“The outer Mongolian wolf is healed, when it licks its wound three times”
It was 1975. Wolver Mishig was riding along Stony river a tBeaver Mountain with several other hunters. They saw the tracks of an animal who had crept on all fours across the river ice. Wondering why an animal would crawl so, they began to trace the tracks. They traced them to a wolf crawling on its belly. When they killed it, they saw that all four of the wolf’s legs had been sprained at the second joints. The hunters traced backwards to see what had injured the wolf. At the river’s beginning a steep cliff jutted out into the water. The wolf had chased a must deer from behind the cliff. Must deer are deft in rocky places. The wolf caught up with the musk deer at the top of the cliff and sprang to attack but the musk deer leapt down the cliff and landed on a terrace dodging sideways. The wolf taken by surprise fell down the cliff landing on ice that caused its limbs to slip out from under and sprain. The wolf proceeded to crawl for days. Here the hunters witnessed wolf courage. Every hunter will say with admiration that wolf always chews its own legg off to get out of trap. A trap set for a wolf can not be anchored. Choton said. A wolf caught in an anchored trap will without a doubt chew off its own leg. If the trap is not anchored, a wolf caught in it will be encouraged with the possibility of moving away without cutting its legs free dragging the trap behind. A wolf won’t chew off its leg meaninglessly. The end of the leg caught in the trap will become numb and in winter frozen. The wolf will gnaw off the numbed part up to the trap jaws and pull the rest out.
Lkhamjav, the father of a journalist Tseren-Ochir is a herder in Ikh Tamir county, Arkhangai province. One spring he had to track a wolf caught in a trap for two days and his horse got tired and he had to change horses. On the third day he caught sight of the wolf. The wolf began to shed thin red blood. When Lkhamjav caught up to the wolf it sprang into a gorge. When he rounded the gorge and came to the other side he saw neither the wolf nor any tracks. His horse became shy bucking and snorting so he knew the wolf must be close. Then he leaned back and looked up. The wolf was sitting in a big branch of a tree that had taken root in the rock. Once he killed the wolf, Lkamjav saw the wolf had been gnawing at its trapped leg. The hunter Tuvaan out with companions shot a wolf once and the wolf dragged its hind legs behind. When the hunters chased it and tried to run it over with their UAZ-69 Russian jeep, Tuvaan warned that the wolf might spring up. The others didn’t heed the warning, thinking such a wounded wolf unable to do serious harm. But the wolf sprang up onto the bonnet of the jeep snarling so close to Tuvaan’s face that the hunter recoiled in fear. Falling down from the bonnet of the jeep the wolf bit the steel bumper and left an indent of its fangs there.
In December Tuvaan was riding his horse from the top of White Hill toward the county center when he saw nine wolves through his binoculars. He left his horse behind the hill but when he made it over the hill, the wolves were already descending the hillside. When Tuvaan sat and howled the wolves stopped and hesitated for a while. Four cubs moved toward him and others followed. At first he meant to kill a she-wolf with a bullet to her head, but then he remembered that if a she-wolf is killed her companions will kill the hunter, so shot a male wolf. He seemed to have hit his target but the wolf ran away and disappeared. Tuvaan then thought he had missed, but when he tracked the wolf he saw that it had run about thirty meters and then slid of its own inertia another five meters over the snow. The bullet had pierced its lung and gone out through the ventricle of its heart. In late September 1997 the herders Gyalbayar and Purev of Jargalant county Bayankhongor province, shot at a wolf and seemed to have hit it. When they looked through binoculars they saw the wolf was running dragging its intestines. The hunters thought a wolf dragging its intestines would not last a chase but the wolf could not be overtaken and it disappeared. While herder looked from a mountaintop through binoculars two wolves appeared one galloping and one trotting. He shot the galloping wolf. When he approached he saw that its two hind legs were cut at the hocks. He wondered how long the wolf had to go on like that. The hunter Jhevegjav said that one hunter “waited with his driver, Naidansuren on Narrow pass for the wolf to come over the mountain and when it did he shot. But the wolf run away dragging its backside. For two days they tracked it then founded it hidden in a ravine called Shaded Gorge. Naidansuren said to the hunter “You made it suffer and you must shoot it yourself”. I can drive it out of the ravine. Naidansuren frightened the wolf out of the ravine. When the wolf emerged from the ravine the hunter shot. The first bullet from before had hit the wolf’s back and came out through its chest, but because the wolf had been licking it, the wound was almost closed. In this way wolf heals its wounds.
The poet Nyamdorj wrote the following lines about the wolf:
With hard and severe destiny Ramble wolf faced death and danger waiting at its every step But the wolf is endowed with the stamina and courage to fight for survival.
