Seeing that the China Rescue Team had good tactics for killing wolves, Shen Cong gave it no more thought and started back the way he had come.

But he had barely come out of the Taihang range and was passing the Xishanbei settlement when explosions began going off inside it, one after another. They were bomb fruit — the peculiar fruit that detonates.

"Turn around, Yellow Great-Immortal."

The weasel wheeled at once and ran for Xishanbei.

By the time he drew near, the Third Eye had a clear view of what was happening in the settlement. Upward of a thousand giant wolves were storming it. The patrol men were fighting for their lives and could still hold with bomb fruit for the moment. But the Rescue Team's elite had all gone into the Taihang, and the settlement's fighting strength was at its lowest ebb.

"So the Laiyuan giant wolf pack turns up here. Weren't they saying the China Rescue Team had tracked them for a long while and worked out their tactics, and were going to wipe the wolves out to the last one?" Shen Cong frowned over it.

"Or do the giant wolves understand strategy? Have they lured the tiger off its mountain?"

Wolves are cunning by nature to begin with, and these had grown smarter since, with the potential to evolve higher intelligence besides. It was hardly beyond them to lure the tiger off its mountain.

Even before the apocalypse, wolves had understood all kinds of tactics when they hunted.

Shen Cong remembered a story out of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio that he had studied in his middle-school Chinese textbook. A butcher was walking home at night after selling his meat when he met two wolves. He backed up against a haystack so they could not come at him from front and back — and then the wolf in front pretended to doze with its eyes half shut, while the wolf behind set about digging through the haystack.

Dogs were domesticated out of wolves. They are clever animals, so wolves are hardly likely to be stupid.