Bilgee nodded his agreement. “I’ll set some traps around the dead horses as a decoy,” he said. “The alpha male will spot the traps and assume we don’t plan to attack. When headquarters organized hunts in the past, they always took a pack of dogs along when they set the traps. This time we’ll set the traps before the attack, which will confuse even the smartest alpha male. If we catch a few of the wolves in the traps, the rest of the pack won’t know what to do. They’ll stare at the horsemeat from a distance, not daring to approach but unwilling to leave. That’s when we surround them. We’ll have them right where we want them, most of them anyway, and this time we’ll bag several alpha males.”
Bao Shungui turned to Bilgee. “I hear the wolves out here avoid places where there are traps or poison, and that older animals or pack leaders will leave tooth marks on poisoned meat to ensure that the females and the young eat only around the poisoned area. I’ve even heard there are alpha males that can drive a hunter crazy by removing his traps as if they were land mines. Is that true?”
“Not quite,” Bilgee replied. “The poison sold at the co-op has a strong odor, and if dogs can smell it, you know the wolves can. I don’t use poison, since there’s always the chance I’d kill the dogs. I prefer traps. I’ve got a special way of laying them so that hardly any wolf can sniff them out.”
Bao sensed that assigning Uljii, the commander of a cavalry company, to the grassland had been the right decision. Sending Bao as military representative had also been the right thing to do. He tapped his mug with his pen and announced, “Then that’s how we’ll do it!”
The order was given that no one was to hunt wolves north of the grazing land without headquarters permission, especially with rifles, which would frighten them off. Everyone was told to be ready to set out on a wolf extermination campaign at a moment’s notice.
People began choosing their horses, feeding their dogs, repairing lasso poles, sharpening knives, cleaning rifles, and readying ammunition. Everything progressed with a quiet rhythm, as if they were preparing to tend to birthing stock around the Qingming Festival, or to shear sheep in midsummer, or to bale straw at midautumn, or to slaughter animals in early winter.
Early morning. Clouds darkened the sky and pressed down on the distant mountains, shaving off the peaks. The Olonbulag seemed flatter than ever, and gloomier. Snow swirled lightly; the wind barely blew. Metal chimneys poking through the tops of yurts were like asthma victims struggling to breathe, releasing an occasional cough and sending puffs of smoke to settle on the ground around the snow-covered barracks that was dotted by animal droppings, patches of hair, and tufts of dying grass. The late-spring cold front was hanging on, giving no sign that it was ready to yield to warmth. Fortunately, the livestock still had a layer of fat sufficient to keep them warm until the snow melted and the grass sprouted with the coming of spring. New buds were close enough to the surface that sheep could get to them by kicking the snow away.
The sheep lay quietly in their pens, lazily chewing their cud, content to stay where they were. Three cold and very hungry guard dogs that had barked through the night huddled together and shivered in the doorway of the yurt. When Chen Zhen opened the door, the dog named Yellow stood up and rested his paws on Chen’s shoulders as he licked his chin and wagged his tail ferociously, begging to be fed. Chen laid down a big platter of bones. The dogs grabbed them and lay down, stood the bones on end, and began to chew and gnaw. Crunching sounds accompanied the gradual disappearance of the bones, marrow and all.
Chen also brought out some lamb from inside the yurt for the bitch Yir, a dog with a shiny black coat. Like Yellow, she was a hunting dog from the Great Xing’an Mountains, with a large head, a long body, long legs, a narrow waist, and short fur. Both were born hunters, fast, agile animals that could do considerable damage with their teeth. They were excellent foxhunters, especially Yellow, a well-bred, quick-learning dog with unique skills. He was never fooled by how a fox swished its bushy tail, but caught it in his mouth, then put on the brakes and let the fox strain to keep moving. By abruptly opening his mouth, he sent the fox tumbling in a somersault, its neck and abdomen facing up. Yellow had only to trot up and sink his teeth in the fox’s neck, and the hunter was presented with a flawless fox pelt. If they encountered a wolf, Yellow and Yir alertly, nimbly, and fearlessly engaged it, snapping and grappling, but always managing to avoid being bitten, buying time for the hunter and other dogs to catch up.
Yellow had been given to Chen by Bilgee and Gasmai. Yir had been brought over by Yang Ke from his landlord’s place. The Olonbulag residents always gave the students the best things they owned, and when these two dogs grew to adulthood, they outstripped their canine brothers and sisters in every respect. Batu often invited Chen and Yang to go hunting, mainly because of the two dogs. Just since the previous winter, Yellow and Yir had caught five large foxes. The fur caps Chen and Yang wore in the winter were gifts from their two favorite dogs.
Yir had a litter of six pups soon after the Spring Festival. Three were immediately spirited away by Bilgee, Lamjav, and one of the students. That left one female and two male pups, a black and two yellows. They were roly-poly animals, like little piglets but more appealing.
Yang Ke, cautious by nature, fawned over his dog and her pups. He prepared a meaty broth of millet and shredded lamb for Yir nearly every day, using up half the yurt’s monthly ration of grain, which was based on a Beijing standard-thirty jin a month per person: three of “fried rice” (cooked corn millet), ten of flour, and the remaining seventeen in millet. Most of the millet went to feed Yir, so the students had to model themselves after the Mongols by making meat the foundation of each meal. The herdsmen were given only nineteen jin of grain a month, all of it millet. Gasmai had taught Yang and Chen how to prepare food for a bitch with new pups. As a result, Yir had an abundance of milk, which made her pups hardier than those raised by the Mongol herdsmen.
The third guard dog was a husky black five- or six-year-old Mongol breed with a broad snout and wide mouth, a burly chest, and a long body, a male who roared like a tiger and was absolutely ferocious. He was covered with battle scars: black, hairless gouges on his head, chest, and back, all of which made him both ugly and fearsome. At one time there’d been a pair of yellow eyebrows above his eyes, but one of them was missing, lost perhaps to a wolf. Now it almost looked as if the dog had three eyes, and Chen called him Demon Erlang, after a fictional character in classical literature.
On his way back from a neighboring co-op one day, Chen had felt a chill on his back, something that made the ox up front jittery. He turned to look, and nearly fell off the wagon when he found himself face-to-face with an ugly, fiendish-looking dog the size of a wolf, his tongue lolling out of the side of its mouth. He tried to scare him off with his cow-herding pole, but that didn’t work, and the dog followed him all the way home. Several of the horse herders recognized the dog. They said he was a mean animal with a bad habit of attacking sheep. He’d been driven out by his owner. The herdsmen advised him to drive the dog away, but Chen felt sorry for him, and the fact that he could live with wolves and survive the brutal winters piqued his curiosity. There had to be something special about the animal. Then too, since moving out of Bilgee’s yurt and losing contact with the impressive Bar, Chen felt as if he were missing his right arm. “The dogs belonging to the students,” he said to the herdsmen, “are hunters, fast but young, and they lack the ferocity of a big dog like this, with experience guarding a livestock pen. I think I’ll keep him around and see how he does. If he kills another sheep, he’ll pay with his life.”