The vehicles screeched to a stop about three or four yards away. Bao leaped off with his rifle; seeing that the wolf wasn’t moving, he fixed his bayonet and walked up to it. It was quaking, its eyes unfocused. It remained motionless as Bao walked up, so he stabbed at its mouth, still getting no reaction. He laughed. “We’ve chased it stupid.” Then he reached out to rub the wolf’s head, like petting a dog.
Bao may well have been the first man in thousands of years who dared to touch the head of a living wolf sitting in the wild. The wolf crumpled to the ground as Bao’s hand moved toward its ears.
Chen Zhen returned home feeling like a sinner, finding it difficult to enter the yurt. He hesitated before finally walking inside, where he found Zhang Jiyuan talking angrily to Yang Ke and Gao Jianzhong he found Zhang Jiyuan talking angrily to Yang Ke and Gao Jianzhong about the brigade’s wolf extermination campaign. "Everyone’s gone mad about killing. The hunters and workers use trucks and cars, given all the gasoline and ammunition they need. Even the doctors have joined in. They inject an odorless and colorless poison into the bone marrow of dead sheep that they then tossed into the wild. I have no idea how many wolves they’ve poisoned. The worst are the corps’ road repair crews. They use any weapon they can find. They even found a way to insert explosives into sheep bones, smear them with sheep fat, and then leave them at places frequented by wolves. The rigged bones blow wolves’ heads off when they bite down. The workers have put the sheep-bone bombs everywhere. They’ve already killed several of the herdsmen’s dogs. The wolves have fallen into the abyss of the people’s battle. Everywhere people are singing, ‘Kill the wolves! Generation after generation, we won’t stop fighting until all the jackals are dead.’ I hear that the herdsmen have lodged a complaint with the military district.”
“The workers in our team have also joined the fray,” Gao said. “They killed five or six big wolves. These herdsmen-turned-farmers are even better at killing wolves; it cost me two bottles of liquor to find out how they do it. They use wolf traps, but they’re much sneakier than the herders. The herders leave traps near dead sheep, and after a while the wolves figure it out. They’re cautious with dead sheep in the wild; they won’t touch them until the alpha male, with its sharp nose, sniffs and digs out the trap. But the workers do it differently. They set traps at places where there are lots of wolves, with no dead sheep or bones, on level ground. Guess what they use for bait? You couldn’t guess in a million years. They soak horse dung in melted sheep fat and dry it. Then they break it into small pieces and spread it around the traps. That’s their bait. When a wolf passes by, it’ll smell the sheep fat, but it won’t be on guard since there are no dead sheep or bones. It sniffs around, and sooner or later it’s caught. How cruel is that! Old Wang said that’s how they killed all the wolves in his hometown.”
Unable to bear any more, Chen went out and walked to the wolf pen, where he called softly to the cub, who had obviously missed him that day. He was waiting for Chen at the edge of the pen, his tail standing straight. Chen crouched down and held the cub for a long time, his face touching the cub’s head. The moon seemed cold on this frosty autumn night; the wolves’ tremulous howls were distant memories on the new pasture. Chen no longer worried about the mother wolves coming for the cub; now he wished they’d come and take him north across the border.
He heard footsteps behind him; it was Yang Ke, who said, “Lamjav said he saw the White Wolf King leading a pack of wolves across the border before the corps could react. I don’t think he’ll ever return to the Olonbulag.”
Chen couldn’t sleep that night.
33
You can tame a bear, a tiger, a lion, or an elephant, but you cannot tame a Mongolian wolf.
The cub would rather be strangled than move to a new place. The brigade’s cows and sheep left soon after dawn and the caravan of transport wagons, separated into sections, crossed a western mountain ridge on their way to the autumn pastureland. Those from the Section Two students’ yurt, with their six heavy oxcarts, had not yet started out, even though Bilgee and Gasmai had sent people twice to tell them to get on the road.
Zhang Jiyuan took time off to help them move, but he and Chen Zhen were helpless in dealing with the fiercely stubborn cub. Chen never dreamed that they would fail in the move after weathering so many storms with the cub over the past six months.
The little wolf had been a recently weaned cub no more than a foot long when they’d put him in a wooden box used for dry cow patties to move from the spring pasture. After a summer of voracious eating, he’d grown into a midsized wolf. They didn’t have a cage big enough for him now, and, even if they had, Chen would not have been able to put him in it; besides, there wouldn’t have been space. There weren’t enough carts to begin with. All six carts were seriously overloaded (the students’ books alone filled one cart) and ran the risk of overturning or breaking down on the long trek. Weather was the determining factor in choosing a date for the move; the brigade wanted to avoid the coming rains. Chen was in a tough spot.
Sweat beaded Zhang Jiyuan’s forehead. “What have you been doing all this time?” he grumbled. “You should have trained the wolf to walk with you.”
“How do you know I didn’t try?” Chen fired back. “I could drag him along when he was small, but that couldn’t last forever. All summer long he pulled me where he wanted to go, and if I tried to assert myself, he threatened to bite me. Wolves aren’t dogs; they’d rather die than change. Have you ever seen a wolf perform in a circus like a tiger or a lion? No animal trainer could manage that. You’ve been around more wolves than I have, you ought to know that.”
Zhang clenched his teeth and said, “I’ll try again. If it doesn’t work this time, we’re going to have to do something drastic.” He walked up to the cub, herding club in hand, and took the iron ring from Chen. As soon as began to pull on the chain, the cub bared his fangs and growled, staying glued to the spot by leaning backward and digging in with all four paws. Zhang pulled with all his might but couldn’t budge the little wolf. So he turned around and draped the chain over his shoulder to pull like a coolie dragging a boat on the Yangtze River.
He barely managed to move the cub, whose paws gouged tracks in the sandy soil, leaving two small mounds at the end. Unhappy about being dragged along, the cub shifted his weight forward and prepared to pounce, sending Zhang flying headfirst to the ground and covering his face with dirt. That dragged the cub even farther, and now man and wolf were a tangled mess, the cub’s mouth no more than a foot from Zhang’s throat. Terrified, Chen rushed up, grabbed the cub around the neck, and held tight. The cub was still snarling at Zhang.
Both men were gasping for breath, their faces ashen. “We’re in big trouble,” Zhang said. “The move will take two or three days, which means a round trip of at least five. If it was only a day, we could leave him here and come back with an empty cart. But the guard at the wool shed and the workers haven’t moved yet, and if we leave him here longer than that, either they’ll kill him or the corps wolf hunters will. We have to get him to move with us. How’s this? We’ll tow him along behind a cart.”
“I tried that a few days ago. It didn’t work. I just about strangled him in the process. Now I understand the meaning behind ‘unbridled wildness’ and ‘death before surrender.’ The wolf would rather be strangled to death than follow our orders. I think we’re stuck.”
“I can’t accept that,” Zhang said. “Why don’t you do it first with one of the puppies to show him?”