On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  “It’s freezing in there! It’s much warmer out here!” he cried.

  The temperature overnight had plummeted to around -15°C, and unfortunately we had just one sleeping bag and mat between us. Aset had shivered through the night under my horse blankets, and later he admitted it had been his first night in a tent.

  When the sun rose higher there was some reprieve from the cold, and we rode out into a honey-yellow sea of wild grasses and heath. To the northwest a sliver of earth blanketed in snow rose across the horizon like a rogue wave. We met only one man during the day, a sheepherder who drifted across and away from us as if on the ocean currents.

  It was the kind of autumn riding I had dreamed of, when the horses didn’t overheat, there was plentiful pasture, and the air had such clarity it seemed that only the curvature of the earth prevented me from seeing what lay far ahead. As soon as the sun began to dip again, however, there was no more denying that winter was setting in. My leather boots froze solid and my feet became numb. I pulled out my knee-high Canadian-made winter boots and attached my wide Mongolian winter stirrups, which provided another layer of protection against the cold and wind.

  At around four o’clock all concessions from the weather vanished. The grass howled with random, menacing strokes of wind, and the ambiguous sky of shifting clouds and scattered light was eclipsed by a dense, sweeping curtain of black and gray.

  Terrified by the prospect of another night in the cold, Aset was determined to find somewhere indoors to regroup. Reluctantly I folded up the map and we moved into a fast trot toward the nearest aul.

  In the last dying minutes of dusk we slowed the horses to a walk on the edge of Azunbulak. Aset wasn’t familiar with this remote community and warned we might not find a place to stay. As we reached the sprawling carcass of Azunbulak’s former collective farm, however, a young man came out on foot and greeted us with particular charm.

  “What the dick? Yes, we have dick weather here, but true, we also have grass up to the dick!” he exclaimed. We could only take this as a warm welcome.

  Even before we were led into the animal yards of the old collective farm I felt like I knew our host-to-be, Baltabek, who was steely and short, with a gold-toothed grin that belied his age, which was only twenty-one. It didn’t come as a surprise to learn he had only recently been released from prison.

  “Silly me! Young and stupid! I stole a few horses from the village! But I learned a lot in jail. In fact, that is where I learned Russian language. Before that I could speak only Kazakh!” he told us.

  With the benefit of experience, I came to think that Baltabek’s real crime had probably been not so much the stealing of horses as being young and, more important, getting caught. He was passionate about horses, and if he was to be believed, he had stolen them not to sell but because he didn’t have enough money to buy the good ones he loved. That somehow seemed fair in a land where, until nomads were dispossessed of their animals during Stalin’s era, Kazakhs had viewed their world almost exclusively from the saddle.

  Nowadays Baltabek was getting on with his life. He worked for his father, who had established a small farm amid the wreckage of the defunct collective farm, and owned a black stallion that he couldn’t wait to show us. Furthermore, his rather empty bachelor pad—the former administration office of the collective farm—was about to be transformed into a family home.

  “My wife has just given birth, and if only you wait two days, you could join the celebration when she and the baby return from hospital!” he said feverishly. According to him, my arrival was good luck, and it was “crazy” for me to continue through the winter. There was a better option: I could live and work on the farm with him and his family.

  We stayed up talking with Baltabek late into the night, and come morning his proposition to stay for the winter no longer seemed farfetched. About 20 cm of snow had fallen, transforming the landscape, and the storm showed no signs of abating. Snowflakes choked the sky, blowing in horizontally, caking everything in their path.

  There was no choice but to stay put, and as the day wore on, my disappointment at being delayed turned to one of morbid fascination. While in Zhana Zhol I had reflected on the effects of collectivization, here in Azunbulak I was offered a glimpse of the tragic fallout following the collapse of the Soviet system.

  The small farming operation run by Baltabek’s father, which involved modest numbers of horses, sheep, and cattle, was dwarfed by the graveyard of the original collective. Gutted buildings stood falling in on themselves, and scattered all around were dismembered combines, tractors, and trucks, lying twisted and rusting. So violent and swift had been the death of the Soviet era, it seemed, that its remains had not been given the dignity of burial.

