’s hand hurt, his arm ached, and he sweated profusely. The air was noticeably thinner here than in Beijing, and the cub often made him run so much that Chen’s face paled and his legs cramped. In the beginning, he’d planned to run with the cub to toughen himself up. But he lost his confidence once the cub’s potential for long-distance running exploded; even the fastest Mongol horses cannot keep up with running wolves. Chen and Yang began to worry about how they’d manage to “walk” the cub once he grew to adulthood. If they weren’t careful, he might drag them into the middle of a wolf pack one day.

  Sometimes the cub flipped Chen or Yang onto the ground, to the sheer delight of women and children in their yurts. Though they disapproved of raising the wolf, they enjoyed watching the Beijing students walk the cub, waiting for Tengger to punish them for their “scientific experiment.”

  A middle-aged herdsman who knew a bit of Russian once said to Chen, “Humans cannot tame wolves, nor can science.”

  Chen defended himself by saying he just wanted to observe and study the cub and had no intention of taming him. But no one would listen to him.
His idea of mating the wolf with a hound had spread across the pasture and, like the story of the cub flipping the young men to the ground, was a joke shared by herdsmen. They said they’d wait to hear about the wolf devouring a bitch.

  The cub ran happily, dragging Chen, who was panting hard, trying to keep up. At first the cub had run aimlessly, but in recent days he’d begun dragging Chen to the northwest, where the nocturnal wolf howls had been concentrated. His curiosity aroused, Chen let the cub lead him where he wanted to go. They passed through a ravine and arrived at a gentle slope; it was the farthest they’d ever gone.

  Chen saw that they were three or four li away from the yurt, which worried him a bit. But, with the protection of the two dogs and his club, he decided not to force the cub to turn back. They ran for another half li or so before the cub slowed down to sniff at everything around him: a pile of cow dung, a small mound, a piece of white bone, a clump of grass, a rock, anything that lay on the ground. He sniffed his way to a clump of cogon grass and, all of a sudden, the hair on his back stood up like quills. His eyes lit up in surprise and joy, while he continued to sniff at the clump of grass as if wanting to bury his head in it. Then he looked up and howled at the setting sun. It was a sad, dreary moan, not the excited, happy howl of the past. Maybe he was complaining to his kin about his life in prison, Chen thought.

  Erlang and Yellow sniffed at the grass, and the hair on their backs also stood up. As they pawed at the soil and barked frantically, it dawned on Chen that the cub and the dogs had detected the smell of wolf urine. He parted the grass with his shoe. Several stalks of grass were yellowed at the bottom. A pungent odor assaulted his nose, making him nervous; this was fresh urine, which meant that the wolves were still hanging around the camp.

  The setting sun shrouded the slope in a dark green shadow. A gentle wind blew over the undulating grass, making it seem like the backs of a pack of wolves. Chen shuddered, fearing an ambush. Just then, the cub raised his leg to urinate.

  The mother wolf clearly missed her cub, and now he had learned how to send her a message. If he made contact with her, the consequences would be unimaginable. Without a second thought, Chen flipped the cub backward. Having his desire and his plan to find his mother interrupted, the cub glared and crouched down before exploding forward and leaping at Chen like a true wild animal.

  Chen backed away instinctively, but he tripped and fell by the clump of grass. The cub bit him savagely on his calf. Chen cried out as a searing pain and a sense of terror coursed through his body. The fangs had bitten through his pants and sunk into the flesh. He quickly sat up and pushed his club against the tip of the cub’s nose. But the cub had gone wild; he would not let go, as if the only thing that would please him would be to take a chunk out of Chen’s leg.

  The dogs were stunned, but they sprang into action. Yellow grabbed the cub by the nape of his neck and tried to drag him away, while Erlang barked menacingly at him. The thunderous bark finally shocked the cub into letting go.

  Chen nearly collapsed from fright. He saw his blood on the cub’s teeth. Erlang and Yellow were still restraining the young wolf, so Chen grabbed him by the neck and held him tightly in his arms, where the cub continued to struggle and growl, eyes glaring, fangs bared.

  Chen yelled at the dogs until they stopped barking. The cub stopped struggling. As Chen loosened his grip, the cub shook himself and backed away, glaring at Chen, the hair on his back still standing straight up. Chen was both angry and scared. “Little Wolf,” he said breathlessly, “have you gone blind? How dare you bite me?” The familiar voice finally brought the cub back from his bestial madness. He cocked his head to study the man before him, as if slowly recognizing who Chen was. There wasn’t a hint of apology in his eyes.

  Chen’s wound was bleeding, the blood seeping into his shoe. Scrambling to his feet, he plunged his club into a rodent hole and looped the iron ring on the chain through this temporary post. Afraid that the sight of blood would give the cub the wrong idea, he took a few steps and turned around before sitting down to take off his shoe and roll up his pant leg. There were four tiny punctures in his calf. Luckily, the pant fabric, which was like canvas, had taken most of the force of the bite, so the wounds weren’t deep. Chen pressed the skin around the wounds to release clean blood and clear out the toxins, a trick he’d learned from the herdsmen. After squeezing out about half a syringe of blood, he tore off a strip of his shirt to wrap around the wound.

