Wolf Totem

by Jiang Rong

They do it so that the old, sick, and wounded wolves will have something to eat. Do you know why tigers and such can’t survive out here? And why wolves dominate the grassland? It’s because of their pack mentality.

Tigers make a kill for themselves, not for other tigers, not even for their mates or offspring. But wolves kill for themselves and for the rest of the pack, even those that can’t be in on the kill—the old, the crippled, the nearly blind, the young, the sick, and the nursing females. All you see now are the carcasses, but when the alpha male howls tonight, half the wolves in the Olonbulag and any others that can claim some kinship with this pack will show up, and there won’t be anything left by morning.

Ground squirrels are the favorites of female wolves and their cubs. Before the young ones are weaned, their mothers teach them how to hunt, beginning with ground squirrels.

That is a worthy death. Most grassland wolves die in battle!”

The battles produce fine horses, year after year, increasing the stallions’ courage and fighting skills, and their families flourish. This is where the stallions hone their skills for fighting and killing wolves. Without these drills, the herds of Mongol horses could not survive on the grassland.”

“maybe wolves’ taste buds are in their stomach.”

The grassland wolves are known for long-range raids, for splitting up to scout a situation and then joining for an attack. As pack animals, they range far and wide while hunting, and this highly advanced system of communication is how they make contact across great distances. In the most ruthless battles, results are all that count; how they sound is immaterial.

After the cub’s third and fourth immature attempts, the wolves in the surrounding mountains stopped in midhowl and fell silent.

You must have watched how he bayed last night. Wolves are the only grassland animals that howl up into the sky; you’ll never see a cow, a sheep, a horse, a dog, a fox, a gazelle, or a marmot do anything like that.

The wolves have given the Mongols their ferocious combat nature, the wisdom of sophisticated warfare, and the best warhorses. These three military advantages led to their stunning conquests.”

used to think that the wolf totem was the sole reason why the Mongols were so brave and fierce, as well as wise in military strategy. I didn’t realize that wolves were their unwitting trainers, drilling world-class army horses for the Mongol hordes.

The alpha male was here last night, and he’s not easy to trick. He must have seen through the trap, since he understands that deception is the battlefield norm.

Jebe, Genghis Khan’s general who conquered Russia, was a famous archer who had learned to shoot like that.

He could shoot a prairie dog in the head on a galloping horse from a hundred yards.

Shooting the smallest, cleverest, and most difficult target, the prairie dog, was how they honed their archery skill.

Wolves aren’t dogs; they’d rather die than change.

Have you ever seen a wolf perform in a circus like a tiger or a lion? No animal trainer could manage that. You’ve been around more wolves than I have, you ought to know that.”

No grassland wolf would surrender to humans.

Refusing to follow or to be led was a core belief for a Mongolian wolf, and that

was...

even for a cub who had never been taught by me...

Few people could live according to that code without bending and compromising; fewer still would pit their lives against a nearly invincible external force.

He had based that assumption on his understanding of human behavior. Neither food nor killing was the purpose of the wolves’ existence; rather, it was their sacred, inviolable freedom, their independence, and their dignity.

There are only twenty million people in the real Mongolia, which is a spiritual paradise that venerates the wolf totem; it is free of a farming population that hates wolves and wants only to kill them.

The Slavic Depression that had been common for centuries on the Russian grassland and Siberian wasteland was closely tied to the long, dark winters on vast snowy fields. But how did the Mongols manage to spend several thousand years in a similar environment with healthy bodies and high spirits? They must have developed those as a result of their tense, violent, and cruel battles with the wolves, Chen concluded.

At that instant, Chen Zhen believed he saw his very own wolf totem.

The manuscript he’d completed was written with their blood, animals in which the noble blood of the White Wolf King may have flowed.

The wolves had receded into legend, and the grassland was a distant memory.

Wolf Totem is a fictional account of life in the 1970s that draws on Jiang’s personal experience of the grasslands of China’s border region.