  “Yes, fuck your mother!” Baltabek told us, surveying the farm. “It has all gone to fuck.”

  His father, an old man whose body was used to working uncomplainingly, was a little more enlightening. In its prime during the 1970s and 1980s, the collective had employed 250 people and supported three hundred families in Azunbulak. Now just thirty families were involved in the new cooperative, and the village had shrunk to seventy homes. Baltabek’s father couldn’t really explain where all the animals and machinery had gone, but he did recall a time in the 1990s when the only way to acquire 1 litre of diesel was to trade 10 kg of meat. It had been in this disastrous era that the collectives were transformed from state-owned enterprises into collective entities, and later into largely failed privately run cooperatives. To pay off debts, farmers had flooded the market with mutton, causing the price of meat to plummet. Between 1991 and 1998 grain production also fell by over 50 percent and the transport system ground to a halt, meaning there was no longer enough fodder getting to livestock in state farms. Many animals either were slaughtered or simply starved. To make matters worse, many collective directors, as in Azunbulak, had taken the opportunity to steal or sell most of the collective’s assets and abandon the community.

  By the end of the 1990s the majority of Kazakhs in collectives had been left to scavenge among the remains for anything they could sell or use as spare parts. People such as Baltabek’s father had turned to subsistence farming, surviving on the meager food rations they could produce themselves with animals they privately owned.

  “In my father’s time,” Baltabek’s father told me bitterly, “the Soviets dispossessed us of our animals and way of life. It was a terrible time, but over the years we grew accustomed to state-run farms. Now though, we have been abandoned by the Soviets and left without any of the skills of our ancestors. We feel betrayed.”

  Whichever way one looks at it—whether from the point of view of city dwellers or that of country folk—the chaos of the 1990s, during which Kazakhstan emerged as an independent nation, was a staggering time of hardship and lawlessness. To the masses, perestroika meant the severe shrinkage of industry, the breakup of agricultural collectives, the dissolution of social services including pensions, and the departure of educated experts, largely to Russia, Germany, and Korea. Power shortages were rife and not helped by a burgeoning trade in scrap metal as organized crime groups stripped and sold huge lengths of power lines. Between 1991 and 2000, the population of Kazakhstan dropped by almost two million.

  It was no wonder that most Kazakhs, like Baltabek’s family, rued Gorbachev and recalled Soviet times with nostalgia, even though they knew full well the horrors that the Soviet era had inflicted on their people. Then again, as Baltabek’s father later told me, a quizzical expression on his face, “To be honest, life, as far as I can remember, has always been hard, no matter who had the reins, Moscow or Astana.”

  In the evening we rode into the aul of Azunbulak proper for an extravagant dinner with Baltabek’s family, and the appalling reality around us vanished. We swapped photo albums, sifting through each other’s lives, and celebrated long into the night. Baltabek’s father saw my arrival as a great omen and wished me luck.

  The storm had lulled by the time we rode out the
next day. Stony clouds swooped over the steppe, blocking the sun that seemed to begin its downward trajectory before the day had begun. The poor dog, experiencing the first winter of his short life, was suffering from frozen paws. Whenever we stopped for a break he whined and peered up with a look of bewilderment. Once, in a desperate attempt to escape the cold, he leaped up onto my back with his front paws clinging to my shoulders. I had dismounted and was taking a pee at the time, and he caused me to lose aim.

  For an unbroken few hours Aset rode in front of me, singing sorrowful-sounding songs in Kazakh and spluttering between verses: “Ah, Tim, when you have vodka, you have a voice. No vodka, no voice!” I wondered if the soft rocking motion of his horse, the trackless land before him, and the presence of a loyal dog by his side was bringing his nomad roots out of dormancy.

