On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  We stopped in briefly with the herder’s family, enjoying fresh deep-fried dough—known in Kazakh as baursak—and hot milky tea. I secretly hoped we might turn in for the day, but all too soon we were back into the cold and riding under a sky that was wilting into dark gray. The storm was gathering again, and as the frozen earth meshed with the sky, we pushed the horses into a trot. This time I had no objections to Aset’s urgency—we would ride for as long as it took to find shelter.

  The light was fading fast and the snow was falling nearly horizontally when we came across the trail to Kindikti. First there came the muffled bellow of cattle and the cry of herders, then two figures materialized from the bleakness, hunched in their saddles, whips in hand, sweeping from one side to the other of a large herd of horses and cattle. Up close I could see they were wearing valenki, traditional Russian knee-high felt boots, and rode atop saddles with thick cushions—the kind that Aset had recently been encouraging me to get for my own saddle to prevent hemorrhoids. From tightly drawn hoods, the men squinted against the snow and wind. Then, despite the conditions, they took off the mitts they wore and reached out to shake our hands. As luck would have it, we had caught the men herding the animals home to shelter for the night.

  When the glow of homes emerged from the pall of snow, cattle peeled off to their respective owners and we followed a herder to a mud-brick house. Askhat, as he was called, dashed inside and came out with his father, a tall man named Bakhetbek. There were handshakes all around before we rushed to unload. Askhat was sent to the roof to gather hay, a young boy was given the job of preparing a barn, and Bakhetbek must have told his wife to prepare things in the house.

  Accustomed to making sure the horses were cared for before I could think about relaxing, I was hesitant to go inside until everything was done. Ruslan had taught me that when we were finished riding for the day, it was unthinkable to remove the saddle and offer the horses water and feed until they had rested for two or three hours, or until their backs were warm and dry under the blankets. As I later understood, this was a kind of universal law on the steppe and possibly one that had been around since before the time of Genghis Khan.10

  I began to explain to Bakhetbek how important this system was for my horses, but he interrupted me.

  “Tim! Tim!” he said, almost angrily. “Don’t even say it—it is offensive. Everything will be done, you don’t have to worry about your horses. You are our guest!”

  Aset pulled me aside. “Trust him and watch carefully—a sign of a Kazakh host who respects his guests is that he will feed the guest’s dog before his own.”

  True to Aset’s words, Bakhetbek fed our ribs-on-legs dog a pot of lamb innards and stale bread, sinking his boots into his own dogs when they tried to join in.

  As tired as I was, somehow I got through dinner, and a few shots of vodka too, before tumbling into sleep. At some point in the night I woke in panic from a dream: we were on a creaking ship, but where was the exit? Then I remembered where we were and surrendered to sleep, confident that the horses, like us, were under the watch and care of the family.

  By the time I woke it was late. Where Aset had been lay a pile of blankets, and from the kitchen drifted the homelike sounds of shuffling feet, muffled conversation, and tinny clanging of pots. Peeling my eyes open, I sat upright slowly. What I had assumed to be bright sunshine through the small window of our room was the glare of a snowdrift creeping up the windowpane. Outside, the storm, muted by the house’s thick walls, raged on. Heavy clouds of snowflakes were being tossed about in violent gusts, and I could just make out the outline of an animal shelter, its timber frame encrusted by wind-driven snow and ambushed on one side by a drift banking up to the roof. On the shelter’s lee side, a herd of sheep stood huddled in a pen, their wooly coats under a gathering blanket of snow.

  The blizzard had all the hallmarks of a buran, the fierce winter wind-storms of the steppe, accompanied by a whiteout, that could last for days, and which, I had been told, could bury livestock and people alive if caught in the open. It was for this reason Aset considered it reckless to camp alone on the steppe.

  I found Aset and Askhat sitting idly by the softly crackling coal stove, looking over my Australian saddle. When he noticed me Askhat motioned to the window and joked, “You think this is winter? You should see winter here! There is usually two metres of snow!”

