A fierce northwestern wind sent the cub’s pelt soaring, combing through his battle garb and making him appear to be dressed formally for a banquet in heaven. Pale smoke rising from the yurt’s chimney wafted under the pelt, making it seem as if the cub were riding the clouds, roiling and dancing freely and happily in the misty smoke. At that moment, there was no chain around his neck and no narrow, confining prison under his feet.
Chen’s vacant gaze followed the impish, lifelike figure of the cub’s pelt as it danced in the wind; it was the undying outer shell the cub had left behind, but the beautiful and commanding figure seemed to still contain his free and unyielding spirit. Suddenly, the long, tubular body and bushy tail rolled a few times like a flying dragon, soaring in the swirling snow and drifting clouds. The wind howled and the white hair flew. The cub, like a golden flying dragon, rode the clouds and mist, traveling on snow and wind, soaring happily toward Tengger, to the star Sirius, to the free universe in space, to the place where all the souls of Mongolian wolves that had died in battles over the millennia congregated.
At that instant, Chen Zhen believed he saw his very own wolf totem.
Epilogue
Early in the second spring after the wolves disappeared from the Olonbulag, the Inner Mongolian Production and Construction Corps sent down an order to reduce the number of dogs so that they could save the precious sheep and cows to supply the agricultural units in need of meat. The first unfortunate victims were the puppies. Nearly all the newborn puppies were tossed and sent to Tengger, and sad wails from the bitches could be heard everywhere on the grassland. Sometimes the mother dogs were seen digging up puppies their owners had buried behind their backs; they would often run around in circles holding the puppies in their mouths. The women wailed; the men shed silent tears. The big dogs were getting thinner by the day.
About six months later, someone in a corps truck shot and killed Erlang after he’d left the yurt and was wrapped in his own thoughts out in the grass. The killer took his body. Outraged, Chen and the other three students ran to the corps headquarters, but no culprit was found. The newly arrived Chinese, united behind the issue of eating dogs, hid the killer as if shielding a hero who was being pursued by an alien race.
Four years later, one early morning during a white-hair blizzard, an old man and a middle-aged man rode alongside an oxcart heading to the border highway; on the cart lay Bilgee’s body. Two of the three sky-burial grounds had already been abandoned, as some of the herdsmen had adopted the Han custom of underground burial. The old man insisted on being sent to a place where wolves might still roam, so two of his cousins took his body to the no-man’s-land north of the border highway.
The younger cousin said, “The wolves up north howled all night, and didn’t stop till daybreak.”
Chen Zhen, Yang Ke, and Zhang Jiyuan believed that Bilgee had suffered more than most but that he was also the luckiest, the last Mongol to have a sky burial and return to Tengger.
Not long after that, Chen, Yang, and Gao were assigned to company headquarters, where Yang became a grammar school teacher, Gao was sent to drive tractors, and Chen worked as a storehouse guard. Zhang Jiyuan was the only one left, kept on as a horse herder.
They left Yir and her puppies with Batu, while the loyal Yellow followed Chen. But every time Gasmai came with her oxcart and dogs, Yellow had a great time with his family and followed the carts back to the herding team. No one could stop him, and he would return to Chen only after spending a few days back home. He’d return no matter how far the herding section moved, even from a hundred li away; but he always looked unhappy on his arrival. Chen was worried that something might happen to Yellow on the way, but his worries vanished when the dog showed up again. He wouldn’t deprive Yellow of the pleasure and freedom of being with his grassland family. A year later, however, Yellow was “lost.” The grassland people knew that their dogs would never get lost or be eaten by wolves, since there were no more wolves; even if there had been, a wolf pack would never kill a lone dog. Yellow could only have been killed by people, people who did not belong to the grassland.
Chen and Yang were back in a place inhabited mostly by Chinese, living a settled life. Most of the people around them were professional soldiers and their families from all parts of China, as well as soldiers from the Student Army Corps from Tianjing and Tangshan. But emotionally, they knew they could never live a purely Han-style life. After work and study sessions, they often climbed a small hill nearby, where they could gaze into the distance at Tengger in the northwest, searching for traces of the cub and Bilgee in the blindingly bright, towering clouds.
In 1975, the Inner Mongolian Production and Construction Corps was formally disbanded, but the Majuzi River area, with its lush grass and abundant water, had already been turned into a desert by farming. Most of the workers-along with their concepts and lifestyle, as well as their houses, machines, vehicles, and tractors-remained. The Olonbulag regressed by the year, and a sheep killed by a wolf would be a topic of discussion for days, whereas more and more horses were stepping in mouse holes, injuring themselves and their riders.
A few years later, before Chen Zhen returned to Beijing to take the graduate school entrance exam, he borrowed a horse to say good-bye to Batu and his family. Then he made a special trip to visit the ancient den where the cub had been born. The den was still dark, deep, and solid, but spiderwebs covered the entrance and a pair of slender green grasshoppers were struggling to free themselves. Chen pushed the grass aside to look in and detected an earthy smell, not the pungent, acrid odor of wolves. Tall grass grew on the land outside the cave where the seven cubs had played and sunned themselves. Chen sat by the cave for a long time, but there was no wolf cub, no hunting dogs, not even a puppy with him.
In the thirtieth summer after the Beijing students had been sent down to the Olonbulag, Chen Zhen and Yang Ke left the capital in a blue Jeep Cherokee on their way to the grassland.
Upon graduating from the Academy of Social Sciences, Chen had joined a national affairs institute at a university where he conducted research on system reform. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in law, Yang went on to get a master’s degree and was given a license to practice law. By this time he was the founder of a highly regarded Beijing law firm.
The two old friends, now in their fifties, had never stopped thinking about the grassland but had been afraid to return. At the thirty-year mark, an important anniversary in the life of a Chinese, they decided to go back to see their friends, to the Great Ujimchin Steppe they’d been afraid to visit, and the old wolf cave at the foot of Black Rock Mountain.
The sky was still a clear blue when the Jeep entered Inner Mongolia, but anyone who had spent a long time there knew that Tengger was not the same. The sky was dry and cloudless; the Tengger of the grassland was now the Tengger of the desert. Under the dry hot sky, no dense green grass was visible; large patches of hard sandy soil filled the spaces between sparse, dry yellow grassland, as if giant sheets of sandpaper had been spread out across the ground.
On a highway, half covered with dry sand, caravans of trucks equipped with iron cages to transport sheep and cows rumbled toward them, trailing thick columns of yellow dust as they made their way to China proper. They hardly saw a yurt or a herd of horses or cows along the way; every once in a while they spotted a flock of sheep, but they were small and thin, with dirty, tangled black wool. Even the “processed” sheep looked better than those. The two friends nearly gave up on the trip, not wanting the moist, lush grassland in their hearts to be replaced by dry dust.