The Dukha are a unique group, herding reindeer way to the south of counterparts working the same ecological niche in the tundra that runs around the world in a belt above the Arctic Circle. For hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, the Dukha have undertaken seasonal migrations as a tribe, constantly on the move through remote fragile pastures. But they number only a few hundred, and in recent years they have struggled, their future in question. Inbreeding and disease ravaged the reindeer herds on which the Dukha depend for meat, milk, shelter, and clothing. Overweening officials down in the valley abused them, denying them schooling or health care. Unscrupulous tour operators brought in Westerners in search of a spiritual trip, for the Dukhas have shamans living among them. The operators encroached with demands that grew ever more acquisitive and unscrupulous. The Dukha countered with a general meekness, their default response to the outside world.
At this point Morgan moved in among them. She strong-armed Western vets to volunteer their time, leading them on the four-day horse ride into the mountains at such a pace, and traveling so light, that grown Texan men broke down and cried. She put the Dukha in touch with Sami raising fat, healthy reindeer in Finland and Inuit herders of caribou in Canada. She fought battles on the herders’ behalf with the local officials and the tour operators, and the Western spiritual trippers imposing themselves on the Dukha for month after summer month, abusing the codes of hospitality and leaving herding families with depleted food supplies, wondering how they were to survive the hard winter ahead.
Slowly, though, the Dukha changed, prodded by members of the three-hundred-strong group who could see better possibilities. First they dealt with their own differences. Then they pushed back as a community, standing up to local bullies and insisting that tourism take place on their terms, the income spread among all. Their confidence grew, and when that started to happen, Morgan left the mountains and a people who had become her family. Back in Ulan Bator, during mountain-bike rides in the pine-forested hills around the capital, she and Gala began to fall for each other. Much was unusual in their relationship, nothing more so than the bikes. Mongolians are a people who resent locomotion under their own steam. They will not walk more than a few yards if a horse is nearby; if no horse, then a jeep or at least a motorcycle. In neighboring China are a billion bicycles. Those belonging to Gala and Morgan remain the only two I have ever seen in Mongolia.
On the Kherlen, this is a coming home of sorts for Gala. Years ago he spent a summer camped among the grasses of this valley, studying them as part of his doctoral thesis. With the single exception of the mountain-dwelling Dukha, it is the steppe that defines how it is to live as a Mongolian. Too arid usually for forest or even field, the high grasslands of Mongolia are the material basis for a nomadic life given over to raising livestock. In the east of this huge country, the steppe is so flat it curves with the earth. In the center, it rolls like ocean swells. In other places, and especially farther west, the grasslands are punctuated by rocky outcrops, hills, and high mountains. In these places, ibex and argali, Mongolia’s wild mountain sheep, creep down the slopes, sometimes intermingling with domestic flocks—wolves and snow leopards their chief predators.
For animal husbandry such as this, it is what is underfoot that counts. The twelve or so inches of soil below the steppe’s surface hold thousands of years’ worth of fertility, the product of grasses’ ability to turn to biomass the energy of the fierce but brief summer’s sun. Squirrel-tail barley, needlegrass, a clutch of fescues, Tatary buckwheat, plains lovegrass, and wild oats: the rooting networks of these grasses seek out and trap moisture and nutrients. Dead roots are broken down and added to the store of humus.
Above ground, some grasses of the steppe, like needlegrass, are sod-forming: they put out surface runners that trap moisture and smother bare ground. Forbs—the nongrasses such as herbs and wildflowers—bring up nutrients from deeper down, or, if they are leguminous, fix in the soil essential nitrogen from the air. An ungrazed summer pasture is no monotony: it is a riot of rippling grasses and flowering gentian, cinquefoil, yellow-rattle, motherwort, and Syrian rue. In his history of grass, Graham Harvey described the American prairie as a “biological powerhouse, rich in wildlife and with a productivity no modern farming system could match.” That was the prairie before settlers waged war on it, overgrazing it or plowing it up. Mongolia will face similar threats. For now, its rippling grasslands are the American prairies before the Fall.
And so, in a huge land, fewer than three million Mongolians live among livestock that outnumber them more than ten to one. On the steppe, horses supply mobility, and camels transport when moving camp. Sheep and goats are the basis for food, clothing, shelter (felt for gers, the Mongolian yurt), and fuel (dried dung, for cooking and stove heat during winter’s extreme cold). The odd motorbike that bumps across the prairie ocean; a solar panel stuck up outside a ger with flickering images inside of a South Korean soap opera: nothing really changes the material basis for life, that equation between pasture and survival. It has held for centuries.
