On the Trail of Genghis Khan Page 6

  “There must a be a nomad family down there after all!” I said to Kathrin, fixing my eyes downstream, expecting to locate a nomad encampment. As I strained to focus in the fading light, the only white tinge to the landscape came from a ghostly rock that glowed from a slope of blackened, dead trees.

  The howl came again, long and hound-like. From up the valley a similar cry echoed, then another from high in the forest on the far bank. Kathrin tripped over our canvas duffle bag, then sat where she had fallen with her panicked eyes skirting the forest. Nothing moved, and again things fell silent.

  “You—you secure the horses! I’m going for firewood!” I stammered.

  Nomads had long cautioned me about wolves and thought us mad to be traveling without a gun, but I had always dismissed their warnings as scaremongering. During my studies in Finland, I had learned that despite all the rumors and fear about wolves, there had only been a handful of recorded stories in history about attacks on humans, and even then the victims had been babies or young children.

  It was only now that the real threat dawned on me. The wolves were interested not in us but in our horses. If the horses were frightened enough to break free of their tethers and escape, what would we do?

  Night flooded in fast as I chopped away at standing trees, the axe first smashing its way through charcoal before hitting a core of dead dry wood that was hard as steel. After an hour’s work I barely had enough wood to fill my outstretched arms, but nevertheless hurried back to camp.

  Without a gun, there were only two courses of action available. I urinated near each of the three horses—a trick long suggested to me by veterinarian Sheila Greenwell. Second, I lit a fire and rationed out the meager wood supplies that would need to see us out until dawn. According to Mongolians, a fire would keep the wolves at bay.

  Once the fire was going we relaxed somewhat and sat gazing into the flames, eating a mash of rice and rehydrated meat. As my tummy filled, I watched a deep blackness spill into the eastern sky and stars flicker on.

  After an hour or two had passed with no sign of wolves, I collapsed in the tent while Kathrin took the first shift by the fire.

  I woke after what felt like just minutes. Kathrin was shaking me.

  “Relax, Tim! Apart from the fact that I’m freezing, everything is okay. No wolves so far. It’s one in the morning, so it’s your turn, you lazy Australian!” she said, her German accent, as always, more pronounced when she was tired.

  I swapped my sleeping bag for the down jacket she had been wearing, and I settled in beside the gentle crackle and spitting of the fire. The flames licked the night air and cast a circle of flickering light that just reached the horses. All three of them had eaten themselves silly in the afternoon and now stood like statues, their heads hanging. The sky was giant above, yet as we nestled in this tall grass in the bosom of the hills, there was an intimacy that cradled us. I couldn’t help wonder what it would be like after Kathrin went home and 9,000 km to Hungary yawned. The longest journey in the wilderness I’d ever done alone until now was a mere ten days.

  By three o’clock an invisible heaviness tugged at my arms and legs. I rested my head on a rolled-up coat and drifted off.

  When I felt the thudding of hooves vibrate through the soil beneath me, I thought sleepily that I was in the tent. I assumed Bor was attempting to move in the hobbles that bound his two front legs to his back left leg. While the others had mastered the art of walking at a reasonable speed with the hobbles on, Bor stumbled awkwardly.

  Then, however, I heard furious pounding coming in toward me from all directions.

  No sooner had I pried open my eyes than a howl shot through the darkness. This time it was from somewhere right behind us, perhaps no more than 100 m away, on the edge of the forest. I lay low, not daring to breathe. It was black all around—I had let the fire burn down to a few glowing coals.

  When the fire was again ablaze I picked up the axe and checked on the ropes and tethering stakes. The horses’ necks and withers were tense and their heads were raised high, ears twitching this way and that. Over thousands of years they had evolved as a supreme animal of flight, able to reach top speed within seconds and escape at the first hint of predators. By hobbling them, however, I had turned them into easy prey.