  The family and I settled down with tea from the pot that was perpetually on the boil. I sat leaning up against the white-washed walls that were hung with nothing more than a couple of rugs and a horse whip. In the afternoon the blizzard briefly abated, and movement out a window caught my eye—a young boy riding bareback with a hypothermic sheep slung across the neck of his horse.

  Bakhetbek was a tall and stately man in his fifties with leathery dark skin, green eyes, and a strong jaw line. When he moved, he did so measuredly, with grace and power. He was the father of four, and both he and his wife worked as schoolteachers. His passion was geography.

  “Tim, if I am correct, you are not the first foreigner to travel here. An Englishman once came prospecting for gold and other minerals. That was about eighty years ago. I am fairly sure, though, that you are the first Australian,” he said, eyes twinkling. His hands, broad and strong, shifted gently in their embrace around his cup of tea.

  Bakhetbek’s wife, wearing a scarf that accentuated her moon face, smiled. “Yes, that is true. But my Bakhetbek is a traveler, a foreigner even, of sorts, too.”

  Bakhetbek had been born near Urumqi in China’s Xinjiang province, and fled to Kazakhstan after his brothers were murdered in the 1960s. Later his nephews, who remained behind, were also murdered. At his wife’s gentle prod, Bakhetbek began telling his story himself, hesitantly, but was swiftly overcome with emotion.

  “They killed us simply because we are Kazakhs,” he said. “Back then, and even now, Chinese authorities don’t protect Kazakhs. Actually, it was probably the police who did the murdering.”

  There was a bitter irony in Bakhetbek’s return to Kazakhstan that he was well aware of. His own grandparents had originally fled to China among two hundred thousand others when the Russian imperial army violently quashed the 1916 Kazakh uprising. At the same time, though, Bakhetbek acknowledged that the tragedy of his family had been the experience of his ancestors through the ages—whenever the Kazakhs found themselves under oppression or attack, they would historically flee to Chinese Turkestan, Siberia, and other parts of Central Asia, only to find themselves under another oppressive regime.11

  After telling his story, Bakhetbek looked spent, but there was a sparkle in his wife’s eye. “Actually …” She looked over at her husband. “We still have one relative alive in China. She is Bakhetbek’s niece, and she is studying in Urumqi. She wrote to us one year ago, but we have never met. She gave us a phone number, but we have never been able to call.”

  It was dark by the time everyone assembled outside in winter coats and fur hats. I pointed the satellite phone aerial to the sky and experimented with a few prefixes until the call went through. A woman answered. After a brief initial silence, all of Bakhetbek’s family members took turns talking, struggling to hold back tears but smiling.

  The occasion called for a feast, and after the phone calls it was all hands on deck. Bakhetbek’s brother, who due to his balding head was nicknamed “the Kazakh Gorbachev,” raced to get a sheep. In an outbuilding the men gathered with cupped hands to say a prayer before its throat was cut. Had I been of the Muslim faith, I would have been asked to bless the sheep, since traditionally guests were required to ask permission from the animal’s spirit to partake of its flesh.

  Late into the night we sat around gorging on meat and being plied with vodka. A dombra, the traditional two-stringed mandolin of the Kazakhs, was passed around.12 When Bakhetbek played there was a fire in his eyes, and he sat with his back even straighter and prouder than usual. Strong fingers moved instinctively up and down the instrument’s neck. In Kazakh they say a good playe
r can make the dombra sing. I was sure I could hear the beating hooves of horses. It was as if a stoic, unfaltering rhythm prevailed through the harsh realities of life and the land. I looked across to Aset, who was welling up with pride. The last beat ended, and Bakhetbek looked at me. His eyes arched into crescents; from them tears spread into the many channels of his weathered face and disappeared.

  Kazakhs believe that when a guest walks through the front door, luck flies in through the window. It is a good omen: the sheep will give birth to twin lambs in the spring. Looking back on this occasion, the magic of this belief was embodied by my meeting with Bakhetbek.

  As we prepared to leave Kindikti, Aset was whistling and calling angrily, with an undercurrent of panic—the dog was nowhere to be seen. I felt guilty for rushing but still held resentment toward Aset for bringing the dog in the first place. We couldn’t afford to wait any longer. If we didn’t get out of Kindikti today and start heading south, there was the risk I would be stranded here until spring.

