The cub continued to fight the chain, which delayed the healing of his throat. Chen felt his own throat tighten whenever he looked at the cub. All he could do was check the chain, the collar, and the post more often to prevent the cub from running away into the land of freedom and death before his own eyes.
Pangs of guilt struck Chen’s heart. In this barren, uninhabited land, he enjoyed the company of a young wolf whose life generator created the power to help him through the seemingly endless winter. He’d learned so much from the clash in nature and destiny of two species on a fertile yet bramble-covered wasteland. He worshipped and admired the wolves. Had it really been necessary to imprison the cub and deprive him of his freedom and happiness so he could overcome Han ignorance and prejudice and succeed in his study of the wolves?
Chen sank deep into doubts and worry regarding the series of actions he’d taken.
It was time to do some reading, but he couldn’t seem to lift his feet. He felt he’d developed a spiritual and emotional dependence on the cub. He finally dragged himself away, though not without constantly looking back and wondering what else he could do for the imprisoned animal.
The cub’s temperament eventually sealed his fate.
Chen Zhen always felt that losing the cub in the harsh winter climate was an inevitable plan by Tengger, who also launched a lifelong assault on Chen’s conscience, so that he’d never be forgiven.
The cub’s injury took a turn for the worse on a windless, moonless dark night when the dogs did not bark and the stars did not shine. The ancient Olonbulag was quiet and lifeless, like vegetation trapped in a fossil rock.
In the second half of the night, Chen was awakened by a violent shaking of the chain. A heightened sense of fright made his head unusually clear and his hearing uncharacteristically keen. He detected, amid the sounds of the chain, indistinct wolf howls from the mountains across the border. The intermittent howls sounded old and sad, anxious and angry. Defeated wolf packs that had been driven out of their homeland may have been under attack by stronger wolves from the other side of the border; maybe only the White Wolf King and a few wounded and lone wolves were left, and they had run south to the no-man’s-land between the border marker and the highway. They could not return to the old blood-soaked place. The White Wolf King’s anxious howl seemed to be an urgent search to gather together the defeated and dispersed wolves for one final battle.
It had been over a month since Chen had last heard the howls of free Olonbulag wolves, and the tremulous, feeble, anxious howls transmitted a message that had been worrying him. He wondered if Bilgee was crying at that moment, for hearing the howls of desperation was worse than hearing nothing at all. Most of the strongest, most ferocious, and smartest males had already been eliminated by the hunters. After snow blanketed the grassland, the army vehicles were of no use, so the hunters exchanged them for fast horses and continued to hunt wolves, who seemed to have lost the power to find their way out and create a new territory for themselves.
This was Chen’s greatest fear. The return of the long-absent wolf howls rekindled hope, longing, resistance, and a fighting spirit in the cub. Like an imprisoned grassland prince, he heard his aging father’s call, a call for help, and he grew anxious, agitated, and violent, so much so that he wanted to respond with a howl as loud as a cannon shot.
But his injured throat would not allow him to answer his father and his own kind. Crazed by anxiety, he grew reckless, jumping and running, jerking the chain and the wooden post, oblivious to the possibility of mortal injury. Chen felt the frozen ground move; given the clanging and clamoring from the pen, he could imagine the wolf cub running, crashing, coughing up blood.
Frightened, he jerked away his felt blanket and quickly put on his fur-lined pants and deel before running out of the yurt. Blood was visible in the beam of his flashlight. The cub was bleeding openly, but he kept running and crashing, his tongue lolling involuntarily from the pressure of the tightening collar. The chain was stretched taut, like a bow at the breaking point. Bloody icicles hung from his chest, while beads of blood splattered the ground.
Chen ran up, without regard for anything, in an attempt to hold the cub by his neck, but the cub took a large patch of sheepskin from Chen’s sleeve the moment he reached out. Yang Ke ran over anxiously, but even with two of them they couldn’t get close. The madness that had been building up inside the cub turned him into a demon with eyes reddened from killing, or a cruel, enraged, suicidal wolf. They hurriedly dragged over a large thick, filthy felt used to cover the cow dung, and lunged at the cub to press him to the ground.
Seemingly engaged in a bloody life-and-death struggle, the cub went completely wild; he gnawed at the ground, bit the felt and anything else he came into contact with, and continued shaking his head to free himself from the chain. Chen felt as if he himself were losing his mind, but he forced himself to calm down and call out in a tender voice, “Little Wolf, Little Wolf.” Finally, the cub exhausted his energy and slowly gave in. Chen and Yang sat wearily on the ground, gasping for breath as if they’d been engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a wild wolf.
In the light of dawn, they pulled the felt away to see the consequence of the cub’s crazed struggle for freedom and longing for his father’s love: The infected tooth was now protruding from his mouth; the root had broken when he tore at the felt. He was bleeding, his wounds possibly made worse by the dirty felt. His throat was still bleeding as well, worse now than when they’d first moved here. The old wound had clearly been reopened.
His eyes bloodshot, the cub kept swallowing the blood, but it was everywhere: on their deels, on the felt, inside the pen, a worse sight than when a foal was killed. The blood quickly turned to ice. Chen’s knees buckled from the fright and he stammered in a shaky voice, “It’s all over. He’ll die for sure.”
“He’s probably lost half his blood,” Yang Ke said. “He’ll bleed to death if we don’t do something fast.”
They didn’t know how to stop the bleeding. Eventually, Chen got on his horse to go ask for Bilgee’s help.
The old man, shocked by the sight of blood on Chen, went back with him. “Do you have anything to stem the bleeding?” the old man asked.
Chen brought out four bottles of Yunnan White Powder. Bilgee entered the yurt, where he found a cooked sheep lung, which he soaked and softened in warm water from a vacuum bottle. He cut off the hard windpipes and separated the two halves before smearing powder on the surface of the softened lungs. He took it out to the pen for Chen to feed the cub, who caught and swallowed one of the halves as soon as Chen pushed the food basin in. He nearly choked, for the lung had swelled up after soaking up the blood in his esophagus. The soft organ remained in the throat for a while, like blood-stemming cotton, before slowly going down. The expanded lung put pressure on the blood vessels while helping to medicate the esophagus, slowly reducing the bleeding after the cub had swallowed both lung halves.
The old man shook his head and said, “It’s useless. He’s bled too much, and he’s injured his throat, a mortal wound. Even if you could stop the bleeding this time, could you stop it the next time he heard wolf howls? This is terrible for the cub. I told you not to, but you insisted on raising him. Seeing him like this is worse than having a knife in my throat. It’s no life for a wolf; not even dogs have it this bad. It’s worse than the ancient Mongolian slaves. Mongolian wolves would rather die than live like this.”
Chen pleaded with the old man. “Papa, I want to raise him to old age. Please, is there any way to save him? Please, teach me all your cures.”