by Liz Welch
“How can I keep this baby?” she asked.
This shaman was famous in the Bayan-Ölgii Province and beyond. His name was Tserern. He had healed Samrakhan’s broken neck the year before, after he was thrown from his horse. It was so bad that when my parents brought my brother to the hospital, the doctor there said Samrakhan would never walk again. They refused to believe this news and brought him to see the shaman, who said, just as they entered his home, “I have been waiting for you.”
The shaman prayed over some mare’s milk, which is already considered holy in our culture. That is the milk of the female horse. We drink it on special occasions. This shaman used it as his medicine and told my mother to give it to Samrakhan first thing in the morning and last thing at night. His neck healed quickly after that.
My mother said the shaman had the spirit. He came from three generations of shamans and was powerful.
The shaman rubbed my mother’s pregnant belly with yak butter and performed a ritual around her that included chanting and the burning of a special herb. Then he wrapped her belly with fabric, “to hold the baby up high in her womb,” he said.
He also ordered my mom to rest. For a nomad woman, this is very difficult. But she took him seriously, as did my father, and his parents, and her parents, who started visiting regularly to help my father with all the chores that my mother usually did. These included cooking and cleaning and milking the cows and turning that milk into soft and hard cheeses. It also meant collecting the dung patties that were being air-dried in the special corral outside our house to make the coal to heat our home. My mother was also responsible for sewing clothes for my brother and father, and for herself, and making the felt from lamb’s wool and the blankets from sheepskin and other animal hides that we use to keep warm at night. We also use them as insulation to keep our spring and autumn homes warm. The list of things Kazakh women do is very long.
The bigger she got with me, the more the shaman encouraged my mother to keep still.
She worried that she would lose me as she had the others.
So when my grandmother arrived, after my mother had carried me for nine months, and reported that she had seen the White Eagle in her dreams, my mother felt relief for the first time during that entire pregnancy.
“This baby will bring luck to our household,” my grandmother announced that same day.
The very next morning, on May 9, 2001, I was born.
Or, as my mother says, “I was ready to see the light.”
This is the expression we use when a baby comes into the world.
My mom was ready, too. But our car was not. My father could not get it to start! Instead, he had to ride his horse to the hospital, an hour away, and fetch someone on a motorbike to come back with him, and then ride my mother on this same motorbike back to the hospital in Altansogts, the nearest town.
When they arrived, my father barely got her up the stairs to the gurney awaiting her. I was born before they even entered the birthing room.
News of my birth traveled quickly, and family members came to the hospital to meet me. My mother’s brother was the one who came up with my name.
Aisholpan means “Venus moon,” the one star you see in the sky all the time, no matter what time of year. It is how nomads tell time. It guides us.
My uncle said, “Aisholpan will guide us. She will be shiny, like this star.”
The curse had been broken.
My mother could return home to her nomadic way of life and continue to build her family. As for me, my mother says that, despite my harrowing arrival, I was an easy child.
“You rarely cried,” my mom said. “We could leave you inside at home all day to go get the sheep from the mountains. And when we would come home, you would still be in the same spot. Staring out the window. Never moving. Just waiting for us to come back.”
My father insists that my calm nature is why I was such a natural with eagles.
2
My People Are Eagle Hunters
For a time, long before I was born, eagle hunting was banned in Mongolia. From 1924, after World War I, until 1989, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communists in power decreed it illegal, punishable by time in prison. The way my father explained it to me was that the Communists believed that everyone should live the same life—which meant that any cultural practice, such as eagle hunting for my people or the Buddhist religion for the Mongol people who were the majority in Mongolia, was outlawed. It also meant that nomads no longer owned their herds—the government did. This was a very difficult period for the Kazakh people.
Kazakhs lived for centuries with no homeland, roaming the land between the Altai Mountains and the Black Sea. This is why Kazakh nomads now live in China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. We were never people to be contained by borders. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that Mongolia offered citizenship to the Kazakh nomads in the northwestern region of the country.
But in 1924, the new Communist ruler led a brutal purge of Kazakhs, as well as Buddhists. Nomads raised livestock for self-reliance, but the new laws mandated that their livestock was now property of the Communist regime. Livestock exports to Russia rose dramatically—and, understandably, the Kazakh nomads revolted. Instead of living off the land, every single citizen had to register with the government and perform an assigned government job. People who disobeyed wound up in prison or dead. They were dark times.
Life under communism was all my mom and dad had known.
My father’s father worked for the government as a commissioner for the district. As part of his job, he had to shoot marmots, foxes, and wolves for their pelts—not for his family, but for the government. He often brought my father along because my father was a good shooter. So as a teenager, my father hunted with guns for the government. And since the Altai Mountains are so remote, and therefore the risk of being caught was slim, my grandfather would also bring his eagle.
My grandfather is one of the reasons eagle hunting is still practiced in Mongolia today.
