Free Wolf Totem: A Novel by Jiang Rong

Bilgee was teaching the Beijing student how to use it. Chen Zhen thus had the good fortune to be the first Han Chinese to actually navigate one of those ancient, primitive boats.
    From time to time, as the felt boat picked up speed, the crusty snow beneath them cracked and crunched, and Chen felt as if he were riding on a magic carpet, gliding across the snowy whiteness below, trembling with fear, excited by a sense of danger, floating like an immortal, and immensely grateful to the wolves and human inhabitants of the grassland for introducing him to an almost mythical sort of primitive life. Eight felt boats, sixteen flying carpets, converged on the snow lake as if chasing one another, raising clouds of powdery snow and sprays of ice. Dogs barked, people shouted, Tengger smiled. Suddenly a heavy cloud passed overhead, sending the temperature plummeting. Snow that had begun to melt was immediately transformed into brittle ice, which hardened the crusty surface and tripled the degree of safety in retrieving gazelles, with no need to change tactics. The men took off their sunglasses, opened their eyes wide, and looked up into the sky. “Tengger! ” they shouted joyfully. “Tengger!” Now the boats picked up speed, their pilots emboldened, and at that moment Chen actually sensed the existence of the Mongols’ eternal Tengger, which once more caressed his soul.
    Then, without warning, shouts of joy from Yang Ke and Bayar erupted behind them. Chen turned to look. “We got one!” Yang and Bayar shouted together. “We got one!” Chen trained his telescope on them and saw that somehow, under Bayar’s direction, Yang had dug a large gazelle out of the snow. They were dragging it by its leg back to the cart, while others were running up with shovels over their shoulders.
    The felt boat had traveled far from the safety of the shore and was getting closer to one of the gazelles, a pregnant female with a look of fear and hopelessness in her eyes, an almost prayerful look. Surrounded by holes in the snow, she was standing on a crusty spot no bigger than a small table, which could give way at any moment. “Slide the hook over slowly,” the old man said. “Don’t frighten her. We’re dealing with two lives here. Life on the grassland is hard for us all, and it’s sometimes important to spare lives.”
    Chen nodded, lay down on his belly, and lightly moved the felt in front past the holes until it was up next to the female gazelle’s feet. The crust was holding. Maybe the animal had been rescued before, or maybe she recognized a slim chance of survival for the fetus she was carrying, but she leaped onto the felt and immediately fell to her knees, quaking all over. She seemed paralyzed with exhaustion, nearly frozen, and frightened out of her wits.
    Chen breathed a sigh of relief as the two men stepped lightly onto the front sheet of felt and carefully dragged the rear sheet around the holes in the snow, pushing it to the west, where the snow was harder. After repeating the maneuver a dozen or so times, they reached a gentle slope where holes in the snow were replaced by gazelle droppings and tracks. “All right,” the old man said, “let her go. If she falls in now, it will be because Tengger wanted her to.”
    Chen approached the gazelle slowly and looked into her eyes. He didn’t see a gazelle; he saw a docile deer about to become a mother. She possessed motherly beauty in her big, tender eyes. He rubbed the top of her head; she opened her eyes wide, now seeming to beg for mercy. Chen stroked the helpless, feeble creature kneeling at his feet, and felt his heart shudder. Why did he not strive to protect these warm, beautiful, peace-loving herbivores instead of gradually moving closer to the wolves, whose nature was to kill? Having grown up hearing tales that demonize wolves, he said without thinking, “These gazelles are such pitiful creatures. Wolves are evil, killing the innocent, oblivious to the value of a life.