Bao Shungui pointed his whip at Laasurung’s nose. “You’re not blameless in this,” he said. “Bilgee was right when he said they were close to reaching safety. If you three hadn’t fled the field of battle and had instead stayed with Batu to keep the herd moving, none of this would have happened. The only reason I haven’t sent you to be interrogated is that you rode out and saved Batu’s life.”
Bilgee reached out and lowered Bao’s whip with his herding club. “Representative Bao,” he said with a stern look, “as a Mongol from a farming region, you should at least be aware of our customs out here. You do not point a whip at people’s noses when you talk to them. That was a prerogative reserved to kings and pasture lords.”
Bao lowered his whip and shifted it to his left hand. He pointed first to Laasurung, then to Batu with his right index finger. “You!” he barked. “And you! Why aren’t you down there shoveling and sweeping snow? I want to see those remains. I want to see how big a wolf pack we’re talking about. Don’t try to pin the blame for what happened on the wolves. Chairman Mao tells us that man is the primary element!”
The men climbed down off their horses; picked up their spades, shovels, and brooms; and began clearing the graveyard. Bao Shungui rode around taking pictures with a Seagull brand camera as evidence and giving commands: “Sweep it clean, absolutely clean! Inspection teams from the prefecture and the banner will be here in a few days.”
Along with Uljii, Bilgee, Batu, and Laasurung, Chen Zhen walked toward several snowbanks in the middle of the lake, where the ice was hard and the snow crunched beneath their feet. “To determine how ferocious a pack it was, all we need to know is whether the horses buried out there were killed by the wolves,” Bilgee said.
“How come?” Chen asked.
“Think about it this way,” Uljii said. “The farther out you go, the greater the danger. The mud out there would be the last to freeze, and no wolf would risk the possibility of drowning. So if those horses were killed by wolves, that’ll tell us how ferocious a pack we’re dealing with.”
The old man turned to Batu. “Didn’t it help to fire your rifle?”
“No,” Batu said with a sad face. “I only had ten bullets, and they were gone in no time. The wind swallowed up the sound. But even if I’d scared them off, they’d have returned when I was out of ammunition. It was pitch-black, and my flashlight was dimming. I couldn’t see a thing.
“But I wasn’t thinking about that at the time.” Batu reached up and touched the frostbitten skin on his face. “The snow kept falling. I was afraid I’d shoot the horses. I was hoping the wind would die down and the lake wouldn’t freeze so that the wolves would stay back. That way some of the horses could have lived. I recall raising the angle of my rifle a foot or so.”
Bilgee and Uljii sighed heavily.
When they were standing in the middle of the lake, Batu hesitated before clearing the snow near the horses’ heads. The men sucked in their breath. Half of the exposed neck of a great white horse had been chewed off and the head had been pulled around until it was lying on the animal’s back. Its bulging eyes, frozen into nearly transparent black-ice eggs, were stamped with the despair and fear of the horse’s last moments, a terrifying sight. The snow beneath the head was stained red by frozen blood, so hard that the men’s tools couldn’t crack it. Without a word, the men shoveled and swept the snow away, exposing half of the carcass. To Chen it looked as if the horse’s abdomen had been torn open by an explosion, not by wolf fangs.
They stood around gaping at the sight. Chen’s hands and feet were cold as ice, the chill seeping deep into his bones.
Holding a spade in his hands, Bilgee looked thoughtful. “This may be the second or third largest wolf pack I’ve ever encountered,” he said. “I don’t have to see any more, since the innermost horse has been torn apart like this. Not a single horse escaped the carnage.”
Uljii, his face a study in dejection, sighed. “I rode this horse for two years,” he said. “Together we caught three wolves. It was one of our fastest horses. I never rode a better one, not even when I was suppressing bandits as company commander of a mounted unit. No horse thief could have devised the strategy or tactics this wolf pack employed. They took advantage of the wind and the lake, which makes you wonder just how smart we are. If I’d been a bit smarter, this horse would still be alive, and I have to accept some of the blame for what happened here. If only I’d been more forceful in my comments to old Bao that day.”
The greater half of the carnage site had been cleared. Carcasses lay all over the frozen lake, with its bloodred ice. Broken limbs were strewn everywhere, as on a battlefield after heavy bombardment. The two horse herders sat on their heels on the ice, cleaning the heads of their favorite horses with fur-lined sleeves and the hems of their deels, weeping nonstop. Every man in the party was stunned by the miserable scene. Chen Zhen and other students who had never witnessed the bloody results of battle or the aftermath of a wolf attack stared at each other, their faces turned ashen by visceral fright.
The old man’s displeasure was obvious. “You Chinese are poor horsemen. When the riding gets rough, you can’t even stay in the saddle.”
Not used to being reproached by Bilgee, Chen understood the implication in the old man’s comment. The wolf totem occupied a more unshakable place in his soul than a skillful rider on a Mongol horse. After thousands of years, during which unknown numbers of minor races had died out or were violently displaced, the grasslanders would never question their predatory totem, which would remain their sole icon even after killing seventy or eighty fine horses. Chen was reminded of the sayings “The Yellow River causes a hundred calamities but enriches all it touches”; “When the Yellow River overflows its banks, the people become fish and turtles”; “The Yellow River-our Mother River”; and “The Yellow River-cradle of the Chinese race.” The Chinese would never deny that the Yellow River was the cradle of the Chinese race or that it was crucial to the survival and development of their race even if it sometimes overflows its banks and swallows up acres of cropland and thousands of lives. The grasslanders’ wolf totem deserved to be revered in the same manner.
Bao Shungui, who had stopped shouting commands, rode around to get a fuller picture of the carnage. As Bao took photographs of the scene, Chen Zhen noticed his hands trembling violently; he was having trouble keeping his camera steady.
Bilgee and Uljii were shoveling snow in an area where several rendered carcasses lay, digging here and poking there, as if looking for evidence. Chen Zhen hurried over to give them a hand. “What are you looking for, Papa?” he asked.
“The path the wolves took,” the old man replied. “We need to proceed carefully.”
Chen bent over and, stepping carefully, helped them look. It didn’t take long. There on the ground they spotted a path where the snow was tightly packed atop the frozen mud. After it was swept clean of the powdery snow that had settled on it, they saw wolf prints as large as an ox hoof and as small as a large dog’s paw print. There were traces of blood in some of the heel marks.
Uljii and Bilgee called the others over to help clear the snow from the wolf path; according to Bilgee, what they learned from the path would bring them closer to the size of the pack. As the path was gradually revealed, they saw it was curved, not straight, and farther along they noted that it became a semicircle. It took more than an hour to clear away the entire length of the path, and to learn that it ran in a complete circle, a circle of ice and blood, of red-stained snow that was as thick as a fist; the black and red frozen mud and red ice was a terrifying sight, like a sort of demonic writing. Shocked to their core, the men shuddered as they discussed what they’d found.