  “If he doesn’t come, let it be that his destiny is here,” said Aset at last, playing down his distress. Just then there came a whoosh as a stringy heap of bones and elastic tendons leaped over the fence of a pen and came screaming toward us, eyes wild in panic. I had learned that the dog had been notorious in Zhana Zhol for stealing eggs from under chickens in the early morning, before they could be collected. As we rode out of the village, I thought with a shake of my head that if he kept this up in places such as Kindikti, he didn’t have much hope of a long life.

  For the first few hours we followed the compass southwest through a mire of deserted hills and gullies. Jagged rock fisted through unbounded white like compound fractures. Peaks of around 1,500 m gnashed at the horizon. To the south we could see the foothills of the Tarbagatai range, which slope from east to west out of the Tien Shan.13

  The sky had been blown clear of clouds, but despite the white glow of the sun, cold tightened its grip. Even the slight breeze landed heavily, forging ice crystals in my eyelashes and nose hairs. On the horses it gathered as ice beards around their nostrils and chin. The air was powder dry, and beneath the horses the snow exploded in puffs, then fluttered back to earth in glittering clouds. Bakhetbek’s tune strummed in my head.

  When the sunlight withered we were stranded in the open. The earth froze to a standstill and the temperature dropped to around −20°C. Aset and the dog hung around my camping stove looking unconvinced we would survive the night.

  “In these conditions you should not only consider leaving the saddles on the horses for three hours after you finish, but leave the saddle blankets on all night. We Kazakhs would even leave the saddle on for the whole night in this situation … And of course without vodka you won’t survive. When your hands get cold, rub the vodka into your skin and drink it before you go to bed,” Aset said. After dinner I unfolded my cotton blankets so that they covered the horses from withers to rump, and tied them on with spare belts and ropes.

  Food and hot tea in our bellies, we climbed into the tent. Poor Aset bundled himself up in my down jacket under the remaining horse blankets and put on the insulated liners of my boots. The dog curled up at his feet.

  In the morning it seemed that Aset had conquered his fear of camping in the open, or at least he could joke about it now. “Aaaaaawww! Tashkent! Tashkent down there!” he said, shivering and pointing to his feet, where the dog was still fast asleep. “But up here it is bloody Yakutsk!”

  The inside of the tent was covered in hoarfrost, and any slight move sent a shower of ice down on us. Outside, the wind had picked up again, and the sky was streaked with shreds of blood-red cloud. Overnight one end of my tent fly had suffered a rip nearly half a metre long, and the small transparent windows at the entrances had turned brittle and shattered. When Aset went for a piss he came back with more worrying news—not more than 50 m away there were fresh wolf tracks.

  Saddling up proved harder than usual as I struggled to find dexterity in mitts, yet when I took them off, even briefly, my fingers went numb. It was always a gamble putting Ogonyok’s crupper on, and this morning as I lifted his tail and slid the leather down onto the sensitive skin above his butt he shied away and threatened to kick.

  Inspecting the horses’ hooves, we realized that Taskonir had one loose shoe, and all the horses had snow balled up under their feet, so they could hardly walk. We improvised with an axe head to solve both problems, but it took more than three hours, all told, to pack up, eat, and load the animals. By the time we settled into the saddle my feet were numb. I didn’t want to think about the state of Aset’s feet, since he was wearing only my hiking shoes.

  For once the GPS and map proved correct as we passed through the tiny aul of Chubartas, a collection of twenty ramshackle homes and barns inundated by snow. Dogs came running, snarls of teeth and fur, and I watched our little guy scuttle away under the legs of Zhamba, tail between his legs and his back arching up like a skinny feline’s. Aset lashed out at the attacking dogs with his lead rope. Not a soul came out onto the street.

  Clouds crowded in, the temperature rose enough so that the frost on our faces melted, and the wind blunted. Following telegraph lines and tracks, we no longer needed the compass. Two days’ ride to the southwest from here lay Ayagoz, where I would part ways with Aset.

