It did not seem to Chen as if the smell of wolves was in the air. The three half-grown puppies ran up to him. He petted each one. Yellow and Yir followed the pups over to get their share of attention. Erlang alone, loyal as ever, kept watch on the flock. He, more than other dogs, understood wolves and was always as alert as any wolf could be.
The night winds grew colder, drawing the sheep closer and closer to keep warm, shrinking the space they occupied by at least a fourth. The three pups crawled under Chen’s tattered deel as they settled down in the dark, intensely cold night.
After a couple of turns around the flock with his flashlight, he had barely sat down on his felt mat when, from somewhere not far off, he heard the mournful baying of a wolf-Ow… ow… ow… -trailing off slowly, with only the briefest of pauses between each pure, resonant trill, a sound mellow yet sharp-edged, simultaneously seeping into and boring through the consciousness. Before the sound had died out, low echoes rebounded from the mountains on three sides-north, south, and east-and swirled in the valleys and in the basin, as well as along the lakeshore, where they merged with the rustling of reeds in the gentle breezes to create a chorus of wolf, reed, and wind. The melody turned cold, carrying Chen Zhen’s thoughts off to the Siberian wilderness.
It had been a long time since he’d listened to the call of a wolf late on a calm and clear night, and it made him shudder. He drew his deel even more tightly around him, but that could not keep out the fearful chill of the howls, which penetrated his deel and his skin, then moved down his spine to his tailbone. He reached out and pulled Yellow to him, wrapping his deel around the dog, and that brought him a bit of warmth.
This was just the overture, somber and drawn out. Next came the high-pitched bays of several powerful male wolves, which set all the dogs in the brigade camps barking. The dogs around Chen, big and small, ran to the northwest perimeter around the flock and raised a din of ferocious barking. Erlang rushed noisily toward the howls but stopped and headed back, fearing an attack from the rear. Taking up his place before the flock, he continued barking. Flashlights shone at all the brigade camps that snaked past the foothills on the edge of the basin; the hundred or more dogs belonging to the brigade barked for half an hour before gradually quieting down.
The night was, if anything, darker still, and colder. The wolf leader began baying again; the answering calls of more wolves, like three walls of sound bearing down on the camps, were so loud that they drowned out the dogs, whose barks had a flustered, surging quality. All the night-watch women flicked on their flashlights and frantically swept the area where the sound was coming from as they cried out: Ah-he… wu-he… yi-he…, wave after wave of shrill cries pressing down on the wolf pack.
Taking a cue from their human masters, the dogs set up a ferocious storm of noise: a mixture of barks, howls, roars, provocations, intimidations, and jeers produced a cacophonous drumbeat. Chen added his uncontrolled shouts to the mix, but his weak shouts were immediately swallowed up by the night.
On the new grazing land, the proximity of the yurts had the effect of concentrating and invigorating the herdsmen’s vocal and light-beam counterattack, producing a warlike tension.
The wolves’ cries were quickly overwhelmed. The close concentration of yurts, devised by Uljii and Bilgee, had worked as a strategy. The unified camp would hold, making an attack from the wolves unlikely.
Suddenly, Chen heard the sound of a rattling chain and ran immediately to the young wolf, who was jumping up and down outside the hole, snarling and baring his claws, wildly excited by the sound-and-light war between humans, wolves, and dogs.
Darkness is kind to wolves: they are liveliest at night and at their most warlike. It is a time of plunder, of gorging themselves on flesh and blood, of dividing up the spoils of a kill. But a metal chain kept the young wolf imprisoned, turning him into a crazed animal. As he struggled in vain against the chain, roaring his anger over being denied the fight he sought, he curled into a ball, then burst out and raced to the path he had worn in the pen. He leaped into the air, snapping at imaginary targets as he ran, stopping abruptly before the next charge and rolling on the ground. Then he closed his mouth, ground his teeth, and shook his head, just as if he had taken down a large animal and was waiting for it to die from his death grip.
Moments later, the cub was standing on the northern edge of the pen, staring straight ahead, his ears pricked straight up, and not moving a muscle, poised to launch another charge. His fighting instincts had been stimulated by the prebattle tension and palpable sense of fear in the air, and he seemed incapable of distinguishing between friend and foe, so long as he could enter the fray on any side. It seemed as if killing a puppy or killing another cub would have made him equally happy.
The cub rushed up to Chen Zhen as soon as he saw him coming, but he then backed up so Chen would come into the pen. Chen took one step into the pen and was about to crouch down when the cub attacked like a hungry tiger, wrapping his legs around Chen’s knee and opening his mouth, ready to bite. Chen was prepared for the attack; he jammed his flashlight up against the cub’s nose and turned it on. The blinding light stopped the attack.
The cub cocked his head and listened enviously to the warlike howls of the big dogs, then lowered his head thoughtfully, as if just discovering that he could not bark like they could. He opened his mouth, determined to learn from them. Chen was surprised; he crouched down to see what the cub would do next. The young wolf opened his mouth and managed, with considerable difficulty, a strange guttural sound; but it sounded nothing like a dog’s bark, and that made him furious. So he tried again: he took a breath and held it, then constricted his belly over and over, copying the movements of the dogs; but the raspy sound that emerged belonged to neither dog nor wolf, tormenting the cub, who spun in circles of exasperation.
As he watched the cub’s bizarre movements, Chen nearly laughed out loud. The cub could not yet make wolf sounds, so he’d tried to imitate the barking of a dog, but that was simply too hard. Most dogs are able to imitate the sounds of wolves, but wolves have never tried to bark like dogs, possibly finding that demeaning. But at that moment, a young wolf maturing among dogs wanted only to sound like them. The poor thing was having an identity crisis.
Yet even as the cub fretted over his inability to bark like a dog, he refused to stop trying. Chen walked up, bent down until his mouth was next to the cub’s ear, and barked. The cub, appearing to understand that his “master” was trying to teach him something, briefly had the embarrassed look of a slow student but quickly followed that with the defiant glare of a shamed classroom bully. Erlang came running over, stood beside the cub, and began to bark, slowly, like a patient teacher. A moment later, Chen heard the cub cry out in the cadence of a dog’s bark, but without the sound a dog makes-orf orf. The cub was so excited he leaped into the air and began licking Erlang’s mouth. From then on, the cub made the same un-doglike sound. It made Chen laugh.
The strange sound brought the three puppies running, while the other dogs made deriding sounds as if mocking the cub. Every time he went orf orf, Chen answered with an arf arf, and before long the camp was awash in a battle of strange, unharmonious sounds: orf orf- arf arf. The cub may well have been aware that the man and the dogs were making fun of him, but that only increased the intensity of the orf orf-arf arf. The puppies were so happily caught up in the atmosphere that they were rolling on the ground. Before long, all the brigade dogs stopped barking, and with no models to follow, the cub turned mute.