Bilgee was silent, smoking one pipeful after another. Chen overheard him mutter, “The wolves will soon have their revenge.”
5
Dense dark clouds raced over from the northern horizon, tumbling and roiling their way through the blue sky, ferocious as dense smoke or a black fire. In a matter of seconds, clouds swallowed up many miles of mountain ranges, like a colossal black hand pressing down on the pastureland. Off to the west, the orange-colored sun was not yet consumed, as a northern wind carrying powdery snow swept quickly across the vast Olonbulag. Swirling flakes sparkled in the slanting rays of sunlight like hungry locusts.
A Mongol proverb: Wolves follow the wind. For decades, the Olonbulag pack, which had fought guerrilla wars on both sides of the border, took advantage of the rare early spring to come south, leap across fire breaks, and force its way past guarded public roads to return to the grassland. The wolves had suffered the bitter cold and, since there was little grass, scant prey, which had left them desperately hungry. But the cache of frozen gazelles in their home territory had been pillaged, while beyond their territory famine raged, making it impossible to catch the light-footed gazelles. Great numbers of starving wolves had formed a pack on the frontier, eyes burning red as they entered the territory; their appetites were gargantuan, their killing methods ruthless, their behavior unmindful of consequences. Alpha males, filled with murderous thoughts of revenge, and ready to die for food, led the pack ever nearer, at a time when the people were so caught up in raids on wolf dens that they were oblivious to the scourge bearing down on them.
During the latter half of the 1960s, if rain was predicted, a drought occurred; if a clear, bright day was on tap, the sun never made an appearance. “Those weather reports are a joke,” Director Uljii commented. Except for Bilgee and some of the other old-timers, who worried that the pasture leadership had taken too many people away from their jobs to raid wolf dens, no one had anticipated the early spring or the wolf scourge. The men at the frontier station, who had always shown concern for the herders and the livestock production, failed to warn of what was on its way. In the past, when they discovered tracks of a wolf pack during their rounds, they notified headquarters and the herdsmen. Low hills occupied the frontier grazing land, offering neither cover nor barriers, and arctic currents produced blizzards known locally as white-hair winds. Wolves, unmatched at climatological warfare, often launched lightning strikes during blizzard conditions.
A new herd of horses had recently been guided to a patch of fine grazing land on the Olonbulag, seventy or eighty of the finest horses among the dozens of herds belonging to a certain regiment of the Mongolian mounted militia. They had been sent there to await the results of a medical examination. If none of the horses was found to be suffering from glanders, they could be on the road. Given the tensions of war preparedness, the herdsmen were saddled with great responsibility. The military representative and revolutionary committee had specifically selected four dependable, vigilant, and courageous herdsmen, who were also excellent horsemen, divided them into two teams, and assigned them the task of watching over the horses twenty-four hours a day. The two teams were led by Batu, who was a company commander in the Second Militia Group. In order to keep the horses from running back to their own herds, he ordered all the other herds moved to a distance of several miles. The breezes were light, the spring air warm, the water clear, the grass lush; the year’s first buds had appeared, setting the scene for a contented herd of warhorses that happily stayed together. The four herdsmen took their task seriously, and all was well for several days.
Suddenly the gentle breezes were replaced by sweeping gale-force winds. Lake water poured onto the grassland, and livestock began breaking out of their pens. Yurts set up along wind tunnels were blown upside down, turned into huge bowls that tumbled briefly before falling to pieces. Carts heading into the wind lost their felt canopies, which flew off into the sky. The blowing snow was so dense that anyone riding a horse could see neither the head nor the tail of his mount. The snow stung like buckshot, whistling through the air as it tore millions of white scars across the sky. Old Man Bilgee said that in ancient times there had been a shaman who exclaimed, “Blizzard, blizzard, the madness of a white goblin with unkempt hair!” The shaman’s words had survived into modern times. Everywhere between heaven and earth on the grassland, the mere mention of a blizzard struck fear into man and beast. People screamed, horses neighed, dogs barked, and sheep bleated-a cacophony that came together in a single sound: the crazed howls of the monstrous white-hair blizzard.
People preparing to continue their nightly foraging for wolf dens were stranded in the mountains, with no way in or out. Hunters heading home lost their way. Laborers, the old and the sick, women, and children who stayed behind to tend livestock were kept busy chasing down and penning up stray animals. On the grassland, the ability to hold on to savings accumulated over years of labor was often tested in the space of a single day or night.
The primary target of an organized attack by the wolf pack that had crossed the border was the thriving herd of warhorses. Bilgee, who assumed that the horses had already been sent off as ordered, secretly rejoiced when the blizzard rose up. He later learned that the herd’s departure had been delayed by one day, pending the medical report, and that the person who was to deliver the report had chosen instead to follow the military representative up the mountain to look for wolf cubs. A larger number had been found that year than usual, more than a hundred from at least a dozen dens, and grieving mothers whose cubs had been taken joined the pack, turning it especially frenzied and cruel.
Bilgee said, “Tengger has presented the wolf leader with this opportunity. There’s no doubt that the white wolf king, so familiar with the Olonbulag, has chosen this path to vengeance.”
At the first sound of wind, Batu had burst out of the small yurt for the temporary herders. After several night watches in a row, this was supposed to be his day of rest. He was exhausted, as was his horse, but he could not sleep and hadn’t closed his eyes all day. Having grown up around horses, he had suffered through many blizzards and had often been victimized by wolves. But now a number of uneventful days had put him on edge, and his nerves were as taut as the string of a Mongolian lute. The slightest breeze, the mere swaying of grass made his ears buzz. All the seasoned herders had committed to memory a grassland maxim, written in blood: On the Mongolian grassland, peace does not follow peace, but danger always follows danger.
The moment he stepped out of the yurt, he could smell the coming blizzard, and when he saw the direction of the wind, his broad ruddy face turned a grayish purple and his amber eyes glowed with fear. He rushed back into the yurt and nudged his sleeping comrade, Laasurung. Then, in rapid order, he picked up his flashlight, loaded his rifle, looped his herding club over his wrist, put on his fur deel, doused the fire in the stove, and picked up fur jackets for the two men watching the horses. He and his comrade, rifles slung over their backs and carrying long flashlights, mounted up and galloped north to where the herd was grazing.
As soon as the sun set behind the mountains, the grassland was cloaked in darkness. The two riders had no sooner reached the bottom of a slope than they were met head-on by the blizzard, like a tidal wave or an avalanche. It swallowed them up. The men choked on the wind until their faces turned purple; the pounding snow pellets forced them to shut their eyes. The horses too succumbed to fear, throwing their heads up in a desperate attempt to turn and flee from the wind. The men had started out shoulder to shoulder, but Batu, who could not see his hand in front of his face, shouted frantically; there was no response from Laasurung. Wind and snow consumed everything in a raging howl. Batu reined in his horse, wiped the frost from his forehead, and tried to calm himself. Then he tucked the flashlight under his arm and turned it on. Usually, it would light up the area like a searchlight, sending out a beam that could illuminate a horse at a hundred yards or more. Now he could see no more than a few yards ahead; dense horizontal strands of white hair filled his sight. Suddenly, a snowman and snow-horse entered the beam and, at the same time, sent a weak light his way. The two men made circles in the air with their flashlights as they strained to control their panic-stricken mounts. Finally, they were side-by-side again.