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.