by Tim Cope
“My wife needs me. I can’t just drop everything for you! I have two children. They need to be fed. You need to pay me for the broken wheel, then I am going home.” I gave him $50, and he drove off.
Ruslan, in the meantime, was nowhere to be seen, and although his father and brother tried to convince me that he would turn up sooner or later, panic crept up on me despite my resolve. I retreated to a pit toilet in the village, where among piles of frozen shit and cigarette butts I squatted, struggling to hold myself together. The first flakes of winter were beginning to fall from heavy gray skies, and I listened to the sounds of a drunken argument drifting over from somewhere nearby. Perhaps I was just coming to terms with my decision to travel alone, but the past few days had not been the kind of experience I had envisioned on my journey. I was overwhelmed by an unshakable feeling that journeying across Kazakhstan would be one long trial.
It was two days before Ruslan showed up, and when he did, I was not taking chances. I helped him into the back of a 1960s Moskvich—a small sedan of the Soviet era—where he collapsed into a deep hangover-induced sleep. The smell of beer and cigarettes rising off him was worse than the cold, and so we set off with the windows wide open, rising and dipping along the same road where my journey had earlier disintegrated. Ruslan slept until well after dark and woke remarkably sober as we crashed our way through the last icy potholes and puddles to Pugachevo.
The locals complained that I had kept them waiting, with their horses standing around eating valuable hay, but I made them laugh with stories of Ruslan’s antics, and any sense of guilt vanished when an old man approached me and whispered to me that the white horse was in fact fifteen years old—he had apparently wanted to tell the truth at the time, but it was a tradition to keep to the script of a fellow villager.
Though I’d agreed to buy Ogonyok, the chestnut horse, I announced that I was not leaving until I found two decent horses that could take me to Hungary. The wheeling and dealing began again, and every time a horse was offered I was told I “would not find a better one.”
Eventually an elderly man trotted in on the back of a large bay horse. Nurkhan, who had again taken me under his wing, looked surprised.
“Take a look if you please. If you want it, buy it now. If you don’t, I will release it back to the herd,” said the man gruffly.
The horse’s name was Taskonir,7 which roughly meant “brown stone.” His back was straight and sloped away at the hindquarters, while his mane was coarse and untamed. In his dark eyes was a look of fire I recognized as that of a wild horse, independent and strong-willed. Yet he was also comfortable and calm in the presence of so many people, suggesting he was a veteran work animal. Like most of the horses in Pugachevo, he was a breed known as dzhabe. Renowned for endurance and ability to hold their weight—and subsequently the choice of preference for horsemeat—Kazakhs say that their nation “rode the back of a dzhabe.”
I took Taskonir for a ride with no bridle or bit, just an old goatskin thrown over his back, then fitted my Australian stock saddle. He moved instinctively, with only the slightest of commands, making me appear more of a horseman than I really was. I asked the owner, whose name was Altai, the price.
“Seventy thousand tenge!” he replied, quoting me a figure roughly equivalent to $520, before adding, “But for that price I keep the horseshoes!”
“How about sixty-five thousand with the horseshoes?” I asked.
“Fuck you!” he shouted. “What kind of person are you? Take your fucking saddle off my horse.” He threw my saddle into the mud and stormed off with the horse. The crowd that had gathered fell silent.
Nurkhan came to my aid.
“He is an old, honored man. Maybe that is why he will not bargain.”
The crowd followed me to Altai’s home. Altai refused to come out. His son emerged, and I sent him back to make an offer of seventy thousand tenge—but only if it included the horseshoes. It was some time before the son appeared and waved us in.
I joined Altai at a small wooden table. In the light that drifted through the old warped glass, he sat still, glistening eyes shifting back and forth from the window to the cup of tea in his weathered hands. He had removed his fur hat and coat to reveal a bald scalp and a wiry figure that was sinking with age. In the wake of his temper, sadness filled his pale brown eyes. Later I understood that he was selling his horse to pay for medical treatments and his daughter’s education at college. He was probably torn between a love of his horse and the need to support his family, and I was the unwelcome catalyst for deciding his loyalties. It wasn’t just sentimentality, though. Horses here were essential for survival and work, and Taskonir had been a reliable work animal.