  For the next few hours I sat, axe at hand, convinced our lives hung in the balance. When the fire sputtered and it seemed my pile of wood wasn’t going to make it to dawn, I was sure I could make out the furry outline of wolves prowling the perimeter of camp. I even began to think there might be hundreds of them, half crazed by starvation in the cremated remains of the forest. Feeding my remaining branches into the fire piece by piece, I prayed for dawn and rued my formerly dismissive attitude. No matter what I might have previously thought about wolves, there was something deeply petrifying about these howls in the dark. Perhaps through thousands of years of coexisting and competing with the wolf, humans, like horses, had evolved an innate reaction to them—one that was surely not without reason.

  I recalled what my friend Gansukh had once told me: “It’s not for nothing you call a dog in your country ‘man’s best friend’—we Mongolians know they were the first animal to be domesticated! We believe the wolf is the wisest and most spiritual of animals. Look how cunning they are, how they survive in such tough conditions. To see a wolf, in our belief, is a good omen. It means you will inherit some of its wisdom. To kill a wolf is to be wiser than a wolf. We eat wolf meat for strength and use it for medicinal purposes.”

  The significance of the wolf for Mongolians went beyond Gansukh’s words. There was a legend that the ancient Mongolian people had been born from a union between the blue-gray wolf and a deer. Wolves carried the spirit of the Mongolian ancestors, the link proven by what was called a “Mongolian spot”—a bluish patch found on the lower back of most Mongolians in their infancy. It was also understood that when a wolf howled, it was praying to the sky, making it the only other living being that paid homage to sacred tengri.

  Perhaps most important for nomads was the belief in the symbiosis that existed between wolf and humans on the steppe. Wolves were an integral part of keeping the balance of nature, ensuring that plagues of rabbits and rodents didn’t break out, which in turn protected the all-important pasture for the nomads’ herds.

  Although they caused havoc when they attacked sheep, when it came to horses wolves were known to mostly attack the injured and the weak, therefore aiding natural selection and ensuring that only the strongest horses lived on to breed. Reflective of the deep sense of gratitude and respect Mongolians reserved for wolves, there was a belief that only through wolves could the spirit of a deceased human be set free to go to heaven. When a person passed away, his or her body would be taken to a mountain and left for the wolves to eat. A good person would be eaten by wolves quickly, while a bad person would be left to rot for days. According to legend, wolves would fly up to the sky with the ingested human flesh and release the person’s spirit.

  As Kathrin and I would later discover, this “sky burial” was a practice still carried out among modern nomads. In Uvs province, only a day’s ride from Ulaangom, we came across the skeleton of a young man on the steppe with only a few remaining pieces of sun-dried flesh and a torn khadag lying nearby.

  In the safety and comfort of a nomad ger this philosophy might have made for engaging storytelling. But as the fire wavered it was difficult to feel gratitude toward the wolf. How could I reconcile the benevolent creature that Mongolians so worshipped with the ruthless animals that were surely about to attack my horses, and perhaps even Kathrin and me? And how was it that Gansukh could speak about worshipping the wolf and then in the same breath about killing and eating it?

  I didn’t know it yet, but these were questions that would linger for me well beyond the end of my journey. Over time I would come to believe that to dismiss the wolf as a bloodthirsty enemy would be akin to labeling nomads in the same ignorant way that Europeans had done for centuries.


  The reality was that survival on the steppe was a fine balance, and wolves, like the humans, were no more cruel than was required to survive. Perhaps the relationship between wolves and nomads was best described in the fictional tale “Wolf Totem.” In it an old Mongolian herder recounts to a Chinese student that the “wolf is a spiritual totem but a physical enemy.” Of course, this understanding was still light-years from my mind where I sat now, barely a stone’s throw from the beginning of my journey on the way to the distant Danube.

  In the end, the test between night and my fire went down to the wire, and there were times when I was sure the fire would not hold out. When finally the night began to wilt away, however, there had been no howls for hours. I placed the last morsel of wood on the flames and lay until the sun’s glow had eclipsed that of the coals. Soon the fire I had so clung to was nothing more than a gray bed of ashes.

