Wolf Totem

by Jiang Rong

“Would you believe that one ferocious wolf can bring down a gazelle all by itself?”

“Wolves have developed a special skill. In the daylight, a wolf will concentrate on a single gazelle but do nothing until nightfall, when the gazelle will look for a place with tall grass out of the wind to lie down and sleep. That still isn’t the time to strike, because even though the gazelle is asleep, its nose and ears remain alert.

the wolf won’t be able to catch it. So the wolf waits, all through the night, lying nearby. At sunrise the gazelle gets up with a full bladder, and now the wolf is ready to pounce. A gazelle can’t urinate while it’s running, so before it’s gone far, its bladder bursts, its rear legs cramp up, and it stops. You see, a gazelle can run like the wind, but not all the time, and wise old wolves know that’s when they can bring one down alone. Only the cleverest gazelles are wise enough to forsake the warmth of sleep to get up to relieve themselves at night.

when wolves attack, they do so in silence—no shouts, no wolfish howls. Warrior wolves!

The wolves flew out of the tall grass like torpedoes armed with the sharpest, most fearsome teeth and menacing glares, heading straight for the herd.

Chen was witness to the wolves’ intelligence and patience, their organization and discipline.

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.”

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.

“that one large wolf had leaned its front paws against the wall, rear legs on the ground, and made its body available as a springboard. The other wolves ran full speed, jumped on its back and shoulders, and sailed into the enclosure. From inside, wouldn’t it look like they flew in?”

“The way I see it, that wolf flew in and ate just as much as the others. You should know that these wolves have a strong collective spirit; they stick together. It’s not in their nature to abandon one of their own. A wolf on the inside acted as a springboard for another one, which had eaten its fill, to leap back across the wall. Then it acted as a springboard for the hungry wolf to fly into the enclosure and eat its fill. Those two bloody paw prints were left by the second wolf. How else would they have been bloody? The first wolf hadn’t made a kill when it was the springboard, so its paws were clean, no blood.

On the Mongolian grassland, peace does not follow peace, but danger always follows danger.

The wind lent the wolves wings. Under normal circumstances, wolves can outrun horses, with the wind or against it. But with the wind, even though they are faster, they would not dare to try to bring horses down from the rear, afraid of meeting up with a clever horse that might suddenly dart ahead, causing the wolf, aiming for the back of its prey, to land on its hooves; injury or death would be inevitable.

Wolves are afraid of bright light; it hurts their eyes.

But wolves are demonic fighters with incredible patience in locating and waiting for opportunities.

Wolves often fight alone, though they also hunt in small packs of three to five or do their plundering in families of eight to ten. What occurred here, with a small army of wolves, was rare. They had decided to organize themselves into a field army for mobile warfare.

a man or a race lacks the death-before-surrender spirit, a willingness to die along with the enemy, then slavery is the inevitable result,” Chen said. “Whoever takes the suicidal spirit of wolves as a model is destined for heroism, and will be eulogized with songs and tears.

Learning the wrong lesson leads to samurai fascism, but anyone who lacks the death-before-surrender spirit will always succumb to samurai fascism.”

“Here’s some of what the wolves knew: weather, topography, opportunity, their and their enemy’s strengths, military strategy and tactics, close fighting, night fighting, guerrilla fighting, mobile fighting, long-range raids, ambushes, lightning raids, and concentrating their strength to annihilate the enemy. They made plans, they set goals, and they undertook a measured campaign of total annihilation. It was a textbook battle plan.

How could a nomadic, uncivilized, backward race of people with no writing system, one that used arrows tipped with bone, not steel, be in possession of such advanced military capabilities and wisdom?

“History books tell us that wolves have strong maternal instincts,”

“There are recorded instances of wolves raising human children. The ancestors of the Huns, the Gaoju, and the Turks were wolf children, all raised by wolf mothers.”

“Wolves are worse than outlaws!” Bao Shungui cursed. “They even kill their own wounded!”

Wolves are unyielding creatures. They’d rather die than suffer humiliation. And an alpha male won’t let that happen to a member of his pack.