I wondered what Altai was thinking. Having lived his life true to the Soviet mantra that labor brought reward, he was selling his pride to a young foreigner who had not an inkling of the hardship he had seen. Like so many of his generation, he had entered retirement just as the Soviet Union collapsed, and now he found himself with nothing to rely on but his own hands, which were already worked to the bone.
I counted the money out onto the table, where it was counted again by his wife, then by his son.
“This horse,” he boasted, “will take you all the way to Hungary.”
“Will it?” I asked. “I will not forget your word.”
I shook his hands, raised a shot of vodka, and reminded Altai: “In my culture it is a sign of disrespect to throw someone’s saddle in the mud.” He apologized, and then with a grin admitted the horse was probably twelve years old, not ten, as he had maintained.
We took photos together with Taskonir, and I promised to send a photo from the Danube. I could see now that I was taking away a part of his soul, and I pledged to myself never to forget the privilege of having Taskonir and the many years of training and wisdom that Altai had invested in him.
Negotiations for my second horse, Ogonyok, were more straightforward, but in the light of day, this big chestnut horse was more fiery than I remembered. His eyes were untrusting, and he jumped nervously when I reached out to stroke his back. He was clearly the kind of horse that would bolt at the sound of his own fart and minutes after handing over the money I was told a story that confirmed my fears. It had been several months since anyone had ridden Ogonyok and the owner had been willing to sell only because Ogonyok had fallen on him and crushed his leg the previous winter.
Given the risk Ogonyok posed, I heeded Nurkhan’s advice to have him shod with special studded winter shoes for gripping on the winter ice and snow. What I didn’t know was that he had never been shod before. Only moments after being secured in a special wooden stall built for farrier work, he exploded in a frenzy of kicking. Nurkhan and the other men leaped for cover, and by the time they lifted themselves out of the mud Ogonyok had ripped apart the wooden frame and stood shaking his head.
The second time round they tied Ogonyok’s tail to the top of the stall, then winched it up so high that his back legs barely touched the ground. Extra girths were fitted to his belly and every time he dared move a man beat his side with a steel pipe. This was still not enough to subdue Ogonyok, who managed to bust away the girths kicking back and forth until he was hanging upturned by his tail. It was only on the third attempt that they managed to tie his leg to a post and forcibly bang the shoes on.
During the fiasco I stood holding Ogonyok’s bridle and peering into his eyes, which were wide with terror. Although monstrously strong, he was oblivious to his power. He was an honest horse, with none of the cunning of older, more experienced steeds. Even so, overriding any sympathy at this point in time was my own fear—how would I cope with Ogonyok on my own in the wilds?
Ruslan, Nurkhan, another villager known as Orolkhan (and nicknamed “the Chechen”), and I decided to get away from the village and find a fresh starting point for my journey in the loftier reaches of the surrounding peaks. I hoped to use this trip to purify my own spirits with something other than vodka, as well as to find some redeemi
ng traits in Ruslan. I had hardly been able to look him in the eye since his misadventures with Meirim and was frustrated by the reluctance he had shown in helping me bargain during the negotiations over the horses. In the summer months Nurkhan lived and worked at a cooperative deer farm at a remote mountain station. The excursion into the mountains would double as a chance for him to return to his hut and gather the animals and goods he’d left behind.
We set out, and the village of Pugachevo shrank below in a mash of autumn browns and grays. After a heavy sleep in Nurkham’s hut that night, Ruslan and I picked one of the peaks and set off to climb as high as we could.
Air gushed into my lungs as Taskonir attacked the slope. I sat snugly in my saddle, daypack hugging my shoulders, my eyes drifting from the few wisps of cloud that caressed the open blue to the freshly powdered crests that curved skyward. On the far horizon, the custodial pyramid of Mount Belukha—the highest peak of the Altai at 4,506 m—stood head and shoulders above everything else.
