Staff Officer Xu laughed. “The wolves all left for Outer Mongolia,” he said. “Dorji took us everywhere, but we didn’t see a single one. Luckily I brought the rifle with me for killing marmots. They’re so stupid they didn’t even run back to their dens when we got closer, as if they were waiting for our bullets to hit them.”
“These two can hit a marmot’s head from fifty yards,” Dorji gloated. “We killed every one we spotted along the way. It was a lot faster than setting traps.”
“Why don’t you turn back and go home?” Batel said. “I’ll drop two large marmots off at your yurt on my way back.”
The vehicle took off before the old man had regained his composure from the shock of witnessing the power of this new weapon. As the smoke and dust from the army vehicle cleared, Bilgee turned his horse around and draped the reins over its neck to let it find its way home. Everyone talks about how China’s Last Emperor suffered, Chen was thinking as he rode beside the old man. But the last nomadic herdsman is suffering a great deal more. How much more difficult it must be to accept the destruction of a ten-thousand-year-old grassland than the overthrow of a thousand-year-old dynasty. The once energetic old man was deflated, his body suddenly shrunk to half of its original size. Tears coursed through the wrinkles on his face, spilling onto patches of wild blue-white daisies.
Not knowing how to lessen the old man’s sorrow, Chen held his tongue, before finally stammering, “Papa, the autumn grass is really good this year… The Olonbulag is truly beautiful… Maybe next year… ”
“Next year?” the old man replied woodenly. “Who knows what bizarre things will happen next year? In the past, even a blind old man could see the grassland’s beauty. It’s no longer beautiful. I wish I were blind so that I wouldn’t have to see how it’s being destroyed.”
He swayed in the saddle as his horse plodded ahead. He closed his eyes. Old, guttural sounds emerged from his throat, infused with the aroma of green grass and fading daisies. To Chen, the lyrics sounded like simple nursery rhymes:
Larks are singing, spring is here;
marmots are chirping, orchids bloom;
Gray cranes are calling, the rain is here;
wolf cubs are baying, the moon is rising.
He sang the same thing over and over, as the melody turned ever lower and the lyrics became indistinguishable, like a stream flowing from some faraway place, crisscrossing the vast grassland before disappearing in the undulating grass. Chen Zhen wondered if the nursery rhyme had been sung by the children of the Quanrong, the Huns, the Tungus, the Turks, and the Khitans, as well as the offspring of Genghis Khan. Would the future children of the grassland be singing the song or even understand it? Or would they be full of questions: What are larks? What’s a marmot? Gray cranes? Wolves? Wild geese? What are orchids? What’s a daisy?
A few larks rose up above the vast, yellowing grassland; they flapped their wings and hovered in midair, singing clear and happy songs.
35
The first winter snow melted, moistening the air, while chilling and freshening the fields. The dense winter grass on the wild field was yellow and sere, so bleak it resembled a desert plateau where no grass would grow.
Only the sky was the same blue as in late autumn. The sky was high and clouds were sparse, like a clear lake. The vultures flying high in the sky were smaller than rust spots on a mirror. Unable to catch marmots and mice, which were hibernating inside their dens, the vultures had to fly high into the clouds to broaden their search for rabbits, but the wild Mongolian rabbits, which could camouflage themselves by changing color, hid in the tall grass, hard for even foxes to find. Bilgee had once said that many vultures starved to death each winter.
When the snow covered the bottom half of the grass, the livestock had much less grass for winter grazing, which was why the herders had to move once a month. Once the pastureland turned white from all that grazing, they’d herd the cows and sheep to another yellowish snow field, leaving the remaining grass beneath the snow to the horses, who could dig up the grass with their hooves.
None of the moves took them very far, just far enough to be away from where the livestock had been grazing. It usually took half a day, too little time for the cub to bite through the cage no matter how hard he tried. Chen breathed a sigh of relief, having finally, after two weeks of racking his brain, found a solution to the problem of the cub’s survival during their constant moves.
Chen and Yang had also figured out how to make the cub enter the cage: they would trap him under a covered basket on the ground, then lift the shaft of the oxcart and slide the cart under it with the cub inside. All they had to do after that was lower the cart and secure the basket, and the cub would be safely on the cart. They reversed the procedure when they reached a new site. They were hoping to move the cub the same way each time until they settled in one place, where they would build a stone pen; that would be the end of their troubles and enable them to live side by side with the cub. They’d raised him with puppies, and since they had basically grown up together, they’d surely produce results-a few litters of wolfhounds, true descendents of the grassland wolves.
Chen and Yang spent a great deal of time sitting with the cub, rubbing his head as they chatted. At moments like this, he would rest his head on one of their legs, prick up his ears, and listen curiously to their conversation. When he was tired, he’d shake his head and rub his neck against their legs or raise his head for them to scratch his ears or cheeks. The scene would draw the two men deeper into their fantasy about their lives with the cub.
Holding the cub to brush his coat, Yang said, “Our little wolf wouldn’t try to run away if he had his own litter. Wolves care about their families, and male wolves are model mates. So long as no wild wolf came along, we wouldn’t have to chain him; he could play on the grassland and return to the pen on his own.”
Chen shook his head. “He wouldn’t be a wolf if he did that. I don’t plan to keep him here. My initial dream was to have a real wolf friend. If I rode into the hills by the border and yelled out, ‘Little Wolf, Little Wolf, time to eat,’ he’d bring his whole family, a group of true grassland wolves, and run happily toward me. There’d be no chains around their necks, their teeth would be sharp, and they’d be strong. They’d roll in the grass with me, lick my chin, and bite my arms, but not hard. But now that the cub’s sharp teeth are gone, my dream has become just that, a dream.”
Chen sighed softly. “But I don’t want to give up. I have a new fantasy now: I’ve become a dentist and have given the cub four sharp steel teeth. Next spring, when he’s fully grown, I’ll secretly take him to the border and free him in the mountains of Outer Mongolia, where there are still wolf packs. Maybe his father, the White Wolf King, has fought his way to freedom and opened a base for them. This cub is smart enough to find his father, and when they’re together, the White Wolf King will sniff out the bloodline in the cub and welcome him back. Armed with his sharp steel teeth, the cub will be invincible and may even take over as king in a few years.
“Little Wolf clearly has the best genes of all the Olonbulag wolves. He’s stubborn and extremely smart; by rights, he should have been the next king of the wolves. But only if he could return to the real Mongolia, where few people inhabit a vast territory. There are only twenty million people in the real Mongolia, which is a spiritual paradise that venerates the wolf totem; it is free of a farming population that hates wolves and wants only to kill them. The vast, lush grassland is where our little wolf ought to display his prowess. I committed a crime when I destroyed the future of such an outstanding little wolf cub.”