To begin with, wolves have a high birthrate. A female wolf can produce seven or eight, sometimes a dozen or more, cubs in one litter.

wolves are combat ready when they’re a year old.

A dog at one year can hunt rabbits, a wolf at that age can hunt sheep, and a one-year-old child is still in diapers.

The last time I went out with Sanjai, we dug for two whole days and still didn’t reach the end. Finally we lit a fire and sealed the opening, figuring we’d suffocate the cubs inside. Sanjai said the mother wolf would know how to block off the smoke, and that there’d be a secret exit somewhere. By now you should know how wolves can trick

bark. Wolves sleep with their ears pricked, and at the first sign of danger, they’re up and away.

“A wolf can be merciless with its own body. If one of its legs is caught in a trap, it’ll chew it off and escape on three legs.

“Fighting wolves is like fighting a war: strength against strength, spirit against spirit, wisdom and courage against wisdom and courage. All the thirty-six stratagems, except for using

the wiles of a beautiful woman, are in play.”

I’m going to have to tell him they’re not bad at tunnel warfare and camouflage either, and can even combine the two. Soldiering is the art of deception, and wolves are the world’s finest soldiers.”

But then I came to the Olonbulag and saw that the rabbit population was actually quite small. A major contribution by the wolves, I take it. When I’m tending my flock, I often see them catch rabbits, and when there are two working together, they never miss.”

“The Tibetans feed their dead to eagles. Here it’s wolves. If you kill off all the wolves, won’t the locals hate you?”

“You can’t kill off all the Olonbulag wolves. The government tells us to hunt them, saying that each wolf killed saves a hundred sheep and each litter of cubs taken saves ten flocks. If you think I’ve killed a lot of wolves, you should see the champion wolf hunter of the Bayan Gobi Commune. One spring a couple of years ago, he brought out five litters of cubs, almost as many as I’ve managed over a decade.

“Wolves are born sneaks,”

“All that barking and shouting a moment ago woke them up for sure. They’re playing dead. Pick one up if you don’t believe me.”

But when he touched its chest, he could feel the tiny heartbeat, frighteningly fast. “Put it down on the ground,” Dorji said, “and see what it does.”

As soon as it touched the ground, the cub sprang to life and crawled as fast as it could away from the humans and the dogs.

all he had to do was raise a male wolf to maturity and mate it with a bitch to produce a wolfhound,

Forty or more wolves had been surrounded by as many as 170 dogs. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, back-to-back, tails touching, fangs bared, facing death with a unified defense.

They fought in threes and fours, coming to one another’s aid, using their deadly fangs and tasting blood with every bite.

And so eating dog meat, skinning a dog, or sleeping under a dog skin were considered acts of unforgivable betrayal. This was one of the reasons why herdsmen had come to hate inhabitants of farming regions and Han Chinese.

The Westerners who fought their way back to the East were all descendants of nomads. The builders of ancient Rome were a pair of brothers raised by a wolf. Images of the wolf and her two wolf-children appear on the city’s emblem even today. The later Teutons, Germans, and Anglo-Saxons grew increasingly powerful, and the blood of wolves ran in their veins.

you don’t know wolves, you can’t understand the spirit and character of the nomads, and you’ll certainly never be able to appreciate the differences between nomads and farmers

The slender wolf had obviously been standing guard for the other two and spotted the hunters at the moment they had the wolves in their sights. The largest of the three animals, the one being guarded, was no ordinary member of the pack, but one of its leaders. All three ran for the steepest hillside in the area.

“the wolf knew that his leg was slowing him down, dragging along on the ground, so he chewed it off.”

“The big ones dig into the burrow entrance, sending the occupants scurrying out escape holes, where other wolves are waiting to kill and eat them. Sometimes smaller wolves actually dig their way deep into the burrow to catch and drag them

“Because they often take over marmot burrows. A wolf will clear out one of these burrows and have her cubs inside.”

‘When marmots leave their burrows, the wolves go up the mountain.’ Once the marmots are out in the open, the livestock can rest easy for a spell.”