“I think you’re right. This looks like a real wolf’s den, gloomy as hell.”
“And there’s a strong wolf smell,” Chen said. “They’re in there, I know it!”
Chen bent down to examine the berm in front of the opening, typical of dens, built by moving rocks during the digging process; the bigger the hole, the bigger the berm. This one was the size of two school desks placed side by side. There was no snow on it, but plenty of wolf prints and bone fragments. Chen’s heart was thumping; this was what he’d been looking for. He called Yellow over and had him stand guard. Then he and Yang knelt down to examine the berm. By then Yellow had stepped all over the animal tracks, but the men could distinguish the prints of two or three adult wolves and five or six young ones. The cubs’ prints were like plum blossoms, small, delicate, quite lovely. They were so well defined that the cubs might have been playing there only moments before, running inside only when they heard the barking dog; the berm itself looked as if the mother wolf had built it as a sort of play-ground. There were shards of lambs’ bones and bits of hide here and there, with traces of nibbling on the tender bones by the cubs. Little piles of cub droppings were visible alongside the berm, thin as chopsticks and oily black, like little honeyed Chinese medicine pills.
Chen slapped himself on the knee. “The cub I’ve been looking for is in there,” he said. “That mother wolf made suckers out of us.”
Yang also realized what she’d done, and he pounded the berm. “You’re right. This is where she’d been running to, and when she spotted us on the mountain, she made a detour and tricked us into searching an empty tunnel, then made us believe it was the real thing, drawing the dog into a fight, like any mother protecting her young. You damned wolf, you got us that time.”
Chen thought back and said, “I had my suspicions when she changed directions, but she quickly made a believer out of me. That’s a wolf that knows how to adapt. If you hadn’t tossed those three firecrackers in there, she’d have gone around and around with us till nightfall, and we’d have been the ones who got screwed.”
“We’re lucky we had good dogs with us. If not for them, we’d have had to slink back to camp empty-handed.”
“We’re not in much better shape now,” Chen said. “This wolf has kept us busy most of the day and got us to waste three bombs. This den goes down into the belly of the hill, deeper than the first one, with more twists and turns.”
“We haven’t got much time,” Yang said as he stared at the opening, “and we don’t have any more bombs. I think we’re done for the day. Maybe we should check the area to see if there are any more openings, and seal up any we find. Then tomorrow we ask some herdsmen what we should do now, especially Papa, whose ideas are always the best.”
Chen Zhen, not happy with how things had turned out, said, “There’s one thing we can try. This is a big opening, probably the size of that Hebei tunnel, which we were able to crawl into. Why can’t we do the same here? After all, Erlang’s out dealing with the mother wolf, and there shouldn’t be another adult wolf in there. If you tie your sash around my foot and lower me in, who knows, we might find our cubs. And even if we don’t, I can get an idea of how the den is laid out.”
Yang Ke shook his head. “That’s suicide. What if there is another wolf in there? I’ve been tricked by wolves enough for one day. How confident are you that this is her den? What if it belongs to another wolf?”
The desire Chen had suppressed for more than two years suddenly burst to the surface and drowned out his fears. Clenching his teeth, he said, “If a Mongol boy has the guts to crawl into a wolf’s den, and we don’t, what does that make us? I’m going in, and that’s that. I just need you to give me a hand. I’ll take my flashlight and spade with me, in case there’s an adult down there.”
“If you’re intent on going in, let me go first. I’m stronger, and you’re too skinny.”
“Being skinny gives me an advantage. If the tunnel narrows, you could get stuck. So no more arguments. The fat guy stays behind.”
After Chen took off his deel, Yang reluctantly handed him the flashlight, the spade, and his bag. He tied Chen’s Mongol sash, which was several feet long, around Chen’s foot, then tied his own sash to Chen’s. Just before he went in, Chen announced, “If I’m afraid to enter the wolf’s den, I don’t deserve a wolf cub!”
“If there’s an adult in there,” Yang reminded him, “don’t forget to shout and give a hard tug on the sash.” Chen turned on the light, got down on his hands and knees, and slid down the forty-degree slope into the passage. The smell of wolf was heavy in his nostrils, nearly suffocating him. Not daring to breathe deeply, he moved slowly past slippery walls with an occasional tuft of hair stuck to a protruding rock, on ground that was covered with tiny wolf tracks. I could be getting my hands on the cubs within a few feet, he was thinking happily, once he was completely inside the tunnel; Yang was feeding him the tether little by little, constantly asking if Chen wanted to come back out, to which he responded by telling Yang to keep going as he inched along on his forearms.
The first gradual turn in the passage came when he was five or six feet inside the den, where light from outside did not reach. Chen could now see only that much of the tunnel illuminated by his flashlight, and as he negotiated the turn, the tunnel gradually leveled out, though the walls abruptly narrowed and the ceiling lowered. He could move forward only by keeping his head down and holding his arms close into his body. As he crawled along, he studied the walls, which were slicker than the ones just inside the opening, and firmer, as if a spade had been used on them. Hardly any dirt fell when his shoulder brushed against the walls or when he scraped his spade against the ceiling, which eased his fears of a cave-in. He doubted that a single wolf could dig out such hard-packed dirt with her claws, certainly not this deep. All the sharp edges had been rubbed smooth, like cobblestones, so this must have served countless wolves-male, female, adult, and newborn-for a century or more. He had entered the world of wolves, and its smell was overpowering.
The farther in he crawled, the greater his sense of terror. On the floor beneath him, the tracks of adult wolves lay beneath those of cubs; would his spade be enough to allow him to survive if he encountered a mature animal? The tunnel was so narrow that it might be difficult for a wolf to use her fangs to full effect, but her claws would easily make up for that. She could probably rip him to shreds. Why hadn’t he considered that? He began to sweat. Hesitation. All he had to do was jerk his leg, and Yang Ke would drag him out of there. But thoughts of the eight or nine cubs, or more, waiting up ahead convinced him that he couldn’t stop now, so he clenched his teeth, relaxed the leg tethered to the outside, and continued crawling tenaciously. By now the walls were hugging him tightly, and he felt less like a hunter than a grave robber. The air thinned out, the smell of wolf got stronger, and the thought that he could die of suffocation came to him. Archaeological digs often turn up the remains of grave robbers trapped in just such narrow passages.
An opening loomed up ahead. Big enough for an adult wolf to squeeze through, but too small for him, it clearly was the wolf’s defense against her sole predator on the grassland. Chen knew she’d built it to protect her litter against water and smoke; it also succeeded in stopping him. But there was no surrender in him. He tried to breach a wall with his spade, but it didn’t take long to see how cleverly she’d chosen this site: the walls were constructed of large rocks with abundant gaps, making them sturdy yet dangerous. He was beginning to have trouble breathing, and his strength was ebbing. Even if he’d been able to keep hacking away, a cave-in was a possibility and he’d succumb to the wolf’s trap.