Zhang laughed. “That’s right. I remember you said that all the grassland tribes that waged war here, from the Quanrong, the Huns, the Tungus, and the Turks, down to the present-day Mongols, understood the secrets and value of wolves. That’s making more and more sense to me. The wolves have given the Mongols their ferocious combat nature, the wisdom of sophisticated warfare, and the best warhorses. These three military advantages led to their stunning conquests.”
As he kneaded the dough, Chen continued, “You’ve made an important discovery, figuring out how wolves have trained the battle-savvy Mongol horses. I used to think that the wolf totem was the sole reason why the Mongols were so brave and fierce, as well as wise in military strategy. I didn’t realize that wolves were their unwitting trainers, drilling world-class army horses for the Mongol hordes. Such formidable horses were like wings for people who already possessed exceptional character and wisdom. I’m impressed! You haven’t wasted your time out there.”
Zhang smiled. “I owe it all to the influence of a true wolf fan. Over the past couple of years, you’ve shared what you learned from history books, so I’m obligated to repay you with some living knowledge.”
Chen laughed. “That’s a fair trade. But one thing I’m still not clear on. Exactly how do the wolves kill the foals?”
“They have many ways. I’m always on edge when we take the horses to a spot where the grass is high or the layout of the land is complex. Wolves can crawl like lizards. Without looking up, they can locate their prey by smell and sound. The mares often call out to their foals, softly, which helps a wolf determine the location of the foals as they inch closer. If a stud horse isn’t around, the wolf will pounce on a foal and bite through its neck before dragging it away to finish it off in a secluded spot. But it will quickly run away if discovered by the mare or the stud horse, then come back to finish the foal off after the herd leaves, since the herd cannot take the dead foal with it.
“The most cunning wolves are especially good at tricking the foals. When a wolf finds a mare by a foal’s side, it’ll crawl over to where the grass is tall and lie on its back, hiding in the grass and sticking out its paws, waving them back and forth. From a distance, they look like the ears of a wild rabbit or some other animal looking around, but nothing like a dog or a wolf. The newborn foals are naturally curious, and they’ll run over to check out anything smaller than they are. The wolf will snap the foal’s neck before the mare can stop it from leaving her side.”
“Sometimes I feel that wolves are demons, not animals,” Chen said.
Zhang agreed. “You’re right, they are. Just think, the horses are spread out during the day, making it hard for us to be sure that everything is okay, even though we stay with the horses. Come nighttime, the wolves run wild; they steal and snatch at will. If they can’t do either, then they attack as a pack. The stud horses will keep the mares and foals safe inside the herd while fending off the wolves with their hooves and teeth. It’s hard for an average-sized pack of wolves to break through the united line of defense of a dozen big stud horses. But when the weather is bad and the wolves are driven by hunger, the stud horses are powerless. That’s when we’re expected to protect the herd with lights and rifles. If we fail, the wolves will get into the herd and kill the foals. By this time the wolf cubs are grown and the demand for food increases dramatically. If they can’t catch gazelles or marmots, they turn their attention to the foals.”
“How many are lost each year?”
Zhang paused for a thoughtful moment. “Last year the herd Batu and I watch had over a hundred and ten foals, but we only have about forty left this summer. Seventy were killed or eaten by wolves. That’s a sixty percent loss, but it was actually the best record in the brigade. Section Four only has about a dozen left from last year, an eighty percent loss. I asked Uljii once about the average loss in the whole pasture each year, and he said it’s usually about seventy percent.”
“That’s a high mortality rate. No wonder horse herders hate the wolves with such passion.”
Chen fell silent as he started to make wrappings.
Zhang washed his hands to help Chen make the buns. “But we can’t do without them,” he continued, “no matter how tired we are or how hard the work is. Batu says that the quality of the horses would drop without the wolves, that they’d get fat and lazy, unable to run. Mongol horses are short to begin with, and they wouldn’t command a good price without speed and stamina, since the military wouldn’t use them as warhorses. Also, the herd would grow too fast without wolves. Just think, a herd can have over a hundred foals each year, a twenty or thirty percent growth if most of them survived. Each year there would be new mares ready to give birth, which means the growth rate would be even higher. The number of horses in a herd would double after three or four years. Under normal circumstances, we only sell four- or five-year-old horses and keep the younger ones. Uljii says that except for rodents and rabbits, horses do more damage to the pasture than any other animal. A Mongol horse can consume enough grass to feed several cows, even a hundred sheep. The herdsmen complain that horses are taking the grass away from the sheep. If we didn’t control the growth of the horse herd, in a few years the cows and sheep would have no grass and the Olonbulag would become a desert.”
Chen hit the chopping board with his rolling pin and said, “So the herders use the wolves to conduct birth control for the horses, while raising or maintaining their quality, is that it?”
“Yes. The grasslanders are the best practitioners of dialectic materialism and are good at ‘the middle way,’ unlike the Han Chinese, who prefer extremes. We promote the east wind overpowering the west wind, or vice versa. But here they’re experts in making use of contradictions to strike a balance while achieving two goals with one action.”
“But this kind of controlled balance is cruel,” Chen replied. “In the spring the horse herders raid wolf dens, taking and killing a hundred, even two hundred cubs, without completely killing them off. In the summer, the tables are turned; the wolves start killing foals, taking seventy or eighty percent of them, since you herders won’t allow them to take all the babies. The price of this controlled balance is blood flowing like a river. It requires the herders to be forever vigilant, always ready for combat. This sort of ‘middle way’ is more combative and more real than the Han Chinese ’middle ground.’ ”
Zhang said, “These days, all the officials are from farming areas. They know nothing about life on the grassland. All they care about is quantity, quantity, quantity. In the end, they’ll lose everything by being single-minded. No more wolves, no more demand for the Mongol horses, nothing but yellow sand rolling over the Inner Mongolian grassland; the cows and sheep will die of starvation, and we’ll all go back to Beijing.”
“You wish. Historically, Beijing has been taken more than once by Mongol armies, who then made it their capital. The city can’t even hold back the horses, so how can it stand up against the sand, a new yellow peril that is thousands of times more powerful?”
“We can’t do anything about that,” Zhang replied. “Millions of peasants keep having babies and reclaiming the land. The population equal to an entire province is born every year. Who can stop all those people from coming to the grassland?”
Chen sighed. “No one, which is why I worry.”
Zhang added, “I have a soft spot in my heart for the Quanrong and the Huns, both outstanding races. They were the ones who created the wolf totem, a tradition that has existed ever since.”
“The wolf totem has a much longer history than Han Confucianism, ” said Chen, “with greater natural continuity and vitality. In the Confucian thought system, the main ideas, such as the three cardinal guides and the five constant virtues, are outdated and decayed, but the central spirit of the wolf totem remains vibrant and young, since it’s been passed down by the most advanced races in the world. It should be considered one of the truly valuable spiritual heritages of all humanity. There’d be hope for China if our national character could be rebuilt by cutting away the decaying parts of Confucianism and grafting a wolf totem sapling onto it. It could be combined with such Confucian traditions as pacifism, an emphasis on education, and devotion to study. It’s a shame the wolf totem is a spiritual system with a scant written record. The fatal weakness of the grassland race is its backwardness in written culture. Chinese Confucian scholars and historians were not interested in recording the culture of the wolf totem, even though they were in contact with grassland races for thousands of years. I wonder if Confucian scholars, who hated wolves with a passion, intentionally deleted everything related to wolves from the history books. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack to read anything about wolf totems in Chinese history books. The books we brought don’t help, so we’ll have to try to find more when we’re back home.”