  By the time we were ready to go, the sun had painted out the shadows, and, just as the mountains around us appeared to shrink in the daylight, the threat of the wolves began to seem exaggerated. I started to think that had I been a more experienced horseman, I might have taken the night’s experience in my stride. As if to leave us with a reminder of the danger, however, only a stone’s throw from camp we passed the fresh tracks of a wolf on the muddy banks of the river.

  In the future, particularly on the open steppe of western Mongolia and Kazakhstan, I would not have the advantage of firewood, nor the company of Kathrin. While carrying a gun seemed out of the question, it was clear I might have to come up with some kind of plan. For the time being, though, I was just grateful to be riding away.

  4

  A FINE LINE TO THE WEST

  When we emerged from the forest into the grazed slopes of the lower valley, thoughts of the dangers posed by wolves faded and I was comforted by thoughts of a bigger picture of the journey. The mountain river we followed from the pass, known as the Delgerekh, was part of a greater watercourse I had crossed paths with during previous travels. Not more than three days’ ride downstream it entered the Ider River, which in turn flowed east and north, joining the Selenga, and emptying into Lake Baikal in Siberia.

  Four years earlier during the cycling journey across Russia, Chris Hatherly and I had crossed Baikal’s pristine waters by ship and ridden our bikes along the Selenga. The following year I had returned to the shores of Baikal to join three others rowing a wooden boat more than 4,000 km northward through Siberia to the Arctic Ocean. Following first the Angara and then the Yenisey River and rowing twenty-four hours a day, we spent four and a half months meandering through steppe, then dense taiga, and finally frozen tundra. Having reached the Arctic coast at the river’s mouth on the Kara Sea, we abandoned the boat with a reindeer-herding community and made our way home.

  Now, three years later, riding alongside the humble waters of the Delgerekh that would someday make the same journey to the Arctic, I was on a very different trajectory. Heading west into the center of Eurasia, I could never hope for the abundance of firewood, water, and fish that had come to characterize those earlier experiences. For nomads, pasture held currency above all else, and so I was destined to remain on the steppe, picking a line between the boreal forests of the north and the deserts and mountains found at more southerly latitudes. Although the river tempted me with the possibility of greater plenty, I was looking forward to breaking away from its predetermined course and returning to open horizons. Just a few days’ ride from here lay the prospect of exiting the Khangai Mountains, from where our route promised to take us into the broader and drier terrain of western Mongolia.

  Before we could leave the valley and recover some rhythm, however, the Delgerekh had some important lessons in store for us.

  We had only just made camp near one of the first gers we had seen in days when the distant rumble of a Russian four-wheel-drive from down the valley rapidly grew into a roar. I was attending a pot of boiling water when the headlights found us. As Kathrin ran to pull the horses in close to the tent, the car motored in over the tethering lines and jerked to a halt half a metre shy of my stove. The engine cut out and there was momentary silence, but then a door opened and from beyond the blinding glare of headlights the silhouette of a man stumbled into view, a waft of vodka preceding him.

  “Do you have whiskey? Vodka? Airag?” he screamed in Russian, digging his index finger into my chest. Infuriated by my blank look, he lunged for the knife on my belt. When I resisted, keeping it out of his reach, he clenched his fist and drew it back, ready to punch.

  “I take two of your horses now! They are mine!”

  What had begun as a calm evening in what we assumed was the safety of peopled, wolf-free lands was about to become an all-night ordeal during which we managed to narrowly save the horses but had our crucial navigation maps stolen. When the attacker drove away, we took refuge with a nomad family, only to find ourselves in the throes of more drunken antics. Arguments, the odd prod and jab at Kathrin and me, and the coming and going of horsemen lasted until dawn, when, upon checking the horses, it was clear we were still not out of the woods. We found Bor sitting on his haunches trying to lick a swelling that had appeared on his spine. It was on an area of his back well behind my saddle, in a spot where I had earlier noticed multiple scars—signs, according to vet Sheila Greenwell, of a possible warble fly infestation. The larvae of this fly were known to burrow into the flesh, causing painful swellings and then sores when the mature flies resurfaced.

