by Liz Welch
He kept smiling and nodding at us, and speaking this funny language to the Mongolian man, who kept laughing and speaking back to him in gibberish. Then this glow-in-the-dark ghost man took a small black box out of his bag, put it up to his face, and pointed it at me. I heard a clicking sound, and then a bright light filled the room, like a flash of lightning that sent a shock throughout my whole body.
I was so scared that I burst into tears.
My father laughed—so did the tourist and the translator. But my mother was also upset. She put her arm around me and shouted at my father to stop laughing, while staring sternly at this stranger with his flashing machine. I kept crying.
My dad tells this story all the time. He thinks it is so funny, and I do, too, now that I have met hundreds, if not thousands, of tourists who have visited my home and taken my photo.
At first I did not understand why everyone was so interested in seeing how Kazakh nomads live: Yes, we live in one room, and sleep on mats, and eat the animals we raise. Yes, we live with eagles, and hunt with them, too. And, yes, we use the fur from the fox and rabbit and wolf that our eagles catch to make our coats and hats. This is and has always been my life, so it was fascinating to me that it was so fascinating to them—to the point that they paid real money to live with us for a few days for the “nomad experience.”
We have gotten used to it by now.
It is not unusual to have four or more strangers sleeping in our one-room home, side by side in their sleeping bags. These people—mostly from North America, but also from Europe and other parts of Asia—have been coming for years now. They bring rice or cooking oil or money in exchange for spending a night or several. They want to eat our food and drink our salt tea or fermented mare’s milk, a delicacy. They want to live the way we live.
During the hunger years, these visits were a lifeline. The money that tourists paid to stay with nomad families helped these families, mine included, to survive.
My father often tells the story of the first time he saw a tourist. The man’s name was Zeep, and he came on horseback with a translator.
That first night, for dinner, my mother made a stew out of cow intestines—we eat every part of the animal, not just the meat. When my father invited Zeep to stay and eat, he said he was not hungry, which my parents found strange.
“He had been riding for hours in quite cold conditions,” my father remembers.
“How is he not hungry?” my mother asked the translator.
“He is not used to the food we eat,” the translator explained.
Zeep stayed the night, and when my parents were ready to go to sleep, he rolled out a funny-looking bag that was long and thin. He placed it on the floor, next to my parents’ bed because the house was so small—there was nowhere else to go—then zipped himself in and closed his eyes.
Not much time had passed when my dad woke up to find Zeep shivering because he was so cold. My dad laid an animal hide on him—this is how we keep warm—and the next thing he knew, Zeep was snoring so loudly that he woke up my mother, who thought an animal was in the house. They still laugh about this.
Zeep is a very important person—or VIP, as my dad says—as his visit was the beginning of our good relationship with tourists. He came for one night and wound up staying for twenty days.
My dad had a Russian motorbike at the time and drove Zeep around the steppes and showed him how we herd and care for our animals. Zeep was amazed at how beautiful Bayan-Ölgii was. He said it looked like the moon, which my father also thought was funny.
“Have you been to the moon?” my dad asked him. “How do you know what it looks like?”
Teasing aside, my dad said it was fun to have this foreign visitor.
“He was so amazed by things that are no big deal to us,” my dad recalls. “That the stars in the sky are our maps. That we put salt in our tea. That we hunt with eagles and wear the pelts we catch. What is fascinating to them is normal to us. It is our life!”
The next time Zeep came back, the following year, it was with three other people who looked a lot like him and who also were interested in the nomad experience. They stayed for ten days, and this time, my dad showed them how he hunted with his eagle.
“People could not believe their eyes,” my father recalls. “From that moment on, it became the thing everyone wanted to see.”
It was the very thing I would get to do with my father now.
We saddled up six ponies in preparation for the tourists we knew would be coming. I would get to be the scarer, just as my dad had promised.
Several hours later, we saw the dust rising in the distance. A gray van barreled toward us. As it approached, my father and I laid out our outfits for the hunt. My mother put on the kettle for tea.
The van pulled up in front of the house and three tourists piled out of the backseat.
Their translator was someone we knew well. He introduced us to this new group: two men in their thirties and a woman in her forties, all visiting from Canada. We greeted them and invited them into the house to eat bread with yak butter and drink salt tea. Then we went back outside to mount the waiting ponies.
My father called to me, “Aisholpan, bring me my eagle!”
I went to her perch, where she was waiting with her hood still on.
We call the mask eagles wear a tomaga, which is made of cowhide. It keeps the eagle calm. I then coaxed her onto my right arm by placing it near her feet. I was wearing my brother’s biyalai, the glove made of goatskin to protect against the eagle’s sharp claws. The glove covered my brother’s forearm, but since my arm was smaller, it went past my elbow. As the eagle stepped onto the glove, I picked up each of her feet with my free hand to wrap each taloned toe securely around my forearm.
In the meantime, my father had mounted his pony and was attaching the baldahk, or leaning stick, to the saddle. It is made of river birch and has a padded cushion that rests on the horse’s shoulder. This is where an eagle hunter can rest the hand he uses to hold the eagle when he goes on long treks. I passed the eagle to my father, who had his biyalai on, and then went to mount my pony.