  Chen stood up again, took the chain, and pointed the cub’s head in the direction of the yurt. Signaling the cooking smoke rising out of the yurt, he shouted, “Little Wolf, Little Wolf, time to eat. Drink some water.” He and Yang had figured out that that was the only way to get the cub to return after each walk. When he heard food and water, he drooled and, forgetting what had just happened, dragged Chen toward home.

  The cub ran to his bowl, eagerly awaiting his food and water, so Chen looped the iron ring over the post and buttoned the cap, then gave the marmot’s neck and half a basin of clean water to the cub, who ignored the neck and instead buried his face in the basin of water and gulped it down. In order to ensure that he’d return willingly each time after the walk, they’d stopped giving him water all day before walking him. After running until he was famished and parched, he’d drag them back at the mere mention of water.

  Chen went into the yurt to tend to his injury. The sight of the wounds so alarmed Gao Jianzhong that he made Chen promise to go get a shot. Not wanting to risk infection, Chen rode over to the students’ yurt in Section Three, where he asked the barefoot doctor, Little Peng, to give him a rabies shot, apply some salve, and bandage the wounds, while begging him not to tell anyone about the bite, for which he’d let Peng keep a book he’d borrowed and lend him two more, a biography of Napoleon and Balzac’s Père Goriot.

  Peng agreed, though not without some grumbling. “The Brigade office clinic only gives me three or four vials of antirabies serum at a time,” he said. “I’ve already used up two on laborers who were bitten by herders’ dogs, so now I have to go back there on a hot day.”

  Chen appeased the man, though he was barely aware of what he was saying; all he could think about now was how he was going to keep the cub. It had finally bitten him and, according to the laws of the grassland, even a dog was killed if it bit a sheep and was beaten to death on the spot if it bit a person. With a wolf cub that had bitten a human, there’d be no way out. Raising a wolf was already “violating the laws of nature,” and now its survival was threatened. Oblivious of his injury, Chen got back on the horse, slapping his own head on the way home, wishing he could dream up a way to save the cub.

  Back at the yurt, he heard Yang and Gao arguing about how to deal with a cub that had begun biting people. “What an animal!” Gao shouted. “If he’ll go after Chen Zhen, who won’t he attack? We have to kill him. What if he bites someone else? In the fall, when we move to a new pasture, the sections will be so far apart I don’t know how anyone could manage to get a rabies shot. A wolf bite is worse than a dog bite. You can die from it.”

  Yang Ke said softly, “I’m afraid the brigade won’t give us any more vaccine. It’s so precious they keep it for people who are bitten by a wolf or a dog on the job. What I’m thinking is, we set the cub free as soon as possible. Otherwise, they’ll send someone to kill him.”

  “You’re talking about setting free a wolf that’s already bitten someone? How dense can you be? It won’t work, not now.”

  Chen knew what he had to do. He clenched his teeth and said, “I’ve made up my mind. We won’t kill him and we won’t set him free. If we kill him, my wounds would all be for nothing and our efforts over these months would be wasted. And setting him free would be a death sentence. Even if he returned to the pack, the wolves would treat him as an outsider or a ‘traitor wolf.’ How would he survive then?”

  “Then what do we do?” Yang said with a dark look.

  “All we can do now is perform tooth surgery. We snip off the tips
of his teeth, a wolf’s most lethal weapon. He’ll still be able to bite, but he won’t draw blood and there’ll be no need for rabies shots. We can cut the meat into small pieces to feed him.”

  Yang shook his head. “It’s doable, but that’s a death sentence too. A wolf without fangs can’t survive out here.”

  “It’s the only thing I can think of. In any case, I say we don’t stop just because I got bitten. Maybe the tips will grow back. For now they’re a threat to us.”

  The following morning, Chen and Yang performed the surgery on the cub before taking their sheep out to graze. After giving him plenty of food to make him happy, Yang grabbed him by the back of his head and forced open his mouth with his thumbs. The cub was used to such antics, and didn’t mind them a bit. Facing the sun, they took a close look into the cub’s mouth. The fangs were slightly transparent and the root visible. They could see they wouldn’t damage the roots if they just clipped off the tips. He could keep his canines, which might be sharp again before long.

  Chen let the cub sniff and play with the clippers for a while so as not to fear them. Then Yang forced open his mouth, and Chen quickly and carefully snipped off the tips of the fangs, about a quarter length of each tooth. Thinking that clipping off the cub’s canines would be as hard as pulling a tiger’s teeth, they’d been prepared to tie the cub up and battle him over the forced surgery. The whole process took less than a minute, with no injury to anyone. The cub licked at the broken surfaces, seemingly unaware of what he had lost. They set him down gently. They wanted to give him something good to eat but decided not to for fear of hurting him.