The wolf had gone limp by the time Dorji was halfway up the hill, but it was still breathing and still losing blood. Dorji jumped to the ground, jerking the pole with both hands so the wolf could not get to its feet. When he’d pulled it up to where he stood, he grasped his herding club and crushed the wolf’s head with it. Then he took out his Mongol dagger and buried it in the animal’s chest. The wolf was dead by the time Chen got down off his horse. After kicking the animal a couple of times and seeing no reaction, Dorji mopped his sweaty forehead, sat down, and smoked a cigarette.
Sanjai rode up and looked down at the dead wolf. “Good job,” he said, and then went out to round up Dorji’s sheep. Chen rode over to his flock to do the same and get them headed back to camp. He then went back up the hill to watch Dorji skin the wolf. In the heat of summer, there is always a concern that a pelt will begin to stink, so instead of skinning the animal with the legs intact, the grasslanders skin the wolf like they do a sheep, producing a flat pelt. By the time Chen reached him, Dorji had already laid the pelt out on the ground to dry in the sun.
“That’s the first time I’ve seen a wolf killed with a lasso pole,” Chen remarked. “How were you so confident?”
With a bit of a gloating laugh, Dorji said, “I saw right away that this wasn’t a very smart wolf. A really clever one would have shaken off the noose as soon as it landed by drawing its neck in.”
“You’ve got sharp eyes,” Chen complimented him. “I’m no match for you, and couldn’t be if I spent the next five years trying. Then there’s my horse. Next year I’m going to get some good stud horses. You can’t get by out here without a good horse.”
“Have Batu give you one of his,” Dorji said. “He’s your big brother; he’ll do it.”
Suddenly, Chen was reminded of the wolf cub he’d given Dorji. “There’s been so much going on lately,” he said, “I haven’t had a chance to ask about your cub.”
“Didn’t they tell you?” Dorji shook his head. “What a shame. I killed it a couple of days ago.”
“What?” Chen blurted out, suddenly heartsick. “You killed it? Why? What happened?”
“I should have chained it up, like you did,” he said. “My cub was smaller than yours, and not as wild, so I kept it in a pen with some puppies. After a month or so, it had gotten used to being around dogs, and everybody treated it like just another dog. But it soon outgrew the puppies, and got more and more like a wolfhound. Everyone favored him, especially my four-year-old son. But a couple of days ago, while they were playing, out of the blue he attacked my son, taking a bloody bite out of his belly. It scared the hell out of the boy, who screamed and bawled. Unlike a dog’s, a wolf’s fangs are lethal, and I was so startled I clubbed it to death. Then I rushed my son over to see the brigade’s barefoot doctor, Peng, who gave him a couple of shots. Fortunately, that was the end of it, except that my son’s belly is still swollen.”
Chen felt a sense of panic coming over him. “Don’t let it go at that,” he said anxiously. “You need to give him another shot, and soon. If it’s rabies, a series of injections will take care of it.”
“The herdsmen all know you need to get injections if you’re bitten by a dog,” Dorji said. “With a wolf, it’s even more important. Dogs and wolves are different, and the locals have been saying I shouldn’t try to raise a wolf. Well, it looks like they were right. You can’t take the wildness out of them, and sooner or later there’ll be trouble. I advise you to give it up. That cub of yours is bigger and wilder, and has an even more lethal bite. It could kill you with its teeth alone, and chaining it doesn’t guarantee safety.”
Chen, bothered by a nagging fear, thought for a moment, then said, “I’ll be careful. I’ve raised it this far. It hasn’t been easy, but I can’t give up now. Even Gao Jianzhong, who hated it at first, has taken to it. He plays with it every day.”
The sheep had wandered off, so Dorji rolled up the wolf pelt and tied it to his saddle. Then he mounted up and began driving his flock back to camp.
Chen was thinking about his cub as he walked up to the half-eaten sheep. He took out his knife to slice off a piece where the wolf had been eating and then fished out the intestines; he left the heart and lungs. After tying the sheep by its head to the saddle to take home to feed the dogs and the cub, he climbed onto his horse and headed slowly home, weighed down with anxiety.
The next day, the story of how Dorji had traded a sheep for a wolf spread through the brigade. After Bao Shungui received the wolf pelt, he couldn’t praise Dorji enough; he circulated a commendation throughout the brigade and rewarded him with thirty bullets. A few days later, a young shepherd from Group Three who had decided to use his sheep as bait, left his flock alone, hoping to swap a sheep for a wolf. But he encountered a wily old wolf that ate only one and a half legs of the sheep, enough to be reasonably full, but not enough to influence its ability to run; in fact, the wolf ran faster than usual and was quickly out of sight. Bilgee gave the shepherd a tongue-lashing in front of the brigade and punished him by not letting his family kill a sheep for food for a month.
22
Once again, Chen Zhen was assigned the night shift for tend-ing the sheep. With Erlang along to keep guard, he was free to stay in the yurt to read and to write in his journal. He moved his squat table up next to the door, then set two books on edge between the lamp and his sleeping comrades so as not to waken them. The grassland was perfectly still; no wolves were baying that night, and none of the three watchdogs was barking, though they were awake and alert. He left the yurt only once, to take a turn around the flock with his flashlight, and the sight of Erlang lying awake and alert on the northwestern edge put him at ease. He rubbed the big dog’s head to express his appreciation. Back in the yurt, he read some more to keep from dozing off. Finally, in the early-morning hours, he fell asleep. When he woke the next morning, he went out to feed the wolf cub.
After coming to the new grazing land, the cub awoke every day at the crack of dawn and crouched down, as if ready to pounce on unsuspecting prey, staring at the door of the yurt and glaring at his food bowl. To him, the bowl was his prey, and, like an adult wolf, he waited patiently for the right moment to attack it. The moment it came close enough, he pounced, and the meat he ate from it was the flesh of his prey, not something supplied by humans. That was how the young wolf preserved his wolfish independence. Chen helped by feigning fear of the cub and backing off; still, he was seldom able to mask his delight.
Before the summer rains come, the Mongolian plateau is visited by dry hot air for a time, but the heat this year seemed worse than usual. As far as Chen was concerned, the Mongolian sun not only rose earlier than it did in China proper but seemed lower in the sky. It was as hot at ten in the morning as it was at noon down south; the sun baked the grass around their yurt until each blade was nothing but a hollow green needle. The mosquito scourge hadn’t yet begun, but maggot-born big-headed flies swarmed across the land and launched assaults on men and their livestock. They focused on the eyes or the nose, on chapped corners of mouths, or on bloody strips of raw lamb hanging inside yurts. Men, dogs, and wolves waved arms and swished tails in an unending and futile attempt to bear up under the assault. Yellow was expert at lightning-quick grabs of flies in his mouth, which he chewed up and spat out, and it never took long for the floor around him to be littered with the bodies of flies, like the empty husks of melon seeds.