I saw that the tourists’ faces had lit up and heard them chatting to one another in an animated way, but I had no idea what they were saying. All I knew was that they seemed as excited as I felt—I was finally getting to do something I had dreamed about since I was small. Seeing these strangers’ feelings matching my own made me realize that this was a big deal, after all. I was going to participate on an eagle hunt.
All these thoughts ran through my mind as l followed my father on his horse up into the surrounding hills, with the three tourists and the translator in tow.
We rode for about forty-five minutes before we arrived at the top of a hill where my dad thought there might be a fox. They like to burrow and make dens in the crevices between the shale rock. My dad gave me the signal—“Hup!”—which meant I should start galloping in a zigzag down the hill.
The point is to scare the foxes out of their dens. I had seen my brother do this countless times and thought I could do it. Now was my chance. I dug my heels into my pony to get her started. “Hiya!”
I galloped and shouted, scanning the area for any movement. I knew that this could take many attempts. The goal is to scare the fox (or rabbit or wolf cub or wolf, for that matter) out of its burrow.
Once I see any movement, my job is to signal to my father, who would then take the hood off his eagle and release her into the air to hunt.
We had no luck on that first hill, so we went to another ridge nearby and did the same routine. This time, I saw a flash of fur in the distance. I signaled to my father, who quickly set his eagle on course with a strong “Huka!” cry, the sound eagle hunters make to activate their eagles.
The hunt was on!
Watching the eagle take flight from my father’s arm is still one of my favorite things. She spread her wings, then launched straight up, like a rocket, into the sky, where she scanned the horizon, looking for that s
ame flash of orangey-brown, silver fox.
I saw her spot it, then circle again, looking for the best attack route before plummeting beak first through the air, as if she were diving toward the ground.
Her eagle eyes were focused on the fox, her beak pointed toward it like a bow trained on a target. As she closed in on her prey, she flipped her body so suddenly that her feet faced the fox, which had stood up on its hind legs in self-defense. That gave the eagle a clean target—she grabbed its neck with one claw, its chest with the other, and quickly killed it by puncturing its heart and lungs with her talons.
My heart seemed to be racing as fast as my pony could gallop as we rode toward the eagle, now bowing over the dead fox. I saw my father galloping there as well. The thrill on his face matched mine.
I watched in awe as his eagle remained stationary, her talons gripping the now-limp fox. Never once did she he even try to peck at its flesh. She seemed to know intuitively to keep the pelt intact, as that is the prize—a pristine fur to turn into a hat or coat. This is the most amazing trait about the eagle, my father says. She is that smart.
My father arrived and jumped off his horse, grabbing a rabbit leg out of the bag he wore strapped to his chest. This pouch is called a djem khlata, or “food sack,” which is made specifically for transporting food for the eagle. Since hunters hunt in the winter, when it is freezing cold, the bag is lined with felt to prevent the meat from freezing.
My father knelt on one knee, with the rabbit leg in the gloved hand, and waved it below his eagle’s beak. That seemed to snap her out of her reverie. She perked up and started tearing at the rabbit leg with her beak.
That was when my father bowed his head and cupped his hands to pray. “It is the law of nature.”
We say this to praise both creatures, the fox and the eagle. It’s similar to our tradition before we slaughter an animal for food, when we say, “Forgive us. You are a pure creature. It is not because you have sinned; it is because we are hungry.”
By then, the Canadian tourists had arrived on their ponies and were snapping photos and marveling at what just had happened.
As we rode home, my father and I were discussing what I had just seen.
“She knew exactly what to do,” I said, still marveling at the eagle’s speed in killing the fox.
“This is her natural ability,” he replied. “As a hunter, you just want to create the space for your eagle to be able to do what she does in the wild.”
The tourists had so many more questions than I did—I had grown up knowing about eagle hunting, but for them, this was brand-new. A miracle witnessed.
We’d had so many tourists visit us by then that my dad was used to their questions and curiosity. The people who came to stay with us were often as kind as they were curious.
One year, there was a doctor in the group. By that time, my father’s mother was going blind. She was having a very hard time getting around and could no longer sew, which is what she was known for. Her beautiful Kazakh quilts decorate our ger. The doctor who was visiting noticed this and asked if he could look at her eyes. The translator explained that he might have a way to help my grandmother see again.
After he examined her eyes, he said to my father, “I can help her.”
He arranged for my grandmother to go to Ulaanbaatar. That meant driving for seven hours to a town called Khovd, where my grandmother still had to take an airplane for another four hours to get to the capital city. The doctor promised that the trip would be worth it.
In Kazakh, there was no word for cataracts. We say, she has the white dots in her eyes.
My grandmother agreed to go.
Once she arrived, they did an operation and she could see. It was like magic.
“She could sew again!” my father says so proudly. “She made coats and hats with fox and wolf fur and did Kazakh embroidery until the day she died.”
This tourist gave my grandmother more than her sight back.
