Wolf Totem: A Novel by Jiang Rong Page A

found that big gazelle. I tell you, that Bayar may be small, but he’s got guts. When he saw you out there, he opened his fur coat and, because he weighs so little, crawled out on the snow without falling in. He found a depression before he’d gone more than five or six yards, so he crawled back and we dug a tunnel in the snow. We didn’t have to dig far to reach the gazelle, so he went down and tied a rope around one of its legs. When he came back, I pulled the animal out of the snow. He was fearless, but the whole time he was down there I was worried the snow might cave in and bury him.”
    “That doesn’t surprise me,” Chen said. “Anyone who isn’t afraid to grab hold of a wolf with his bare hands isn’t going to be scared by a hole in the snow. Now you know what a Mongol kid is capable of doing. Just think what he’ll be like when he grows up!”
    “When I told him not to go down into the snow,” Yang said, “he said that when he was seven, he crawled into a wolf’s den and stole a litter of cubs, so a snow cave is nothing! You’ve talked about wanting a wolf cub, haven’t you? Well, take Bayar along and get one.”
    “Not me,” Chen replied. “These Mongols, all I can do is stand back and admire them.”
    As the two students rode their Mongolian snow raft, Yang’s face was joyfully wrinkled. “I can’t believe how great it is to hunt on the grassland. Shepherding is so boring. As soon as wolves entered the picture, our lives got a lot more interesting and a lot more exciting.”
    “This is a vast, sparsely populated territory,” Chen said. “Sometimes there isn’t a yurt within miles. Without the wolves and the hunt, life out here would be stultifying. I’ve gotten hooked on reading lately and it appears that these people have revered the wolf totem for thousands of years.”
    Having eaten braised venison with their tea that morning, they had an abundance of energy, so, with clouds of white steam bursting from their mouths, their arms and legs churning like dragon-boat racers, they skimmed the snowy surface, the two halves of their felt raft rapidly changing positions. Eventually, Yang also managed to hook a gazelle and was so excited he nearly tipped the raft over, causing Chen to break out in a cold sweat as he rushed to calm his friend down. With a smack of his hand against the frozen animal, Yang shouted, “I thought I was dreaming when I saw people hook these things and bring them up, but now I know I wasn’t. This is terrific! And all thanks to you, wolves. Wolves! Wolves!”
    Yang refused to turn the hooking pole over to Chen, who was too concerned with their safety to wrangle over it, and content to be his friend’s muscle. All in all, Yang hooked three gazelles and got so addicted to what he was doing that he didn’t want to head back to shore. With a wicked smile, he said, “Let’s drag some more out and take them back all at once. More efficient that way.” Without a second thought, he laid the frozen carcasses flat on top of the hardened snow.
    Back on the shore, Bilgee had finished a pipeful of tobacco and was telling people to clear a wide space, where women from each family piled up broken boards, wooden axles, and the like as kindling. Then old felt was spread around and piled high with insulated bottles of milk tea and liquor, wooden utensils, and salt cellars. Sanjai and one of the boys slaughtered a pair of half-dead gazelles, both with broken legs. People on the Olonbulag only eat meat from freshly slaughtered animals, so these would serve as the hunters’ noonday meal. The dogs, who had stuffed themselves with kills left behind by the wolves, gazed on the two skinned, gutted, steaming gazelles with indifference. Bilgee and the women and children speared chunks of fresh, still-twitching meat onto metal and wooden skewers, added salt, and held them over the blazing bonfire. Then they sat back to eat the meat and drink tea; its seductive fragrance, along with that of