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.
At that instant, Chen Zhen believed he saw his very own wolf totem.
Epilogue
Early in the second spring after the wolves disappeared from the Olonbulag, the Inner Mongolian Production and Construction Corps sent down an order to reduce the number of dogs so that they could save the precious sheep and cows to supply the agricultural units in need of meat. The first unfortunate victims were the puppies. Nearly all the newborn puppies were tossed and sent to Tengger, and sad wails from the bitches could be heard everywhere on the grassland. Sometimes the mother dogs were seen digging up puppies their owners had buried behind their backs; they would often run around in circles holding the puppies in their mouths. The women wailed; the men shed silent tears. The big dogs were getting thinner by the day.
About six months later, someone in a corps truck shot and killed Erlang after he’d left the yurt and was wrapped in his own thoughts out in the grass. The killer took his body. Outraged, Chen and the other three students ran to the corps headquarters, but no culprit was found. The newly arrived Chinese, united behind the issue of eating dogs, hid the killer as if shielding a hero who was being pursued by an alien race.
Four years later, one early morning during a white-hair blizzard, an old man and a middle-aged man rode alongside an oxcart heading to the border highway; on the cart lay Bilgee’s body. Two of the three sky-burial grounds had already been abandoned, as some of the herdsmen had adopted the Han custom of underground burial. The old man insisted on being sent to a place where wolves might still roam, so two of his cousins took his body to the no-man’s-land north of the border highway.
The younger cousin said, “The wolves up north howled all night, and didn’t stop till daybreak.”
Chen Zhen, Yang Ke, and Zhang Jiyuan believed that Bilgee had suffered more than most but that he was also the luckiest, the last Mongol to have a sky burial and return to Tengger.
Not long after that, Chen, Yang, and Gao were assigned to company headquarters, where Yang became a grammar school teacher, Gao was sent to drive tractors, and Chen worked as a storehouse guard. Zhang Jiyuan was the only one left, kept on as a horse herder.
They left Yir and her puppies with Batu, while the loyal Yellow followed Chen. But every time Gasmai came with her oxcart and dogs, Yellow had a great time with his family and followed the carts back to the herding team. No one could stop him, and he would return to Chen only after spending a few days back home. He’d return no matter how far the herding section moved, even from a hundred li away; but he always looked unhappy on his arrival. Chen was worried that something might happen to Yellow on the way, but his worries vanished when the dog showed up again. He wouldn’t deprive Yellow of the pleasure and freedom of being with his grassland family. A year later, however, Yellow was “lost.” The grassland people knew that their dogs would never get lost or be eaten by wolves, since there were no more wolves; even if there had been, a wolf pack would never kill a lone dog. Yellow could only have been killed by people, people who did not belong to the grassland.
Chen and Yang were back in a place inhabited mostly by Chinese, living a settled life. Most of the people around them were professional soldiers and their families from all parts of China, as well as soldiers from the Student Army Corps from Tianjing and Tangshan. But emotionally, they knew they could never live a purely Han-style life. After work and study sessions, they often climbed a small hill nearby, where they could gaze into the distance at Tengger in the northwest, searching for traces of the cub and Bilgee in the blindingly bright, towering clouds.
In 1975, the Inner Mongolian Production and Construction Corps was formally disbanded, but the Majuzi River area, with its lush grass and abundant water, had already been turned into a desert by farming. Most of the workers—along with their concepts and lifestyle, as well as their houses, machines, vehicles, and tractors—remained. The Olonbulag regressed by the year, and a sheep killed by a wolf would be a topic of discussion for days, whereas more and more horses were stepping in mouse holes, injuring themselves and their riders.
A few years later, before Chen Zhen returned to Beijing to take the graduate school entrance exam, he borrowed a horse to say good-bye to Batu and his family. Then he made a special trip to visit the ancient den where the cub had been born. The den was still dark, deep, and solid, but spiderwebs covered the entrance and a pair of slender green grasshoppers were struggling to free themselves. Chen pushed the grass aside to look in and detected an earthy smell, not the pungent, acrid odor of wolves. Tall grass grew on the land outside the cave where the seven cubs had played and sunned themselves. Chen sat by the cave for a long time, but there was no wolf cub, no hunting dogs, not even a puppy with him.
In the thirtieth summer after the Beijing students had been sent down to the Olonbulag, Chen Zhen and Yang Ke left the capital in a blue Jeep Cherokee on their way to the grassland.
Upon graduating from the Academy of Social Sciences, Chen had joined a national affairs institute at a university where he conducted research on system reform. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in law, Yang went on to get a master’s degree and was given a license to practice law. By this time he was the founder of a highly regarded Beijing law firm.
The two old friends, now in their fifties, had never stopped thinking about the grassland but had been afraid to return. At the thirty-year mark, an important anniversary in the life of a Chinese, they decided to go back to see their friends, to the Great Ujimchin Steppe they’d been afraid to visit, and the old wolf cave at the foot of Black Rock Mountain.
The sky was still a clear blue when the Jeep entered Inner Mongolia, but anyone who had spent a long time there knew that Tengger was not the same. The sky was dry and cloudless; the Tengger of the grassland was now the Tengger of the desert. Under the dry hot sky, no dense green grass was visible; large patches of hard sandy soil filled the spaces between sparse, dry yellow grassland, as if giant sheets of sandpaper had been spread out across the ground.
On a highway, half covered with dry sand, caravans of trucks equipped with iron cages to transport sheep and cows rumbled toward them, trailing thick columns of yellow dust as they made their way to China proper. They hardly saw a yurt or a herd of horses or cows along the way; every once in a while they spotted a flock of sheep, but they were small and t
hin, with dirty, tangled black wool. Even the “processed” sheep looked better than those. The two friends nearly gave up on the trip, not wanting the moist, lush grassland in their hearts to be replaced by dry dust.
Yang pulled over and stopped, and, as he brushed the dust off of his body, said to Chen, “I’ve been so busy over the past decade I haven’t had time to come back. Now that the people in my firm can work independently, I’ve finally found some time, but to be honest, I’m scared about seeing the grassland. Zhang Jiyuan came for a visit this past spring and told me about the desertification. So I’ve had plenty of time to prepare myself emotionally. But I’m afraid it will be worse than I imagined.”
Chen patted the steering wheel. “Why don’t I take over? It’s barely been twenty years since Papa died, and we’re already seeing the bad end he predicted. We really should pay our respects to him, and, besides, Little Wolf’s cave will be filled up by sand if we wait a few more years. That cave is the only remaining relic left by wolves that dominated the grassland for thousands of years.”
“I miss Uljii too,” Chen added. “I’d really like to see him again so I could ask about the wolves and the grassland. But unfortunately he felt so bad about the grassland that he left after retirement and now lives in the city with his daughter, where he’s recovering from some illness. Since China doesn’t have a competitive, scientific, and democratic system for selecting top talent, honest and frank people are denied a chance to rise up. Uljii, a rare expert on wolves and grassland, was buried under the yellow sand of our current system, which is far worse than the yellow sand of the grassland, because the system was the true origin of the dust storm there.”