  In the late afternoon we cut across a plain and climbed through a tangle of snow-laden spurs toward a plateau. My legs were beginning to ache and I could think only of retiring in camp with dinner on the boil. But just as we were nearing the top of a gully the light dimmed and there came a gust of wind carrying a sortie of airborne shards of ice and snow. Then the cloud was upon us, like an avalanche from somewhere above, wiping out all before it. Aset stopped singing in the middle of a verse, and within seconds the world had hemorrhaged away all shape and form. There was no sky or earth anymore, just a swirling, soupy sea of white. The sun was still up, casting weak, diffuse gray-blue light onto the snow, but illuminated little. Leaning forward and clinging onto Taskonir’s mane I flicked my head back to see Aset’s silhouette melting in and out of focus. When he caught up, Taskonir nudged forward, uneasily probing for solid earth. I urged him on, but for every step forward our circle of vision closed tighter.

  For the next hour there was no telling where we were or when this rushing cloud might dissipate. Several times I lost Aset, only to scream out for him, and he would reappear. Every ten minutes I checked my GPS and compass bearing. The horses plodded on up slopes, down into gullies, and up again.

  Eventually we crested yet another hill, the terrain surrendered to a plateau, and there came an acute change in the temperament of the air, as if the world were drawing a breath. I stopped, and as the wind eased and the mist about me scattered, I looked to the west. Dark, jagged clouds on the wings of the wind began to lift, and a purple-blue light flooded over the wavy troughs and crests of the frozen earth. It glowed ever brighter until a shaving of cobalt-blue sky blinked into focus. The tail end of the sun had just slithered over the horizon leaving a trail of fading watercolors—blue on the clouds, purple on the ground, a hint of orange here and there.

  The truce was short-lived. Darkness fell, the wind recoiled, and cold took its grip.

  “The closer to people the better!” Aset ranted. While the raw feeling of this place had evoked in me a sense of awe, Aset was beside himself with fear.

  For the hundredth time I stopped and spread the map out over the reins from the saddle, studying it with the light from my headlamp. We were aiming for the aul of Kindikti, two days’ ride to the southeast, and were somewhere in the stretch of deserted hilly steppe in between. Since the map had a scale of 1:1,000,000, I could only hazard a guess at where we were.

  “We have food, we have a tent!” I told Aset. “We can stop now, make ourselves warm, cook dinner, sleep, and see how things are in the morning light,”

  “To hell with your tent!” he replied. “What if a snowstorm really comes in? What about wolves? We have to get to a kstau!” he replied, using the nomad term for a herder’s winter station. Finding one would be a long shot, even with the GPS I carried and the approximate directions Baltabek had given us, but Aset was willing to bet his life on it.

  One of my rules of travel was to stop before dark and, more important, before the horses were too tired and cold. On previous journeys I had learned that I was never lost as long as I still had food, my wits, and shelter. But I gave in, and we trudged on.

  My hands turned stone cold and stiff. The horses became so exhausted they were immune to the kick of my heels. The sky cleared, but the wind was so ferocious it brought a stinging swarm of ice particles that hit like glass shards.

  At half past ten we arrived at the coordinates where we thought the kstau might be, but there was nothing. I had given up trying to figure out the landscape.

  “It’s got to be somewhere here! We have to make it,” shouted Aset, his words garbled by his nearly frozen face. At that moment he struck me as mad. His hankering for civilization was such that any sign of human life, even a piece of old horse crap that we stumbled on, sufficed to calm him.

  As a last resort, he ordered that we release the reins and let the horses guide us. This is a custom found across the steppe—when lost or in search of water, always let the horses guide you. To my surprise, the horses seemed to know where they were going, and half an hour later we stumbled into the dark shape of something man-made. There was no one to greet us, but this was good enough to console Aset, who dismounted achingly. Hypothermic, he crawled into the cocoon of my sleeping bag and passed out.

  In the morning I woke with the residual hum of wind in my ears. Stillness ushered in the new day, and as shadows turned to real shapes and lines, it became clear we had camped in an abandoned concrete pumping shed littered with frozen manure and graffiti.

