There's no escaping the call of the wild

By James Healy (China Daily)

Updated: 2015-03-20

No matter how big a city we live in, we're followed, it seems, by a deep-seated nostalgia for the long-ago life of nomadic hunters, who made camp wherever the wind and wild herds took them.

This yearning sometimes comes howling to the surface, as it did for me recently while reading Wolf Totem. (A far cry better than the toothless, oversimplified movie.)

Eagerly lapping up this Chinese novel about survival on the grasslands of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, I was reminded of likewise riveting tales by US authors John Neihardt and Mari Sandoz.

Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks and Sandoz's Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas - like Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem - are sympathetic descriptions by outsiders of a lifestyle pushed to near-extinction by the encroachment of modern life. The three books depict Mother Earth as a living being. They also describe the unpredictable weather as both nurturing and cruel, and the environment as a sometimes merciless stage on which predators and prey act out their tragic dramas.

The Inner Mongolian grassland, writes Jiang, is "bighearted and innocent". Neihardt and Sandoz use similar words when writing of the US' Midwestern Plains, whose harsh winters, like those of Inner Mongolia, are unforgiving, but where spring sees tender green shoots reaching skyward.

The Lakota people, the bison-hunting Native American tribe of both Black Elk and Crazy Horse, watched as European settlers took their land by force, pushing them onto reservations that extinguished their spirit with a restrictive agrarian lifestyle.

Like Chen Zhen, the protagonist of Wolf Totem who was fascinated by the Mongolians, I have long been captivated by the nomadic Lakotas and especially Crazy Horse and Black Elk (whose son, with bright warpaint on his face, I met as a child). The Lakotas, like the Mongolians, were excellent horsemen and fierce warriors.

A horrifying event in 1890 that marked the sunset of the Lakotas' greatness also captured my imagination: the massacre, by avenging cavalrymen of the US Army, of nearly 300 Native Americans, mostly women and children, at an empty stretch of grassland known as Wounded Knee. I have often stood atop the hill where the blizzard-frozen bodies of the Native Americans were stacked and buried in a mass grave now marked by a crumbling monument.

A few years ago, on a solo pilgrimage there, I met an aging Lakota chief who related inspiring tales of days long past. He allowed me to stay the night in an empty tepee pitched in the tall grass beside the mass grave.

After walking plaintively, beneath a full moon, along the gully where the massacre victims were shot down or run through with swords, I slept alone on the prairie floor. That summer night, as coyotes howled and wild dogs sniffed just outside the tepee's open flap, I felt the exhilaration the nomads must have experienced while chasing bison, their lifeblood and totem, across the open plains.

This primeval thrill returned as I ventured deeper into Wolf Totem. And it occurred to me that, even in the city, the nomad (as well as the wolf) still lives within us.

Contact the writer at jameshealy@chinadaily.com.cn