Chen parted the door curtains, thick felt sewn into auspicious patterns with camel hair, and joined Bilgee in a cup of butter tea.
“Don’t envy people just because they’ve bagged gazelles. Tomorrow I’ll take you out and you can get a wagonload of your own. I’ve been up in the mountains the past few days, and I know where to find them. This will be the perfect opportunity to get firsthand knowledge of a wolf pack. That’s what you’ve been wanting, isn’t it? You Chinese have the courage of sheep, who survive by foraging grass. We Mongols are meat-eating wolves, and you could use a bit of wolf courage.”
Early the next morning, they traveled to a southwestern mountain slope, hiding themselves to watch. The old man had brought neither a rifle nor a dog along, only his telescopes. Chen had hunted with Bilgee before, but only for fox, and this was the first time he’d gone out empty-handed. “We’re not going to try to bring down a gazelle with a telescope, are we?”
The old man smiled and said nothing. He was always happy when his apprentices came loaded with curiosity and doubts.
Finally, when Chen spotted the wolf encirclement through his telescope, the old man’s hunting plan became clear, and Chen was delighted. Bilgee flashed a crafty smile. Chen forgot the cold the moment he spotted the wolves; blood seemed to race through his veins, and the terror he’d experienced the first time he saw the big wolves vanished.
There wasn’t a breath of wind deep in the mountains; the air was cold and dry, and Chen Zhen’s feet were nearly frozen. The blasts of cold air were getting stronger. If only he had a wolf pelt to lie on! He turned to the old man and whispered something that had been bothering him: “Everyone says that wolf pelts make the warmest bedding you can find anywhere, and the people around here, hunters and herdsmen, kill plenty of wolves. But I’ve never seen them in a herdsman’s home. Why is that? The only pelts I’ve seen are a wolf-skin mat in the home of Dorji and a pair of chaps his father wears over his sheepskin pants, with fur on the outside.”
The old man replied, “Dorji is a northeastern Mongol. They’re farmers who own a few cows and sheep, but they’ve been around Chinese so long they’ve begun following Han customs. People who come here from the outside have forgotten the Mongol gods and their own origins. When someone in their family dies, they put him in a box and bury him in the ground, instead of feeding him to the wolves, so of course they don’t see anything wrong with using wolf pelts as chaps. Here on the grassland, wolf pelts are the thickest and the densest, so there’s nothing better for keeping out the cold. Two sheepskins put together won’t keep you as warm as a single wolf pelt. But we don’t use them as bedding. We respect the wolves too much. Any Mongol who doesn’t isn’t a true Mongol. Out here, a Mongol would freeze to death before he slept on a wolf pelt, since doing so would offend the Mongol gods, and their souls would never go to Tengger. Why do you think Tengger bestows its favors on wolves?”
“Didn’t you say that wolves are the protective spirits of the grassland? ” Chen Zhen asked.
“Right,” the old man said, his wide smile slitting his eyes. “That’s it exactly. Tengger is the father, the grassland is the mother, and the wolves kill only animals that harm the grassland. How could Tengger not bestow its favors on wolves?”
There was movement in the wolf pack, and the two men trained their telescopes on a pair of wolves that had looked up. The animals quickly lowered their heads. Chen searched through the tall grass but saw no more movement by the wolves.
The old man handed his glass to Chen so that he could observe the situation with a full pair of binoculars. The original double-tube glass was Soviet military issue. Bilgee had found it on the Olonbulag twenty years earlier, on an old battlefield from the Soviet-Japanese war. During World War II, a major battle between the Russians and the Japanese had occurred nearby to the north. Toward the end of the war, the Olonbulag had been the primary military artery for the Russo-Mongolian army into Manchuria. Even now there were deep ruts left by tanks, as well as the hulks of Russian and Japanese tanks and armored vehicles.
Nearly all the old herders owned Russian or Japanese bayonets, canteens, spades, helmets, binoculars, and other military equipment. The long chain Gasmai used to tether calves came from a Russian army truck. But of all the military equipment left behind by the Russians and the Japanese, binoculars were the herders’ favorite and had become an important tool for production.
The herdsmen, who treasured things they could not produce themselves, usually took the binoculars apart to make a pair of “telescopes,” for the reduced size made them easy to carry and doubled their usage. “These have helped us in hunting,” Bilgee said, “and have made it easier to find lost horses. But the wolves’ eyesight seems to have improved, and if you observe a wolf through one of these things, sometimes you’ll see that the he’s looking right back at you.”
One day after Chen had been living in the old man’s yurt for six months, Bilgee took a telescope out of the wagon box and handed it to him.
The Russian telescope was old and the copper nonskid surface had been worn smooth in places, but the powerful lens was of the highest quality. Chen treasured the gift, which he wrapped in red silk, using it only when he was helping cowherds run down strays or horse herders find lost horses, or when he went hunting with Bilgee.
Chen surveyed the area through his telescope; his latent hunting instincts were awakened as he looked through his “hunter’s eye.” These hunting instincts had awakened too late in his life, he felt, and he was saddened to have been born into a line of farmers. Farmers had become as timid as sheep after dozens, even hundreds, of generations of being raised on grains and greens, the products of farming communities; they had lost the virility of their nomadic ancestors, going back to the legendary Yellow Emperor. No longer hunters, they had become the hunted.
The wolf pack still showed no signs of attacking, and Chen was beginning to lose patience over their extraordinary ability to hold back. “Are they going to complete the encirclement today?” he asked. “Are they waiting until it gets dark to attack?”
“War demands patience,” the old man replied softly. “Opportunities present themselves only to the patient, man and beast, and only they take advantage of those opportunities. How do you think Genghis Khan was able to defeat the great armies of the Jin with so few mounted warriors? And all the nations that fell to him? Displaying only the power of wolves isn’t enough. You must also display patience. Even the largest and mightiest armies can stumble. If a mighty horse stumbles, it is at the mercy of even a small wolf. Without patience, you are not a wolf, you are not a hunter, and you are not Genghis Khan. You are always saying you want to get an understanding of wolves and of Genghis Khan. Well, then, lie there and be patient.”
There was an angry edge to the old man’s comment. So Chen tried to cultivate a bit of patience. He trained his telescope on a wolf he’d observed several times already. It lay there as if dead. After a few moments, the old man softened his tone and said, “After lying here all this time, have you figured out what the wolves are waiting for?”
Chen shook his head.
“They’re waiting for the gazelles to eat their fill and doze off,” Bilgee said.