It was a relief to be looking at the world from horseback again. With every step, the self-doubt and snafus that had plagued me in recent times receded like a single tree in the landscape below.
When the slope became too steep we tied the horses to trees and set off on foot up a rocky spur and into the descending front of winter. After a couple of hours of scrambling through knee-deep snow we emerged from the cover of Siberian larch and pine and finished our climb on a rocky crag. From there I gazed over the land through a multitude of filters. Before us lay invisible trails of the original hunter-gatherers, their descendants who had spread out over the steppe with their horses, Mongol armies that had surged past these natural ramparts in their thousands, explorers who had arrived on a quest to find lost worlds, and imperialist Russians and Chinese who had only recently drawn up artificial borders. I imagined the enchantment for explorers who might have traveled here, beyond the Himalayas and Tibet, in search of shambala.
Some believe this Buddhist concept of a celestial kingdom, accessible only to those on the most evolved spiritual path, is a place of the spirit alone. Others write of a physical hidden world in the Altai, in Tibet, in India, or somewhere in between, where all inhabitants are enlightened. Whether or not the legend is true and there is a mysterious world that has camouflaged itself from modern-day cartographers, the Altai, encompassing a mix of taiga, tundra, glaciated peaks, and desert, would surely accommodate such a dream.
Yet to me, it was the view to the west over the steppe that most captured my imagination. I ran my eyes down the spurs to where they merged seamlessly with a sea of brown. There were no forests out there, or sheltered valleys of thick grass. Even rivers turned north on the edge of this exposed abyss. How many people had stood here like me and wondered just how far this land stretched, and what lay beyond the horizon? From here the open land continued unabated to the Carpathian Mountains on the fringes of central Europe. And regardless of the modern, post-Soviet reality of Kazakhstan and countries farther afield, I felt confident that the horses that would carry me were an ancient link whose primary needs, grass and water, had never changed.
“C’mon, Tim, I’m getting cold, and we have no food or water. Let’s go!” I shifted my stare. Ruslan had finished his cigarette and, having thrown the butt in the snow, was trudging back down.
We arrived at the hut after dark and found Nurkhan and Orolkhan cooking up the heads of freshly shot wild boar.
“Two wild pigs were guests in our home today. They left their heads behind but they themselves ran away,” said Orolkhan as he plunked the two boiled skulls on the table.
We laughed, cutting away flesh from the jaws, eyes, and ears. The three men with me didn’t have any problem enjoying the meat, even though pork is typically forbidden to Muslims.
“Mr. Cope,” Nurkhan reminded me, “keep this to yourself. We are Kazakhs, but we can eat these pigs because they are clean, they are from nature!”
Our descent back to the valley in the morning was a fitting send-off. Nurkhan gathered some geese and a cat into a couple of potato sacks and loaded them onto an old cart that he harnessed to his horse. One tire was blown, so the cart moved precariously down the steep, icy trail. The geese honked, the cat meowed, and Nurkhan swore violently at them to shut up. I sidled up with my horse and pulled my camera out.
“Don’t you dare! With geese and a cart people will think I am a bloody Russian!” he said.
By afternoon Pugachevo was behind us. We rode on after dark until we found refuge back in Maraldy with a family whose eldest son had served in the army with Ruslan. In the morning word reached the patriarch of the family that his brother had just died. Later we saw him, his wife, and their children huddled on the back of a truck rattling down the valley to the funeral procession.
Farther along the Kurchum River where it deepened into a gorge Ruslan led the way up into a maze of bald peaks riddled with rocky gullies. We spent the night at a remote herding station, where we were stirred awake in the early hours by an old man who strode outside and began howling. He had been wakened by a wolf, and this was how he scared them away. Before leaving the man offered us a gun for the remainder of Ruslan’s time with me, but Ruslan refused the offer on the grounds that he didn’t have a license. The man’s question to us would be repeated many more times during the journey: “Why don’t you carry a gun? What will you do about the wolves? Thieves?”
