Then the cub loosed a howl that dwarfed all those before it.
At first, there had been no response to the young wolf’s calls, not by humans, by dogs, or by distant wolves, since all had been caught unprepared. The wolves, however, were the first to react. After the cub’s third and fourth immature attempts, the wolves in the surrounding mountains stopped in midhowl and fell silent.
Chen surmised that the wolves out there-pack leaders, old warriors, alpha wolves, or females-had never before heard a wolf howl emerge from a camp of humans, and he tried to imagine their unbelieving shock. The pack had to be completely mystified, and Chen imagined that they were staring at each other, momentarily silenced by what they heard. He knew that, sooner or later, the wolves would realize this was one of their own and that a prairie fire of hope would be kindled in the hearts of the mothers whose young had been taken from them; they would want their offspring back. Thanks to the cub’s sudden self-revelation, Chen’s worst fears were about to become reality.
The dogs were next to react to the wolfish howls. A round of ferocious barking erupted, filling the night with a canine din of unmatched savagery, turning the grassland virtually upside down. Prepared for a deadly battle, they alerted their human masters that the wolf pack had launched a surprise attack and warned them to pick up their rifles and engage the enemy.
The last to react were the people. Most women on the night watch had fallen asleep from fatigue and hadn’t heard the cub’s baying; it was the extraordinary ferocity of the dogs’ barking that woke them. But now that they were awake, their shrill cries cut through the night, their flashlights penetrated the darkness. A wolf attack just before the mosquito onslaught was the last thing any of them had imagined.
The waves of ferocious barking unnerved Chen Zhen. It was an uproar he had caused, and he wondered how he was going to face the wrath of the brigade members when the sun rose in the morning. He worried that a group of herdsmen would arrive and fling his cub to Tengger, especially since the cub showed no interest in bringing an end to the noisemaking; he howled as if celebrating a rite of passage, stopping only long enough to wet his throat with a bit of water. The darkness was beginning to lose ground to early-morning sunlight; women not on watch were getting up to milk the cows. Starting to panic, Chen wrapped one arm around the young wolf and held his snout closed with his left hand to get him to stop howling. But it was not in the cub’s nature to be bullied, and he fought with all his might to loosen Chen’s grip. By then he was a fully half-grown animal, and much stronger than Chen could have believed. He easily broke free from the arm around him, and Chen knew he had to hold on to the snout or he would surely be bitten.
The cub resisted furiously, his blazing, awl-like eyes all the proof Chen needed to know that he had now become the enemy. With Chen still holding his snout, the cub struck out with his claws, ripping Chen’s deel and gouging the back of his right hand. Shocked by the pain, Chen screamed, “Yang Ke! Yang Ke!” The yurt door flew open and Yang ran outside, barefoot; a moment later, the two men succeeded in pinning the cub to the ground, where he panted and puffed as he dug furrows in the sandy ground with his claws.
With Chen’s hand bleeding noticeably, the men counted-one-two-three-before letting go and quickly backing out of the pen. With plenty of fight left in him, the cub charged his retreating captors but was held back by the chain. Yang ran into the yurt to get some antiseptic powder and a bandage from the first-aid kit to treat Chen’s wound.
All this activity awoke Gao Jianzhong, who stumbled out of the yurt, cursing. “You treat this damned wolf like royalty, day in and day out, and it bites you anyway. If you won’t do away with him, let me have him!”
“No,” Chen said anxiously, “don’t do anything. It’s not his fault. I clamped his mouth shut. That set him off, and for good reason.”
It was getting light by then, but the cub’s passion hadn’t cooled. Jumping and leaping, he panted noisily until finally crouching at the edge of the pen and looking up into the northwestern sky to howl yet again. Strangely, however, in the wake of the exhausting struggle he had just experienced, he couldn’t howl-the newly mastered sound was forgotten. He tried and he tried, but all that emerged was a series of doglike barks that set Erlang’s tail wagging happily and eliciting whoops of joy from the three men looking on. Angered and embarrassed by his failure and the reaction to it, the cub snarled at Erlang, his adoptive father.
“The cub now knows how to howl,” Chen said unhappily, “like an adult wolf. Everyone in the brigade must have heard him, and that means trouble for us. What do we do?”
Gao Jianzhong was unmoved. “I say kill it. If we don’t, the pack will take up positions around our flock night after night, howling nonstop, which will get all the dogs barking, and no one will get any sleep. And if they take any of our sheep, you’ll have more trouble than you can handle.”
“We can’t kill him,” Yang said. “Let’s just quietly set him free and say he escaped.”
“We can’t kill him,” Chen echoed, grinding his teeth, “and we can’t let him go! We’ll hold on, take it one day at a time. If we’re going to set him free, it can’t be now. There are dogs in every camp, and they’ll pounce on the cub almost as soon as we let him go. For now, you tend the sheep when the sun’s out, and I’ll take the night shift. That way I can keep my eye on him during the day.”
“I guess that’s all we can do,” Yang said. “If an order to kill him comes down from brigade headquarters, we’ll turn him loose someplace where there aren’t any dogs.”
“You’re a couple of dreamers,” Gao said with a derisive snort. “You just wait. The herdsmen will be here before you know it. The damned thing kept me awake all night, and I’ve got a splitting headache. I tell you, I’m ready to kill it.”
The sound of horse hooves arrived before they’d finished their morning tea. With a deep sense of foreboding, Chen Zhen and Yang Ke ran to the door, where they saw Uljii and Bilgee circling the yurt on their horses, looking for the cub. The second time around, they spotted the chain leading into a hole in the ground. They dismounted for a closer look. “No wonder we couldn’t find him,” Bilgee said, “he’s hiding down here.”
Chen and Yang ran up to grab the reins and tie the horses to the axle of an oxcart. They stood without speaking, like men awaiting sentencing.
Uljii and Bilgee crouched just outside the pen and gazed into the hole where the cub was lying, unhappy that strangers had come to disturb his rest. He snarled as he poked his head out and glared at the crouching men.
“He’s grown since the last time I saw him,” Bilgee commented. “He’s bigger than young wolves I’ve seen in the wild.” He turned to Chen Zhen. “You’ve spoiled him,” he said. “Even digging a hole so he can cool off. I was thinking that by leaving him out in the heat every day, you’d have made it easy for us: we wouldn’t have to kill him, the sun would do that.”
“Papa,” Chen replied cautiously, “I didn’t dig that hole, he did. He was dying out in the sun, and after a while he hit on the idea of digging the hole.”
With a look of astonishment, the old man stared at the cub. “He knew how to do that without a mother teaching him?” he said. “Maybe Tengger doesn’t want this one to die, after all.”
“Wolves have agile brains,” Uljii said. “They’re smarter than dogs, and in some ways smarter than humans.”
Chen Zhen’s heart was racing. “I…,” he said breathlessly. “I was puzzled too over how a wolf this young could figure that out. His eyes hadn’t even opened when I took him out of that hole. He’d never so much as seen his mother.”