Mongolian wolves are brilliant fighters on a snowy field, fully cognizant of the limits of battle. They will ignore gazelles out in the deeper snow, those lying on top and those sunken beneath the surface. There wasn’t a single track from a probe outside the safe zone. The animals dragged out of the snow could have fed several large wolf packs; the ignored frozen carcasses were the wolf pack’s guaranteed fresh food, for they would keep till the spring thaw, when the wolves would return for more tasty meals. This enormous snowdrift and snow lake was a wolf pack’s natural cold storage. Old Bilgee said, “There’s ice and snow storage for wolves all over Olonbulag. This is just the biggest one. The wolves often store their kills in places like this to keep from starving the following year. The meat of these frozen gazelles is life-saving food for wolves that grow lean in the spring and have a lot more stored-up fat than the live, and very thin, gazelles.” The old man pointed to one of the holes and said with a laugh, “Wolves out here really know how to live. We’re no match. As winter sets in each year, herdsmen slaughter their cows and sheep before they start losing their autumn fat and then they store the meat, which will take them through the winter. They learned that from wolves.”
When Bar and the other dogs spotted live gazelles, their hunting instincts kicked in and they ran toward them. But when they reached the spot where the wolves’ paw prints ended, they stopped. Denied the kill, they stretched out their necks and barked madly in the direction of the gazelles. Some of the targets were so frightened that they broke for the snow lake. But before they’d gotten far, the crust gave way and they sank into the quicksand-like snow, struggling briefly before disappearing from sight. The snow above them shifted like sand in an hourglass, until it formed a funnel. One of the animals broke through the crust, thrusting out its front legs and supporting the front half of its body while the rear half sank into the snow. Half a life was saved-for the moment.
The team dug a path to allow the carts down off the ridge, and when the lead cart reached a point where it could go no farther, a line of carts stretched out behind it. The men got out and shoveled away the snow around them so that they could unload the carts.
The men walked up to Bilgee. “All of you, see how the snow off to the west has frozen solid?” he said. “There aren’t many holes there, but there are a lot of gazelle droppings and tracks, and that means that many got away.”
The sheepherder Sanjai said with a laugh, “I can see that wolves miscalculate sometimes too. If the alpha male had sent four or five wolves over here to close off this route, those gazelles wouldn’t have gotten away so easily.”
“If you were the alpha male,” Bilgee snorted, “you’d starve to death. If you kill off all the gazelles at one time, what will you eat the following year? Wolves aren’t greedy like humans. They know how to figure things out, big things!”
“There are too many gazelles this year,” Sanjai said. “You could kill a thousand more and still have plenty left. I want to get my hands on enough money to build a new yurt and get married.”
The old man glared at him. “When your sons and grandsons get married and the gazelles are gone, then what? You young people are getting more like those outsiders all the time.”
Seeing that the women had unloaded the carts and dug paths to the deep snow by clearing out troughs the wolves had made when dragging the gazelle carcasses through the snow, and that they’d also built up a snowbank, Bilgee looked skyward and chanted something. Chen Zhen guessed that he was asking Tengger for permission to go out in the snow and bring up the dead gazelles.
The old man closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again and said, “There are plenty of frozen gazelles at the bottom of the snow, so don’t get greedy. When you’re out there, first free the surviving animals, all of them, before coming back to dig out the frozen ones. Tengger didn’t want those animals to die, so we must save them.” He lowered his head and said to Chen Zhen and Yang Ke, “When Genghis Khan finished an encirclement hunt, he let a small number of animals go. The Mongols have fought like that for centuries, and the reason we can have these hunts year after year is that, like the wolves, we don’t kill off all the prey.”
Bilgee assigned gazelle collection sectors to each family, then let them go off and work on their own. Everyone followed hunting custom by leaving the nearest and most plentiful holes for the students and for Bilgee, who led Chen and Yang over to his cart, where they unloaded two large rolls of felt, each about two yards wide and four yards long. They appeared to have been sprayed with water beforehand, for they were frozen stiff. Chen and Yang each dragged one along the cleared path, while Bilgee carried a long birch club, tipped with a metal hook. Batu and Gasmai also carried large rolls of felt to the deep snow; little Bayar walked behind his parents with a hook over his shoulder.
After they reached the edge of the deep snow, Bilgee had Chen and Yang spread one of the rolls of felt over the crusty snow, then asked Yang, the heavier of the two, to see if it could sustain his weight. It was like a gigantic skateboard. Yang stepped onto the felt, drawing crunching sounds from the snow under it, but no signs of danger. He jumped up and down. The felt sank beneath his feet slightly but not perilously. The old man quickly made him stop. “Don’t do that when we’re out on the deep snow. If you break through the felt, you’ll become a frozen gazelle yourself, and that’s no joke. Now then, Chen Zhen is lighter than you, so I’ll go dig out a couple of gazelles with him. After that, you two can go out on your own.”
Yang jumped off and helped the old man onto the felt. Chen followed. The felt easily withstood the weight of the two men and looked as if it would hold up under the added weight of a couple of gazelles. Once they were steady, they dragged up the second roll of felt and laid it out in front of the one they were standing on. They squared the two pieces and then stepped onto the second piece. After laying down the hooked pole, they repeated the process, moving the first piece out in front of the second. This they did over and over, as if piloting a pair of felt boats, gliding toward a living gazelle.
At last, Chen Zhen was aboard one of those marvelous creations, which grassland inhabitants had devised to transport themselves across the snow and avoid calamitous blizzards. Countless Mongol herdsmen had ridden these boats over the millennia, escaping the snowy abyss and rescuing vast numbers of sheep and dogs. It had also allowed them to drag out victims of hunts by wolves and humans and to claim spoils of war abandoned on snow lakes. Rather than keeping this Mongol secret from an outsider, Bilgee was teaching the Beijing student how to use it. Chen Zhen thus had the good fortune to be the first Han Chinese to actually navigate one of those ancient, primitive boats.
From time to time, as the felt boat picked up speed, the crusty snow beneath them cracked and crunched, and Chen felt as if he were riding on a magic carpet, gliding across the snowy whiteness below, trembling with fear, excited by a sense of danger, floating like an immortal, and immensely grateful to the wolves and human inhabitants of the grassland for introducing him to an almost mythical sort of primitive life. Eight felt boats, sixteen flying carpets, converged on the snow lake as if chasing one another, raising clouds of powdery snow and sprays of ice. Dogs barked, people shouted, Tengger smiled. Suddenly a heavy cloud passed overhead, sending the temperature plummeting. Snow that had begun to melt was immediately transformed into brittle ice, which hardened the crusty surface and tripled the degree of safety in retrieving gazelles, with no need to change tactics. The men took off their sunglasses, opened their eyes wide, and looked up into the sky. “Tengger! ” they shouted joyfully. “Tengger!” Now the boats picked up speed, their pilots emboldened, and at that moment Chen actually sensed the existence of the Mongols’ eternal Tengger, which once more caressed his soul.