Wolf Totem: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

them,” the old man replied. “But not often. If we killed them off, the grassland would perish, and then how would we survive? This is something you Chinese cannot understand.”
    “It’s starting to make sense to me,” Chen said. He was getting excited, without quite knowing why. The vague image of a wolf totem formed in his head. Before leaving Beijing two years earlier, he’d read and collected books on the inhabitants of the grassland, and had learned that they revere a wolf totem, but only now did he have an inkling of why they treated the wolf, a beastly ancestor, an animal despised by the Chinese and by all people who tilled the land, as their totem.
    The old man looked at Chen; his broad smile turned his eyes to narrow slits. “You Beijing students threw up your yurt more than a year ago,” he said, “but you don’t have enough felt padding around it. We’ll take a few extra gazelles back with us this time and trade them at the purchasing center for some felt. That way the four of you will be a bit warmer this winter.”
    “That’s wonderful,” Chen said. “We’ve only got two layers of felt now, and even our ink bottles freeze inside the yurt.”
    The old man smiled again. “Well, take a good look, because this pack of wolves is going to hand you a nice gift.”
    On the Olonbulag at the time, a full-grown frozen gazelle, meat and hide, sold for twenty yuan, equivalent to a herder’s wages for two weeks. Considered choice material, its hide was used to make pilots’ jackets. But China’s pilots could not get them, since the gazelle hides produced in Inner Mongolia were for export only, a commodity of exchange with the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries for steel, automobiles, and munitions. The choice meat cuts were canned and exported. The remaining meat and the bones were targeted for domestic consumption but only occasionally appeared in butcher shops in the Mongolian banner territories, where ration coupons were required.
    In the winter of that year, great quantities of gazelles had streamed across the border, creating excitement among leaders of the various Mongolian banners. Purchasing stations made space in their storerooms for the carcasses. Officials, hunters, and herdsmen were like fishermen who had been told the fish were schooling. Nearly all the hunters and herders had saddled up the fastest horses and were heading out with hunting dogs and rifles to kill as many gazelles as possible. That did not include Chen Zhen, who had his hands full with his sheep and, of course, had no rifle and no ammunition. Besides, a shepherd was given only four horses, while the horse herders had seven or eight, and as many as a dozen for their exclusive use. So the students could only look on enviously as the hunters went out.
    A couple of nights before, Chen had visited the yurt of the hunter Lamjav. The gazelles had only been in the region for a few days, yet he had already bagged eleven, once bringing down two with a single shot. For a few days of hunting he had earned nearly as much as a horse herder made in three months. Proudly he told Chen that he’d already taken in enough to supply himself with liquor and cigarettes for a year. After a few more days out on the grassland, he planned to buy a Red Lantern transistor radio, leaving the new one at home and taking the old one to the herders’ mobile yurt. That night, for the first time in his life, Chen had a true taste of the wild grassland. There is no fat on gazelles, and the leanness of their meat, which tastes like venison, can be attributed to their perennial battle with wolves.
    Once the gazelles had migrated onto the Olonbulag, the Beijing students were demoted to second-class citizens. In their two years on the grassland, they had learned to tend cows and sheep by themselves, but they were incompetent hunters, and in the nomadic existence of people in eastern Inner Mongolia, hunting ranks higher than tending livestock. The Mongols’