But we mean to leave these grasslands behind for some days. Beyond Mongonmorit we pick our way across an old wooden bridge to the river’s eastern side—the last bridge on the Kherlen, indeed the only one that anyone can think of. Now the steppe grasses no longer dominate. The scrub willow, which had hugged only the river, grows bolder, planting itself where ice-melt has dredged stony spoil from the valley head and scattered it over the plain. Soon willow thickets come to choke the narrowing valley, and a mind loosened by the jeep’s lurching starts playing with the idea of seeing moose.
By now the track our old jeep is following seems less certain of its heading, and from time to time our wheels race as they lose grip in damp, peatier ground. When we clamber out, the air is cooler. At the valley head, licks of flaming larch reach down the slopes, harbinger of another season—and another country, for we have come to the end of the steppe, the limit of the largest grasslands on earth. In front of us, a wilderness. The mountains are the Khentii range, southernmost spur of the taiga, an ecosystem bigger even than the steppe, indeed the largest on land: dark and endless, the coniferous forests of Siberia.
Here, at this meeting of two worlds, we hope to meet Batjargal and Bayara. These two local men keep their herds at the back of us, on the far, far side of Mongonmorit. Yet Batjargal has spent more of his life than anyone in the mountains before us, as a government ranger responsible for protecting them. He knows—and there are very few who do—where the source of the Onon lies and how to reach it. He has agreed to lead us there. Bayara, a horseman of local repute, will supply the animals to carry us.
• • •
Mongolians’ material needs are met on the steppe. But their spiritual sustenance comes from the mountains ahead. The mountains are worn and soft-featured, damp in the valleys, a forested rumple of curves and ancient folds, a grandmother’s bosom of a range. One mountain among them, Burkhan Khaldun, at 7,700-something feet not even the highest, is held in awe. All mountains are holy in Mongolia, but this one is especially revered for its association with one Mongol, Temujin, later Genghis Khan.
Temujin was born into a Mongol line that once had been great but was no more. The boy’s father, Yesugei, was a small-time chieftain whose clan pastures lay on the Onon some one hundred miles east from where I am, after the river has left the mountains and met the plain. There, early each summer, snowmelt bursts the river’s banks, transforming the parched steppe into an emerald sheet. Temujin’s mother, Hoelun, was a beauty. Yesugei had got her by snatching her from a noble of a rival tribe as the proud man drove her, his new bride, in a cart back home.
When Temujin was eight, Yesugei took the boy away to his wife’s clan, the Ongirads, to arrange his marriage to one of the Ongirad girls. Her name was Börte, and her clan lived on the eastern plains toward Tatar country, probably near where the borders of Russia, China, and Mongolia meet today, a land that later came to be known as Dauria. A
fter fixing the match, Yesugei left Temujin with the Ongirads and set off on the long journey home. He came upon a party of Tatars feasting. They invited him to join them, as is the way on the steppe. They talked. They laughed. And then they poisoned him, spiking his drink. Yesugei staggered home. He sent for Temujin, but did not survive. Perhaps the Tatars who killed him had once been victims of his countless raids.
With Yesugei dead, his clansmen and followers abandoned the family, hounding Hoelun and her children from the steppe and into the forests of the Khentii range. For three or four years in the mountains, the family hung on precariously to life, no longer herders but grubbers and gatherers, barely surviving, gathering berries on the flanks of Burkhan Khaldun or, with a sharpened juniper stick, rooting about for edible stuff. The boys learned to make fishhooks and set nets in the Onon River.
With wild onions and garlic
The sons of the noble mother were nourished
Until they became rulers.
A single mother raising four children and two stepchildren in the wilds: this was, as the most recent of Temujin’s chroniclers John Man puts it, a family under stress. The two eldest boys, Temujin and his half-brother, Begter, began to fight. When he was thirteen, Temujin went running to his mother about a squabble the boys had had over a lark and a sculpin that Temujin had caught. Hoelun gave him a tongue-lashing for not getting along at a precarious time:
Apart from our shadows we have no friends,
Apart from our horse-tails we have no whips.
