“Are they really that smart?” Chen asked in amazement.
“You Chinese don’t know a thing about wolves. People aren’t as clever as they are. Here, I’ll test you. Do you think a single wolf, even a large one, can bring down a gazelle?”
Chen thought a moment before answering: “No, you’d need three, two to chase it and the third lying in ambush. No wolf could do it alone.”
The old man shook his head. “Would you believe that one ferocious wolf can bring down a gazelle all by itself?”
“Really?” Chen said, finding it hard to believe. “I can’t imagine how.”
“Wolves have developed a special skill. In the daylight, a wolf will concentrate on a single gazelle but do nothing until nightfall, when the gazelle will look for a place with tall grass out of the wind to lie down and sleep. That still isn’t the time to strike, because even though the gazelle is asleep, its nose and ears remain alert. At the first sign of danger, it will leap up and run off, and the wolf won’t be able to catch it. So the wolf waits, all through the night, lying nearby. At sunrise the gazelle gets up with a full bladder, and now the wolf is ready to pounce. A gazelle can’t urinate while it’s running, so before it’s gone far, its bladder bursts, its rear legs cramp up, and it stops. You see, a gazelle can run like the wind, but not all the time, and wise old wolves know that’s when they can bring one down alone. Only the cleverest gazelles are wise enough to forsake the warmth of sleep to get up to relieve themselves at night. They never have to worry about a wolf running them down. Olonbulag hunters get up early in the morning to claim gazelles taken down by wolves, and when they open up their bellies, there’s urine everywhere.”
Chen Zhen laughed softly. “I couldn’t have come up with that strategy under the threat of death. That’s remarkable. But Mongol hunters are crafty too!”
The old man laughed. “We’re the wolves’ apprentices, so we have to be.”
Finally, most of the gazelles looked up. Their “drums” were tauter than ever, more than a night with a full bladder. Some were so full their legs were splayed in four directions. The old man looked through his telescope and said, “They’re so full they can’t run. Watch closely. It’s time for the wolves to strike.”
Chen tensed. The pack was slowly tightening the semicircle; there were now wolves to the east, north, and west of the gazelles. A line of mountains lay to the south. Chen assumed that wolves on the other side of the mountain were waiting for the main body to drive the gazelles toward where they lay in wait, and the slaughter would begin. Herdsmen had said that wolves often employ this tactic. “Papa,” he said, “how many wolves are there behind the mountains? Enough to close the circle on all these gazelles?”
“There are no wolves behind the mountain,” the old man replied with a sly smile. “The alpha male wouldn’t send any over there.”
“Then how will they close the circle?” Chen asked doubtfully.
“At this time, in this place, they can get more with a three-sided encirclement than a full circle.”
“Then I don’t understand what they’re doing.”
“One of the biggest and best-known snowbanks on the Olonbulag is on the other side of that mountain. The grazing land here is a windward slope, and during a blizzard the snow is blown to the other side of the mountain, turning it into a basin with snow from a depth of waist-high to higher than a flagpole. Pretty soon the wolves will drive the herd to the other side of the mountain. As they press forward, they’ll tighten the circle. What do you think it will look like?”
Everything turned dark for Chen, as if he’d fallen into a snowdrift that kept out all light. If he’d been a Han soldier in ancient times, he was thinking, he could not have seen through this strategy, this trap. Now he began to understand why the great Ming general Xu Da, who had driven the Mongols back onto the grasslands, had won every battle he fought south of the Great Wall but had seen his armies annihilated on the grassland. He also understood why the other great Ming general, Qiu Fu, with his hundred thousand soldiers, had driven the Mongol hordes to the Kerulen River in Outer Mongolia, only to be ambushed. When he was killed, his army’s morale plummeted, and all the Han soldiers were taken prisoner.
“In war,” the old man said, “wolves are smarter than men. We Mongols learned from them how to hunt, how to encircle, even how to fight a war. There are no wolf packs where you Chinese live, so you haven’t learned how to fight. You can’t win a war just because you have lots of land and people. No, it depends on whether you’re a wolf or a sheep.”
The attack was launched. The wolf with the gray neck and chest led two large wolves on the western flank in a lightning assault on a hilly protuberance near the gazelle herd. This, obviously, was the final gap in the three-sided encirclement. By occupying this hill, the wolves completed the encirclement. This sudden action was like sounding the bugle for all three sides to charge. The wolves, which had patiently lain in wait for so long, rose up out of the grass and charged the gazelles from the east, west, and north. Never had Chen Zhen witnessed such a terrifying attack. When men charge the enemy, they shout “Charge!” or “Kill!” Dog attacks are accompanied by frenzied barking to intimidate and instill fear. But when wolves attack, they do so in silence-no shouts, no wolfish howls. Warrior wolves!
The wolves flew out of the tall grass like torpedoes armed with the sharpest, most fearsome teeth and menacing glares, heading straight for the herd.
Stuffed from overeating, the gazelles were thrown into a panic. Denied their primary weapon-speed-they were now little more than sheep, nothing but meat on the hoof. Chen imagined their great terror. Souls had probably already fled from most of them and were on their way up to Tengger. Many merely stood where they were and quaked; others crumpled to the ground as if kneeling, their tongues out, their short tails twitching.
Chen was witness to the wolves’ intelligence and patience, their organization and discipline. Faced with a combat opportunity that came around only once every few years, they were still able to wait patiently, keeping their hunger and their appetite in check, then disarm the enemy-the herd of gazelles-with ease.
Now he understood how the great, unlettered military genius Genghis Khan, as well as the illiterate or semiliterate military leaders of peoples such as the Quanrong, the Huns, the Tungus, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Jurchens, were able to bring the Chinese (whose great military sage Sun-tzu had produced his universally acclaimed treatise The Art of War) to their knees, to run roughshod over their territory, and to interrupt their dynastic cycles. They had the greatest of all teachers in military strategy; they had an excellent and remarkably clear model of actual combat; and they had a long history of struggle with crack lupine troops. To Chen, these hours of exemplary combat tactics had proven more enlightening than years of reading Sun-tzu or Clausewitz. He had been smitten by the study of history at a very young age, obsessed over solving one of the great mysteries of world history: Where had the tiny race of people who had swept across Asia and Europe and created the Great Mongol Empire, the largest landholding in the history of the world, learned their military secrets? He had asked that question of Bilgee more than once, and this old man, whose educational level was low but whose erudition was broad, had gradually answered all his questions by enlightening him on the combat methods of wolves. Chen felt a sense of deep veneration for the grassland wolves and for the people who worshipped the wolf totem.
The battle and the observation continued.
The moment had finally arrived when the herd of gazelles began to stir. Only those older members with previous battlefield experience and the herd leaders had been able to resist the seduction of fragrant, mid-winter grass and had not eaten a quantity that would impede their speed; they immediately took off running toward the mountains, at the same time urging the rest of the herd to run for their lives. But they didn’t have a chance, given their full bellies, the deep snow, and the angle of the slope. It was a bloodbath, a punishment by the wise on the stupid and careless. In Bilgee’s view, this was a sacred cleansing of the grassland, a good and benevolent deed.