Then, without warning, shouts of joy from Yang Ke and Bayar erupted behind them. Chen turned to look. “We got one!” Yang and Bayar shouted together. “We got one!” Chen trained his telescope on them and saw that somehow, under Bayar’s direction, Yang had dug a large gazelle out of the snow. They were dragging it by its leg back to the cart, while others were running up with shovels over their shoulders.
The felt boat had traveled far from the safety of the shore and was getting closer to one of the gazelles, a pregnant female with a look of fear and hopelessness in her eyes, an almost prayerful look. Surrounded by holes in the snow, she was standing on a crusty spot no bigger than a small table, which could give way at any moment. “Slide the hook over slowly,” the old man said. “Don’t frighten her. We’re dealing with two lives here. Life on the grassland is hard for us all, and it’s sometimes important to spare lives.”
Chen nodded, lay down on his belly, and lightly moved the felt in front past the holes until it was up next to the female gazelle’s feet. The crust was holding. Maybe the animal had been rescued before, or maybe she recognized a slim chance of survival for the fetus she was carrying, but she leaped onto the felt and immediately fell to her knees, quaking all over. She seemed paralyzed with exhaustion, nearly frozen, and frightened out of her wits.
Chen breathed a sigh of relief as the two men stepped lightly onto the front sheet of felt and carefully dragged the rear sheet around the holes in the snow, pushing it to the west, where the snow was harder. After repeating the maneuver a dozen or so times, they reached a gentle slope where holes in the snow were replaced by gazelle droppings and tracks. “All right,” the old man said, “let her go. If she falls in now, it will be because Tengger wanted her to.”
Chen approached the gazelle slowly and looked into her eyes. He didn’t see a gazelle; he saw a docile deer about to become a mother. She possessed motherly beauty in her big, tender eyes. He rubbed the top of her head; she opened her eyes wide, now seeming to beg for mercy. Chen stroked the helpless, feeble creature kneeling at his feet, and felt his heart shudder. Why did he not strive to protect these warm, beautiful, peace-loving herbivores instead of gradually moving closer to the wolves, whose nature was to kill? Having grown up hearing tales that demonize wolves, he said without thinking, “These gazelles are such pitiful creatures. Wolves are evil, killing the innocent, oblivious to the value of a life. They deserve to be caught and skinned.”
Old Man Bilgee’s expression changed abruptly, and Chen nervously swallowed the rest of what he was about to say. He knew he’d offended the old man’s deities and the grassland inhabitants’ revered totem. But the words were out of his mouth, and there was nothing he could do about that now.
Glaring at Chen, the old man said angrily, “Does that mean that the grass doesn’t constitute a life? That the grassland isn’t a life? Out here, the grass and the grassland are the life, the big life. All else is little life that depends on the big life for survival. Even wolves and humans are little life. Creatures that eat grass are worse than creatures that eat meat. To you, the gazelle is to be pitied. So the grass isn’t to be pitied, is that it? The gazelles have four fast-moving legs, and most of the time wolves spit up blood from exhaustion trying to catch them. When the gazelles are thirsty, they run to the river to drink, and when they’re cold, they run to a warm spot on the mountain to soak up some sun. But the grass? Grass is the big life, yet it is the most fragile, the most miserable life. Its roots are shallow, the soil is thin, and though it lives on the ground, it cannot run away. Anyone can step on it, eat it, chew it, crush it. A urinating horse can burn a large spot in it. And if the grass grows in sand or in the cracks between rocks, it is even shorter, because it cannot grow flowers, which means it cannot spread its seeds. For us Mongols, there’s nothing more deserving of pity than the grass. If you want to talk about killing, then the gazelles kill more grass than any mowing machine could. When they graze the land, isn’t that killing? Isn’t that taking the big life of the grassland? When you kill off the big life of the grassland, all the little lives are doomed. The damage done by the gazelles far outstrips any done by the wolves. The yellow gazelles are the deadliest, for they can end the lives of the people here.” The old man’s wispy goatee quivered, worse than the gazelle at their feet.
Chen Zhen was deeply moved by the old man’s monologue; it beat on his heart like a war drum, persistent and painful. The inhabitants of the grassland were far ahead of any race of farmers not only in terms of battle strategies and strength of character but in their modes of thought as well. This ancient logic went to the core of why, over millennia, there has been constant and violent conflict between the carnivores and the herbivores. The old man had delivered his monologue as if he were standing on the Mongol plateau and looking down on the plains of Northern China: commanding, wolf fangs bared, forceful and resonant, pointed and convincing. Chen, who had been a skilled debater, could say nothing. Much of his worldview, based on the Han agrarian culture, crumbled in the face of the logic and the culture of the grassland. The nomadic inhabitants safeguarded the “big life”-the survival of the grassland and of nature were more precious than the survival of people. Tillers of the land, on the other hand, safeguarded “little lives”-the most precious of which were people, their survival the most important. But, as Bilgee had said, without the big life, the little lives were doomed. Chen repeated this over and over, and it pained him somewhat. But then he was reminded of the large-scale slaughter of tillers of the land by nomads throughout history, and the actions they took to return crop-lands to pastureland, and the doubts returned. He’d always considered these actions to be backward, regressive, and barbaric. But he was forced to reconsider his position after being scolded by the old man, who had employed the yardstick of big and little life. Both Easterners and Westerners all refer to the land as the mother of humanity. How then can anyone who does injury to Mother Earth be considered civilized?
Timidly, he asked, “Then why is it so important for you to free this gazelle?”
“Gazelles attract wolves,” the old man said. “Wolves hunt the gazelles, and that makes for fewer losses of cows, sheep, and horses. The gazelles also provide extra income for the herdsmen. In fact, many Mongols rely on what they earn from hunting gazelles to build their yurts, get married, and have children. Half of a Mongol is hunter. If we could not hunt, our lives would be like meat with no salt, tasteless. We Mongols go crazy if we can’t hunt, partly because that safeguards the big life of the grassland. We hunt animals that eat our grass many times more than we hunt animals that eat meat.” He sighed. “There are so many things you Chinese don’t understand. You read books, but what you find in them is false reasoning. Chinese write their books to advocate Chinese causes. The Mongols suffer because they can’t write books. If you could turn into a Mongol and write books for us, that would be wonderful.”
Chen nodded as he thought back to all the fairy tales he’d read as a child. The “gray wolves” were stupid creatures, greedy and cruel, while foxes were clever and likable. Not until coming to the grassland did he realize that in nature there is no wild animal that has evolved more highly or more perfectly than the gray wolf. Books, and especially fairy tales, he saw, often misled people.