Suddenly, the silence was shattered by loud bleating on a sandy ridge on the northwestern shore, as Chen’s sheep smelled the water. In the summer, sheep were watered every other day, and the animals were voicing their thirst. They ran to the lake, raising a cloud of dust. The herdsmen and their livestock had been on the new land slightly more than a week, but the grass near the lake had already been trampled into the sandy soil by all the cattle, sheep, and horses that had drunk there. The sheep rushed into the lake, crowding the horses as they greedily lapped up the water.
Chen’s sheep had barely climbed to the top of the ridge after drinking their fill when another flock of thirsty animals ran noisily to the lake’s edge, raising another cloud of dust.
Laborers had set up four or five tents on a gentle slope a few hundred feet from the lake, where dozens of men were hard at work digging trenches. Under Bao Shungui’s direction, they were building a dipping pool for sheep, a wool storage shed, and a provisional headquarters building. Chen saw some of the laborers and members of their family dig trenches and plow plots of land for vegetable gardens. Another group of laborers had dug a stone quarry on a distant hill and were loading bright yellow rocks and flagstone onto large wagons, which were driven back to the work sites. Chen hated to see scars opened on the virgin land, so he turned back to his sheep and herded them off to the northwest.
The flock crossed a mountain ridge into a grassy basin. Bilgee had asked that the livestock not graze exclusively in the basin; since the summer days were so long, he said, the animals should be taken as far away as possible. That way there would be no need to move again as summer turned to fall. He planned to have the animals make several large sweeps of the basin and its outlying areas to keep the grass from growing out of control and patting down the loose soil as a means of mosquito control. Chen’s flock, forming a crescent, moved slowly toward mountains to the west.
In the glare of sunlight, the thousand or so sheep and their lambs sparkled like a field of white chrysanthemums, in stark contrast to their green surroundings. The lambs, whose coats were getting fluffy, alternately suckled and grazed the field. Their round tails were filling out and were nearly as big as those of their still-nursing mothers. Chen felt his eyes fill with the golden luster of yellow daylilies, which had just bloomed on the mountainside. Tens of thousands of bushes, two feet tall, offered up large, trumpet-shaped yellow flowers, with long, thin new buds dotting the branches below, ready to open soon.
Chen got up, mounted his horse, and rode over to an even denser field to pick the flowers, which had been introduced into the Beijing students’ diets: lilies and lamb dumplings, lilies and mountain onion salad, lilies and shredded lamb soup, and more. After going without vegetables all winter, they took to the wild greens and flowers like sheep to grazing land. The local herdsmen were amazed, since wildflowers were not something they ate. Before Chen left the yurt in the morning, Zhang Jiyuan had emptied out a pair of schoolbags, denying him the pleasure of reading while he tended the flock, so he and Yang could bring back a load of wildflowers before they withered and died. He blanched them in boiled water and dried them for the coming winter. In a few days they had already filled a sack half full of dried flowers.
The sheep grazed on the field behind Chen as he quickly filled a bag with flowers. While he continued to pick, he spotted some wolf droppings by his foot. He bent down and picked up a piece to examine it closely. It was gray, about the length of a banana, and already dry, though he could tell that it was still relatively fresh. He had just sat down to study it when it dawned on him that this must have been a resting spot for a wolf only a few days before. What was it doing there? He checked but found no bones or animal fur, so it wasn’t where it had eaten a kill. Small clusters of sheep often passed through the area, with its tall flowers and dense grass, so maybe this was the wolf’s hiding place, an ideal spot for an ambush. Suddenly quite nervous, he stood up and looked around, happy to spot some shepherds surveying the surroundings while they rested. Since his flock was several hundred feet behind him, he relaxed and sat down again.
Chen was familiar with wolf droppings, but this was his first opportunity to study them up close. He broke off a piece; inside he found gazelle fur and sheep’s wool, but not a shard of bone. There were a couple of field-mouse teeth and a few calcified chunks of wool. He crumbled the piece in his hand, but that was all it contained. The meat, skin, bones, and tendons of the sheep and mice the wolf had eaten had been completely digested, leaving behind only the fur and teeth. When he looked even closer, he saw that only the coarsest hair had passed through the wolf’s body. No dog had as effective a digestive system as that, he knew, since you can normally find undigested items like bone and kernels of corn in their droppings.
The efficiency with which wolves, the grassland’s sanitation workers, disposed of everything-cows, sheep, horses, marmots and gazelles, wild rabbits and field mice, even humans-was astonishing. As the animals passed through the wolf’s mouth, stomach, and intestines, the nutrients were removed, leaving behind only bits of hair and teeth, not even enough to feed germs. The grassland remained clean down through the ages thanks largely to its wolves.
The wildflowers swayed in a breeze. Chen crumbled the last of the wolf dung, which was carried off by the wind, settling to the ground to become one with the grassland, leaving no waste at all. With wolf dung it was truly a case of ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Chen was by then deep in thought. Over the centuries, the herdsmen and hunters of the grassland returned to Tengger with no burial and no markers, and definitely no mausoleums. Men and wolves were born on the grassland, lived there, fought there, and died there. They left the grassland exactly as they found it.
Every month, or at least once every season, a grasslander was given a sky burial to send his soul to Tengger. Chen lifted his hands to the blue sky and said a silent wish that all those souls were at peace.
Summer days are dreadfully long on the Mongolian grassland. The sky is light from three in the morning till nine at night. The sheep are not taken out until eight or nine o’clock, after the sun has burned off the frost. At night they are not returned to their pens until after dark, since the period between sunset and darkness is when they eat the most ravenously and fatten up. Tending sheep in the summer takes nearly twice the time as it does in the winter. Summer is the shepherds’ least favorite season of the year. After breakfast, they go hungry until nine o’clock at night; all day long they bake under the sun, fight off the urge to sleep, go thirsty and hungry, and are bored stiff. At the height of summer, the mosquitoes turn the grassland into a torture chamber. Compared to the draining days of summer, the long cold winters are happy times.
Before being exposed to the hordes of mosquitoes, Chen had believed that hunger and thirst took the greatest toll on people. Herdsmen, on the other hand, tolerated hunger and thirst well, even though most of them were bothered by stomach ailments. During their first summer, the students took dry food along when they let the sheep out to graze, but eventually they followed the local custom of going without a midday meal.
While Chen was standing there in the tall grass, Dorji rode up and asked how he’d like some roast marmot. Chen salivated over the prospect. "They’re all over the place,” Dorji said. "That mountain ridge to the west is pockmarked with marmot holes. Let’s survey the place today, then lay out a dozen traps tomorrow. We’ll catch some by noon, and we can have roast marmot for lunch. That’ll take care of our hunger and keep us from napping in the middle of the day.” Dorji looked out at the two flocks of sheep, his and Chen’s, and saw that none of the animals were up and grazing. So the two men rode over to the mountain ridge, where they hid behind some limestone boulders, in sight of the sheep behind them and the marmot holes in front. They took out their telescopes. The ridge was still, the dozens of marmot holes seemingly empty; sunlight glistened on the bits of mineral ore in the limestone.