A long day of around 50 km brought us to the village of Terektbulak, where I bought my third horse, Zhamba. He was one of the old scarred workhorses I had seen during our first day of horse searching. For the remainder of the journey I regretted this decision. I bought Zhamba because he was much cheaper and in the short term would cause less trouble. This, however, meant forgoing a flighty young black gelding on offer that might have been expensive and dangerous but in the long term would have had what it would take for this kind of journey.
From here on, Ruslan felt he was on home territory, and with around 70 km to cover we moved at a trot, weaving our way up and over bare wrinkled hills and through frozen reed-choked gullies. Every now and then we caught sight of wild goats and deer moving like flecks being picked up on the path of a whirlwind across the slopes.
Ruslan was impressed with Ogonyok, whom he had nicknamed “The Tank.”
“This is a great horse. I like him—he reminds me of my own. He is wild, that is true—all ginger horses and redheaded people are like that—but he will settle down after a few days on the road. If you teach him to trot and not be lazy, you will be able to cover a lot of distance every day,” he said.
Taskonir was proving himself agile and determined as well. To the astonishment of Ruslan and others, I had ridden him without a bridle or bit, able to control him with a rope halter and the lead tied as the reins. With winter looming, I had extra incentive to dump the use of a bit, given how uncomfortable the freezing metal would be in a horse’s mouth.
By contrast with Taskonir and Ogonyok, the third horse, Zhamba, was already struggling although he was carrying no load. We renamed him Maral, which means “roe deer,” since he looked more like a mix between a deer and a donkey than a horse when he moved.
There was little time to settle into a walk and we seldom spoke, but during a short rest break Ruslan seemed anxious to talk. He had never acknowledged the days of riotous drunkenness with Meirim, and I thought perhaps he wanted to clear the air. With a look of sincerity he took a long drag on his cigarette and began.
“Tim, how much do girls cost in Australia?”
I tried not to look surprised.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for example, Russians here, I have tried plenty of them. When I lived with my uncle for a while in Astana, I just watched TV during the day and could pay about a thousand tenge an hour when I needed it. I was even able to try a Korean—they are the most expensive at around three thousand. And the Germans come at a high price too.”
He said it so solemnly that I wasn’t sure how I could a
nswer without either offending him or leading to the impression that I was homosexual.
“Well, I don’t know, to be honest.”
“But how do you fuck girls, then?” he interrupted.
I thought a while.
“Well … I guess you could say it is free.”
Ruslan’s eyes lit up, and he gave me a grin that showed his gold teeth.
“I thought so! You know Kazakh girls—they never put out unless you are married to them.”
I didn’t believe him, but I did know that many people I had met in the former Soviet Union during my previous trip had had conflicting views about Western women and very rarely had the chance to ask for themselves. The word in rural areas in particular was that either they “wore pants like men” and were highly nonsexual because of the feminist movement or they were all willing to offer themselves at will like in American movies. This was one of hundreds of such frank conversations that I would have with men, often herders in the saddle, right across the steppes. One colorful man later told me that Shymkent was his favorite city because “watermelons are twenty-five kopeks and Uzbek women two hundred.”
I tried to explain to Ruslan that things were a bit more complex than what he had concluded, but another, more pressing problem had surfaced; Ruslan had clean run out of cigarettes, and he needed to think about going home.
The momentum and camaraderie of my time with Ruslan waned quickly in Slavyanka. Ruslan had his mind on other things. He was planning to get married, but more important, the next couple of weeks would be his last chance to fish before the Irtysh River weir froze over for winter. While I could only offer him $15 a day, which was a stretch for me, he claimed to be able to earn almost $100 with a good day’s catch. Like many others in his village, he was able to pay off the fishing inspector and send his fish by car to Oskemen for lucrative sales at the market. (Later I was told that because of this kind of poaching, the Irtysh was headed toward being fished out within a matter of years.)