Free Wolf Totem: A Novel by Jiang Rong Page B

you to free this gazelle?”
    “Gazelles attract wolves,” the old man said. “Wolves hunt the gazelles, and that makes for fewer losses of cows, sheep, and horses. The gazelles also provide extra income for the herdsmen. In fact, many Mongols rely on what they earn from hunting gazelles to build their yurts, get married, and have children. Half of a Mongol is hunter. If we could not hunt, our lives would be like meat with no salt, tasteless. We Mongols go crazy if we can’t hunt, partly because that safeguards the big life of the grassland. We hunt animals that eat our grass many times more than we hunt animals that eat meat.” He sighed. “There are so many things you Chinese don’t understand. You read books, but what you find in them is false reasoning. Chinese write their books to advocate Chinese causes. The Mongols suffer because they can’t write books. If you could turn into a Mongol and write books for us, that would be wonderful.”
    Chen nodded as he thought back to all the fairy tales he’d read as a child. The “gray wolves” were stupid creatures, greedy and cruel, while foxes were clever and likable. Not until coming to the grassland did he realize that in nature there is no wild animal that has evolved more highly or more perfectly than the gray wolf. Books, and especially fairy tales, he saw, often misled people.
    The old man helped the gazelle to her feet and nudged her out onto the snow, in a spot where the tips of a few weeds poked through the surface. The hungry pregnant gazelle bent down and gobbled them up. Chen hurriedly pulled up the felt. The gazelle took a few wobbly steps, spotted the tracks of other gazelles, and ran off toward the ridge without looking back; she quickly vanished in the mountains.
    Batu and Gasmai also brought up a live animal, a half-grown gazelle. Gasmai muttered, “Huolehei, huolehei” (Mercy, mercy), as she picked it up in her arms, set it down on the snowy ground, and sent it off running toward the ridge with a pat on its rump.
    Chen gave Gasmai a thumbs-up. She laughed and said, “Its mother fell into a hole in the snow, and it just kept running around, not wanting to leave. We had a terrible time trying to catch it, until we managed to hold it down with our poles.”
    The other snow boats drew near, and the surviving gazelles on the snow lake eventually formed a small cluster that went over the mountain ridge and disappeared. The old man said, “Those animals have learned something here. In the future, the wolves won’t be able to bring them down.”

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    Finally, the people were able to claim their well-deserved New Year’s provisions. The freezing air over the snow lake was becom-ing heavier, the snow on the surface harder. The old man said to the hunters, “Tengger is urging us to move quickly.” So the men ran to their spots, and the hunting ground once again steamed with exuberance. Bilgee led Chen Zhen to an average-sized depression in the snow, where they stopped. “Don’t look for the largest depressions,” he said, “because they usually contain seven or eight suffocated gazelles, and all that heat keeps them from freezing right away. As the heat builds up overnight, the animals get bloated, their legs turn rigid, and the skin over their abdomens turns purple. As much as half the meat on them is bad by the time they finally freeze. So what you get is a frozen gazelle with half its meat inedible. At the purchasing station, you’ll get less than half the price of a whole gazelle, money for the hide only, not a cent for the meat. But rotting meat is the wolves’ favorite, and the gazelles buried here will be on their mind all winter. So we’ll leave the choice wolf food for the wolves.”
    The old man lay down on the felt and thrust his hooked pole into the depression, which was at least six feet deep. He probed and probed until he abruptly jerked the pole upward. “I’ve hooked one,” he said to Chen. “Help me pull it up.” They began