  Staying to rest the horses was not an option, and so I loaded my backpack and set off on foot with Bor and the packhorse, Kheer, in tow. It was a relief when two young men rode up to us with the stolen maps, although they promptly threatened to tear them up unless we paid for their services. After negotiating a fee of $10, we carried on aware that while we had escaped serious misfortune this time, there was no guarantee we would always be so lucky.

  Even before we threw ourselves on the mercy of a friendly nomad family that night, it was obvious that one of the main challenges of this journey would be treading the fine line between the dangers of the wilds and those of a human sort. More important, the coming days and weeks of travel would confirm that navigating between these perils was a defining reality of life and survival for the nomads themselves.

  After two days’ rest we parted ways with the Delgerekh, crossed the Ider, and headed northwest. As expected, the bottleneck of the Khangai Mountains gave way to open, barren plains and sleepy hills where the land faded from an early summer green to a brittle golden yellow. The temperamental weather of the mountains mellowed, and nomad camps, like our troubles, grew sparse and thin.

  On the shores of a brackish lake known as Telmen Nuur, we were able to buy a new horse from a nomad family and thereby allow Bor to travel load-free. The new addition was a calm eighteen-year-old gelding, bigger than most Mongol horses, with a sharp odor and unusual coloring. His torso was white, speckled with rusty flecks of chestnut, while his hindquarters were splashed with large chestnut spots. Rusty, as we named him, led from the front with a fast pace, which, coupled with the wide-open land, enabled us to stride out and cover around 40 km a day—far more distance than we had previously.

  It was just over a week after leaving behind the Khangai Mountains that our respite from trouble ended and the rigors of the land began to test us once more. The northwest of Mongolia, which we were entering, is part of a semi-arid basin known as the Great Lakes Depression. Dominated by desert, shallow saline lakes, and salt flats, it is a dry and sparsely populated corner of the country where the distance between watering points for the horses would turn out to be farther than we could cover in a single day.

  The challenge began in earnest with a precarious route between a rocky range known as the Khan Khokhii and the southern fringe of the Borig Del Els, a desert renowned as the most northern in the world, which spreads out in a series of sand dunes beyond Mongolia’s border into the republic of Tuva, in Siberia. According to nomads we had spoken to, there was no bo
rder fence, and, owing to the remoteness of the Borig Del Els and lack of patrols, the dunes were a favored route for horse thieves who specialized in smuggling into Russia.

  Our departure from the river Tes coincided with a heat wave, and by 9:00 A.M. the temperature had already reached 30°C. Although our horses were hardy, while working in the heat they required a minimum of 20 litres of drinking water a day—more than we could ever hope to carry. For the next two days we saw no one and were only able to water the horses courtesy of a chance thunderstorm that left rainwater collected in a handful of puddles along the wheel tracks we followed.

  Three days farther on, the heat was taking its toll. Kathrin’s face was sunburned to nearly burgundy, her lips were swollen, and her hands were a mess of splits and cracks.1 I had long lost my sunglasses and, after days staring into the raging sun, my pupils felt seared. We were both weary and dehydrated, and so were our horses.

  Hungering for water and a day or two of rest, we stumbled into an isolated camp of two gers beyond the dusty village of Baruunturuun. A mother and her children took us to a well in a riverbed, then invited us to join in picking apart the boiled head, organs, and trotters of a freshly slaughtered goat. We were ravenous, and so the rubbery boiled scalp, lips, ears, and intestines—which only weeks ago I had found nauseating—slid down with ease.

  For all the refuge this family offered us, they were in a particularly difficult predicament themselves. In the summer months they ordinarily retreated to the cool of the Khan Khokhii Mountains, but their remote pastures had been overrun with wolves, and so they had recently migrated to the slightly more populated corridor between the mountains and the Borig Del Els. As we would come to learn during our stay, however, life on these baking hot plains that lay wedged between the wolves and the dunes was by no means a perfect solution.