  Outside, nothing had escaped the fury of the storm. The stands of heath looked like a bleached, exposed coral reef, the intricate form of each twig entombed in finger-thick ice. Every blade of grass was also encased, rising from the earth in a million stalagmites. The horses stood stiffly in half sleep. As Taskonir turned his head to me, ice cracked and fell away from his mane. Ogonyok woke, automatically lowered his head, and crunched through a carrot of ice with his teeth.

  When Aset woke, slit-eyed and puffy, he was worried. The storm had passed for now, but this kind of weather apparently foreshadowed the beginning of a zhut—a harsh winter, more universally known by the Mongolian term zud, that sweeps through the steppe every few years, traditionally ensuring that only the hardiest animals, and humans, survive.

  “At first the ice weighs down the grass, snapping it off. If this is followed by a warm period, the ice and snow will melt before freezing again to form a cap of ice. On top of this may come deep snow, which means even if the animals dig to the ground they will only find ice and won’t be able to break through. If any horses survive, they will be naked by spring because as a last resort they eat each other’s hair,” he told me.7

  There were different kinds of zuds—some caused by an impenetrable layer of ice, others by the sheer depth of the snow, and others still when there was no snow at all. Common to all of them was that if they were preceded or followed by drought in summer, it typically meant the nail in the coffin for large numbers of livestock. By way of example, the year that I had ridden across Mongolia by bicycle, Mongolia had been in the midst of a series of three consecutive zuds and droughts. Come the end of the winter in 2002, 11 million animals had been wiped out. There was one Kazakh in western Mongolia I was told about who had just one of three hundred horses remaining by spring.8 Kazakh herders would later describe to me how, when the grass was particularly lean, they kept their animals alive by feeding them a combination of horse dung mixed with sheep tail fat and a grain by-product that was like wheat bran.

  Given the carnage that zuds could wreak, it wasn’t difficult to understand why for thousands of years zuds had been the common enemy of nomads on the steppe. In the case of the Kazakhs, a new foe, the Soviet regime, joined the zuds as threats to the people’s survival. This new enemy proved unbeatable, and the famine that resulted from forced collectivization and the destruction of aul life remains known among Kazakhs as the “Great Zhut.”9

  After feeding the horses the remaining bag of crushed corn that we had picked up in Azunbulak, we loaded up and wrenched ourselves away from the shelter. The horses moved hesitantly, like barefoot children on sharp gravel. Spikes of crystalline ice sha
ttered, popping and exploding under their hooves. The poor dog remained curled up in the pump shelter until it dawned on him that we were not coming back. He came whimpering, tail between his legs and whiskers all frosted up.

  An hour of riding took us over the sweeping face of a hill where another scabby piece of civilization broke the emptiness. This time smoke tendrils rose timidly from it, and a herd of flea-like sheep and goats inched across the otherwise inanimate landscape. It was the kstau we had been searching for, and as we drew closer, a herdsman on horseback pulled away from his animals and approached.

  “As-salam aleikum,” he said, extending his hand. The man had swollen, chapped cheeks and was struggling to control a violent shiver. He looked how I felt. The wind cut like razors, and no matter how I slouched into my jacket and pulled the hood tight over my face, it was inescapable.

  I was happy for Aset to take over the introductions, and as we rode I learned that the herdsman was originally from western Mongolia. He and his wife had decided to carry on a semi-nomadic existence, traveling to higher pastures with a yurt in the summer months—a camp known in Kazakh as the jalau—and retreating to the kstau in winter.

  When we reached the cattle shelter of the kstau, I watched as our host skillfully climbed onto the roof of the shelter despite the wind and with a fork peeled off hay for my hungry horses. This man embodied the chaban—the iconic herdsman of the Kazakh steppe, who was fast passing into legend in the modern era. Using knowledge inherited from untold generations of experience, he was unequivocally hunkering down to survive the winter, zud or not. As I sat there immobile in the saddle, my elbows frozen at right angles and my feet freezing in the stirrups, I experienced a crisis of confidence. I could barely consider myself a horseman, I didn’t know how to look after horses in such conditions, and I doubted I could manage alone with three of them.