  In the aul of Saariarka Aset promised we would be able to stay with a relative overnight. As the sun set we were greeted by a thin, pale woman who looked terrified at the sight of us. She talked briefly with Aset over a cup of tea, and soon after we left in the dark. His relative—the husband of this woman—had recently died, and it was inconceivable to stay in the house with a woman when there were no men at home. Traditionally a strict custom was adhered to by which a whip was always hung adjacent to the yurt or kstau entrance. I was told that a whip hanging downward meant a man was home. If it was pointing upward, he was away and one should not enter.

  Aset insisted we camp by an old Kazakh grave not far from town. It was a tall mud-brick dome, worn away at the top, the overall shape reminiscent of a giant, upright, cracked eggshell. Perhaps as much as several hundred years earlier the deceased had been laid to rest inside; as the structure eroded, his or her spirit would be given passage to the sky. This particular type of grave, often found in clusters known as “silent auls,” had emerged in the fifteenth century when wandering Sufi dervishes succeeded in persuading nomads in the Kazakh steppe to adopt Islam. But the tradition of holding ancestors in great reverence was a far more ancient one among nomads, part of the shamanic religion of Tengrism once shared with the Mongols. For millennia they had believed that spirits inhabited the sky and land and could provide favor or disfavor depending on a person’s action.

  The next morning Aset turned to me hesitantly.

  “We had a visitor last night. The old man from the grave. Nothing out of the ordinary; he was just here to check on us, to see what we were doing.” Then he added, “My recommendation to you is that if you are alone, always try to find these graves. The old men of the steppe will protect you. If possible, the best thing is to even sleep inside the graves.” He also pointed out that, as prescribed by Muslim custom, he had washed himself in the snow before going to bed.

  For the rest of the day Aset seemed quiet but content. His eyes scanned the landscape longingly. His whip hung limply from his right hand. Every now and then he raised it and gently slapped Zhamba’s hindquarters. He spoke little except once, when he pointed to the horizon across a wide plain.

  “Many hundreds, thousands of my men lie here. Here there were big battles.” He said it with pride and emotion, as though these events had happened recently, but he was talking about the invasion by the Zhungars—Oirat Mongols who ruled an empire known as Zhungaria after the collapse of the Mongol Empire—in the eighteenth century.

  It had been dawning on me gradually, but now I realized that Aset felt a sense of approval from his ancestors at his being out here. On a horse, on the steppe, under the sky, he was liv
ing, even if fleetingly, by customs that he inherently knew but which meant so little in settled village life. Like most Kazakhs I would meet over the coming months, he had preserved a consciousness of Islam, but he clung even more closely to a belief in his nomadic heritage and the spirit of his ancestors—a blend that was symbolized in his behavior toward the grave we had camped by, and which defined the culture of the Kazakh nomad in recent centuries.

  In the aul of Karagash the specter of death followed us. We met a man called Kazibek who was out collecting firewood on his horse. He broke the news that Aset’s relative in that aul, too, had just died. Kazibek, however, was more than happy to have us for the night, and his wife was kind enough to sew up my ripped tent.

  Just shy of Ayagoz, Aset called home to Zhana Zhol and received more bad news: another relative of his had been run down by a tram in Oskemen and killed. The funeral would be the next day.

  The caretaker of a dacha village not far from Ayagoz took us in. Aset pulled out the city clothes he had been carrying all along and suddenly our adventure together was over. It was sad to see him without his winter breeches, knife-laden belt, and woolen sweaters, and sadder still to see him on foot, horseless. He looked like a man dispossessed. At the local market I bought him some Chinese carry bags, a new watch—he had lost his during our trip—and a bus ticket to Zhana Zhol.

  I expected Aset to be upset about his cousin in Oskemen, but he seemed to be resigned to the news and more worried about parting ways with me. There was something he had been waiting to tell me.

  “Tim, you need a friend on the long road, someone to keep you warm at night and protect you from wolves. His name is Tigon. Tigon means ‘fast wind’ or ‘hawk.’ He is a hunting dog. His father was a tazi, a breed of hound that is not afraid of wolves and can run quicker than the wind.