Uljii was intrigued by the term grassland logic. He repeated it a couple of times to commit it to memory. “But during the later years of the Qing,” he said, “they couldn’t stop the flow from China, so the grassland shrank northward, and then westward, until it was right up against the Gobi. If desertification occurs north of the Great Wall, what will happen to Beijing? That’s something even the Mongols dread, because Beijing was once their capital-they called it Dadu-and it’s now an international city.”
Zhang saw his horses drinking at a well. Time to pick out a good horse for Uljii.
18
Chen Zhen stirred the milk and meat porridge. The rising steam smelled so good that all the dogs were lined up at his door whining hungrily. The porridge was for the wolf cub.
Gasmai had taught him the secret of feeding puppies. "They need to be fed milk and meat porridge as soon as they’re weaned,” she said. “It’s a sure-fire way to get them to grow big and strong. What they eat the first three or four months after being weaned determines their growth patterns, especially their bones. If you miss that window, you won’t have big, strong dogs, no matter what you feed them after that. Well-fed pups can grow to be twice the size of poorly fed pups, which will never be decent wolf fighters.”
Once, when their team was hauling rocks to build a wall, Gasmai pointed to someone else’s squat, skinny dog with ratty fur and whispered to Chen, “That dog is from the same litter as Bar. Quite a difference, wouldn’t you say?” Chen found it hard to believe that two dogs from the same litter could be so different. “On the grassland, it’s not enough to have dogs of good breeding; you also have to feed them aggressively.” Chen took that to heart, attending carefully to what went into his cub’s stomach. He followed Gasmai’s puppy recipe to the letter.
Gasmai had added, “After puppies are weaned, a contest develops between women and wolf mothers. The wolves hunt ground squirrels, marmots, and lambs to feed their young and teach them how to hunt.
They’re good mothers. No stoves, no fires, no pots, so they can’t make meaty porridge for their young. But their mouths are better than the pots we use. They turn the squirrels and marmots into a soft, warm meaty mix with their teeth, their saliva, and their stomachs, just what their cubs need and like. They grow like weeds.
“Women on the grassland earn work points by taking the night watch with their dogs, which is why they must be even more conscientious, more hardworking than the wolf mothers. Lazy women raise mongrel dogs; good women raise big dogs. Look at a dog and you’ll know what sort of woman lives in that yurt.”
Chen had changed many of his habits once he’d taken on the responsibility of raising a wolf cub, and Zhang Jiyuan teased him by wondering when he’d become so industrious, so motherly. In fact, Chen felt that he took more care than either a wolf mother or Gasmai. By increasing the number of daily chores he did, he was given the go-ahead by Gao Jianzhong to take some cow’s milk, which he supplemented with a meat pulp. Milk was clearly inadequate for developing strong bones; additional calcium was essential, which he supplied by including shavings of soft bone in the meat. He’d even gone to the medical clinic at the pasture headquarters to get some calcium tablets, which he ground up and mixed into the meat, something that neither the wolf mother nor Gasmai could have thought of. Even the meaty porridge seemed insufficient to Chen, who added butter and salt, making it so fragrant that he himself was tempted to try a bowlful. But since there were also the three dogs, he swallowed hard and decided against it.
The cub was filling out, its belly tight as a drum after each meal, like the fat, squinty-eyed laughing Buddha. He was growing faster than an autumn mushroom, and was already half a snout longer than the puppies he was with.
The first time Chen fed the mixture to the cub, he was concerned the animal might turn his nose up at the millet in the mixture, since in the wild wolves fed only on meat. He was pleasantly surprised when the cub buried his nose in the bowl and gobbled up the fragrant, warm contents, snorting and rumbling until he licked the bowl clean and, finally, raised his head. Chen later discovered that the cub would only eat millet when there was plenty of meat and milk mixed in with it.
The porridge had cooled off, so Chen placed the bowl on a rack just inside the door, opened it a crack, slipped out, and quickly shut it behind him. All the dogs in the area, except for Erlang, rushed up. Yellow and Yir stood and laid their paws on Chen’s chest; Yellow licked his chin to show his affection. The three puppies nibbled at his pant cuffs. But the cub stormed the door, buried his nose in the crack, and greedily sniffed the porridge inside the yurt. He clawed at the door frame, trying to get in.
The last thing Chen wanted was to put any of the animals ahead of the others. The cub was his favorite, but he was fond of the puppies as well, his puppies, and he couldn’t stand the thought of any of them being neglected. He wouldn’t feed the wolf until he’d pacified the dogs.
Chen wrapped his arms around Yellow and then Yir, and twirled them in the air, rewarding them in the most intimate expression he knew. They responded happily by slobbering all over his chin. Then he picked up each of the puppies and lifted them high in the air. Once they were back down on the ground, he rubbed their heads, patted them on the back, and stroked their fur. All these were things he’d begun doing after taking in the wolf cub; prior to that, only when he felt like it would he show that sort of attention. Now, however, if he didn’t treat all the dogs the same, and they one day felt a sense of envy toward the cub, they might well turn on him and kill him. Chen had been surprised to learn that raising a wolf in a nomadic environment was like sitting on a powder keg, and that each day presented a challenge. At the time, everyone was busy with the birthing of new lambs, so there was little socializing among the herdsmen. Few knew that Chen had a wolf cub, and even those who had heard rumors did not come by to see for themselves. What would happen when the word got out? Riding a tiger was bad enough; getting off was worse. That went double for a wolf.
As the temperature rose, frozen winter meat was cut into strips and dried in the sun and wind. The bones, with shreds of meat that were covered with mildew and emitted a strange smell, were fine for late-spring dog food. Chen had a following of dogs as he headed toward the meat-basket wagon, Erlang out in front. He wrapped his arms around the dog’s massive head. Having grown more familiar with human behavior, Erlang knew this meant he was going to be fed, and he nudged Chen under the arm as a sign of thanks. Chen took a basket of bones down from the wagon, divided the contents in accord with the dogs’ appetites, and then ran back to his yurt.
The cub was still trying to open the door with his fangs. By this time, a month after his arrival, he was over a foot in length, and his legs were nice and straight; more and more, he was beginning to look like a wolf, especially now that the blue membranes had disappeared to reveal gray-yellow eyes, with pinpoint black dots in the center. His snout was longer and his ears were no longer catlike, having developed into triangles that stood erect above his head. He spent much of each day playing with the pups; but when no one was around and during the night, he was put back into his enclosure to keep him from running off. Even Yellow and Yir tolerated the presence of the wild addition, though they kept their distance. Whenever he went up to Yir and tried to find a teat, she flicked him away with her nose. Only Erlang was friendly toward him; nothing the little wolf did bothered him. He could crawl on the dog’s belly, he could jump all over his back and head, he could bite his coat and nibble at his ears, and he could relieve himself wherever he wanted. Erlang often licked the little cub, sometimes rolling him over on his back with his snout to clean his belly with his tongue, as if he were his own offspring. The little wolf had come to accept his surroundings and was happy to frolic with his puppy friends, even though his nose told him that this wasn’t his real home.