He also began visiting often. When he learned that my grandmother had died, he came to pay his respects.
“He was crying,” my father remembers.
He still comes to visit and brings doctors with him to help both Mongolian and Kazakh people.
My father says that working with these foreign people was a blessing. We learned about new cultures through them, and they learned about Kazakh culture through us. They also brought so many things, whether flour, or tea, or honey—as well as candies, pens, and paper. Toothbrushes and toothpaste. Things we had never seen or used before.
I have so many happy memories of all the different people who have stayed with us.
I have met people from Canada and the United States as well as many from Europe, South America, and Asia. I learned more about these different cultures, and about basic geography, than I did at school.
Most of the people who visited were my parents’ age—so much older than me. But there was one girl who visited when I was about ten years old who was exactly my age. She said she was from Australia, and I thought that was her name!
I introduced her to Saigulikh as “Australia,” and the two of us called her that all morning until the translator overheard us and said, “No, she is from Australia!”
Saigulikh asked, “What is Australia?”
The translator explained that it was a country that was ten hours away by airplane—and that was just to get to Ulaanbaatar! It took another four hours to get from UB to Ölgii! And an hour to drive to visit us.
“She must really have wanted to meet us!” Saigulikh joked.
“What is her name?” I asked the translator.
“Yuki!” he said.
Yuki and her family stayed with us for several days, and I still remember how much fun we had. Even though we could not speak to one another, we were able to use body language to communicate. I felt that she understood me.
Saigulikh and I took her horseback riding and let her help us herd the baby goats in the pasture. She also helped us collect the dung patties and place them in the corral to dry out. I was so sad to see her leave. We promised to stay in touch, but that is hard to do when you are a nomad. I don’t get many letters, for instance. And we met before I even knew about cell phones, let alone had one.
That was the amazing thing about these tourists. As much as we shared our life with them, they opened up theirs to us. They connected us to the rest of the world. They taught me about different foods, places, and customs. Whereas I thought their lives sounded crazy—houses with boxes that carried you from one floor to another? Stairs that moved? Food that was wrapped in plastic and sold in stores? Milk that came in cartons? Dogs that slept in your bed? Bathrooms with showers and toilets?
These were all as foreign and strange to me as I am sure drying dung patties for fuel and hunting with eagles were for them. It was an education, for all of us.
6
Asher Arrives
Most of the visitors to Bayan-Ölgii were specifically interested in hunting with eagles. Like Asher, a photographer from Israel, which was a country I had never heard of.
I was twelve years old when Asher showed up. It was late October 2012. I was in the paddock, milking our cow, when I heard the growl of the engine growing louder. In the distance, I saw a metal rectangular box barreling toward our house, kicking up a cloud of fine, gold-colored dust in its wake. It was the familiar gray Russian van called a Furgon. I heard it idle to silence, and then my father’s loud voice as he greeted the strangers. I recognized the voice of the translator, a man from Ölgii whom my dad had become friends with over the years. My dad assumed that the man he had brought with him was just another tourist who wanted to learn about the nomadic life, like the others. He welcomed them both into our home.
Asher was a big, tall guy with dark brown hair, a mustache, and a beard. He looked like a grizzly bear but had a smile that matched his laugh, which filled our home the minute my father invited him inside. He had come to Mongolia to see the Golden Eagle Festival, which has been
held in Ölgii since 2000. The festival is named for the majestic bird indigenous to the steppes that nomads have been hunting with for centuries.
The history of eagle hunting in Bayan-Ölgii stretches back 2,500 years. In part, because the mountain peaks Tavan Bogd, Tsengel Khairkhan, and Tsambagarav offer safe nesting grounds and plentiful hunting for golden eagles. Eagle hunters never ate the animals that their birds caught, though. Instead, they traded fox and wolf fur for flour, cooking oil, tea, and sugar on the portion of the Silk Road (a network of ancient travel routes that connected Asia with Southeast Asia) that runs through Mongolia. This tradition was a way of life for nomads until communism outlawed eagle hunting.
The Golden Eagle Festival was founded after the fall of communism to revive eagle hunting, as the practice had dwindled as a result of the seventy-year ban. The contest was a way to bring those who had been hunting with eagles out of the shadows (like my father’s family) and preserve an ancient way of our nomadic life.
In the first contest, sixty hunters participated. My father did not attend that first one, but has since competed in seventeen contests and has won three.
Eagle hunters travel from all over Mongolia, but primarily from Bayan-Ölgii, to compete for the honor of best eagle hunter in all of Mongolia. Asher had come to see the festival and was so fascinated by the event that he decided to stay in the area. Before he arrived at our home, he had been traveling around to different nomad families, asking permission to photograph young eagle hunters in training. He wanted to show how the tradition was passed down from father to son. But he also wondered if there were any women or girl hunters in Mongolia.
The translator explained that every time he visited another eagle hunter, Asher would ask, “Do you know any girls or women who hunt with eagles?”
“I told him I know a girl named Aisholpan who accompanies her father on eagle hunts,” the translator said. “That’s why we are here.”