He and others like him continued the tradition in secret. He taught my father, as well as his other sons, how to hunt with eagles just as his father had taught him—despite the fact that if he or any of his sons got caught, they would have gone to jail.
My grandfather risked it because, as he always said, eagle hunting was in our family’s blood. He kept his eagle in hiding. The end of communism meant no longer having to hide his eagle or this tradition. This was great for my father and his siblings. They no longer had to hunt in secret.
My father can name eagle hunters in our family for all seven generations that precede him, all of them men. I am part of the eighth generation.
All my childhood memories involve an eagle. I have never, ever been scared of eagles. I have been up close to them since before I can remember.
“When you first started to crawl, you went right to my eagle,” my father often says.
This still makes him so proud: His eagle was my playmate. During the winter months, she lived inside our home with us, on her perch, and, according to my parents, I always wanted to play near her. When I started talking, I talked to her, and she would chirp at me, bobbing back and forth, side to side. I was so in love with his bird that my father let me help feed her before I turned one. I held the meat in one hand as my father held my wrist, and I watched, delighted, as the bird pecked at her food.
My dad’s bird was as tall as I was at one year old. Her wingspan was six feet wide, the same length as my father was standing up; her beak was so sharp, it could slice through skin down to the bone; and her talons were so strong, they could snap a finger or an arm. As proof, my father has scars up and down his arms, and is missing the bottom chunk of his earlobe.
“I was helping my friend train his eagle,” he explains whenever anyone asks about his deformed ear, “and his eagle got angry with me.”
We both find this so funny. Eagles have personalities, and this one was particularly feisty! My dad did not blame the eagle. He alway
s says that it is the responsibility of the trainer or hunter to treat his bird with respect, no matter what.
My dad has had eight eagles over his lifetime—and he claims that each had a distinct way of being. They are like any creature. Some are lazy. Others are fierce. Some are sweet.
It depends on their nature and how you treat them.
My dad’s earliest memories are like mine—there was always an eagle in the house during the winter, and outside during the warmer summer months. My mother, however, did not have any eagle hunters in her family, so living with an eagle was entirely new to her. In fact, she had never even seen an eagle up close until she married my dad.
Summer is the one time of the year when eagle hunters don’t hunt—and that was the season when my parents married. My father had an eagle at the time who was living outside at his parents’ home—where he and my mother first lived together—either on her perch or in her own small ger, to keep her protected from the wind at night. That fall, my parents moved to a plot of land at the base of the small hill, where my father began building their winter home. The eagle came with them. This is our home today.
It started as a small room, which my father built from wood and stucco mud. Since there was no extra ger for his eagle, the bird lived in the house—with them.
My mother was newly wed, with a one-room house that was big enough to fit the stove, their marriage bed, and a separate cot for visiting relatives—and the tughir, or perch, which was passed down to my father from his father. My father placed it in the corner near their bed. And then my mother moved it to the far corner, as far away from the bed as possible.
“I was so scared of what the bird might do to me,” she said. “It was big! And had the sharpest beak. And she would look at me in a way that intimidated me. After all, I was the newcomer!”
My mother said that she soon grew accustomed to living with the bird.
“She was a very calm bird,” she says. “She chirped from time to time, but that was it. And your father loved the bird so much. Every night, he would sit and talk to her, stroking her head. She would bob back and forth, chirping to him. I went from being a little jealous to falling in love with the bird, and with your father’s love for her.”
By the time my brother was born, in 1992, my mother knew in her heart that the eagle would never hurt him or her.
If you ask her about any of our eagles today, she says, “The eagle is part of the family. They’re holy birds.”
I was four years old when my brother trapped his first eagle. Samrakhan was thirteen, the age when boys are traditionally taught by their fathers about eagle hunting. I remember him bringing her home and the look of pride on his face. I was small but knew even then that I would catch my own eagle one day. That was my dream.
I looked up to my big brother. He was quiet and calm, always. A lot like me. He also encouraged me to watch him learn. Both he and my father thought it was funny that I, a pudgy small girl, loved eagles as much as I did. Samrakhan let me play with his eaglet, just as my father let me play with his older eagle.
I did not know then that this was a tradition passed down from father to son. I was too young to understand that. But I did think, as most four-year-olds do, that I could do anything a boy could do.
After all, I come from a long line of eagle hunters. We do not back down from a challenge.
3
Nomadic Life
Despite occasional hunger, my memories from childhood are otherwise happy.
I especially enjoyed helping my parents with all our animals. Before I was even one year old, my father would bring me on his horse to herd the goats. I got my own pony soon after that—every nomad child has a pony. That is how we get around. It is our way of life. I started riding my pony when I was four and could gallop by the time I was six. I became a jockey when I was eight years old and, according to my dad, was very good. I entered horse-racing contests and won often.