Stung, Temujin slid away, taking with him a bow and arrow and his eleven-year-old brother, Kasar. Begter was on the ridge, herding pale-gray geldings. The two boys crept up on him. Coolly, Temujin slew his half-brother. When Begter failed to come home, rage and despair overtook Hoelun. “You destroyers!” she screamed:
Like a wild dog
Eating its own afterbirth . . .
You have destroyed!
Later hagiographies of Genghis Khan leave out the shocking act, but not the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols, the oldest surviving written work in Mongolian. Its authors may have wished to underline a ruthlessness and determination even at Temujin’s young age, or perhaps to show how raw his nature still was, how much more he had to learn. Maybe his mother’s despair had an effect. Temujin worshipped his mother till his last day. Later in life, loyalty and mutual help were as much his abiding hallmarks as cruelty. Yet Temujin never betrayed a scintilla of regret for murdering his brother.
The following spring, as the snows melted, Taychiuts, relatives of Yesugei’s, launched a raid on Hoelun’s camp led by a nomad chief so fat that he traveled by cart. Perhaps he had come because Begter’s murder led him to think that Temujin had the makings of a future rival. When the attack began, Temujin fled up a narrow valley, trapped there with two brothers. The raiders were interested only in Temujin. For nine days he hid alone in the forest until hunger forced him out. The Taychiuts took him prisoner. Back at their camp, they affixed a wooden cangue, a portable pillory, around his neck and lashed his hands to the cangue for good measure.
Temujin was billeted that night with a man named Sorkan-shira, who took enough of a shine to the boy that he allowed his cangue to be loosened, the better to sleep. The following day, a full-moon day, a feast took place. Neighbors came from surrounding pastures to make merry on early-summer airag, fermented mare’s milk. A callow guard assigned to Temujin swaggered about the crowd with his charge, accepting cups of airag. As the sun went down Temujin grabbed his chance, swung the cangue at the guard’s head, and made a dash for the woods. Before the moon got up, he turned back to the Onon and hid in its shallows.
While the Taychiuts searched the woods, Temujin staggered downstream in search of Sorkan-shira’s ger, listening for the slap of wooden paddles in leather churns as women made airag—just as they do today. Sorkan-shira was appalled to see him again. Yet the family burned his cangue, clothed and fed him, and hid him in a cart piled high with wool. That night Sorkan-shira gave Temujin a horse, but no saddle or bow, which might be traced back to its owner. He also refused the boy tinder, lest Temujin’s pursuers spot the fire. Inching past the sleeping Taychiuts, Temujin made his way back to his mother’s Onon hideout in the Khentii mountains. He never forgot Sorkan-shira, one of whose sons became a great general of the realm.
• • •
It seems unreasonable in a country of such distances to expect an appointment to be kept with a precision of less than a day or two on either side; and senseless in laid-back Mongolia to show impatience when it is not. Yet ahead of us two herders are flying through the scrub, the string of horses behind them glossy in the sun’s low rays. Like us, the group is heading for the northernmost bend in the river before it disappears behind foothills, just the spot where weeks before Gala had sent word that we should meet. We arrive at the same moment. Batjargal, the older man, has under his del the camouflage fatigues that serve as a uniform for countryfolk of a certain age. Bayara, unusually for a Mongolian, has a thick mustache, and a beaming, open face under his Russian leather cap. They have brought the horses up from grasslands sixty miles to the south. The trip had been done at a fast trot, nonstop, but the feat warrants little mention. Given the hard journey ahead, I am quietly grateful to have been spared that initial trip, getting this far by jeep instead. But from here on, no question: tomorrow this softie changes mounts.
We camp by the river. Brushing down the horses, Bayara talks in a low private voice to each in turn. The animals nudge Bayara, as if playing with him, one of the gang. Even at a distance, they look up and seem always to fix where he is. The relationship is striking in a land where men can treat horses with casual indifference, driving them into the ground like old cars, beasts to be used until they give up the ghost. Mongolians are rarely sentimental toward their animals. Horses do not have names, but the best, the ones who are talked of years later, are referred to by how they look: for instance, “the-bay-with-the-white-fetlock.”
