The hunt was over. Except for half a dozen especially fast or skillful or just plain lucky members of the pack who had used speed or cunning or a shattered pole to break out of the encirclement, all the wolves had been killed.
The hunters in the outer ring came charging downhill, shouting the whole way, to get a close look at the spoils of the battle. Bilgee had already told people to drag two carcasses to where Chen and Yang were standing, then rolled up his sleeves and helped skin them. Gasmai had people bring over the two wolves Bar had killed and two others that Sanjai’s dogs had killed. Sanjai and Gombu came to help her skin them.
Chen had learned from Bilgee how to skin a wolf; now it was his turn to teach Yang. He began by cutting the skin away from the jaw-bone, then tugged it back over the head. After having Yang anchor the teeth with a leather strip, he pulled the skin back to the neck. From there he kept pulling backward, cutting skin from flesh, like removing a set of leotards, and ending by cutting away the legs and the tail. At this point, the pelt was turned inside out, so the two men reversed it, as if it were a length of intestine, to expose a perfect pelt.
“Good job,” Bilgee complimented them. “Not much grease. When you get home, fill it up with dry grass and hang it on a tall pole. That way, the people of the Olonbulag will acknowledge you as true hunters.”
Erlang and Yellow sat on their haunches beside their masters looking on; Erlang licked the blood from his injured chest and front legs the whole time. He appeared to be enjoying it. Yellow, who was uninjured, licked the injuries on the top of Erlang’s head, like a pampered pet. Still, many of the hunters were praising him, telling how he had wrestled several wolves to the ground and taken bites out of their rear legs. If not for Yellow, Lamjav would have been unable to get his noose on the wolves.
That made Yang happy. “Lamjav is like me, after all,” he said, to even a score, “standing brave behind his dog.”
Chen took some hard candies out of his pocket and gave them to the canine generals, three for Erlang, two for Yellow. He’d had a premonition that Erlang and Yellow would make him proud that day. The dogs laid the candy on the ground and peeled the paper away with their teeth, then picked each piece up with their tongues and, heads held high, crunched them loudly. All the other dogs could only look on and slobber, or lick the paper on the ground. The students’ arrival had taught the dogs that there were more good things to eat in the world than they were used to, and eating candy in front of all those dogs brought Erlang and Yellow canine glory.
Grinning, Gasmai walked over and said to Chen, “I guess you’ve forgotten your old dog since moving out of our place.” She reached into his pocket, retrieved some candy, and gave it to Bar. Chen hurriedly took out all the remaining candy and handed it to Gasmai. She smiled, peeled the paper from one piece, and popped it into her mouth.
A layer of heat had settled over the hunting ground; steam rose from the wolf carcasses, the horses’ bodies, the dogs’ mouths, and the people’s foreheads as they separated into family units and skinned the dead animals. Tradition was followed in dividing up the spoils of battle. There were no arguments. The herdsmen always knew which dog or hunter had killed which wolf. A few words might pass between two men who had both gotten their nooses around a single animal, but Bilgee settled the matter with a single comment: Sell the pelt, buy a crock of liquor, and split it. Hunters and herdsmen who had killed no wolves watched enthusiastically as the others skinned their kills, even offering positive comments on the pelts and the people’s dogs. With good dogs, the pelts were flawless; with bad dogs, the pelts were chewed up. Those who wound up with the most pelts loudly invited everyone to their yurt for a drinking celebration. On the grassland, everyone benefited from an encirclement hunt.
People rested on the now quiet site of the hunt.
Women had the most unpleasant work-patching up the injured dogs. Men used dogs during a hunt, but women relied on them for watching the livestock at night. And it was they who raised them, almost as if they were their children. When dogs were hurt, or when they died, it was the women who grieved. A few of the dogs lay dead on the ground. Where they lay was where their souls had flown up to Tengger; what had sent them on their way was their mortal enemy- the wolf. “The dogs should thank the wolves,” Bilgee said, “for without them, the herdsmen would have no need to keep so much meat on hand, and their pups would be off to Tengger soon after they came into the world.”
The dead dogs lay undisturbed, for no grassland Mongol would give a second thought to the lush, beautiful coats. Dogs were their comrades-in-arms, their best friends, their brothers. Grasslanders survived in two enterprises: hunting and tending livestock. For both, dogs were indispensable. As production instruments and livestock guards, they were more important to them than oxen were to farmers on the Central Plains. And their relationship to the humans was closer; they helped to dispel the loneliness of the wildwood.
The Mongolian grassland-vast, underpopulated, and dangerous- was a place where dogs kept people safe. Gasmai told Chen and Yang that she could not forget how Bar had saved her one autumn when she was out dumping stove ashes and hadn’t noticed a still-smoldering piece of dried sheep dung. A strong wind ignited a fire that quickly spread to the dry grass in front of her yurt. She was alone that day with old Eeji and her child, doing needlework, unaware of what was happening outside. Suddenly she heard Bar barking violently and ramming the door. She ran outside, where a fire was threatening haystacks belonging to other production brigades; they were tall, densely packed, and oily, and if they caught fire, there would be no saving them. Animals that were not killed or injured in the fire would starve without that year’s hay, and she would be punished. Bar’s warning had given her time that was more valuable than life itself. She ran out with a large piece of wet felt straight into the flames, wrapped herself in it, and rolled on the ground, managing to crush the fire before it reached the hay. She often said that without Bar she’d have been lost.
“Our men are such big drinkers,” she said to Chen and Yang, “that sometimes they fall off their horses and freeze to death. Those who don’t die can thank their dogs, who run home, grab their mistresses’ clothing with their teeth, and lead the women to their husbands, where they dig them out of the snow and bring them home. Every yurt has someone whose life has been saved by the family dog.”
And so eating dog meat, skinning a dog, or sleeping under a dog skin were considered acts of unforgivable betrayal. This was one of the reasons why herdsmen had come to hate inhabitants of farming regions and Han Chinese.
Bilgee said that in olden days, Han armies would come to the grassland and start killing and eating dogs, infuriating the herdsmen and inciting armed resistance. Even now, shepherds’ dogs were often stolen by outsiders, who killed and ate them. Their coats were secretly sent to the Northeast and to China proper. The pelts of Mongolian dogs-large, with lush fur-were favorites for making hats and bedcovers. The old man commented angrily, “But you’ll never find that mentioned in books written by Chinese!”
Bilgee and his family often asked Chen: “If you Chinese hate dogs, curse them, even kill them, why do you eat them?”
Embarrassed by the question, Chen had to think long and hard to give them a satisfactory explanation.
One evening he said to the family as they sat around the fire, “There are no nomads among the Han, and few hunters. Just about every wild animal that can be killed and eaten has been. So we Han don’t know the value of dogs. With our dense population, it’s hard for Chinese to be lonely, so we don’t need dogs to keep us company. We have dozens of curses based on dogs: ‘rapacious as a wolf and savage as a dog’; ‘A dog in a sedan chair does not appreciate kindness’; ‘You can’t get ivory from a dog’s mouth’; ‘Only busybody dogs catch rats’; ‘Throw a meaty bun at a dog, and it won’t come back’… And some have entered politics.