We do not name our horses. Instead, we call them by their colors. Brown. Black. White with spots. Some of our favorite horses will be named, but even then, it is always something descriptive, such as Black Stallion. Or Trottero for a horse who always trots, never gallops. When I think back to being a little kid, I think of galloping across the steppes on my pony. This, to me, is freedom.
In a funny twist, my sister is named Saigulikh, which means “fast colt.”
When my mother was pregnant with Saigulikh, my father had a beautiful and very fast horse. My mother was nine months pregnant and felt ready to give birth. But there was a very important horse race that was taking place in Ölgii. The prizes were cash, and my father knew he could win with his horse. So he asked my mother to wait one day before giving birth so he could go and compete.
It takes six hours to get to Ölgii by horse, so he went that night, raced the following morning, and won! When he returned home later that evening, no one was there.
“Your mother did not listen to me,” he says whenever he tells this story. “She could not wait.”
“Saigulikh could not wait!” my mother teases back.
Hence her name.
My brother Dinka was born three years after Saigulikh. This, my parents say, proves that I was the beginning of their good luck.
But there are hard memories, too.
I remember being hungry.
And I remember the harsh winters that stole our animals from us.
My parents tell stories from the years before I was born that were dire. They call the period from 1993 to 2000 the starvation times. Frigid storms arrived right after communism ended, which was doubly difficult as nomads went back to their herding and grazing, whereas under a communist government everyone had an assigned job, through the state.
A combination of circumstances, beginning with drought in the summer, meant that the grass was not as abundant, and as a result, our animals went into the winter thinner than usual. And then dzud hit. Dzud is a winter storm that plunges the temperatures to negative sixty degrees Fahrenheit. If the goats and sheep and cows are too thin, they have no fat to keep them warm. They freeze to death.
We depend on our animals, so if they suffer, we suffer, too.
People had less to eat because of dzud. Nomads back then depended on their animals to eat and to trade for basics, such as flour and salt and tea. It got a bit better after I was born—but by this point, so many nomads had given up their way of life. All my mother’s siblings had moved to Kazakhstan, a nation that formed after the Soviet Union collapsed. An invitation from the new government went out to any Kazakh people, saying they were welcome. Many nomads accepted the offer, trading their gers and ponies for apartments and motorbikes. Some nomads chose to stay in Mongolia, but moved instead to apartments or homes in Ölgii or even as far away as Ulanbataar, the capital of Mongolia, where they often wound up living in tent slums on the outskirts of the capital without any of their animals or means to make a living.
This never even crossed my father’s or my mother’s minds. My mother married my father because she loved the nomad life. And my father would say this is the only life he ever wanted to live.
For my family, it is almost impossible to imagine a life without animals.
This is how we have lived for centuries. This is all we know.
I used to play a lot in the mountains with Saigulikh and Dinka. We each always had our own pony and would ride for hours. Before we left home, we would stuff our pockets with the hard, sour-tasting rock cheese that my mom made from the curds of goat’s or cow’s milk. They looked like stones and were so hard, you could chip a tooth on them if you were not careful. That taste to me is happiness. It reminds me of my childhood, before the tourists came. Before a movie was made of my life. Before I was famous.
Back when it was just me living a nomad girl’s life. I had never heard of New York City or Los Angeles, let alone imagined ever visiting either place. My siblings and I had never heard of a hamburger or pizza, or even seen candy! Or gum!
Ev
erything we ate, we made ourselves.
When I was eight and Saigulikh was five, we started going to Altansogts Secondary School, which was in the nearest village. Before that, I went to school in Ölgii, the nearest big town for one hundred miles. I would board during the week and come home on the weekends. But I was lonely. I missed my family. So when Saigulikh turned five and was ready to start school, my parents decided to switch us to both go to the local boarding school. Altansogts was only four miles from our winter house, as opposed to Ölgii, which is roughly forty miles away. Most of the students at Altansogts were from nomadic families and, like us, they spent the weekdays in the two-story dormitory.
My father would ride me and Saigulikh on his motorbike to drop us off on Sunday night and pick us up on Friday afternoon. It was a short ride—only fifteen minutes—compared with the hour walk, and my sister and I loved it. My father sat my sister in front of him on the padded seat, and I climbed on the back, behind him, and held on to his waist as we bumped our way over the tire-track-grooved, dirt-packed road. The hum of the motorcycle coupled with the sand-colored dust clouds kicked up by its wheels was a soundtrack to the happiness I felt heading to school to see all my friends. When we moved to our autumn ger at the end of summer, we could walk to school, and we grazed our animals in a valley that was less than a mile away. That walk was also so lovely, over the rolling green pastures dotted with cows, listening to the clinking of bells some of them wore around their necks to help herders know where they had wandered to.
School started every morning at six thirty. Our alarm clock was a teacher pounding on the door.
Thud, thud, thud!
My eyes would shoot open at the first knock, and I would fling off my sheets as quickly as possible—the faster I got out of bed, the sooner I got to use the washroom. There was only one per floor, for more than two dozen girls.
