The people’s voices had stilled when the wolf cries came from the surrounding mountains, and the flashlights had been turned off; by then even the dogs were just going through the motions. When the wolves responded by howling even louder, Chen Zhen was convinced that they were plotting something. Maybe the pack had discovered how tight the man-and-dog line of defense was, and had settled on a strategy of wearing the enemy down; once the herdsmen and their dogs were worn out from the battle of sounds, they would launch a sneak attack. The state of paralysis could last several nights. Grassland wolves had perfected tactics for wearing down an enemy.
Chen lay back on the felt mat, his head pillowed by the dog Yellow. In China the baying of wolves enjoyed a fearsome reputation. It was a sound the inhabitants of China’s Central Plain equated with “wails of the Devil.” Chen had grown accustomed to hearing wolves over the years, though he’d never understood why the baying was so sad, so desolate-sounding, like a mournful lament, a long drawn-out torment. The sound did indeed call to mind the incessant wailing of widows at a grave site, and the first time he heard it, he wondered how the hearts of the savage, arrogant wolves could be so full of anguish. Was it an expression of the difficulty of life on the grassland? Were they complaining about their wretched fate at a place where death from starvation, the freezing elements, and mortal combat was so common? Chen had long felt that the wolves, so fierce and tenacious, were burdened with weak, fragile hearts.
But in the wake of two years of contact with them, especially over the past six months or so, he’d come to disavow that view. To him, the grassland wolves, with their hard bones, hard hearts, and survival skills, were tough as steel, consumed by a bloodlust, and unflinching even in the face of death. The agony over the loss of a female wolf’s young or the grave injury to a male wolf, even the loss of a leg, was only temporary and immediately led to thoughts of vengeance that grew more intense with each passing day. The several months he’d spent with the cub had convinced him of that. He had yet to discover a single moment of weakness in the young wolf; except for those times when he was overcome with exhaustion, his eyes were always aglow, his energy never flagged, he was full of life. Even after the time his neck had nearly been broken by the herdsman, he’d sprung back to life almost immediately.
As he continued listening to the wolves, Chen began to detect an arrogant, menacing quality to their baying, but he wondered why the threat to men and their livestock had to sound like mourning. What was the reason their baying adopted the sound of wailing? His reflections went deeper into the heart of the matter. The mighty wolf may have its moments of sadness, but at no time, at no place, and under the sway of no emotion does it cry. Crying is alien to a wolf’s character.
Clarity of mind settled in after Chen had been listening for much of the night. Dogs and wolves just sounded different. Dog barks are short and rapid; the baying of a wolf is a drawn-out sound. The effect of these diverse sounds on the listener is radically different. The baying of a wolf travels greater distances than the bark of a dog. The barks of dogs from the northernmost yurts in the brigade aren’t nearly as crisp as the baying of wolves in the same vicinity. Chen was also able to make out the baying of wolves in the mountains to the east, but no dog barks could ever travel that distance.
Perhaps that was the reason the wolves chose to wail-over thousands of years of evolution, they had discovered it was the sound that hung in the air longest and was able to travel the greatest distances. The grassland wolves are known for long-range raids, for splitting up to scout a situation and then joining for an attack. As pack animals, they range far and wide while hunting, and this highly advanced system of communication is how they make contact across great distances. In the most ruthless battles, results are all that count; how they sound is immaterial.
The baying thinned out gradually; but then, quite suddenly, a juvenile howl emerged from somewhere behind the yurt and the flock of sheep, momentarily paralyzing Chen. Had the wolves managed to of sheep, momentarily paralyzing Chen. Had the wolves managed to sneak up from behind? Erlang charged, barking ferociously, the other dogs right behind him. Chen scrambled to his feet, grabbed his herding club and flashlight, and ran after the dogs. When he reached the yurt, he saw Erlang and the other dogs growling as they stood around the cub’s pen in puzzled fashion.
With the aid of his flashlight, Chen spotted the cub, crouching next to the wooden post, his snout pointing into the sky as he howled. So that’s where the sound was coming from! It was the first time Chen had heard the cub actually bay like a wolf, something he thought the cub wouldn’t do until he was fully grown. But here he was, only four months old, and already sounding and acting like a mature wild animal. Chen was as thrilled as a father hearing his son say “Daddy” for the first time. He bent down and stroked the cub’s back; the cub turned and licked the back of his hand, then went back to baying.
The dogs were so bewildered they couldn’t tell if they should kill the cub or just get him to stop howling. The arrival of a mortal enemy in their midst had thrown the sheepherding dogs into total confusion. A dog belonging to their neighbor, Gombu, stopped barking; some of the other dogs ran up to see what was happening and offer their support. Erlang happily walked into the pen and licked the top of the cub’s head, and then sprawled alongside him and listened to him howl. Yellow and Yir glared hatefully at the cub-in those few minutes, the cub had given himself away to the dogs he’d lived with for months, exposing his true identity. He was a wolf, not a dog, a wolf no different from a wild wolf in a battle of howls and barks. But when Yellow and Yir saw their master smiling and stroking the cub’s head, they could only fume silently.
Chen crouched down beside the cub to listen to him howl and watch his movements. He saw how the young wolf raised his snout into the air before making a soft, drawn-out, even sound that Chen found so pleasant; it was like the sound a dolphin makes as it gently noses out of the water, sending ripples in all directions. It occurred to Chen that pointing the snout into the air was how wolves were able to communicate with their distant kin. Their long, mournful baying and their snout-in-the-air attitude were characteristics that had helped make it possible for them to survive on the grassland. The perfection of the wolves’ evolution was nothing less than Tengger’s masterpiece.
Blood surged through Chen’s veins. Most likely, no herdsman deep in the Inner Mongolian grassland had ever before stroked the back of a living wolf and listened to it bay into the night. No one heard the round, gentle, pure sound of the cub’s howls more clearly than he; while they were typically wolf, there was no sorrowful quality to them. On the contrary, the cub was bursting with excitement, stirred to his soul that he was finally able to sing out like a wolf, each howl longer, higher, and more intense than the one before. He was like a novice singer getting rave reviews for a debut performance, glued to the stage as he soaked up the applause.
Over several months, the cub had done many things to surprise Chen, but this amazed him. Since he hadn’t been able to imitate the barking of dogs, the young wolf had turned instinctively to the sounds a wolf makes, and mastered it at once. But how had the posture come to him? That was something he could not have seen, certainly not in the dark of night.
Each howl the cub made was more natural, louder, and more resonant than the one before; and each one pierced Chen’s heart. A stolen gong will never ring out, they say, but this stolen and human-nurtured wolf rang out with no help from the thief, in triumphant self-assertion. Then Chen realized that the cub was howling to be found: he was calling for the wild to which he belonged. Chen broke out in a cold sweat, feeling suddenly hemmed in between man and wolf.