The horses are soon hobbled in scatterings of pasture. Before the light goes, I make for the river, keen to fish the deep pools under the bluff in the hope of meeting taimen. This fish, a six-foot-long projectile, is a carnivorous member of the salmon family. It lies at the bottom of the cleanest and fastest flowing of Mongolia’s rivers, waiting for manna to fall and pass above its head on the riverine conveyor belt. Back in Ulan Bator, the capital, I had met the first violinist of the state symphony orchestra, a small plump man of extraordinary cheer. When I told him where I was going, he declared a passion for fly-fishing and urged me to try for taimen. Which small pattern of fly, I asked, did the fish favor? A midge pattern perhaps? A delicate nymph? The violinist was adamant: you don’t get that big from sipping flies off the surface. Taimen will explode from the depths and whole families of ducks will disappear. From his pocket he pulled a bundle of fur as big as his fist, with three grappling irons for hooks. “Minimum!” he said, beaming at his specimen. “Minimum: a rat imitation!” The little flies on my line now riffle downstream, untroubled.
For supper, we finish the cold boiled goat meat that fed the two herders on the trip here. From this point, we will live off the supplies bought by Gala and Morgan in Ulan Bator. At sunrise, we load the horses for the trip into the mountains. We have a couple of spare animals to carry shelter and provisions. Plastic milk churns have been pressed into service as our larder, crammed with food to last our party several days. To load an animal, Bayara and Batjargal stand on each side, a leg braced against each flank as they cinch the load tight. But one of the horses, Batjargal’s, a gray unbalanced by its burden, takes off, charging around the campsite until it brings itself down in a tangle of wreckage. Once calm is restored and the animals loaded, we mount our own horses and are off, fording the Kherlen at the shallowest point. The water laps at our boots as the horses breast the river, picking their way over the stony bed.
Mongolian horses are quick to like. Mine is a chest
nut, six years old, famous in the district, Bayara says, because of all the races he has won. Horses are broken in early in life, which renders them amazingly docile. For all that, they are tough, phenomenally tough, winnowed by evolution and winters that plunge to 40 or 50 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. At a steady pace Mongolian horses will cover mile after endless mile with no sign of strain. When asked, they will gallop until they drop—horse races can be thirty or more miles long. Little distinction is made between racehorses and workhorses: the best mounts do for both. Our animals seem inseparable friends, each sticking close behind the other when moving along the trails. When the terrain opens up to allow it, the horses spread out, breaking into a canter. At times like that, they snort with pleasure.
All day we move fast along tracks and game trails running into the mountains, between the forest edge and the scattered bog patches of the valley floor. We climb a saddle from which we have a last sight of the Mongolian grasslands now far behind and below us. Over the saddle, the forest grows denser on the mountain flanks: larch and pine and quivering leaves of silver birch. In the bottoms of the broad new valley before us, peat bog spreads out as a blanket of heather and sphagnum moss, dotted with dark pools of meltwater. Filigree streams run through this bogland. Back on the steppe the day had begun bright and clear, but in these uplands the season is changing by the hour, turning cool and damp, with mist banks curling over the ridges. All about are scrapes of wild boar, where the animals have pawed through grass and scrub to the earth below and made soft black beds. A covey of ptarmigan, white-feathered projectiles, explodes from under my horse’s hooves; with a whirring wingbeat and then a glide the four birds settle again at a distance. It is a new world, but we are not yet out of the Kherlen watershed.
• • •
A year after Temujin’s return home to his mother on Sorkan-shira’s horse, the family’s fortunes seem to have turned for the better. Now they had nine horses, and sheep enough. Temujin set off to marry and bring back the bride chosen for him all those years before by his father. Börte was now seventeen. She brought with her a dowry of a rare sleek long gown of the very blackest sable. Now a married man and family head, with single-minded will Temujin set out to build authority and standing. But he needed allies. Already, he had the backing of his wife’s clan, and his two sworn blood brothers. Now he went in search of Toghrul, the powerful leader of the Keirat tribe. Toghrul commanded two tumen or “ten thousands,” that is, two divisions of fighting men. He ruled a swath of central Mongolia that ran down to the Chinese border below the Gobi Desert. Years before, Yesugei had helped Toghrul, perhaps by supplying fighters, at a critical point during the Keirat leader’s rise to power. The two men became sworn brothers. Now Temujin traveled to Toghrul’s camp on the banks of the Tul River, near present-day Ulan Bator, to remind the old chief of his bonds with Yesugei. Toghrul, Temujin said, was almost like a father to him. The older man was unmoved. Börte’s sable coat, on the other hand, had a galvanizing effect. “In return for the sable jacket,” Toghrul proposed, “I will unite your scattered people.”
Black Dragon River Page 3
