Yang fixed his gaze on the distant mountains, the light darkening in his eyes. He sighed and said, “If you’d come here ten years earlier, maybe your dream could have come true, but your latest fantasy is a pipe dream. Where are you going to find a set of dental tools? Not even the banner hospital has those. The old herdsmen have to travel eight hundred li to the league hospital to have their teeth fixed. What are the chances of taking a wolf there? Stop dreaming. We need to face reality.”
That reality was the cub’s injuries. His paws had healed, but the blackened tooth was getting looser by the day and the gums were swelling up. He no longer tore at his meat, and sometimes, when his hunger made him forget about the bad tooth, he took a big bite, but the pain caused him to drop it and open his mouth wide to suck in cold air. He licked the bad tooth until the pain was gone before he started eating again, this time chewing on one side, and very slowly.
What worried Chen most was the injury to the cub’s throat, which had yet to heal. He continued to smear medicated powder on the food, but the cub still had trouble swallowing, even though the bleeding had stopped. He coughed constantly. Since he didn’t have the nerve to ask for help from the vet, all Chen could do was borrow books to study on his own.
The cows and sheep that would feed the people through the winter had been slaughtered and frozen. The four people in Chen’s yurt were allocated six sheep each for the winter, twenty-four in all. They also were given one cow. Their grain allotment remained the same, thirty jin each a month, while the herdsmen, though given the same amount of meat, received only nineteen jin of grain. As a result, the meat in Chen’s yurt was enough for alclass="underline" people, dogs, and the cub. In addition, there were sheep that had died from the cold or illness, and since the herdsmen didn’t eat them, they could be fed to the dogs and the cub. Chen no longer had to worry about finding enough meat for the cub.
Chen and Gao Jianzhong took most of the frozen meat to their section’s storage shed, three rammed-earth rooms on the spring pasture. They kept only a basket of meat in the yurt and went to the shed to restock their supply.
Winter days are short on the grassland, with only six or seven hours for the sheep to graze, barely more than half of the summer grazing time. But, except for the white-hair blizzards, winter is a time of rest for the herders. Chen planned to spend more time with the cub and do some reading and take notes. He was waiting to see what sort of show the cub would put on for him during snowy days. Grassland dramas centered on the wolves’ wild nature, wisdom, and mysteriousness, and Chen was confident the cub wouldn’t disappoint his biggest fan.
During the long, severe winter, wolves that had fled across the border faced conditions ten times harsher than on this side of the border, while his cub would be living in a herders’ camp, where there was an abundant supply of meat. His fur was now fully grown, and he looked bigger, every bit like a mature wolf. When Chen buried his fingers in the thick coat, he could feel the cub’s body warmth, like a burning brazier, better than gloves. The cub still would not respond to his new name, Big Wolf. He feigned deafness if they called him that, but would run over happily to jump onto their legs and knees if they called him Little Wolf. His puppy companion often went into the pen to play with the cub, who no longer bit down hard. Sometimes he’d even mount the puppy, as if mating. Watching the intimate yet violent behavior, Yang Ke would smile and say, “Looks like we can expect something next year… ”
There were things about the cub’s wolf nature that never changed: one, no one could be near him when he ate, not even Chen or Yang; two, he would not let anyone pull him along when out walking, and anyone who tried would be in for the fight of his life. Chen always tried his best to honor his rules. The cub’s craving for and enjoyment of food was much stronger during the freezing winter months than in the other seasons. Each time Chen fed him, he would snarl and bare his fangs until Chen was nearly out of the pen before he felt safe enough to return to eat. Even then he’d growl menacingly at Chen. Though still not completely recovered from his injuries, he was gaining strength and seemed to be making up for the lost blood with his voracious appetite.
Nonetheless, the bad tooth and the injury in his throat affected his wolf nature; it now took him seven or eight bites to swallow a meal that he’d once been able to gobble down in two or three mouthfuls. Chen wondered if he would ever completely recover.
A leaden bleakness heavier than in the depths of autumn permeated the winter pastureland at the border region rarely visited by humans. The quiet, dreary, monotonous grassland looked even more lifeless than ever. A sense of unending, boundless sorrow rose up repeatedly in Chen Zhen; he thought he’d lose his mind or go numb from the boredom if not for the cub and the books he’d brought from Beijing. Yang Ke once told him that when his father was a student in England he learned that the suicide rate was much higher among Europeans who lived close to the North Pole. The Slavic Depression that had been common for centuries on the Russian grassland and Siberian wasteland was closely tied to the long, dark winters on vast snowy fields. But how did the Mongols manage to spend several thousand years in a similar environment with healthy bodies and high spirits? They must have developed those as a result of their tense, violent, and cruel battles with the wolves, Chen concluded.
Physically, the grassland wolves were half of the grassland residents’ enemies, but they were the inhabitants’ spiritual masters. Once the wolves were exterminated, the bright red sun would no longer light up the grassland, and the stagnant stability would bring dejection, a withering decadence and boredom, and other more terrifying foes of the spirit, obliterating the masculine passion that had characterized them for thousands of years.
After the disappearance of the wolves, the sale of liquor on the Olonbulag nearly doubled.
Wolf totem, the soul of the grassland, the symbol of the grassland people’s free and indomitable spirit.
The young wolf grew bigger; the chain grew shorter. The sensitive cub, never an animal to be cheated, protested like an abused prisoner when he realized that the length of the chain was disproportionate to his size. He pulled at it with all his might, tugging and ramming the wooden post as a way to get Chen to lengthen the chain; he wouldn’t stop until he was satisfied, even if that meant being strangled to death.
Chen added a few inches to the chain, as the wound on the cub’s throat had yet to heal. But even he had to admit that it was still too short for the grown-up cub. The only reason he didn’t lengthen it more was that extending the cub’s running distance would give him more power when he tugged at the chain. Chen was worried that one day he’d wear the chain out, or break it.
The cub, seemingly engaged in a prison battle, cherished every inch added to the chain. As soon as it was lengthened, he’d run madly in circles, rejoicing over the new inches of freedom he’d gained. The desolation vanished from Chen’s heart each time he sat down by the cub, as if he’d received a transfusion of roiling wolf blood.
As he watched him, he realized that the cub wasn’t only celebrating the added length of his chain, for after the excitement abated, he kept running, and Chen felt that his instincts were telling him to train for speed, for the skill to escape. He struggled against his chain with more power than during the summer and fall. As he grew stronger and more mature by the day, he stared out at the grassland with a longing in his eyes; he could almost reach out and touch the freedom, and that made him hate the chain even more. Chen realized how cruel his imprisonment was yet felt the cub would surely die if he ran away to roam the snowy land in the depths of winter, when even adult wolves are barely able to survive.